Essays in Idleness

Over Easter we lost two old Idler magazine contributors, & one drinking companion. On Holy Saturday, David Dooley died, age 91: emeritus English professor in St Michael’s College. He was active to nearly the end in pro-life causes, & the Catholic Civil Rights League. He once wrote a few book reviews for the Idler. I first met him, back then a quarterish century ago, when he was already facing the university’s compulsory retirement requirement, enforced the more strictly in the humanities because modern universities were finding themselves seriously overstaffed in such departments, no longer in consumer demand. By now I should think their problem has been resolved.

A real professor, & Dooley was certainly one of those, comes into his own around age sixty-five. That is when he has amassed sufficient learning to begin teaching in earnest, as Dooley explained. He was a fighter by disposition, a good old-fashioned Irish Catlick scrapper, who was doing his best in a hopelessly lost cause. He was from the glory era at St Mike’s — when it had J.M. Cameron, Tom Langan, John Kelly, & many more; had Étienne Gilson & his Pontifical Institute; had Marshall McLuhan & his Media Studies; had the finest humanities library in the Province — not the biggest, but the most carefully chosen, book by book, & extensive archival holdings such as the Newman papers, heroically obtained. Today that campus is largely a waste of valuable downtown parking space. It has ceased to be a Catholic institution except in some obscure, nominal sense, & the Basilian Fathers who once provided impressive spiritual guidance have long since gone over to the other side. In my humble but fierce opinion.

Dooley was of the vintage that fought against the merger of St Mike’s into the University of Toronto. He understood why it was a lost cause. The staff who voted on this nasty question were willing to surrender all their independence, together with their Catholic identity, in return for an approximately 5 percent raise in their salaries, that would bring them into line with pay levels in the larger bureaucracy. They were openly bought, & they went cheaply: in a word, prostitutes. Dooley knew every historical detail of the once-proud St Michael’s University, built with the pennies of old Irish widows so their grandchildren could receive a superb education, & stand tall in this Protestant town; so that Catholics could have a cultivated clergy, ornaments to the Church. It was the splendid product of sacrifices over several generations, not least from faculty once ill-paid. All gone in the end for a contract settlement, for an extra 5 percent & the promise of better sports facilities.

God bless this man, God bless his spirit. A lot of people didn’t like him, he was a fusty old dog. This is just why I loved him, & his knowledge of English literature made him (even when I was just an Anglican) the sort of man to drink sherry with. He was one of the few I could entrust to review a book, who would actually read it; an interpreter of 20th-century “EngLit” who could supply so much by knowing its antecedents, by knowing the classics its authors knew. And thus, seldom welcome in the pages of the more fashionable reviews, where theory prevails & men like that are marked as “plodders.”

I remember him over at my house (I once lived in a house) scanning my bookshelves. He took down a volume of the first Keynes edition of Sir Thomas Browne, which had library markings in it.

“Did you steal this book?” he asked forthrightly.

“No, I bought the set for a couple of dollars in a library sale. You will find the discard stamp on the back endpaper.”

“O Lord, oh my blessed Lord,” was his observation. For yes, this was the sort of literature modern libraries were dumping. He said he would be happier had I stolen it.

*

“RIP Kildare Dobbs, the greatest & quietest of raconteurs,” as Richard Lubbock (the Idler‘s old Chief Cosmological Correspondent, now himself mid-eighties & nursing-homed) tweeted on Monday. That Kildare, in his ninetieth year, would die on April Fool’s Day, was of a piece with the rest of his life. It was his last gently mischievous wink.

One had to see Kildare’s eyes to follow his anecdotes, for his voice was so provocatively soft. The light in them provided important clues to the narrative. You had to sit very close, stare, & hope others in the room would shut up. For every anecdote was worth hearing, & most of them were side-splitting funny. Yet as the telling continued, the voice would become softer still. We see the result when these anecdotes are repeated among Kildare’s old friends: no two versions ever quite agree.

I asked him once what he’d done for a living when he first washed up in Canada (around 1953). He’d found a job teaching in some “godforsaken” two-room schoolhouse in northern Ontario, beyond Sudbury I think. He wasn’t at all suited to it, & his students were soon out of control. But the old man commanding the other classroom had all his charges smartly in order, & Kildare often wondered how that was done. He could never meet this colleague, who disappeared instantly at the end of each school day; till finally he spotted him in the town’s hotel bar. It turned out the man was an alcoholic, & could have been found any evening in there.

Searching for some way to endear himself to this frosty superior, young Kildare confessed that he had problems with class discipline, & had been deeply impressed by the punctiliously correct behaviour of every pupil in the other room. “How do you do it? How do you get them to behave?”

“I hate the little bastards. And they know it.”

That will have to do as a Kildare Dobbs anecdote. He collected stories everywhere. Some people become magnets for the memorable, because they put themselves consistently in harm’s way; though I doubt Kildare would ever have been so crass as to ruin a good tale with excessive fact-checking. He was a connoisseur of corruption & hypocrisy; a diligent observer of how the world really works, & people get what they want. He was delighted to discover a new swindle. He earned his living through much of his life as a travel writer, with frequent excursions to exotic places in search of “local colour.” He had a gift for discovering high life in the low places, & vice versa. Every artist needs patrons, & in his case, the patrons found were first-class hotels, airlines, & travel agencies. Knowing he would actually be read, such sponsors endured his little eccentricities, & let him live off the fat of the land.

He was also a poet, & among my regrets, the Idler went down before we could publish a selection of his hendecasyllables. (They have since appeared in a book, The Eleventh Hour.) This is a reasonably obscure, classical, quantitative measure, nearly impossible to manage in English. (I know because I’ve tried.) Developed in ancient Alexandria, it takes the sapphic, essentially lyric rhythm, & extends it towards narrative — floating it, as it were, on the air. Kildare daringly rejected the standard models, to turn the measure back again, towards lyric. To my knowledge, no one had ever tried this before, in English. Somehow Kildare, with the ear of an Alfred Lord Tennyson, pulled it off: made hendecasyllables sound natural, almost conversational in English, while restoring the sapphic clip. I still have the manuscript marked with typesetting instructions, somewhere in the High Doganate. If I could find it I would give an example.

The 17th-century Thomas Browne was mentioned above, famed as a model for English prose style. Kildare was — & I mean this — the best prose writer of his generation in English, up here in America’s mad attic. By some genetic freak, his nearest rival was his cousin, John Muggeridge (son of Kitty, née Dobbs, the wife of Malcolm Muggeridge). John was as infallible, except, one could seldom extract copy from him, for all one’s pleading & begging. He’d think too much about what he ought to say. But Kildare was spot on deadline. Neither ever constructed a sentence that a subeditor could improve. (Not to say the idiots didn’t try.) It must be something in the water from the River Liffey: from that Ireland entirely within the Pale. It makes prose perfect, immortal. Indeed, the day Kildare made a spelling error, our whole office rejoiced.

I gave Kildare a very poorly-paid, extended regular column in the Idler, entitled “The Rambler.” It was an opportunity for him to write memoirs of his travels, without having to acknowledge sponsors, or take much care over fine little points that might offend them. Happily for me, he leapt at opportunities like that, doing his best work for the smallest sums.

We used to use Dobbs copy at the Idler in training some of our younger writers. I recall telling a certain fellow, now an august media pundit, but then an over-ambitious subliterate nobody of twenty-two, to read Kildare’s columns through again & again with only one thing in mind: where he had placed his commas. For they were a guide to his “perfect pitch” — the musical (as opposed to quasi-logical) pauses that prose rhythm requires, to achieve sublimity. A beautiful bird, or flowering plant in nature, is seen to be lovely at first glance. Yet it is only when it is examined that one begins to appreciate how lovely, how intricately & how exquisitely the whole creature is designed; what a universe of incredible detail has gone into the unified overall effect. That is when we see where God has placed the commas.

Kildare was a patient artist, making his way in our impatient world. And this he did artfully, presenting himself as a rogue, dropping hints that he was not to be trusted, that he was selfish & conniving. Typical was the profession of love remembered by the wife who survives him. (His third wife, but a love-match that endured.) “It has been my experience that beautiful women usually have unworthy men in their lives,” he wrote to the young painter, Linda Kooluris. “I want you to know I’m as worthless as the next.”

This irony was the reverse of modern: Kildare was not really such a rogue (notwithstanding the shocking & self-deprecating anecdotes), nor the coward he professed to be (witness military medals). He was extremely reliable, & secretly generous in a reckless, uncalculating way. He was, in fact, a gentle man, with real empathy for human suffering: a genuine carrier of other’s pain. The eyes, once again, told much, for he could laugh merrily at the bloody farce of it all, tell jokes in the darkest black humour, but in his eyes the wince could be seen.

Christian he was not. He loved the outward artifice of religion, by which he was inwardly puzzled. I got from him good-natured mockery for my own entry into the Catholic Church, during his 80th birthday party (combined, in a pub, with John Muggeridge’s 70th). To him, dogmatic certainty was the normal cause of bloodshed & uncharity, of which he’d seen enough in his youth. He was Japanese in his religious disposition: a faith inexplicably transformed into an aloof aestheticism, a cherry-blossom exhalation upon the transience of things.

