Leibniz

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Leibniz’s goal was not modest; it was to synthesize philosophy and science within a Christian moral framework. He saw a logical connection between science and Christian charity. Scientific investigation demonstrates the perfection of the universe and thereby also the perfection of its Creator. The knowledge of perfection produces love, because “one loves an object in proportion as one feels its perfections; nothing surpasses the divine perfections. Whence it follows that charity and love of God give the greatest pleasure that can be conceived.” And love of God must engender activity in the form of good works; it must lead to charity toward man.

-- Marc E. Bobro in The New Atlantis

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One can come to better appreciate why Voltaire was moved to mockery. These are beautiful sentiments, but they bespeak our sweeter spirits and a medieval religiosity more than they do the nature of the universe and our 'God is dead' secularism.

Philip Larkin

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The reason to read Larkin is that his work, like all great poetry, transcends the virtues and vices of its creator and lives as a special form of language that invites and rewards a special kind of attention. A better man would probably not have written so well. His poems are delightful, observant, and memorable, but those are merely the outward signs of his achievement. The special power of Larkin’s poetry is that it earns its joy, humor, and compassion by working through equal measures of pain, depression, and resentment. The reader always feels the price—and therefore the value—of its hard-won clarities.

In “Reference Back,” Larkin remembers a visit home spent holed up in his room listening to jazz records while ignoring his disappointed mother. Thirty years later, he can’t listen to King Oliver’s “Riverside Blues” without recalling his unkindness in wasting that irrecoverable time together:

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

Toward the end, Larkin complained to Motion that having stopped writing, all the poet had was “a fucked up life.” Reading the sadder chapters of his biographies, one is inclined to agree—until one turns back to the poetry.

-- Dana Gioia, "The Greatness of Philip Larkin" in Commentary Magazine

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