Medieval History 420

We have this phenomenal weed at the moment, and I have this phenomenal book to read whilst high: The Civilization of the Middle Ages, by Norman Cantor. I'm not sure where it came from, but at a guess it either belonged to Magnum or Luke Duke, who did history degrees, or to me, whose undergrad focus was on the Middle Ages in second year. Probably from the extra courses at the U of T that I took when I switched concentrations, since at our home college they didn't let us have secondary texts. It stands to reason I wouldn't remember it, because that year two was my year 'off', in the same way year three was my year abroad. Year two was when I figured out I could still pass if I was high all the time. I had fun and learnt alot on a human level but in retrospect, I regret it a little - we had some great professors who I apparently did my best to ignore. I'm glad I shaped up in fourth year.

But this is not the story of my particularly White Upper Middle Class regrets and rehabilitations. It's the story of this book, that's great to read whilst high. The author draws history in embracing, strong lines, demonstrating in a few vague but powerfully argued pages the unbroken chain of authority linking the Roman Empire with the Roman Papacy, or the wildness of Rhine Germans as one of the bases of the urge towards democracy in European culture. Drawing in one or two pages the emasculation of the Christian church as the notion of social dissent all but fell out the bottom of it in the interests of keeping the institution growing. Lovely, sweeping vaguenesses! I adore them when I'm high.

Apparently the author, Dr. Cantor, was quite anti-post-modernist. I'm sure he had great personal and intellectual reasons for that, but again at a guess I'm going to say it was because of the fact that he was happy to write such sweeping truthinesses, that are very strongly focussed whilst being too general to be wholly meaningful. Post-modernists dissect and pinpoint and agonize and can't conclude their way out of a paper bag, which to me is simultaneously a strength and a weakness - strength because a really clever person and a good arts academic should always have the consciousness that they might be wrong or that someone else's interpretation might be more apt - and weak because it's boring to read while I'm high. Not The Civilization of the Middle Ages. That's ace.