Nor was he in any sense a political “conservative,” except perhaps in my intensely apolitical sense. He despised the doctrinaire proponents of “economic freedom,” just as he despised Marxists & all other ideologues. But he loved the thing itself: the buy & sell. He would explain that for real capitalism, one must go to the bazaars of the East, for what we have in the West is only stage-show competition, fake at every level.

Canadian letters had no better friend. Kildare Dobbs, the immigrant, quietly “discovered” a great deal of fine Canadian writing that had been overlooked; quietly ignored what was coarse & over-celebrated. He played a major, mostly unacknowledged role in the “gardening” of our literature, both in the backrooms of publishing (at Macmillan’s of Canada in the 1950s, in the founding of the Tamarack Review & at the magazine Saturday Night in the 1960s), & later in the foreground, as genial advocate in newspapers & broadcasting.

Thus he fully deserved the Order of Canada he finally received, in January. (Immobilized by his congestive heart, & a hundred other ailments, Kildare could not visit Ottawa to receive it. So our governor-general, the Right Honourable David Johnston, came to him, delivering it in person to his Toronto apartment.) They give these things out by the hundred each year; two or three are often quite deserved.

*

Selwyn Owen died Tuesday. He was one of a pub table of drinking buddies, who have been meeting Tuesdays since well back in the last century. We are all defunct artists of one kind or another, from the convenor down — Paul Young, before his retirement the last skilled drawing master at the Ontario College of Art (since renamed to increase its pretension). Selwyn was only in his sixties. He made his way as a realtor, while secretly persisting as an abstract painter. Others at the table retired from art more completely, at an early age, becoming bank managers, storekeepers, office workers, lawyers, lexicographers, whatever; I can remember most from when they were giddy young aspiring poets & artists, before “reality” set in. Selwyn’s kids came to work with him in the real estate business; he found some happiness there. He ended up withered on a hospital bed, in the unspeakable final stage of Lou Gehrig’s disease. A granddaughter “checked in” to the planet at East General, just as Selwyn was “checking out.” That was, he said when he could last speak, what he was still living for: to see that little girl if he could, perhaps hold her in his dying arms.

I did not know him so well, for I am among the least regular of the regulars at that table; but did know him for a modest & kindly, thoughtful man, who gave little glimpses into a sensibility that was amazingly colourful, behind an outward reserve. He could articulate connexions between visual art & music, that struck me as brilliant. Few have the gift of listening as well as speaking, & Selwyn was one of those, staying remorselessly on topic. A Londoner by birth, another Canadian by immigration, he discarded the accent but retained the manners of a well-bred Englishman. Not all artists are buffoons.

Up here in the High Doganate we are doing what one does of an Easter morning: blaring music out of a powerful little CD player. It is Bach’s Easter Oratorio. It is too beautiful: the shock of the magnificent opening symphonia; the brief adagio; & then the symphonia returns, now with full chorus: “Kommt, eilet und laufet!”

“Come quickly, come running!”

It was the women who first discovered what had happened, at Christ’s tomb. The stone, moved. The tomb, empty. Mary Magdalen’s horror. She goes running, to Simon Peter, & to John (“the other disciple, whom Jesus loved”) to tell them what has happened.

Peter & John are found, & they are told: “Come quickly.” What is this about? “Come quickly! Come running!”

What is going on?

“Run! Run!”

And then Peter, & John, running. Running quickly, & running, wild. Peter slipping, John catching him up. John slipping, Peter catching him up. The wild look on their faces, reflecting the wild look that had been on Mary’s. Peter breathless, falling behind. John gets there first.

The stone is indeed out of place. The tomb has been left open. John can see the linen shroud lying flat inside. It is not covering a body any more. He does not know what to think. He does not step inside.

Peter arrives. He goes right in: sees the shroud. The napkin that had been wrapped about the head is lying separately. Then John, cautiously, enters. The body is gone. They step out, & walk away. Mary remains, weeping, staring into the darkness of the empty tomb.

And then dimly she begins to descry … the two angels. One is at the head, one at the feet, of the place where Jesus had been laid.

“Woman, why do you weep?”

“Because they have taken away my Lord, & I know not where they have laid him.”

There is a man standing behind her. She turns towards him. Perhaps he is the gardener.

“Woman, why do you weep? Whom do you seek?”

“Sir, if you have taken him, tell me where you have laid him, & I will take him away.”

And he replied, “Mary!”

And she looks up into His face, & she says, “My Lord!”

Up here in the High Doganate, we have been taking a break from “reality” these last few days, in the hope that when we return to it, it will have gone away. Instead of writing, or even reading, the entire population of this place (one, at the last census) has been e.g. dabbling in watercolour. Twice it kept us up until five in the morning, because we lost track of time. Such is the danger in modern electric lighting, & why I recommend against having it installed.

My relationship with watercolour goes back to early childhood. My papa wanted to be a painter, but had to give it up for war, family, & other common distractions. Once he had a boy of his own, however, out came the paints. I was a Winsor & Newton baby, & until the age of nine or ten — given the sort of people my parents naturally hung out with — was under the impression everyone was an artist. I considered myself a great authority on the drawing & colouring of trees; my little sister focused on the portraiture of men in suits, from the waist up, almost entirely in the medium of ballpoint.

The end came — “reality” if you will — when we were parachuted briefly into a Canadian public school, from our earlier life in Asia (& before returning to Asia again). Canadian school came as a shock; quite unlike what I was used to. I had difficulty at first adapting to the sudden disappearance of anything resembling academic standards. Later, parachuted again, I got more used to perpetual kindergarten. I found myself in something called a “high school,” with a curriculum that seemed especially designed for children with learning disabilities. Oddly, it considered itself to be an elite high school, which it probably was by Canadian standards. I bided my time until age sixteen, when I could legally drop out. For in my humble but unalterable opinion, these public “schools” (the scare quotes are needed) are crushers of the human spirit. No responsible parent should allow a child to be exposed to them. Ditto, no aspiring teacher should work in one, even temporarily, or he will be destroyed. The administrators should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

In my case, perhaps the greatest traumatic event of childhood came from a teacher having a bad day. Let us call her Miss Gangruel, for that was not her name. I met her again by chance in later life, & found her to be a very charming woman, & was surprised to discover she now had two eyes. At the time she had only a left eye, the other covered by an eye-patch like a female pirate, owing to some medical issue. She had her “art class” covering paper with layer over layer of thick crayon in different colours, perhaps with the intention that we do something with the product, eventually. I considered this to be an unconscionable waste of my time &, seeing a wonderful elm outside the classroom’s industrial window (not yet felled by Dutch elm disease), used my crayons to draw that, instead.

Miss Gangruel had had perhaps one too many discipline problems that afternoon. When she found me (characteristically) ignoring her instructions, she freaked. Being unable in that moment to communicate her displeasure in rational terms, she began shrieking, “That’s ugly! That’s an ugly tree! That’s the ugliest tree I’ve ever seen!”

I, for my part, stood in what dignity I could summon. Then shouted back: “Miss Gangruel, you have only One Eye!”

Soon after, in the principal’s office, I found myself having to explain this remark. But how does one explain what is factually self-evident? It was perhaps my earliest encounter with Canadian political correctness. The old British legal principle, that the truth is an absolute defence against a charge of libel, was already in retreat. Indeed, liberalism must have been spreading fast in Canada, about 1963, for this principal had not even the guts to whip me. (Brother Berg at Saint Anthony’s School in Lahore would have whipped me first, & asked questions after.) All he could do is tell me grimly that I’d done a Bad Thing. “What a wimp,” I was left thinking, as I returned to the hated classroom.

Later, at home, mentioning nothing of what had happened in school that day, I retired to my bedroom for morbid contemplation. (Canadian children are assigned separate bedrooms; another grievous miscalculation.)  Before retiring to bed that night, I had ripped up every drawing or painting I had ever made. I resolved, solemnly, “Never again.” And for the rest of my childhood, I never touched any art material voluntarily.

Yet here I am, half a century later, wasting more paper, & paint. But quietly, privately. I do it only because it makes me absurdly happy, & because I recover my native ability to see, through trying however incompetently to render botanicals or landscapes. To this day, from the event described & from other incidents in Canadian schooling, I carry in the back of my mind an irrational fear that someone will discover me drawing, or see what I have drawn. From another incident with the town librarian — when I was caught trying to borrow a book that was deemed to be “above my age level” — I have also a fear of being discovered reading, & a powerful desire to conceal any elevated work behind, say, a comic book or pornographic magazine, so that my fellow Canadians will not think I am trying to affront them.

That the purpose of the Canadian education system, or modern public education in general, is to suppress curiosity & enterprise in children, to cripple them morally, aesthetically, & intellectually, & make them identical on the bed of Procrustes, could almost go without saying. Hilda Neatby spelt this out in her remarkable survey, So Little for the Mind, published at Toronto in 1953. One must read it to realize that the demonic ideas of John Dewey, the American “philosopher of democratic education,” had far advanced in Canadian schools by that year; & that as a result, standards once achieved & maintained through the later 19th & earlier 20th centuries, had already collapsed. (It is a myth they collapsed in the 1960s.) Just look at the schoolbooks for the Province of Ontario from that earlier period, & compare them to those introduced after the Second World War, & one will quickly understand the moral & intellectual catastrophe that led to the hippie generation — blindly seeking some meaning in life, some way to assert themselves as individuals.

