In defence of idleness
In the past — do you remember when we were “living in the past,” gentle reader? neither do I — in the past, & with our old technology, time delays in publishing & correspondence were not so much an imposition as part of the rhythm of life. A physical letter took at least some time in transit, & the time elapsed contributed to the recipient’s leisure in responding. The physical letter, when from a person loved or esteemed or even silently detested, was an artefact, an object of some value. It could be kept & returned to, over time. There are bales of such keepsakes up here in the High Doganate, to remind me that I was once living in the past, without realizing. They remind me, too, that I must now be living in the past. Handwriting provided a physical presence, & even those who used typewriters became familiar through their fonts, & peculiarities as slight as the way they indented paragraphs. The reply might be “dashed off,” or it might be carefully composed, draughted then copied nicely. In both cases, some degree of “linear thinking” was required.
From the age before “reply all,” I recall the thrill of receiving an envelope addressed in a certain handwriting, in ink of a certain purplish shade, with stamps from a certain country. The world indeed keeps shrinking & shrinking, but I have noticed it is still the same distance to walk; so that it is not the distance that is the primary illusion. It is instead the proximity. Though, distance is of course also an illusion, according to the old Buddhist quatrain that Japanese travellers once carried in their breasts:
Really there is no East, no West;
Where then is the North & the South?
Illusion makes the world close in.
Enlightenment opens it on every side.
An old lady of my acquaintance — one of those who is not my mother — was found smoking in the Parkdale snows the other day. She was clutching a letter, which she wanted to show me; not have me read, just look at it as an “objective thing.” It was the first letter she ever received from the man who became her husband, himself long gone. It was the proof to her that she had not imagined all the past. It was as tattered as an old prayer book. I think it served a similar function, for her, bringing the proximity & distance together until they met at the point of reality. And when she dies someone will throw it out. That won’t matter; it has served in its time. And everything that ever was is immutable in the Eye of God.
Today we require an act of will to appreciate these distances. Time in transit once spared us what I find today an almost excruciating effort — to appreciate distance — compounded by the demand for instantaneous response, & the electronic sense that one is writing on water. “The Internet never forgets,” one correspondent wrote, but I don’t believe this. I’ve seen all my old links go dead after a few years, & the bookmarks themselves lost with old laptops. Our technology becomes faster & faster, & with that, increasingly defective.
A fine lady in Venice has been writing to me, & sending wonderful photographs, which I had better find a way to print out. What enchants her most about that city is a quality she calls the “fittingness” of all things, including the people who have been “conditioned” by their environment. We might say that Venice is a very beautiful city (the part built long ago), but I would go farther & suggest that this Venice was built in the light of the Gloria.
It was built, incrementally, with the kind of time delays we once had by analogy to the transit of mail. An “aesthetic” point is made in the elaboration of one building, & the next after responds to it; not in antagonism, but as a new voice rising in the choir. There is leisure to consider the rhythm of this response, & for the reconciliation of apparent contradictions: the use of dissonant notes in the construction of larger harmonies. There is an etiquette which has grown up organically in statement & response, & over centuries of time what was once successive has become simultaneous: a foreshadowing of life beyond time. Nothing was built, nor removed, casually; though as we can know, things were often built & removed, in the development of this extraordinary choir — in stone, on water.
In the hope that this lady writing from the Cannaregio will forgive me for quoting what she has perfectly observed:
“Why build three huge gorgeous churches on one corner, & fill them with sculpture & painting? Certainly there were not enough people to fill them, so it seems they were built to fill the world with glory.”
Speed & efficiency, both of them narrowly & nastily defined, have been erasing a whole dimension of Reason among us, at a terrible cost. We do not have time, in our “economy,” to consider & reconsider; we must act quickly & decisively. The penalty for dawdling over the “fittingness” of our actions has been growing, till we are reduced to quick mental checklists which focus entirely on the immediate cause & effect. I think of an old architect, in a very old Spain, who in his enthusiasm for his project wrote to his patron, “We will build such & so great a Cathedral that those who look upon it in the future will think that we were mad!” (Cannot find the reference, alas, for I cannot find my old copy of John Harvey’s Cathedrals of Spain.)
