Reading 2024 - various

For a project I am occasionally working on, I've read, exceptionally slowly, with endless recourse to a dictionary, A Princess Remembers, the memoir of Eugénie Odescalchi, who was married to Baron Béla Lipthay.

Wedding picture of Baron Bela Lipthay and Princess Eugenie Odescalchi

The princess and her family endured a great deal of hardship in the early part of the twentieth century, but - possibly because she was exceptionally sweet-natured and a devout Catholic or possibly because her memoir was published before the fall of Communism - there is not a breath of complaint in the text of the book.

Anthony Wilding with Bela Lipthay and his brother, when Wilding lived with the family as tutor

For the same project, I read a book by Anthony Wilding and a book about Anthony Wilding. Both books can be found at Internet archive. The link to the biography is here. The link to the book by Wilding is here 

Each of these books gives glimpses of the world just before the First World War. Each glimpse deepens my sense that it was at the outbreak of that conflict that everything went horribly wrong. 

Wilding, by the way, was a New Zealander who won Wimbledon four times, and is considered by some the world's first tennis superstar. I suspect that no tennis superstar of today would ask his friend to send the following books to give him some light reading matter while staying at the Lipthays in 1907:

Robbery Under Arms

Browning's Poems

The Four Georges by Thackeray

Horace Walpole's Letters

Southey's Life of Nelson 

Romeo and Juliet

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

Earl of Chatham Macaulay

Clive Macaulay

Silas Marner George Eliot 

For my own pleasure, I read AN Wilson's How Can We Know.  I really liked it, particularly Wilson's understanding of the encounter between the rich young man and Jesus. When the rich young man goes away, after being told to sell his possessions, Wilson says that it is not Jesus but the young man who executes judgment on himself. Had the young man fallen "at the feet of Jesus and [said], 'I cannot rid my heart of its love of earthly possession. Help me to do so'", Wilson argues, that would have been fine. Instead, he chooses to walk away. "By implication, he denies not his ability to follow Christ, but Christ himself."

There are also many other good things in the books, as well as some bits I found confusing. The thing I was probably most grateful to discover was this passage quoted by Wilson from Jeremy Taylor who he identifies as a 17th century divine:

"Is it not enough for me to believe the words of Christ, saying, This is my body? And cannot I take it thankfully, and believe it heartily, and confess it joyfully; but I must pry into the secret and examine it by the rules of Aristotle and Porphyry and find out the nature and the indiscernible philosophy of the manner of its change and torment my own brains, and distract my heart, and torment my Brethren, and lose my charity, and hazard the loss of all the benefits intended to me, by the Holy Body; because I break those few words into more questions than the holy bread is into particles to be eaten?"