From what I can see, it is the same throughout North America: this methodical idiotization of the masses, stacked up in their apartment towers. The hippie rebellion ended forty years ago, snuffed by consumerism. God bless the few of them still out there, the ones who stayed the course, getting very old on their strange communal farms. May Christ come to each of them now, in love & the peace which passeth all understanding: to those who were without guile.

*

For part two of today’s sermon, I will simply quote from some remarks by a very fine art teacher, Bruce MacEvoy of California, whose Handprint website is, to my knowledge, the best & most reliable source of hard information on art materials & what to do with them — especially pigments for watercolour — on the entire Internet:

“The traditional method of teaching painters how to use paints emphasizes the map — the colour theory map. ‘Colour theory’ does not define the laws of nature that determine the behaviour of paints, it’s just a story about colour contrived in the 18th century — when it was stylish to stuff tobacco up your nose & lace hankies up your sleeve.

“The facts of colour are learned [not from this map but] by hiking through the landscape — that is, by actually using materials & experiencing how they perform in different situations or applications. So the first guiding principle is to rely on your senses: to learn colour with your eyes & hands rather than with your mind.

“This sensory, hands on awareness helps you to appreciate that paints do what they do as unique material substances, not as interchangeable ‘colours’. Paint mixtures do not conform to an abstract ‘colour wheel’ geometry, not because paints are impure or tainted, but because they are real. Each paint has a unique personality. Colour theory abstractions either fail to describe the actual colour mixtures of these unique personalities (leaving the student even more confused than before), or they encourage the student to think in terms of colour stereotypes, & paint with dogmatic concepts in place of living eyes.”

Right on, I am inclined to add. Or as we say in Christian circles, Amen.

Mr MacEvoy is rejecting, whether or not he fully realizes, the heritage of the Enlightenment, in which precedence was given to the abstract, & withdrawn from the concrete. The vicious & barbaric assault on the human soul, typefied in the expression “liberal education,” is in effect the dry wharks of that heritage. From kindergarten through post-graduate studies, students are taught to be abstract, to take everything as fungible, to eliminate the anomalies, to interpret each fact in the light of “theory.” And these theories, though usually false, are not necessarily so, for e.g. the colour wheel does pertain, abstractly, to certain miraculous prismatic qualities of sunlight. But when imposed upon the extraordinary breadth & variety of pigmentation not only in paints, but in every creature & object in nature, this theory becomes fatuous.

It is not only watercolour we are discussing here. For every discipline of our economic life, students are trained “in theory.” The systems of tutoring & apprenticeship by which concrete knowledge is imparted have been systematically replaced, over time, by the schools & colleges of the Nanny State, in the name of “democracy.” What gentle reader may see all around is the result: the Sovietization of human life, in which the highest ideal is now “equality.”

Christianity does not flourish in such an environment, for Christianity speaks to men as individual men, to women as individual women, not to “the people” in the abstract. In order to become a Christian, a person must today begin to disengage himself from what we might call “the culture of post-humanism.” He must do this, unlike most of his ancestors, on his own. To some degree the scattered Christian communities offer mentoring or advice, but the novice must make his own stand against the current demands of “secular society.” He will need courage. He will certainly be marked as weird; as a “religious nutjob.” (Wear that title proudly!)

The sort of weirdo who might oppose, for instance, the notion now before the United States Supreme Court, or being imposed by legislation in France: that marriage must be a State-conferred right between any “two persons” — two interchangeable persons, who do not even have sexes any more. Such particular expressions as husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, have already been struck out of all the laws in the Province of Ontario. They were an embarrassment to Nanny State, because they suggested that human beings could be particular, in ways defined by nature & not by Nanny State. Nanny State only deals with interchangeable animals, & their abstract animal rights. And as we are assured by the widespread legal practice of abortion, & now quasi-legal euthanasia, these abstract animals are expendable from the moment they become inconvenient.

It is the Cyclopean vision, conducting us into the Cyclopean maw.

*

In my old Anglican days, when I was a parishioner in an extremely High church, the Tenebrae was sung on Maundy Thursday. It was, for an unedifying reason, my favourite liturgical event of the year. The lights were extinguished one by one; & then the strepitus was sounded as the last candle in the sanctuary was put out — a tremendous clash. It was the one day in the year of polite Anglican people — who queue so nicely for communion row by row — in which they were invited to leave the church “in disorder.” In the darkness, the parishioners would collide, shove, step decisively on each other’s toes — all in the proper liturgical spirit. One waited all year for the opportunities.

The symbolism is plain. Christ is no longer with us. Through the hours of Good Friday, to the moment of Resurrection when the candles are lighted again, & the full Gloria is sounded — we contemplate a world in which there is no Messiah; no salvation; no absolution for our sins & indeed, there are no sins. A world in which we are abandoned to the ministrations of Nanny State. It is that Nietzschean world in which “God is dead”; in which Christians are mocked, unless they keep their particularities strictly private.

And since God is dead, & we are not, nor ever were, in His image, the whole human race is reduced to animals — to incidental roadkill in the passage of time. We are, according to the latest teaching of the “deep ecologists,” one of more than 8,400,000 species on Gaia; a species too numerous, taking more than our share of the planetary resources, & thus due for radical culling. The apes & dolphins & whales cannot rule; they haven’t the equipment for it. And so they must wait patiently for what Christians call the Antichrist — whose reign of terror will free them from subservience to man, & grant them their equal rights.

Meanwhile, even within quite “mainstream” Christian folds, Christ is reduced to an abstraction. The Gospel Christ is too particular, the times call for a more generic Christ, who will treat everyone the same. For a Christ who will not be objectionable to the State authorities; who will mind his own business & not create a disturbance. A democratic Christ, who will bless everyone equally, & preach multicultural homogeneity if he must preach at all. A Christ who would not have to be crucified, whose case would never come before Pontius Pilate, because he would never offend anyone. A nice Christ, who embodies niceness, & looks the other way whenever something he doesn’t like is happening. Not man in the image of God, but God in the image of man: a Christ we have made for ourselves, & given a liberal education, so that he does not speak of demons & the like, but only in terms of scientific theory. For we are nice people, & we do not want to hear about demons. We have no theory for that.

And please, would this Christ not rise from the dead. That is terribly disruptive.

*

Against which, what can we say?

John to the seven churches that are in Asia:

“And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first & the last: I am he that liveth, & was dead; & behold I am alive for evermore; & have the keys of Hell & of Death.”

Gentle reader will forgive, if I have been posting my little essays farther & farther apart. Lent has been proceeding, & now we are entering into the Crux of it, my mind wandering along the Via Dolorosa. In the blind-copied email “Doganlist” out of which this website grew, I would retire entirely from posting things, through Lent. I am likely to become more ebullient again, after Easter.

But, too, I have been getting farther away from my long &, in retrospect, painful experience of being a regular “pundit” in a soi-disant “newspaper.” My last such gig cost me fifteen-&-a-half continuous years, that I now find largely wasted. I’ve begun to realize in examining myself how great are the costs of participating in the violent game of “politics.” One succumbs to wrath, when not to despair. One acquires horrible scars from the conflict.

More than any other thing, what comes home to me as I wince through old columns, written in response to items of daily news, is my ignorance. So much of the information immediately available — the best information from the best sources — was wrong, or seriously misleading; is & will always be wrong. But as journalist, one must take something at face value. It doesn’t follow that much better information is available later: usually just enough more to show that what was first reported could not have been entirely true. Often it was pure invention.

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” is the journalist’s adage. I have found too often that where smoke was detected, there was only mist & fog. Perhaps, sometimes, a pot run dry, or a slice of burnt toast. But where it was never detected nor even suspected, the hellfire was discreetly burning away.

The whole enterprise of “news” is a porage of naïve trust, & exploiting malice; hardly worth selling one’s soul. The sensationalism of the media gets worse, as journalists with some real knowledge of their beats grow old & die. They are replaced by “professional communicators” who do not even have beats, let alone the prolonged experience that comes from sticking to one. But while this “trend” is discouraging, those who put their faith in journalists were fools all along.

More deeply, I become ever more convinced that we cannot make sense of anything in this world, except sub specie aeternitatis; that there is no “neutral” or “objective” ground to be found in viewing passing events; that reason itself is not a disinterested player; that this “principle of sensationalism” (in the full meaning of the word “sensation”) was part of modern journalism from its origins in the pamphlet wars of the Reformation.

The world is awash in “news” & “entertainment” to a degree certainly never before seen, abetted by metastasizing technology. The moral, intellectual, & aesthetic qualities decline even where the “production values” are improving. Which is not to say things cannot get worse. We may come to look back upon the present as a kind of Golden Age; just as older people look back upon the ‘fifties & early ‘sixties as a paradise of innocence & human decency. Of course it wasn’t, & all the evil tendencies of today were present then. Moreover, the “trends” themselves have their limitations, & in some respects “the kids today” are better than my own hippie generation. (Perhaps they could not be worse.) The possibility of spiritual improvement remains, even in a fallen world.

Catholic Christians who write, & politic, in this world — we who were not called to the convent — must live with its rough play. But we cannot forget our evangelical purpose, nor pretend that holiness is required only of a chosen few. Those under holy orders must often confront Satan more directly; for the most part we on the “outside” deal only with the agents & outriders of the Father of Lies. This is another aspect of the matter over which I have been puzzling, lately: that for all my cowardly failures, my task was rather easier than that of the men & women “inside.”

