This may have to be a weekly thing. (I see that this shall be a perpetual battle.)
In the morning, I finished rereading Barkman's chapter on Myth and had some decisive moments of insight and understanding. The main thing I need to taxonomize here is the various ways to understand the different facets of the faculty of imagination. The idea is gradually coming into more focus than it ever has, but I still find the conceptual edges needlessly blurred, not with the concepts themselves, but with the way Lewis uses them to explain his own imaginative experience and balancing this with Barkman's sometimes jarring corrections of the incorrect way Lewis had sometimes used these concepts. For example, there's an overlap between Coleridge's Primary Imagination and Aristotle's Deliberative Imagination. Even now, I cannot quite describe the rest. I forget whether Coleridge's Secondary Imagination overlaps with fancy and whether fancy is Aristotelian or Romantic. This could be cleared up in a moment but I don't have Barkman's dissertation on hand.
Re-read the precipitation of what the causes of the Peloponnesian War were in Thucydides. After watching a YouTube video from Sadler on what it means to be 'well read', I learned some encouraging advice on 'pacing' in my reading. It's not how much you read that should be the measure; the pacing is what matters most. I find it vexing that I had forgotten this, since I already learned this from Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, and even from Craig's metaphor of the tortoise. I record it here for no other reason than that it happened. I could be a Sterne and meander more, but I desist. But to conclude, I can't quite make up my mind yet on whether Athens violated the 30 years Peace Treaty in allying itself with the Corcyraeans against the Corinthians (allies of Sparta). Corcyra was neutral with Athens and Corcyra was asking for Athens to be their ally to preempt an aggressing Corinth. So, unless I'm missing some fine print in the treatise, I can't see how Athens isn't expediently exploiting a loophole that the treaty isn't explicit about. The only thing that complicates matters is that Corcyra insulted Corinth's honor and Corcyra belonged to Corinth so Corinth had every right to reclaim a recalcitrant Corcyra. And it only makes sense that a wayward Corcyra would see Corinth's aggression only in terms of oppression since their aggression was contrary to Corcyraean aspirations, like a child seeing a parent's anger as oppression because of similar reasons. Nevertheless, it all seems to hinge on whether the Corcyraeans were right as to whether war between Sparta (the ally of Corinth) and Athens is inevitable. If it was, then it is more expedient for Athens to side with Corcyra. But this foreign policy is further complicated by the fact that this expediency is only a consideration in the first place because Athens had already worried and irritated Sparta because of the former's expansionistic policies! So, yes, war was inevitable, but only because Athens was already the expansionistic aggressor, prompting Sparta to take the necessary measures to protect itself against Athenian expansion. Siding with Corinth would have been counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating. Corinth would have eventually betrayed Athens, already an ally of Sparta, which didn't take kindly to Athenian expansion, which then would have led to Corcyra adopting the geopolitical strategy it did.
Was faithful with my War and Peace readings (about halfway through now). Serial publications are definitely what best explain tomes. The only way to consume them is to take small bites daily unless you're sick in bed or have the skills to trek entire countries in a day's walk. I'm finding the readings a bit tedious. Nothing revelatory or glorious or numinous or jaw-dropping, just a constant reminder that the quality of the descriptions comes from the pen of Tolstoy and a constant expectation that the love affairs betwixt the characters will either end in tragedy or some 'complex good' (in the Lewisian sense). I'm finding that Levin (Anna Karenina) is much the same as Pierre and that Vronsky and Prince Andrei are very similar. This humanizes Tolstoy a bit and, to me, constrains the excessive praise heaped upon his imagination. I begin to see how these love affairs will ultimately come to. Natasha will end up with Pierre after initially choosing Andrei (just as Kitty eventually ended up with Levin after initially choosing Vronsky), and Nikolai will probably end up with Maria, though I'm not sure what Tolstoy will do with Sonya to make that happen.
The other characters are charming in their own way and the resultant effect of the whole upon my imagination is pleasing, it is a species of that pleasure that delights in seeing how unique personalities are interconnected in a causal web that is too big and complex to be taken in as a whole. So, you're moving around the dynamic mass almost like a spirit, which enlivens it and lends to it a donegality that is nearly palpable. It's hard to put into words but I think modern folks will begin to see what I mean. It has affinities with the way the camera works in a cinematic experience. It can move and relocate across time and space while the events themselves can take on a crisp visualization that gives off its own sensuousness conjured and enjoyed only while the imagination is in motion so that while Tolstoy is transporting you from some domestic quarrel to a battlefield, I sense myself moving in the sky from the quaint roof of some Russian home, through the wet and misty clouds, over the tops of some forest, hearing the rustling of the leaves as the wind carries me to my narrative destination, racing through a screen of gun powder from a recently exploded cannonball, the faint murmur of war cries and suffering and bloodshed swelling into the loud horror and confusion and bustle of the battle itself, and then Tolstoy pulling me in to focus on one character's thoughts and actions within the entire imaginative context of that departure, flight, and arrival. That is perhaps the distinct impression that Tolstoy's genius has on my imagination. The more often the geographic departures, the more distinct and vivid the imaginative effect.
After some domestic duties, I think I dipped into Perelandra for no reason. As a species of world-making, Perelandra is positively delightful and gorgeous and peaceful and warm and luscious and pleasurable. It is a world where all the pleasures are finetuned to all the details of our expectations, known or unknown. It is like a celestial vacation to a tropical island that is everything you wanted it to be and yet there are pleasures there beyond the number that satisfies beyond what you were expecting, or what you could have expected. I find myself returning to it again and again, more for the planetary descriptions than for the plot, and then if it's for the plot, it's oftentimes for the sake of the descriptions.
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