Episode 198: “The Mind of the Maker” by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ch. 6-8

Today’s episode of The Literary Life is a continuation of our series covering The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas discuss chapters 6-8 this week, which they acknowledge are probably the most difficult portions of this book so far. Angelina starts off with some questions she has about why chapter six in included and how it fits with other arguments she has already made earlier. Thomas reads and expands on a passage about the autobiographer and his art. Angelina makes a distinction between moral goodness and artistic goodness in works of fiction and art. Cindy highlights the idea of justification and something being “out of true.”

Coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

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Commonplace Quotes:

My friend, the Scottish poet and translator Alastair Reid, carries a lifetime’s worth of poems—an entire small library—in his head. “Do you memorize them?” someone asked him once. “No,” he answered gravely. “I remember them.”

Christian McEwan, World Enough and Time

The book everywhere exhibits the style and temper for which the author was both loved and hated. The essays are full of cheerful energy. The young people would call them ‘bonhomous’.

By a bonhomous writer they mean one who seems to like writing and what he writes of, and to assume that his readers will mostly be people he would like. I think that this last assumption is what infuriates them.

C. S. Lewis, Image and Imagination

If you are not careful…you’ll be a genius when you grow up and disgrace your parents.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

The Bird and the Tree

by Ruth Pitter

The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,
To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?
They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole,
and the moment dies.
O give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living green,
The Tree and the Bird–
O have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?

Books Mentioned:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

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You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

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