*

Today is the commemoration of Saint Benedict of Nursia, in my old Catholic missal — author of the Rule; founder of Western monasticism; patron of Europe. I gather that, along with his relics, he was translated to July 11th in the newer missals, thus sparing his commemoration the fate of falling always in Lent. (But did we ask him? What if he preferred that it fall always in Lent?)

Now, there is something to think about: of Europe from Benedict to Benedict; of the cells up there in Monte Cassino, where the mind of Europe was formed, about AD 529. … And not one newspaper reported the event!

Here we are, already in Passiontide, listening yesterday to the new Pope deliver his first Angelus, & reading his first tweets.

As I am aware from emails, & several comments that I have not agreed to post, some of my dear Catholic friends are in a desolate mood. They think the new Pope doesn’t sympathize with the old Latin Mass; that Rome has turned against them. And just when they thought they were getting somewhere.

Maybe he thinks we are uncharitable wretches, who may care about the Latin in the Mass, but whose hearts are as displayed in these comments & emails. Maybe he thinks we are incorrigibly bourgeois, that we only want to play Mister Dress Up. Maybe he doesn’t realize how heartbroken we are, from years of Church liturgy in shambles. He didn’t say any of this, but we might reasonably suspect he is thinking it, because it’s the truth. The Latin Mass has become associated, beyond the heartbreak, with meanness & nastiness & sophistry & fanaticism. Perhaps we should get it associated with holiness instead.

Apparently, I am just a “Baby Catholic,” as several longer in the Church persist in reminding me — the “progressive” types & the “traditional” types in about equal numbers. My response, when caught in the crossfire between these Mature Catholics, tends more & more towards, “Mummy, daddy: Please don’t fight!” I have come to think the best answer to the question, “What kind of Catholic are you?” is, “You know. … Roman.”

So yes, I am a Baby Roman, of simple & unsophisticated views — such that, especially around this time in the Bible-reading cycle, my mind runs naturally to the story of Mary & Martha. We are shown their respective ways of receiving Jesus at Bethany, in the household wherein their brother Lazarus had been raised from the dead. One might well characterize Mary as the more mystical, Martha as the more practical of these two sisters; one might say they were reverent in their different ways.

But were these ways “equal”? … Not according to Jesus. (See text.)

Martha, it will be recalled, was actually whining to Jesus about the behaviour of her sister, Mary. For while Martha is running about, cleaning & preparing food, Mary would seem to be dawdling. There is housework to do, & there is Mary, sitting at Christ’s feet, just listening to him. It gets better. It was Mary who took the extremely costly oil of spikenard, one pint of it, to pour over Christ’s feet; & Mary who wiped those feet with her own hair, while the scent of this oil filled the neighbourhood.

We know this spikenard from the Song of Songs. In the Gospel of John, we have the testimony of Judas Iscariot that the pint of it Mary poured over Christ’s feet was worth a year’s wages for a working man. (The denarius was the basic silver coin: the standard daily workman’s wage around that time & place. Judas estimated the price at 300 denarii, which is to say, ten times the amount for which he was prepared to sell Jesus out.) Why, Judas asks, was this extravagant perfume not sold, to raise money for the poor? To which Christ replies: “The poor you will always have with you; me you will not always have.” In the approach to the Passover, He suggests that Mary is anointing His body for the burial. A remark, no doubt, lost on everyone, except perhaps Mary.

Our progressive factions have long been of a mind with Judas Iscariot. He was the accountant among the apostles, the keeper of the money bag; & corrupt, as Saint John more than insinuates in the Gospel; but nevertheless, the man who would be distributing the alms, like our modern Nanny State. How obscene of the Church to have all this wealth, when there are poor that go hungry! How “irrelevant” the old Latin Mass, when “the people” do not understand Latin!

Judas is “a man of the people.” He is the master of plausibility. Christ is not plausible. For that matter, the Resurrection from the Dead is not plausible — not to us, & not to the ancient world, either.

I think of our modern social arrangements, under the direction of that Nanny State. The rich will be taxed to help the poor; it is all so plausible. I think of it as Judas Iscariot writ large. I think of him as prime minister, chancellor, president; the man with the golden tongue. I’ve watched his election campaigns; watched him corral the poor constituency; heard all about his compassion. The poor are more numerous than the rich: there’s compassion for you. And the rich have accountants: there’s your hope & your change. I’ve seen all the ads for St Judas Iscariot, & watched him perform at his prayer breakfasts, too.

And the poor will go under the bus, with Jesus.

Why not sell the spikenard? Why not give the money to the poor? It would be the plausible thing, after all; Judas is the expert on redistributing income. Why don’t we just write a cheque, & have done with it? Surely that is the least we can do. … In John’s Gospel, this is all spelt out:

“Now Judas said this not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, & having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.”

Pope Francis is extremely familiar with the Bible. He, who is not stupid, cannot possibly be unaware of this. And moreover I adore him because he is himself not plausible — about the least likely choice for Pope among all the cardinals, in view of his age & narrowly Argentine background.

Indeed, the idea of a Church that serves the poor & the meek is so much less plausible to us than one which might provide an elegant decoration for the rich & the arrogant; a nice pretty place to hold our big fat weddings & our touching funerals. I daresay Pope Francis understands the difference between building a magnificent church for the poor in the middle of their slum &, say, building another monster home in a finely landscaped gated community; between pouring spikenard over the feet of Christ, & dabbing it into one’s own armpits. His consistent & uncompromising opposition to “liberation theology” is a matter of public record. He is decidedly not a Marxist.

Elizabeth Scalia, among my favourite fellow inverted bloguistes, discusses this question wisely at The Anchoress. She was, like me, somewhat arrested by the construction of Pope Francis’s phrase, “How I would like a Church that is poor & for the poor!”

No problem with “for the poor,” & no problem with shedding wealth that serves only to decorate the wealthy. “Give up all that you have & follow me.” (What part of “all” do we not understand?) She makes the astute point that the poor do not feel honoured when they are served the Mass in ceramic chalices, with the Host in straw baskets. Instead, they feel condescended to. God should have beautiful things, & they, who are poor, may share in them. Assisted by a reference to the new Pope’s favourite novelist, Dostoyevsky, the Anchoress adds: “Beauty is evangelical.”

(A correspondent explains that it was Joseph Ratzinger who memorably pointed out, to a Communion & Liberation conference at Rimini in 2002 which Jorge Bergoglio attended, that when Dostoyevsky writes, “The Beautiful will save us” he is referring explicitly to the Beauty of Christ.)

Now, here is the whole context of the remark, in which the Pope is explaining how he took the name Francis:

“I was seated next to the Archbishop Emeritus of São Paolo & Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes; he encouraged me. And when the votes reached two thirds, he gave me a hug & a kiss, & said: ‘Don’t forget the poor!’ And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being counted, till the end. Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves & protects Creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with Creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man. … How I would like a Church that is poor & for the poor! … Afterwards, people were joking with me. ‘But you should call yourself Hadrian, because Hadrian VI was the reformer, we need a reform.’ And someone else said to me: ‘No, no: your name should be Clement.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Clement XV: thus you pay back Clement XIV who suppressed the Society of Jesus!’ ”

The notion put about, by his own old enemies within the Argentine Jesuit order, that Bergoglio has no sense of humour, that “he never smiled,” is clearly a lie. Pope Francis smiles, but is not a grinning idiot; he has a rich sense of humour, & he is warm & demonstrative. But he is not an easy mark. Through decades he has been acquiring street knowledge; even as archbishop in Buenos Aires, wearing basic black, on the street. We know him fairly well already, because he is remarkably free of guile. He will do what he needs to do, say what he needs to say. Charity isn’t a weak substance.

“These days we do not have a very good relationship with Creation, do we?”

That, I think, in its simplicity, is the key to our worldly happiness, & the beginning of spiritual wisdom. Let us call it a task for Martha: to improve this relationship. It necessarily involves shedding wealth, shedding the fat that is no good for us, & would be no good for the poor, either. By which I mean, get rid of the stuff that is ugly, from the mass commercialized “soft pornography” of the media & entertainment culture, to the rat race of corporate employment, to the noisy & noissome machine production of all these goods we don’t need. Eliminate as much of it as we can, not by legislation but by refusing to buy it. One needs food, one needs clothing, one needs shelter, one needs love. Indeed, all of these things can be beautiful, & each requires Art. And this art — to be done well, & for use — requires minds that are chastened. That is to say, made chaste, made free, from the clutter of appetites gone sinful.

“Hands to work & minds to God,” as the Shakers used to say, at their most Catholic. That done, the environmental problems solve themselves.

But, too: the real problems of the poor are exposed. There are children who need mothers & fathers; there are the sick, the mad, the old, the many who are incapable of looking out for themselves (though many of these served in their season). To hell with the State: these “hopeless cases” need hope, need love & practical care; not more borrowed money in the Judas bag. And we, being people, can provide that hope, that love, that care, & even the cash directly into their hands; the dignity of acceptance among the living. They are not numbers; they are not “clients”; each was made in the image of Our Lord.

“What if I’m not up to it?” … That is where Christ comes in. He’s up to it. Let’s make Him our new boss, & push the devil over. Let’s have a revolution, as it were; a great jolly revolution against all this crap. Let’s take this whole sordid mess, & make it crazy beautiful.

“What if I don’t know what to do?” … Pray, & He will tell you.

