THE OBJECT OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO SHOW THAT SCEPTICISM IS NOT ALWAYS USED TO CHALLENGE BELIEFS: IT IS SOMETIMES USED TO "FOSTER" CERTAIN BELIEFS. GLANVILL’S SCEPTICISM REGARDING OUR KNOWLEDGE OF NATURAL CAUSES IS BASED ON THE WEAKNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. BUT THIS ALLOWS HIM TO ARGUE FOR THE EQUAL POSSIBILITY OF BOTH NATURAL AND NON-NATURAL CAUSES, AND THUS OPENS THE DOOR TO BELIEF IN THE SUPERNATURAL. HUME, HOWEVER, WHOSE SCEPTICISM IS ALSO BASED ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THE (...) UNDERSTANDING, REJECTS ANY EXPLANATION WHICH IS OVER AND ABOVE OUR UNDERSTANDING, THAT IS, EXPLANATIONS IN TERMS OF NON-NATURAL CAUSES. (shrink)

This short novel by the writer S´ndor M´rai, regarded by many as the finest Hungarian writer of our time, was published in 1942 but became known in the West only many years later and was finally translated into English in 2002. Its central subject is the importance and value of friendship between men and love between men and women, involving the three central characters, Henrik, Konrad and Krisztina. The men, who had been friends since their early youth, meet again 41 (...) years later. Although Krisztina, Henrik's wife and Konrad's lover, is long dead, she is fully present in the memory of both. Like Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Embers is remembrance of things past, but with a difference. M´rai's novel plays on the contrast between their past friendship and their present broken friendship, and the contrast between Henrik's love for his wife, and her love for Konrad. But whereas Proust's novel is a recapture of the past, M´rai's novel is a recapture of the past through the present. What is left are only embers of friendship and love. (shrink)

Sept cavaliers quittèrent la Ville au crépuscule, face au soleil couchant, par la porte de l'ouest qui n'etait plus guardée. Tête haute, sans se cacher, au contraire de tous ceux qui avaient abandonné la Ville, car ils ne fuyaient pas, ils ne trahissaient rien, espéraient moins encore et se gardaient d'imaginer. Ainsi étaient-ils armés, le coeur et l'âme désencombrés scintillant froidement comme du cristal, pour le voyage qui les attendait. Sur l'ordre du margrave héréditaire, simplement, ils allaient, ils s'étaient mis (...) en mouvement et le plus jeune d'entre eux, qui n'avait pas seize ans, fredonnait une chanson…Seven cavalrymen left the City at dusk, facing the setting sun by the Eastern gate, which was no longer guarded. Head held high, not hiding themselves, contrary to those who had left the City, for they were not escaping, they were not betraying, were hoping even less, and guarded themselves from imagining. Thus they were armed, their unfettered heart and soul sparkling coldly like crystal, for the voyage which awaited them. On the order of the hereditary Margrave, they were simply going, they were setting out, and the youngest of them, who was not yet 16, was humming a song …. (shrink)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. By Jean‐Dominique Bauby, trans. by Jeremy Leggatt 139 pp. £9.99 cloth.

In his beautiful and haunting novel The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis, Giorgio Bassani, the well known Jewish Italian writer, records the calm, happy life of the Jewish community of Ferrara, in north Italy, in the 1920s and 1930s, the growth of Fascism and the response of the Jewish and non‐Jewish Italians to it. The main characters are the wealthy, aristocratic family of the Finzi‐Continis and their friends and their response to the changing political climate in their town. It is also (...) the unhappy love‐story of Giorgio and Micòl Finzi‐Continis. The novel ends with the deportation of all the family and the whole Jewish community to the concentration camps in Germany and their certain death. (shrink)

When reading Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia, we find ourselves in seventeenth century Renaissance Italy and the social life of Artemisia d'Orazio Gentileschi, a woman painter who was raped, tortured by the Inquisition and due to her fine and original paintings, was the first woman painter to become a member of the famous Accademia del Disegno. In sum, she struggled for her personal and artistic liberation long before anyone in Europe had heard about feminism. Moreover, Artemisia is a (...) timely reminder of how sometimes in the past for Europeans, and more specifically for Italians, Art in general and Painting in particular, was an integral part of a form of life not only for artists but for ordinary people as well. (shrink)