Abiezer Coppe

It was raining so fiercely yesterday that visibility was barely a quarter block. Made the early morning trip to the clinic a bit scary.

My foot looked much better, the swelling and redness is greatly diminished. I’ll go back to work Monday.

Having to keep my foot propped up has kept me away from my PC for most of the last couple of weeks. I’m woefully behind on the journals I read.

I thought I’d be sitting and reading while I recovered. But I haven’t felt motivated to do anything; the days have been flat and amorphous. I didn’t feel like watching movies or television. I did have the latter on too much. But I often nodded off halfway through a show and woke up during the last ten minutes of whatever came next.

I did at least finish Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. I have to confess I was mostly looking for some cheap laughs at the prophets and messiahs that flourished amid the disorder of the middle of the seventeenth century. Hill focuses on the communist and equalitarian groups of the time so I didn’t get the giggles. It was interesting to see how the political radicalism of the common folk led to the development of the key conservative idea that rights of property are the real freedoms. And certainly explains why ‘subordination’ (i.e., knowing your place) became so important in the eighteenth century.

I was particularly glad to make the acquaintance of Abiezer Coppe’s dumbfounding prose:

the Ministers, fat parsons, Vicars, Lecturers, &c. who (for their owne base ends, to maintain their pride, and pompe, and to fill their owne paunches, and purses) have been the chief instruments of all those horrid abominations, hellish, cruell, devillish, persecutions, in this nation which cry for vengeance.

You won’t see that on the OpEd page of the New York Times. Maybe one day I’ll see if Coppe is available in a cheap reprint.