“What if I’m still waiting for an answer?” … Pray harder, & look around. Most of what needs doing is staring you in the face. You could even start with a little spring cleaning: go through your house & make a bonfire of your vanities.

“What if God isn’t listening?” … Then pray so hard that you make Him listen.

Surely this is all self-evident.

My sense of things, when Pope Benedict resigned, is my sense now: that we have rounded the cape, that we are in a new ocean. There is a new man at the helm of our barque: the first to have become a priest after Vatican II, the first Jesuit, the first from the New World, &c. That his “style” is a radical break from the last is already apparent. His choice of the name “Francis,” unused by popes over all these centuries, was our first indication. It is as if the polarities were reversed at Rome, & the strange dishevelled saint of Assisi, who was absolutely loyal to the resplendent papacy, now receives the fealty of the robes. I am convinced there is a Hand on the hand of our tiller.

There will, perhaps, be other popes from Europe, but Benedict XVI may still come to be remembered as the “last European pope,” & his resignation to be pregnant with that spiritual message. Here I am not using the term “Europe” geographically; nor would I dream of dismissing the popes who came before, now a heritage to all ages. It is to Europe as the Christian culture I am referring. It began destroying itself in the Reformation of the 16th century; in the time since 1914 it has completed this task, with greater & greater urgency. I am at one with Hilaire Belloc, & Pat Buchanan, & many others in taking this view.

But it does not make me giddy with excitement. I will myself live & die a “European,” for I was formed in that shape; & even though so much of my own earlier life was lived in farther Asia, from my parentage I could not have become anything but a man of the West. It will be the same for most of my readers: we are what we are.

It is a bit like being an old Jew in the early Church, in this New World full of Gentiles. The European, the American sense of being the “chosen people,” the specially enlightened, adheres to us still. But the old Temple is gone; has crumbed, & will be buried in an archaeological stratum. Europe has gone, & in its going scattered the seed of Christianity to the ends of the Earth. Many peculiar customs of Europe will persist, but transformed in new soils & new climates; & we will not live to glimpse some dear familiar folds in the faces of the children of our children’s children.

Here is a son of Piedmont: removed somehow to Buenos Aires, “to the ends of the Earth.” Tied to Italy by one last thread, he still speaks some words in the old Occitan. The thread is inseverable; but a time will come when we can no longer trace it along its full length.

“Religion” & “culture” are two different, though closely & mutually related things. Christianity could not account for all the differences between Spaniards & Englishmen, Germans & Italians, Frenchmen & Poles, Europeans & Americans, even within the Catholic Church. Religion unifies, culture diversifies. The “highest” culture will always be religious, because religion, revelation, God, penetrate most deeply the soul of man qua man. Religion is the music; culture is our song. The culture fashions the religion into a new song. But religion raises & inspires & is its principle of life. A culture freed of religion dies; falls into silence, as if the music were taken out of the song, the soul out of the body. Europe, in freeing itself “progressively” from its Christian heritage, has performed its suicide, for centuries in slow motion, ever quicker towards its end. Over the last several decades it has fully embraced what an old pope called “the culture of death,” & the next called “the dictatorship of relativism”: the culture of glibness; of pure self-adornment; the nihilism that whispers, “one thing is as good as another,” then howls its last out of empty despair.

The seed is now planted abroad; Christ has moved on from where He is not wanted. Yet, too, He remains in our midst, wherever He is wanted. The Europe within Europe is not entirely dead, as we are reminded by the gatherings in St Peter’s Square, by the “youth days,” & by the life that continues in the churches where the Mass is still sung with reverence — even before tiny congregations. There is still some spark of life in the old girl; she is still refusing to be euthanized. But she is surrounded by her hollow children, determined to kill her & take her goods.

There are moments when, even as an old European, I think we should blow up the cathedrals, rather than let them fall into enemy hands; just as our ancestors blew up their forts, rather than surrender them to enemy uses. But no, let future generations see their beauty, even in their ruin. Let them know that Europe was not always a dance of death in the pigsty of consumerism; that we once put our wealth & all our art at the feet of our Saviour.

A great majority of Catholics now live outside Europe, & the Rome of the Vatican is once more being transformed into the capital of a different kind of “empire.” The faces of the cardinals streaming out of the conclave were still in their majority white, but this may only be the case for another generation. The churches within Europe, & in Britain, Canada, the States, have been filling with new faces. The “white man’s world” is passing into history, faster within the churches than on the streets. More & more, the Christianity of Europe & America is being imported.

These are things that go beyond the election of Pope Francis, but to which his election now points. He is an old man, with sciatica, on one lung; we cannot expect to have him with us for long. We can, however, believe that God has entrusted him with a mission, upon which he is acting with the energy of a youth. We can expect that some of it will be incomprehensible to us, in a way perhaps as Francis of Assisi was incomprehensible at first to so many of his contemporaries, who saw in him very worrying departures from conventional religious custom, & did not yet see that he was heroically loyal to the Church; that he honoured the Magisterium, & had come not to destroy but to renew.

Christ, I believe, is bored with Europe, bored with our wealth, bored with our sleaziness, bored with our narcissism, sick through the nostrils with our Paris perfume. He will never, however, be bored with our hunger for the Bread of Life. We must rise & be on our way: Europe has died, & Christ liveth.

“We want a Pope for young people,” sez the current top video item on the Beeb, & looking about the media we find that a Pope is wanted for some other things, too. It is time, I read, for a Pope from Africa, from USA, from South America, from Canada. Even when they are not being especially malicious, the media are obtuse. They do not grasp that the papacy is not a representative government, except in the sense that it represents God to man, & man to God.

Yet this is obvious. Why can’t they get it? You don’t have to be Catholic to grasp the principle of the thing. But brains are baffled by the received ideas of any age. We can see this clearly enough when viewing, say, the 10th century through 21st century eyes. It is the beam in our own eye that we cannot see. And yes, there is an explanation for it. (Original sin breeds false consciousness.)

“Lord do not send us the Pope we deserve.”

It is true I have favourites, for instance Angelo Scola, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, former Patriarch of Venice; or Raymond Leo Burke, Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, former Archbishop of St Louis. But I know these men only through other men who have known them, & I have done little more at firsthand than kiss the ring of a couple of others. I have disfavourites, too, but will not be so stupidly invidious as to name them. I am working from the same kind of vague & often wrong & misleading information that is provided through our media of communications to any general electorate, when making their foolish choices among self-seeking politicians. The Pope isn’t elected like that. Perhaps I am better informed than most; but not a fly on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.

That is where one must be to see what is involved in the choice; & some hopeful trust is required that for all their moral, intellectual, & spiritual limitations, the 115 who are locked inside will be listening through prayer for God’s opinion.

Sandro Magister mentions Michelangelo among the electors, in a recent post. For the cardinals have been locked up with his Last Judgement; & with the prophet Jonah, turned to face our common Maker, Who is separating the light from the darkness at the Creation. Jonah, the prophet sent by God to convert the pagans; the prophet who, with his human sense of justice, regrets that God shows mercy to Nineveh; until by a vision of the Creation, some part of the mystery of God’s Love unfolds before him. Christ took upon Himself “the sign of Jonah”; of a justice & a mercy beyond human understanding.

It is an extraordinary place, which through the genius of popes & artists, & by the trumpet of the Gloria, speaks comprehensively of the Keys, which Christ passed to Peter. The frescoes on those walls, the images placed throughout that chapel & in its vaults & recesses, sober & raise the thinking heart. The cardinals are removed not only from the electronic welter of our present world, but more fundamentally from the welter of its glibness.

*

Update. I was in an Italian grocery shop (in the Greater Parkdale Area) when the white smoke appeared from the chimney. The television behind the cashier was set to it. The cashier — also the proprietor I believe; a man of age, girth, & good humour, with a grand white beard — translated a televised remark that the choice was “unexpected.” But of course, the name was not yet announced.

“They must have elected a black,” my grocer surmised.

Another customer in the store, a Jewish lady, asked him if he is Catholic.

“Some days,” he replied.

I was in another store when I heard a radio flash that it was Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, taking the name Francis I. Now curiously, I had been thinking through, to the best of my ability & knowledge, what would be most likely; & had come confidently to the conclusion that it would take the Conclave until tomorrow evening to settle on … Cardinal Scola.

More than I ever knew about the former Cardinal Bergoglio has now been reported through the usual media, or may be found in the standard reference sites. Everything I learn about his career in Argentina persuades me that he will not be a great enthusiast for Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum; but he will not get in the way of it, either. He appears to be humble & without hypocrisy: he takes his Christianity neat, lives it, & has no illusions about right & wrong. Doctrinally, a rock. He is quietly courageous; the opposite of ostentatious. Not the first man I would expect to swing an axe through the Curia, but we’ll see. I am more surprised by the election of a Jesuit than by the election of a Latin American.

According to a well-publicized account, Bergoglio was runner-up in the Conclave of 2005, but clinched the election of Cardinal Ratzinger with an impassioned appeal to his own supporters to “please stop voting for me.” That he will be utterly unlike Benedict XVI seems clear enough. But as they say, the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in cloning. That so many cardinals both then & now thought this man, whose whole life has been devoted to the Church in Argentina alone, a worthy successor to Saint Peter, must speak for itself.

