Friday I took from the shelves Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, purchased some time ago but not yet read. The last sentence of the third paragraph runs
The just man fall seven times daily.
Unfortunately, she does not offer a source for the statement, and I remain in the dark.
In A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer, S.J., I noticed in the chapter "Dominance and Subjection" the remark that
The self-certainty with which this whole thing [the dialectical progress of self-consciousness] began inevitably involves a sort of universal self-affirmation (we see this in children).
We do.
Quite a while ago, a friend who had no children asked me what the "terrible twos" were about. I thought about this, and said that they were about discovering the subject-object distinction. Some years later, at the Paulist Center in Boston, I heard the homilist say exactly that. My recollection is that he implied that many of mature years still hadn't mastered the distinction.
A while ago, I happened on Proverbs 18:2,
A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
but only in expressing personal opinion.
That struck me as describing a great deal of social media.
I had been looking for Proverbs 24:16,
for though [the just] fall seven times, they will rise again;
but the wicked are overthrown by calamity.
A math teacher of mine in high school, a member of the Christian Brothers (FCS) quoted that as saying that the just man falls seven times a day. He inferred from this that if you made only seven mistakes a day you were perfect. I don't think he graded that way; perhaps he said it to excuse his own occasional errors at the blackboard. The period of a day to cover the seven falls or stumbles must have been his own, I think.
I have once or twice quoted 24:16, to ESL classes, when students have preferred silence to the chance of making a mistake.
(All quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.)
The cabinets with our plates is in a corner of our kitchen with two exterior walls. During the winter that is the coldest corner. From at least December through February it is well to get dinner plates out of the cabinet to warm up for some time before dinner.
I was struck some years ago in reading Disraeli's novel Coningsby by the paragraph beginning
Lord Monmouth’s dinners at Paris were celebrated. It was generally agreed that they had no rivals; yet there were others who had as skilful cooks, others who, for such a purpose, were equally profuse in their expenditure. What, then, was the secret spell of his success? The simplest in the world, though no one seemed aware of it. His Lordship’s plates were always hot: whereas at Paris, in the best appointed houses, and at dinners which, for costly materials and admirable art in their preparation, cannot be surpassed, the effect is always considerably lessened, and by a mode the most mortifying: by the mere circumstance that every one at a French dinner is served on a cold plate.
Disraeli goes on to blame the custom on the poor quality of French porcelain:
The reason of a custom, or rather a necessity, which one would think a nation so celebrated for their gastronomical taste would recoil from, is really, it is believed, that the ordinary French porcelain is so very inferior that it cannot endure the preparatory heat for dinner.
No doubt French manufactures have improved over the last couple of centuries.
