Did you know?

That one in three patients who spend five or more days in a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) end up psychotic? That’s right kids! Keep eating those doughnuts, and you too can end up with a myocardial infarction or cerebrovascular accident that not only leaves you paralyzed from the waist down but also gives you a free ticket to paranoia, imaginary voices, disturbing hallucinations, and violent anxiety. And looking forward to joining the geriatric community? “Sundowning,” which is common in nursing homes, is a form of ICU psychosis brought on by nightfall. Rather puts the character from Top Gun in a new light, doesn’t it?

Uncle Sam the Oil Addict

This, from the most recent edition of The Economist newspaper…

Zuma Surf Report

Firin’, spittin’ barrels, insane, best I’ve ever seen it!  Check out the report for our local break here.

Work in Progress

Now available free online for the very first time, R.G. Marrinan’s Princeton senior thesis, “BEGINAGAINS WAKE! Joyce and Beckett at the Limits of Late Style.”

Or, if you prefer to keep things old school, as it were, you can find a facsimile of the manuscript in Princeton’s Mudd Libary.

Shadows at the Limits: Stevenson’s “Shadow March” and Eliot’s “Hollow Men”

A short piece I threw together for a senior-year seminar. It asks, “What are shadows, and how can R.L. Stevenson and T.S. Eliot shed light, as it were, on them?”

Shadows at the Limits

The R.G. Marrinan Reader

Now up and running, right here.

Gradutorious

A splendid essay about graduating from Princeton University by Elyse Graham, Class of Destiny.

The Ties That Bind

The United States of America are sick.

In order to heal them, we must heal our medical system. In order to heal the medical system, we must first heal our education system. In order to heal our education system, we must rediscover the lost art of paideia.

Below is the Venerable John V. Fleming’s recipe for doing so. He is Princeton’s Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, emeritus, and a living embodiment of paideia.

Heed him and realize your destiny.

What is φρόνησις?

“Moreover, how a man is to manage his own affairs is not plain and requires consideration. And this is attested by the fact that a young man may become proficient in geometry or mathematics and wise in these matters, but cannot possibly, it is thought become prudent. The reason of this is that prudence deals with particular facts, with which experience alone can familiarize us; but a young man must be inexperienced, for experience is the fruit of years.

“Why again, we may ask, can a lad be a mathematician but not wise, nor proficient in the knowledge of nature? And the answer surely is that mathematics is an abstract science, while the principles of wisdom and of natural science are only to be derived from a large experience; and that thus, though a young man may repeat propositions of the latter kind, he does not really believe them, while he can easily apprehend the meaning of mathematical terms.” (Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. F.H. Peters)

This weblog will trace the progressive retrogression of one young man as he moves from proficiency in geometry and mathematics to worldly wisdom, practical wisdom, phronesis. Que vaya con Dios.