It is true that parents have an influence on their children; we cannot know how much. It is also true that children are “born that way.” Among the sane, nature & nurture are both acknowledged, each constantly working on the other, & grace upon both. The list of “rules” to be followed in raising a child is short & vague. This is because each child is a person not a machine, & even the amount of attention he needs varies with each case. Love being the great teacher, what is taught intimately, through love, has some chance of good effect. Example being far more effective than prescription, the love must not be hollow.

But look at these creatures. Humans are much different from cats (& other animals such as hamsters & painted turtles), & yet I found, from my own childhood forward, that cats could exhibit the nature of nature. I so-to-say “owned” more than one from a kitten, & noticed that each came endowed with a personality, an intelligence level, a unique constellation of feline dispositions. And while a cat cannot be a dog, nor a tomcat become a mother, any cat will display Nature is her subtlety. She never repeats herself precisely, is addicted to paradox, & will not allow herself to become bored.

Now, I regret to say such was my fate that I was provided with only a couple of children to experiment upon; both boys. (My original plan was to have enough boys to make a cricket team, & as many girls as came with that.) But even in this limited field I immediately noticed the kitten phenomenon. The same with other people’s children, known since very young: “They come that way,” & unless one is tutoring not lecturing one will miss their finer points.

An example would be my elder boy. His leadership qualities were in evidence in the delivery room; from the start he seemed to be taking charge of the situation. While I tried to teach him drollness, I found the disposition innate: but to understatement rather than to my own gift for exaggeration. He was beating me at chess from a very early age. More galling, from age seven at the latest he had surpassed me in basic maturity. His disrelish of mushrooms, & shellfish — scandalous to me — could never be altered. And so on. Some of the worst parents have raised the best kids, & vice versa. It is something one must try to bear in mind.

Unfortunately, our modern idea of education is all lecturing. We put them in a class; one size fits all. As anyone can see from the products of this system, they do not learn much from it. In particular, the notion that education is centred on the development of character has been lost on our pedagogic authorities, & from what I can see around the Greater Parkdale Area, on parents as well. For given what human beings are, there are moral implications in every form of learning, & this does not cease when morality is systematically replaced with “how to.”

Wrath is my subject of the moment. It is always topical, though in the moment more topical to me than in most. To call it a Deadly Sin is a beginning, but it helps to understand of what the sin might consist. It cannot be a judgement on “mere” temperament, or cats could be sinners.

My father & I were born with unholy tempers, my elder son & my paternal grandfather apparently without. It is a sin to which some seem untempted, as gluttony fails to entice the anorexic. They can be vexed; perhaps anyone can be vexed. But by nature & nurture both, people respond to vexation differently. I knew a man of nearly saintly disposition, who responded to the most outrageous goads by turning in on himself & becoming reflective; who endured a woman for many years whom most of his fellow men considered unendurable; who did not flinch at acute physical pain, but reacted philosophically. We were all surprised the day he killed himself.

The animals I have known (apart from the humans) have more or less of temper; they express it quite spontaneously. With humans one hardly can be sure what one is dealing with. In many Asian cultures, anger is suppressed, & responded to with smiles & then giggling that Western visitors find hard to understand. When in the role of boss, or customer, we think that they are not taking us seriously, & become angrier as a result. My advice would be, “Don’t push your luck.” The giggling is an expression of nervous anxiety; the preceding smiles were intended to assuage. But the capacity for anger is most certainly there, & when it is finally unleashed, you are a dead man.

William Blake wrote, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Granted, he presented this as a Proverb of Hell, but with arcane Swedenborgian approval. The man of power I most fear is the one who seems entirely in possession of his temper, because he is a monster of self-will. The anger will never be expressed in shouted words, yet may sometimes be detected in a gesture. It will be sublimated, & applied in far worse ways, & in the moment he “gets even” you will know that he was ruled by his anger all along, under the direction of a brooding malice. Yet there is still some spontaneity in him. Having finally struck, he will hate his victim all the more, because now his victim knows him. Never work for psychos, & stop electing them to high office.

My father, to the contrary, could explode like a volcano; but had forgiven & truly forgotten a few minutes later. Unfortunately this is a tactical error, & the subject of the explosion seldom quickly forgets. It is hard to be wise with anger.

It makes you blind, hence the expression, “blind anger.” My schooling in this was from people actually blind, long a topic of fascination: for when a person already blind becomes angry, he loses the capacity to feel his way through his environment, & starts colliding with things he could easily have sensed in emotional equilibrium. I recommend the autobiography of the French Resistance hero, Jacques Lusseyran (1924–71), blinded from a childhood accident: And Then There Was Light (the translation last re-issued in 1998). It gives a superb account alike of the physical & spiritual universe of blindness; to which add his collection of essays, Against the Pollution of the I.

Among the physically sighted, as I have found to my cost, anger similarly blinds one to fact. The enemy is demonized, & his virtues are disregarded. Reckless assertions will be made, about his acts & his motives. To bear false witness is among the most grievous of crimes, & in the state of wrath, one bears false witness lightly. But even when the assertions are true, they will be unbalanced. Great generals in the field have known since the time of Sun Tzu, or before, that they may make their opponents blunder, from rage. And clever politicians have mastered the art of infuriating their rivals, into tactical mistakes. Anger makes us do the enemy’s bidding; hence the bottomless wisdom in Christ’s “Resist ye not evil.” Run clear of it, by foot or in mind.

The Catholics have a saying which at first seems Pollyanna: “Offer it up.” There is actually profound sense in this: to offer the laundry up, as opposed to taking it in. A wise priest of my acquaintance recommends carrying the handwritten text of some appropriate prayer, to repeat in emergencies. You may need this script; anger will make it hard to remember the words. And the quicker you turn to it, the easier for you it will be.

In Proverbs (the proper Old Testament version) we read: “A soft word turneth away anger.” It is remarkable how many impending explosions may be obviated by this simple device, available free in any quantity from our Maker. (It is what the Asiatic intended by his smile.) An apology could serve this purpose well — unless, of course, it is barbed by anger.

Yet if there were no anger there would be no justice, so anger must have a place. The desire for vengeance must be proportioned to the deed; but the withholding of punishment may actually be a sin against charity. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” was a prescription for mildness & proportion, lost on us today. Our cult of cowardly “niceness” has largely supplanted and undermined the older societal view of crime & blackguardly behaviour. It is like pacifism: one half of a moral instruction, & that the feebler. For equilibrium requires a weighing of things, & thus the chaste moral clarity to hang in the balance, away from the bodily passions. The question must be asked, “To what degree is my anger justified? How, for the best, can what it has taught me now be applied?”

Blake again: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” I once inscribed this into the ceiling beam of an English cottage I was inhabiting — neatly, with serifs, after pencilling it out for word & letter-spacing. For it seems to me there is wisdom in the storm, if the yachtsman will set his sails for its genius. And as yachtsmen will know, this may require reefing, or in the extreme, bare poles. But were there no wind, we wouldn’t get anywhere.

Choi Sung Bong is a name on everyone’s lips, no? The young tenor’s sudden rise from obscurity to fame on the television show, “Korea’s Got Talent,” has been captured for posterity on YouTube, with English subtitles. “Posterity” being defined today as, “forever, or for a couple of years, whichever comes first,” it grows even while it sheds, & the posterior of our culture has become enormous. But fame is still fame, while it lasts. And we do offer enhanced, if belated coverage of Asian Pop on this website (see, “Gangnam Agonistes,” Dec. 21).

By his own account — the main points given succinctly & modestly to the judges in reply to their direct questions when he first went on stage — Choi was dumped in an orphanage by his parents at age three. At age five, tired of beatings, he ran away. The rest of his childhood was spent on the streets of Seoul, sleeping in stairwells & public lavatories. He supported himself as urchin, selling chewing gum & “energy drinks.” There were “bad things” he did not want to talk about, such as being “sold to someone.” By age eight he had tenuously graduated to day-labour jobs, such as delivering milk & newspapers. Twice he was hit by cars, & went untreated; but after a serious fall he finally made it into the Kun Yang hospital, where the cumulative effect of traumatic injuries were diagnosed & given medical attention.

Choi prefers the name “Ji-Sung,” once given him by a kindly lady food vendor, to the name with which he was registered at the orphanage. (He seems to remember every kindness ever done him.) His life-transforming event happened in a nightclub. At age fourteen, selling whatever he was then selling, he heard a performer who sang “so sincerely.” It was classical repertoire. Choi was only vaguely aware that God had endowed him with a magnificent tenor voice. The food vendor told him he must take lessons, must get some schooling. He earned enough on the street to attend some classes in an arts high school. He listened to recordings, especially by Andrea Bocelli, & tried to emulate them. Another kindly lady gave him voice lessons, for free. He remained invisible, until the day almost two years ago when, still looking so desperately young, he came out to sing before the pop judges on television.

His choice of song was “Nella Fantasia” — by Ennio Morricone, the great Italian composer of spaghetti-western soundtracks. But this number comes from a religious film, about the Jesuits in 18th-century Latin America: the only friends the native Indians had against rapacious white men (though the first missionaries sent to them were martyred). I mention all this as a reminder of the many ways in which, I believe, Christ has embedded Himself even in popular culture; & how we must be discerning & not sneer at the “cross-over” genres by reflex — as I am apt to do.

