daniel persigehl — everything

The Spears Were Real

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

21 July 2026

From Alan Jacobs’ post Auden’s faith.

I said earlier that I wouldn’t say much about the poems, but here I do want to bring one of them in: “Friday’s Child.” Now, we know that Auden believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person who “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” There’s a funny story Mendelson has told about a lecture that Joseph Campbell gave at Smith College, when Auden was teaching there, in which he spoke of the oneness of Jesus and the Buddha, each of whom had spears thrust at him, though in the case of the Buddha they were transformed into flowers. Auden shouted from the back of the room, “ON GOOD FRIDAY THE SPEARS WERE REAL.”

and

Did he believe all this with unwavering faith? Certainly not. Often, it seems, his affirmations were more aspirational than full of conviction. (I know the feeling.) But the aspiration was real: he perceived his small faith and small love as deficiencies, felt himself tempted to acquiesce in faithlessness and lovelessness, and earnestly desired a deeper faith and a greater love. He regularly received Communion not, I think, for the reasons given by Mendelson but because he understood that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And so also he prayed

That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis,
Turns about the abiding tree.

Which strikes me as an echo of the image in “Deep River”

Oh, chillun, Oh, don’t you want to go, to that gospel feast,
That promised land, that land, where all is peace?
Walk into heaven, and take my seat,
And cast my crown at Jesus feet
Lord, I want to cross over into camp-ground.

Super flumina — Psalm 136/137 — planted: the harps on the willows, and the cantor's question in the Greek.

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

planted: the harps on the willows, and the cantor’s question in the Greek.

Beatus vir — Psalm 1 — first notes: the three verbs of verse 1, the tree and the chaff.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

first notes: the three verbs of verse 1, the tree and the chaff.

On potsherds

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

30 June 2026

When papyrus ran short, the monks of the Egyptian desert wrote their psalms on broken pottery — an ostrakon cost nothing, and a verse held in the hand is a verse half-learned already.

Schoolboys, too, scratched their letters on them, and tax-collectors their receipts. The humblest writing surface in the ancient world turns out to have preserved a great deal of ordinary life.

There is no shame in a small surface. Some things are meant to be written quickly and kept anyway.

The Wandering Tone

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Most of the psalm tones are homebodies. Each has a single reciting note — a tenor, the pitch on which the bulk of each verse is chanted — and it holds that note faithfully through both halves of the verse, bending only at the mediant and the ending. The tonus peregrinus is the exception. It will not stay put: its second half recites a whole step lower than its first. [The tenor drops from la to sol between the two halves of the verse — hence peregrinus, “foreign” or “wandering.” The effect is subtle sung but unmistakable once the ear knows to listen for it.]

It is old, and the old theorists already treat it as an oddity — a tone that does not behave, filed among the regular eight with an apology. [Already flagged as irregular in the Commemoratio brevis (9th c.); cf. the discussion in Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, 1958), pp. 208–212, where the tone’s antiquity and its Eastern parallels are laid out at length.] By long tradition it is wedded to a single psalm, In exitu Israel — Psalm 113 in the Vulgate numbering — whose opening is itself about going out: Israel leaving Egypt, a people picking up and moving. [Vulgate/Septuagint numbering; the Hebrew tradition divides the same material as Pss. 114–115. The association of tone and psalm is ancient and very nearly universal in the Western books. Cf. also the glossary at Beatus vir on the numbering question generally.]

I do not think the pairing is an accident, though I cannot prove it was designed. A tone that migrates mid-verse, set to the psalm of a migration; a melody that refuses to settle, carrying the words of a people who could not settle either. Whoever first joined them had an ear not only for pitch but for sense. The wandering is the point.

Augustine on singing

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

28 June 2026

Cantare amantis est. — Singing belongs to one who loves.

A whole theology of music folded into four words. You do not sing what you are indifferent to; the act presupposes the affection. Worth remembering on the mornings the choir is flat and I am tempted to think the singing is the problem.

The shape of a mode

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

24 June 2026

Taught the difference between Dorian and Phrygian today by ear before ever naming them. The students heard it at once — one rises and opens, the other leans down and broods — and only then did the theory have anywhere to land. The name is a hook to hang a thing already known on, never the thing itself.

Miserere — Psalm 50/51 — opening note on the verse-numbering and "after thy great goodness."

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

opening note on the verse-numbering and “after thy great goodness.”

Why a Dead Language

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

The question comes every year, usually around October, usually from a bright student who has just realized that no one in the hallway speaks Latin and suspects, not unreasonably, that he is being asked to memorize a corpse.

It is a fair question and it deserves better than the usual answers. “It helps your SAT vocabulary” is true and beneath the subject. “It trains the mind” is true and unfalsifiable. Neither is why anyone who loves the language loves it.

Here is the honest version. A living language is a river you stand in; you cannot see its whole length, because it is still moving and you are wet. A language that has stopped moving can be seen entire. Latin is finished, and because it is finished it can be known in a way no living tongue can be — its whole literature is gathered, its grammar described to the last exception, its long argument with itself concluded. To learn it is to be handed two thousand years of one conversation, complete.

That the speakers are dead is not the defect. It is the condition of the gift. The dead cannot change their minds, and so they can finally be listened to.

Festina lente

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

19 June 2026

Festina lente — make haste slowly. Augustus’ favourite motto, Suetonius says, and a printer’s device for Aldus Manutius fifteen centuries later: a dolphin twined round an anchor, speed and ballast in one mark. The best advice usually contradicts itself a little.

A line of Horace

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

12 June 2026

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Everyone knows the first half and forgets the second, which is where the sense lives: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the one that follows. Not seize-the-day bravado — a gardener’s caution about tomorrow’s weather.

In Praise of the Small Page

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

There was a stretch of the web, now mostly gone, when a personal page was a small and finished thing. It loaded at once. It held a few hundred words, a list of links to friends, perhaps a photograph that took a moment to paint itself down the screen. You read it, and then you went somewhere else.

What replaced it was not better, only larger. A page today may carry more code than the collected works of an ancient author, most of it spent watching you read. [The surveillance is the point, not an accident of growth. A page that sells nothing and counts no visitors has no reason to be heavy.] The text itself, the part you came for, is a thin seam in a thick rock of machinery.

I do not think the old way was primitive so much as sufficient. A page that loads instantly, works without scripts, and says one true thing has solved the problem that a page exists to solve. The improvements worth keeping from the years since — that the type can resize for a small screen, that the characters of every language can be written down without ceremony [Unicode did in one table what a century of competing national character sets could not: every script a reader might need, addressable at once. Cf. the old mojibake of a Japanese page opened in the wrong encoding — a problem that simply no longer exists.] — are improvements of reach, not of weight. They cost nothing and they ask nothing of the reader.

So this is a small page, and means to stay one.

De profundis — Psalm 129/130 — first note: the watchman image and "out of the deep" as a place.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

first note: the watchman image and “out of the deep” as a place.

On memorizing declensions

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

5 June 2026

A student asked why we still chant the endings aloud when a chart is right there on the page. Because the chart is in the book and the chanting is in you. Rote has a bad name it only half deserves; the ear keeps what the eye lets slide.