Short notes on books I've read.

• Ardor (Roberto Calasso) — A rapture on the Vedic world by way of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa as seen by the Western Indologists. Good insights on the sacrifice's primordial relationship to violence and death, but overall more poetry than treatise. Contemptibly, Indian voices on their own traditions are almost totally absent. Read the book's conclusion first to get a sense of it.

  Yet the thinking of the Vedic ritualists, in its sometimes unfathomable eccentricity, had this peculiarity: it always posed crucial questions, in the face of which all thinking going back to the Enlightenment shows itself to be clumsy and inadequate.