Choi did not project emotion on the stage. Watching the clip, at first I thought, “perhaps he is autistic”; then saw him smile shyly. He answered the judges’ prying questions in a monotone; he did not seem to be playing for sympathy, but to be self-protectively cautious about his past. There was a fluster of anxiety in the hall: “How will this turn out?”

And of course it turned out fabulously. By the end of the first bar, Choi had taken the house down; the judges themselves were near weeping. They waived him right through to the finals. Then after, we see him being mobbed backstage. But again: no emotional response from him, no triumph; & when he can be free of all the well-wishers he walks alone down a corridor, to be by himself.

Now, as hack journalist of long standing, my scepticism was aroused. This story is too perfect; I smell a script. And I flinch at what happens when all the “fact checkers” go to work on what Choi said, because I already love him. But from what I am able to see, after Korean journalists had done their best to find holes in his story, every traceable detail had checked out. Still, they & other writers sprinkle their accounts with qualifiers — “Choi claims this, Choi claims that” — because our world is choking with cheats & frauds & imposters, & no one wants to be caught with his cynicism down.

This last statement is not entirely true. I am every day amazed by media credulity at the imbecile level, typically towards self-serving demagogic politicians. But as I know from first hand, the journalists are seldom so innocent or ill-informed as their reporting might make them appear. They identify with party — usually with the “progressive” side; the side of “secular humanism” — & wish to help it swing elections against what they take to be the “dark side,” of religious believers & the like. (And there will always be darkness enough to go around.) “Truth,” for most journalists, has been “relative” for so long, that they can no longer detect their own lies & hypocrisies. “Good” is whatever serves the agenda, even if it requires the suppression of context to make it sound plausible. The hard simple truth, the big inconvenient fact, will be ignored or scorned. Often, the moral posture becomes the more strident, the more twisted it becomes: & what is beautiful & inspiring is spontaneously derided.

Choi Sung Bong ran off every agenda. His “claim,” though understated, & made only in straightforward reply to factual questions, was staggering. Choi unknowingly broke all the rules, by failing to be a victim of his environment. There had to be something wrong with his story.

Charles Dickens, that wonderful old hack, quite capable of cynicism, was the man to tell dangerously sentimental stories like this. He was the Victorian Solzhenitsyn, in a sense. In a book potentially so mawkish as Little Dorrit, whose central setting was the notorious Marshalsea prison — into which Dickens’s own father had once been thrown, for debt — we find the figure of little Amy Dorrit. She was raised in the Marshalsea, as ward of a father likewise imprisoned. A swill of human evils surrounds the child, & reaches out in the panorama Dickens presents, of moral posturing that extends across England, France, & Italy; by all of which Amy seems untouched. She does what she can for people, out of unthinking loyalties, out of a naïve & unquestioning human decency; she takes her lumps without whining.

Out of a gorgeously colourful background, the “vision” of Dickens is assembled — of this goodness rising from the very mire; a goodness of which Amy becomes allegorical symbol: this angel rising from the squalor. (Dickens is replete with child angels.) From the Marshalsea as from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, it is a vision of salvation. The whole world is a prison camp, & from the bottom of it, “we are rising.” In some details, the novel may seem overwrought; in its overall effect my heart still stops at its splendour, at the breadth & audacity of the thing.

Dickens was no politician. The attentive reader will never find in him anything resembling a political agenda. He is clear that the corruption does not stop at any door; that the evils extend not only through the Marshalsea & out of its gates through the streets of every city, but also through the corridors of the Circumlocution Office. He did not imagine any solutions to the “problems of society,” short of that rising. Only when men & women rise — from within their own humble stations — can the good happen. Dickens’s faith was of the simplest evangelical kind; he had no room in his mind for precise theology. His God was of the simplest kind: the Christ child, & not the adult preacher. Yet from that childish angle he could depict a “life force” at work, that cannot be disentangled from Grace, & by which, mysteriously, Love will conquer all.

I have had the good or bad fortune myself, though only in moments, to taste real hunger & life among some of the poorest & most abandoned of mankind, & see how “the bottom of society” looks & feels. These were only little glimpses, by the luck of my travels; & by more luck I have had little glimpses of life “at the top.” I am disinclined to be sentimental about the former; nor too excoriating about the latter. As Dickens showed in Little Dorrit, give the poor enough money & they will soon assume airs. The problems of “society” will be reproduced in every society, & legislation will usually accentuate the worst features, giving new scope to corruption. Salvation comes not through “programmes” but through persons: a teacher, a food vendor, a nightclub singer.

The beauty in Choi’s case is that it proves nothing. Or else, arguably, it proves everything, which is as good as nothing. I wrote above that, by his own account, his life-transforming moment came in that nightclub, when he found his own calling, which was to sing. I cannot know if his “victory” on television was any kind of a good thing; victories in this world being in their nature transitory & illusory. It is entirely possible that it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. But not if he has taken it in his stride.

There is considerable dispute on the date of the end of the world, sometimes even up here in the High Doganate. It is a gentlemanly dispute, however, in which the (aspiring) gentleman who lives here politely considers & then rejects the various alternatives to his own beliefs. I have been doing that all my life. Sometimes I find that I am wrong, but only in retrospect. In prospect my vision is 20/20. Things that haven’t happened yet have never failed to happen. And I have a perfect track record because in every case, as I would be willing to demonstrate, they fail to happen only in the future. Which is to say, elsewhere in the multiverse, not here.

Once again the issue is in the air, for I gather the President of the United States was so foolish as to predict the end of the world, should the “sequester” of funding he proposed himself be allowed to happen on the first of this month. It is wise normally to predict the end of the world for a more remote date; the President was guessing it would happen “tomorrow” on the very eve. Curiously, he had done everything in the power of his office to assure that the end of the world would take place; for like many petty politicians before him, outraged by budget cuts, he made sure they would fall in the most visibly destructive manner on essential government services, leaving mountains of pork & incredible waste untouched. He wants his opponents on their hands & knees, begging him to restore these services & promising to raise more taxes on “the rich” to support them. It is a game so tawdry, & played so many times, that I’m amazed anyone can still be suckered by it; but needless to say the entire liberal media are playing along with his latest “crisis narrative.”

And yet, it is March 3rd already, the sequester has happened, & the world has not ended; just as it did not end at the Winter Solstice, when the ancient Mayan calendar hit 13.0.0.0.0, & nothing followed beyond the usual news & views. There was not even a memorable earthquake in, say, Tierra del Fuego. As we write, south of the border, there is no evidence of a catastrophe yet unfolding. It turns out that even if you remove la crème de la crème of the most necessary functions of the U.S. Government, nothing much happens. The President will have some explaining to do.

Eschatology is not a science we have much pursued (up here in the High Doganate). This may have something to do with our low regard for the statistical methods that are too often employed in calculating the date on which the world will end. They strike us as almost amateurish sometimes. Of the eschatological systems of the great religions, other than my own, I have sometimes taken note from a motive that could be confused with pure self-entertainment. It is not: I think such spiritual insights as each may provide are presented compactly & vividly, in each end-of-world scenario.

Let us consider in passing Frashokereti, the Zoroastrian expectation, which comes to mind whenever I am reading news of anything from “frosh week” in a university to the hydraulic “fracking” of mineral resources. In brief, there are three ages in the world, that of Creation, of Mixture, & of Separation. The first was good, but into the second evil was insinuated. In the third, which is surely coming soon, God, under the name “Ahura Mazda,” effects a winnowing. There is a huge battle between the Yazatas & Daevas (the proponents of good, & evil, respectively). In the course of their exchange, all the dead are raised. Too, the metals of this world melt & flow by tributaries into one great river through which all must pass. No supernatural agent nor force will be able to intervene on behalf of individuals: each man & woman will be tried in the balance of all his thoughts, words, & deeds. The good will find the river as warm milk, the evil will experience it as a consuming fire. The molten stream will itself pour over the ledge of this world, into the depths, where it will find & annihilate “Ahriman” (the very Devil & his Hell). It is an optimistic cosmogony.

Before I receive death threats from aggrieved Zoroastrians, let me acknowledge that this is not from the Avesta, but from interpretive, non-scriptural works. The Avesta itself, or the parts we retain, contain only poetical allusions to this End Time. The most sacred Gathas — hymns attributed to Zoroaster — are in a very old form of Persian indeed (7th century BC?) but the interpretations were written in Book Pahlavi far more than a millennium later (9th century AD). It makes no sense to speak confidently of any Avestan eschatological doctrine; & yet the power in such ancient prophecy can be discerned in resemblances to every other earthly eschatological doctrine; for in all, the worth of men is tested. And on a Zoroastrian view, as from a Christian, it makes no sense to assign specific future dates, or treat prophecy as a prognostic method.

On the other hand, lest gentle reader titter at the introduction of so exotic a body of mythic moral teaching, let me remind him that from Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, & others, we often encounter doctrines as arcane. Each, to my mind, is the product of very sincere “visionaries,” without “conventional” (not to say, “Catholic”) formation, struggling to convey an experience of unknown otherworldly origin in worldly terms; without first subjecting it to the reasoning of the wise. Then seeking followers among the spiritually estranged & hungry.

For some time in childhood I became a kind of connoisseur of the illustrations in publications of the Watch Tower Society — then as now fairly widely disseminated — which showed the lion lying down with the lamb rather literally, & a multicultural assortment of humans smiling as if they had all just won the Irish sweepstakes. These pictures of an imminent heaven on earth struck me as naïve, & contributed to my youthful, smartass atheism. Moreover, as I was distantly aware, the Society & other congregations of “Christian outliers” had been almost trigger-happy in predicting that imminent end, projected from quite worldly political events.

