Luke Merrell

📚🕯️Basement Library updates 🕯️📚

New shelf, more lighting, more artwork, and a record player.

Current reading stack

enjoy a tidy space, but I also love little evidences of a lived-in space. So, sometimes I find myself purposely leaving an empty drink can behind to for the experience.

New post up on Coleridge and prayer.

thelaysoflanguage.substack.com/p/the-silenc...

Coleridge & coffee

RIP Helen. My brief interactions with you were enough to let me know you were a lovely person and great philosopher.

Very sad to hear that @helendecruz.net passed away today.
dailynous.com/2025/06/20/h...

A Life Lived Sacramentally Believing in and Being Aware of God in All Things

A new Tuesday post is up, on a topic dear to my heart.

open.substack.com/pub/thelayso...

open.substack.com/pub/thelayso...

A Crown That Forever Flowers A Reflection on John Donne's La Corona

thelaysoflanguage.substack.com/p/a-crown-th...

open.substack.com/pub/thelayso...

A Reflection on Loss It has been almost three years since the death of my mother.

The rhythmic sway between death and life, darkness and light, suffering and flourishing.
The ringing of my Savior’s voice: “Blessed are those who mourn.”
The piercing clarity that somehow, even in life’s ugliest moments, there is Beauty.

thelaysoflanguage.substack.com/p/a-reflecti...

Of that Eternal Language How Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" teaches us to find God in all things.

First post over on Substack

thelaysoflanguage.substack.com/p/of-that-et...

Austen is brilliant. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.

Austen’s genius in Northanger Abbey is how she teaches us the power of novels to speak truths about our world (a very Lewisian idea) by first allowing us to think that very idea foolish.

the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

So good.

‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,

I want this quote in defense of novels framed on my wall:

“‘And what are you reading Miss?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.

I had a good feeling about this one, and I am so glad the feeling was accurate.

Austen’s ironic wit is on full display here as she simultaneously defends the novel while also parodying the Gothic literature. 🧵

“For that eternal act [of Creation]—the summoning of all created natures out of the primordial darkness—is most certainly an entirely free and unmerited gift of being, imparted to those who were not and who in themselves had no claim to be…”

-David Bentley Hart

“The human lives in time but [has been] destined to eternity. [God] therefore, I believe, wants them to attend to chiefly two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

This exchange in Northanger Abbey is such a fun commentary on the use of language

“I do not understand you.”

“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

“Me? - yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“Bravo! - an excellent satire on modern language.”

The writing vibes are immaculate

Minutes before my favorite weekday event.

Love Tuesday night discussion group.

YouTube video by Malcolm Guite With Martin Shaw!

For this Spell in the Library you find me with the great mythologist and storyteller Dr Martin Shaw! With Martin Shaw!
youtu.be/J1oq4b9muwE

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Just discovered the “Have your cake and eat it too” saying goes back at least into the early 1600s.

“The Size” - George Herbert

A petition to move the philosophy section at used bookstores away from the astrology and tarot section. Thanks.

You know what to do.

It’s such a joy to read and hold these books and imagine people in the 1900s reading them for the first time.

Even more special to me are the ones that were published while Lewis was alive. Still forever thankful for his life and work.

#cslewis #rarebooks #books #narnia