Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

I'm working on an essay on Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, so I've been plugging some holes in my knowledge of the culture and politics of the period (1848-1851). It's been nice to discover a scholar I hadn't been familiar with before--the Marxist art historian T.J. Clark, who is an absolute model of what the engaged critic should be in his two books: Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851. I also have been reading Balzac--first Pere Goriot, and starting on The Wild Asses' Skin. Great, enjoyable reading--vocation and avocation together, as Frost puts it in "Two Tramps in Mudtime":

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.