We have been erasing, as it were, a dimension of Reason itself, in the name of Reason. For the madness of this architect was a form of reason. He had an image in his mind which could only be conveyed by “rational” drawings, & finally in the Nueva Catedral itself — which would come into its full being a couple of centuries after his death, & after many later modifications to improve the “fittingness” of each part to the whole, & the whole to the landscape of its city. Consider, if thou wilt, the sublime patience of this madman.
As I was just writing to this fine lady: “Now, one of the ‘problems’ as I have come to see it is that, when Reason excludes that form of contemplation in which we discover what is fitting, what is rhythmic, what is beautiful, it starts turning against itself. We have these battles to the death between exponents of Reason from different camps. There is nothing left to elide their differences. The gnit-pickers triumph in blood & gore.”
We have always had this problem. We have always had men who will stop at nothing, & would not dream of stopping to think through the prudential implications of what they are doing; & even centuries ago there were men who would tear all of Holy Church apart for the sake of simplifying fine points of doctrine, excluding one or another of the transcendentals to reduce Truth to a slogan. (And they were not all Protestants, far from it; & to be fair, it was not they who tore the Church apart — for on the larger scale, it was men with their eyes fixed beadily upon worldly power, using theological controversy for their excuse to seize both the property & authority which belonged to that Church — again, French Catholics as English Protestants.) We have always had men in a hurry, & will always have, regardless of technology. The sin in this case is quite “original”; & no machine can be original like that.
What we have not always had, however, is the modern & now post-modern condition of constant acceleration of pace. Reason is not extinguished by this, it is only narrowed: made more & more svelte to keep up with the race. We pitch sanity to keep the frame lighter.
That, in case gentle reader has wondered, will account for the peculiar eccentricities of this blog, & why I am trying to make it & keep it a kind of “anti-blog,” devoted to that spirit of Idleness in which we try, so far as God will assist, to restore the Gloria, & the beauty in things that the world has no time for.
From my own past a few lines remembered from Living in the Past:
Once I used to join in
every boy and girl was my friend.
Now there’s revolution, but they don’t know
what they’re fighting for.
Let us close our eyes;
outside their lives go on much faster.
Oh, we won’t give in,
we’ll keep living in the past.
Eccentrics we may be, dissidents if you will. No one knows for sure what time is but we can travel its meandering roads both ways. We are not slaves of the mere forward clock.
Catino
Mr Speaker,
I may comment, but I want to take some time to think about it. This reminds me that your new fiats should perhaps be amended to include constraints on, or outright censorship of, knee-jerk irony.
The larger purpose of your site as described in your last paragraph is right, of course, for which, thanks very much.
JW
Yes contemplation which brings us to a perception of beauty enables us to slow down and be what our Maker calls us to be — not what we want ourselves to be. To express ourselves in thanks and praise — Gloria in excelsis Deo — for this we exist, and yet when I look around even among my own children I see this frenetic activity and dislike of keeping still, until children come into their lives — and then I see a glimmer of Hope.
This constant state of rushing and frenetic activity is the reason I’ll never hear something like Palestrina’s Missa Te Deum Laudamus in Church. Can you imagine the congregation sitting through eleven minutes of Credo?
Just so, Mr Warren, just so.
I remember when I started down the digital highway myself. My instructor was teaching digital drafting and the creation of architectural and electronic drawings using a computer (this was well before the “Internet”). Our exercise was to discuss what was good and what was not good about digital drafting. On the “not good” side of the ledger I answered: “loss of Old World aesthetics” for I still believe nothing can match a hand drafted drawing.
For a long time after a digital keyboard became available, I persisted in writing my thoughts longhand. I was convinced at the time that typing on a keyboard, even an old school typewriter, robbed the essence of my highest thoughts. Eventually I succumbed to the Siren Song of the keys. I taped over every key so I could not see its mark, and learned to touch type via discomfort and pain.
I would not now go back to hand writing except for special friends. But even so, I lament the passing of hand written letters, it is a gift to someone now if you do that — we should do it more often. I’ve made my peace with it all. My kids would not have a clue of what I’ve written above. But I agree with you we’ve lost something. I can only hope we are gaining something in return. I suppose that’s what it means to grow old within your century. I have yet to sign up for Facebook though my wife tells me all the news.
