people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthful… - Ida Friederike Görres

I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter again - it's one of the greatest poetic books, and the most powerful portrayal of medieval Christendom I know....I must admit that it makes me cry every time - because it's so real, so true , reaching to the depths of human nature, touching one to the quick.

I'm reading a biography of St John Baptist de la Salle - Extraordinary what educational insights and experiments have existed already - and what has been forgotten!. That reformatory, for instance, which he founded on the most amazing principles somewhere around 1680...The young delinquents were detained in solitary confinement to begin with, being promoted later..to community life..But in their single cells they were given flowers and plants to cultivate and singing birds to breed! The prisoners took their meals together with the Brothers, and each of the boys in solitary confinement was entrusted to one particular Brother...The Jansenists were bitter opponents of the Brothers, for in all his schools de la Salle laid great stress on frequent Communion..They did their best to oppose him personally and to hinder his work. The French Revolution wrecked his Institute, some of the Brothers were executed, others emigrated.

Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide...Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods.