The Virtual Stoa

As he was being chased into exile in Switzerland following the condemnation of his book on education, Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed a short “prose poem” based on the Biblical story of the Levite of Ephraim in the Book of Judges. It’s one of his shorter and more obscure pieces of writing, obscure in both the sense of little known and also rather difficult to understand quite what he’s getting at in it. Still, modern scholarship — Thomas Kavanagh, Mira Morgenstern, etc. — is doing its best. He wrote in his Confessions that

In three days I composed the first three cantos of the little poem which I finished at Motiers, and I am certain of not having done anything in my life in which there is a more interesting mildness of manners, a greater brilliancy of colouring, more simple delineations, greater exactness of proportion, or more antique simplicity in general, notwithstanding the horror of the subject which in itself is abominable, so that besides every other merit I had still that of a difficulty conquered. If the Levite of Ephraim be not the best of my works, it will ever be that most esteemed…

I’m delighted to be able to report that this disturbing Biblical tale of violent rape and murder is now available to the contemporary reader in Lego, over at (where else), The Brick Testament. Read on, Rousseauists, read on…

Winterval Christmas Greetings from the Virtual Stoa; image taken from The excellent, excellent Brick Testament; sensible quotations over at SIAW and JAFA.

More and more is being posted at The Brick Testament, the internet’s only attempt to illustrate the entire Bible in Lego.

The book of Joshua is currently being published, so there’s some pretty dramatic stuff going on. Do go and have a look, if you haven’t been following it for years now.

I recently turned thirty. Throughout my twenties, I tended to ignore birthdays, to the best of my ability. But last week I had a 30th birthday party here in Oxford, and lots of friends came, and I enjoyed myself, and I didn’t get too drunk.

And the excellent presents which my excellent friends gave me, which are still making me happy, include an original (empty) jar of Plumtree’s Potted Meat — which will mean nothing to people who never became a little too obsessive about Ulysses, but something to people, like me, who did; a box of Lego bricks, which is altogether too complicated to explain here (though they are much more fiddly than I remember them from 20+ years ago); Gary Mulholland’s celebration of English pop music; and a copy of David Icke‘s recent book, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, which had to be specially imported from the USA…

I love you all: many thanks.

Update: [5.2.2003]: An excellent one to add to the pile: the CD of Chansons “Contre”, including the nineteenth-century classic by L�o Taxil, “La Marseillaise anti-cl�ricale”!

Off to Newcastle for a few days tomorrow morning. (Or Newcastle Gateshead, as we now have to call it).

So, while I’m away, Season’s Greetings from the Virtual Stoa. (Appropriate nativity image from The Brick Testament, of course.)

You may remember a post earlier in the year advertising the excellent Bible in Lego. A less ambitious project, though in some ways a more extraordinary one, is Anthony Giddens teaching in his office in Lego, thanks to the people at theory.org.uk.

Chris adds [3.11.2002]: New stories are being added to the Bible in Lego every month: visit its Latest Additions page. Recent highlights include all ten plagues afflicting Egypt from the Book of Exodus!

One of the many pleasures of a recent trip to Sicily was a visit to see the magnificent cathedral at Monreale, a short bus ride from Palermo, with its wonderful mosaics depicting Old Testament scenes. So it was a special pleasure to visit (thanks to a link at andrewsullivan.com) the Brick Testament, which has much the same idea, but with lego-bricks. The respective Towers of Babel appear at left and right. (Traditional values in a modern setting!)