David, your point about email replacing written letters is well taken. But this trend started long before computers. It started with the telephone. But I am of mixed mind about it. I am old enough to remember letters, but possibly not old enough to be nostalgic about them. Have we lost something? Yes. But you seldom touch on what may have been gained. The Internet has allowed families to stay in touch (email, messaging, Skype, etc.) in a way that was not possible in the past. For a brief few minutes whenever I desire, I can see and talk to my daughter who is teaching in a northern community. Written letters do not compare.
As with any progress (I know you hate that word, but it isn’t evil), there are benefits and drawbacks. If the drawbacks exceed the benefits then they don’t last. What happened to eight tracks?
The beauty and attraction of cathedrals is not all due to their well thought out designs and plans, because many of them are not. In many cases, some of the structure was put up to stop the building from collapsing due to original poor design. The use of the flying buttress is an example. Their Beauty and attraction has as much to do with people growing up with them and getting used to them. To me, the most beautiful structure that I have ever seen is the tiny semi-detached house that I grew up in.
When the Sydney Opera House was proposed, it was criticized as being ugly and an eyesore. The same was said of the CN Tower, Casa Loma, and hundreds of other buildings. But I dare any politician or developer to propose tearing any of them down.
When I went online the other day to order something and did so by instantly finding out what I’d ordered at the same time last year, clicking a few keys, and putting myself in the position to sit back and wait for it to arrive at my door, I said to my wife, “There are some things about this that I will miss when it is all gone.”
Because much or all of it will be. The systems upon which it is based are just too tenuous to sustain. I take recent events, lightning strikes on St Peters, huge rocks crashing into Russia, freak storms altering presidential elections, as a jarring indication of just how easy it will be for a little huffing and puffing to blow this whole house of cards down. And then, as David implies, we will be left holding nothing where we once thought we had something tangible.
Getting used to something does not really make it beautiful or good. Nor does being able to use it effectively to do this or that. What makes for beauty and goodness is alignment with that which is good, true, and beautiful. That’s what makes for true progress. That’s what makes us more human, more ourselves.
Without that it’s all just ashes to ashes and dust to dust, no matter how many monuments or robots we manage to build while we’re here.
When my father goes, he will leave behind many things that were written in his own hand. I would like my children and grandchildren to have, for example, what I am writing right now to see someday to remind them of who I was. In the beginning was the word, not the Kodak snapshot. But unlike some here, I have never been disciplined enough to write my late in life thoughts except in this format, which they will never see.
It is happening everywhere, not just with the written word. The logos is being violated everywhere in the name of “progress,” so that now the basic mechanism of psychosocial transmission, the family, is being ruptured in many of the more “advanced” places in the world.
Last month, a nice young woman introduced another woman as “my wife.” I graciously said hello, but what I wanted to say was, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” What she might as well have said was, “Hi, I’m so and so, and it is my mission to destroy everything that mankind and God have worked together to attain for thousands of years.”
Anyway, as I said, reality will intrude soon enough, but in the meantime, we ought not to kid ourselves about what makes us and things better and what does not.
Perhaps the reason we no longer appreciate our past is that we (meaning our civilization) feel we have no future.
Having, in general, lost any hope of, even belief in, heaven we can only live for today. This is exacerbated by the increase of childless families that no longer have the goal of building a business or a thriving farm for their descendants.
I remember reading, many years ago, a description of the years of back breaking toil by early settlers of Texas that planted and watered groves of pecan trees that they knew would not bear during their lifetimes. Even then, long before our current general aimlessness, the author was amazed (albeit admiring) that anyone would labor so hard on something they would never benefit from.
I think the essential and tragic thing lost in our relentless focus on today is the feeling that nothing we do really matters, except to the extent it affects us today.
Having, what passes for, our society’s leadership constantly repeat that our history is a long string of atrocities, our beliefs either false or no better than those of our enemies, our futures dim, and the result of all our efforts to build something is the destruction, not improvement, of the world — has taken its toll.
The constant reiteration in schools, media and politics, that our past should not be cherished because it was filled with evil, our present contains nothing of value and must be completely revamped, and our future is oblivion, has had its effect on the masses. They neither remember, strive, nor hope.
If a man’s reach should not exceed his grasp because there is nothing worth reaching for, then most conclude that the only “wise” course is to grab what you can today.