From The Ridiculous to the Sublime....

The picture is of St Isidore of Seville, who is 'a leading candidate' for the role of being patron saint of computer users and the internet, and was a Medieval Schoolmaster. He is, incidentally, represented symbolically by bees.

I don't normally do this sort of thing, though I did put a Christopher Lasch quote up a while ago. Anyway, Here's John Kennedy Toole, on Ignatius Reilly, who should really now be made the patron saint of bloggers; and, following that, Edmund Burke, on how vegetables can lead you to Platonic Beauty. These two used to have to write for a living, but you know as well as I that, these days, they'd be on blogspot or wordpress.

Ignatius had decided against going to the Prytania. The movie being shown was a widely praised Swedish drama about a man who was losing his soul, and Ignatius was not particularly interested in seeing it. He should have to speak with the manager of the theatre about booking such dull fare.
He checked the bolt on his door and wondered when his mother would be coming home. Suddenly she was going out almost every night. But Ignatius had other considerations at the moment. Opening his desk, he looked at a pile of articles he had written with an eye on the magazine market. For the journals of opinion there were “Boethius observed” and “In defense of Hroswitha: To Those Who Say She Did Not Exist.” For the family magazines he had written “The Death of Rex” and “Children, the Hope of the World.” In an attempt to crack the Sunday supplement market he had done “The Challenge of Water Safety,” “The Danger of Eight-Cylinder Automobiles,” “Abstinence, the Safest Method of Birth Control,” and “New Orleans, City of Romance and Culture.” As he looked through the old manuscripts, he wondered why he had failed to send any of them off, for each was excellent in its own way.
There was a new, extremely commercial project at hand, though. Ignatius quickly cleared the desk by brushing the magazine articles and Big Chief tablets smartly to the floor with one sweep of his paws. He placed a new looseleaf folder before him and printed slowly on its rough cover with a red crayon THE JOURNAL OF A WORKING BOY, OR, UP FROM SLOTH. When he had finished that, he tore the Blue Horse bands from the stacks of new lined paper and placed them in the folder. With a pencil he punched holes in the sheets of Levy stationery which already held some notes and inserted them in the front section of the folder. Taking up his Levy Pants ballpoint pen, he began writing on the first sheet of new Blue Horse paper…

And from the great Burke, the counter-reformation meets the enlightenment in a potato;

Proportion not the cause of BEAUTY in VEGETABLES

Beauty hath usually been said to consist in certain proportions of parts. On considering the matter, I have great reason to doubt whether beauty be at all an idea belonging to proportion. Proportion relates almost wholly to convenience, as every idea of order seems to do; and it must therefore be considered as a creature of the understanding, rather than a primary cause acting on the senses and imagination. It is not by the force of long attention and enquiry that we find any object to be beautiful; beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as in the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold…Proportion is the measure of relative quantity…but whether a part of any determinate quality be a fourth, or a fifth, or a sixth, or a moiety of the whole; or whether it be of equal length with any other part, or double its length, or but one half, is a matter merely indifferent to the mind; it stands neuter in the question…but surely beauty is no idea belonging to mensuration; nor has it anything to do with calculation and geometry.