Yet in retrospect, it seems there is something sound woven into their notions. The significance accorded by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to October 1914 — when Christ was held to have resumed the throne of which He had been deprived by the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, & the End Time began to unfold — was well chosen. I myself assign not that event, but something cognate, to a moment a little earlier in that year: to the 28th of June, 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. The summer which followed consisted of an extraordinary matrix of declarations of war, & acts of invasion. By September, Tannenberg & the Marne trench warfare; by October, Ypres.

The Great War was an entirely man-made, planetary disaster, whose vortex was Europe, then fairly plausibly the centre of everything. Its effect was like Constantine, in reverse. Almost everything we now live is fallout from that War: through Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism, to the effects of mass democracy & the construction of Nanny States. In the background, everywhere, the replacement of religion with ideological totalitarianism, & the moral & spiritual blindness which follows from our new loyalties to the available “least evils.” We entered an era that might be called with justice the Age of the Mass Grave; or if you will, the Culture of Death with Wheels On; or with less colour, “post-modernity.” The evils of the Modern Age came home to roost, among all the false hopes of “man’s triumph over nature.”

One might call 1914 the beginning of the end, but let me credit the Jehovah’s Witnesses for also discerning, while I was growing up in the ‘sixties, the impending end of the end in that decade. Though let me quickly add that, in retrospect, John Lukacs (the historian of Chestnut College, not to be confused with György Lukacs, the fatuous Marxist) put the matter more elegantly in his book, A Thread of Years (1998). This book offered a series of vignettes, from commonplace life, cast year by year from the beginning of the 20th century, to 1969, in which the decline & final extinction of “the idea of a gentleman” was knowingly presented. It stands in my mind as the greatest of several dozen of the author’s imaginative yet authoritative historical works.

Though I don’t entirely agree with Lukacs’s world view, which I consider too Anglophile & Churchillian, I think he offers real insights into what has gone down. In particular, his understanding of the emergence of the bourgeoisie in “Renaissance” modernity, & of its development into the Populism of our post-modernity, is essentially correct. He owes this to an astute grasp of 20th century history. As a World War II survivor himself (Budapest son of divorced parents, a Catholic father & a Jewish mother), personally acquainted with forced labour in the penumbra of the Holocaust, he was able to spot a lie at the heart of historical teaching in liberal academia. It was the lie that the German working classes were opposed to Hitler. No: they were his principal support. It was the goad for Lukacs to expose more generally false teaching.

To say that he despises Populism is almost an understatement. I despise it with some warmth, & Lukacs despises it with more than I will ever muster. There is a crucial question we would answer, perhaps, a little differently. I anchor Populism in the self-worship of man, per se. He, to my mind, is a little too indifferent to this philosophical question, & comes closer to despising it for itself. But for practical purposes, the difference comes out in the wash. We have been led, through post-modernity, by men who were truly representative of “the people,” & not by any of the old, & now demonized, men of aristocratic vocation. The carnage may be attributed to the ideal of “democracy” in itself & in its natural ramifications; to the promise of giving the people exactly what they want, without reference to the better angels.

This democratic ideal, though already eloquently expressed through the bloodletting of Paris after 1789, may be said to have matured definitively by the summer of 1914. One might even call it the greatest triumph of democracy — with mass public demonstrations in all the capitals of Europe, from all sides, demanding immediate total war. In cause & effect, we have this history backwards: again, from the lies taught in our schools. It was not old aristocratic politicians cynically manoeuvring “the people” into war against their will, to serve their own mysterious interests. It was “the people” manoeuvring them, into an Armageddon; one which many of the aristocratic, old school, “balance of power” diplomats did actually foresee, & did everything in their power to forestall, fearing it would be the end of their own class.

But it was not a simple process, not some new or sudden thing, for the history of the rise of “popular” national chauvinism & jingoism goes much deeper. We look here only at the point of combustion, through which the politics of the world were radically & unambiguously transformed, from a degree of self-critical civilization, to a high-tech barbarism incapable of self-appraisal. Within this new world order, that emerged from all the blood lust: an oscillation between the “total war” of conscripting national armies, & the “total peace” of conscripting national bureaucracies.

It has been an apocalyptic scenario, to be sure; & it is understandable that we, in consequence, have come to look forward — sometimes religiously, more often superstitiously — to a nuclear incineration, or some equivalent environmental catastrophe. In our gut, we feel that we may have contributed to this as tiny atoms; but at large it is something over which we believe ourselves to have no control, being mere cells in the body politic, hardly to be held to account. From the train of secondary explosions throughout the 20th & into this 21st century, we expect things to end, inevitably with a bang not a whimper.

*

In fact, the world ended on the 10th of August, 1969. This happened to be a Sunday. People look to the future for an event which actually happened in the past; but I am glad to see that Alain de Benoist, the celebrated French pagan of the nouvelle droite, has picked up on this, over at Occidental Observer. He is the compleat crackpot of course, or cinglé as I believe it is called over there, with a long history of viewing everything upside down. That might be his strength, however. Turn him right side up & all becomes coherent. Meanwhile, let me offer encouragement for the first thing he may have got right: in his essay entitled, “Yes, the end of the world has happened.”

For decades I have held this view against all comers. Indeed, I have held it since the 10th of August, 1969, when I was sixteen. How do I know the date? Because I was there. I remember it perfectly. I was standing at the time in a ruined coastal fortification, from World War II, near New Waterford, Cape Breton. I was up in a concrete tower (once disguised as a church steeple), looking down over a field of blank concrete slabs (once pretending to be a churchyard). It must have happened around two o’clock in the afternoon, Atlantic time; which is to say, about Vespers, GMT.

At the time, I will admit, I was not entirely certain that the world had come to an end that day. But everything I have since read or otherwise learned has tended to confirm my initial observation.

People often ask me what happened that day. “It was the end of the world,” I reply. “You are asking me to mention something bigger? What else could you want? Surely the end of the world will do for a newscast.”

Pressed on the point, of what happened on the day the world ended, I say, “Nothing much.” It ended, after all, not with a bang as everyone had expected, but instead with a whimper, or less. Pressed further, I recall that the LaBianca murders also happened on that day, “But that was sheer coincidence.”

I am even asked what happened to me on that day, as if my own personal fate could have any significance against this world-historical background. “Again, nothing much,” I explain. “The usual adolescent stuff, you know. Unrequited love & all that.”

And nothing much has happened, since; or at least, nothing much good has happened. Forty-three years, & a half, have passed in which people have gone on, not realizing it is over, pretending to themselves that the end of the world has not, in fact, happened. It is obtuse to look to the future for something that has already occurred in the past. I protest against this general obtuseness, & argue earnestly that it must be overcome. We have reached the point of stasis, at the end of the pendulum; we hover there. But I look for some movement, sooner or later, in which the pendulum begins to swing back, the other way.

For Saint David’s Day, our Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield, twitters from space: “A perfect pass coming up on Cardiff.” Were it only not, alas, for the clouds over Wales. I discovered his Twitter page this morning, thanks to BBC. The man is an obsessive space photographer, & some magnificent pictures from high over Scotland were re-splashed through the Beeb. In one, the Isle of Skye is depicted, with the late February snows on her peaks — “mist & mountains, a stirring landscape,” our astronaut observes. The islands Canna, Rum, Eigg, Muck, are below her; the Scottish coast to her right, from Loch Torridon down to Loch Nevis. The relief is crisp, from the acute angle: one could almost use it for a walking map. Well, it brought tears nearly to my eyes.

Some Scotsman tweets back: “I live on the island bottom left, here’s a photo I took of you last week,” showing the light streak of the International Space Station crossing the night sky.

Yesterday, the Pope’s resignation, Commander Hadfield clicked remarkable shots looking down the throat of Mount Etna, which is currently quite active. His finale for the day was the huge cyclone, swirling clockwise off the Australian coast. His captions gleam with geographical precision, & the unquenched boyish delight in his adventure. And, too, with unconcealed Canadian patriotism, as he flags an announcement from our space agency with, “Canadian know-how on its way to see what asteroids are made of.” Or, assures the launchers of the latest package for the space station that his Canadarm is ready-aye-ready to catch it in space. But there are friendly words, too, for a Japanese robot.

My uncle Bob (H. Robert Warren) was something to the Canadian space programme, & on secondment to the British, from their earliest days; his name is written in the annals of our Alouette, & with our teams to Houston. Octogenarian now, enfeebled by age, he was once the dreaming child of a very modest farm cottage in Clarkson, Ontario — inspired by his elder brother who went off to fly Spitfires in the last World War. How he longed to fly, himself. He was just too young to follow. But he never looked down, climbing height to height, from aero to astro. In old photos, still, he is my papa’s earnest & adoring little brother; & through the huge family he begatted in his turn, I have long since taken our space effort personally. Whatever tiny part of my taxes go to support that effort, I pay with uncontained enthusiasm. (It is only about 86 percent of current Dominion expenditures that I find morally abhorent; down a couple of points from the previous administration.)

For astronaut breakfast this morning, in the space station, how perfectly Lenten: “Granola with dried blueberries, dehydrated vegetable quiche, instant pineapple juice, instant black coffee. Suit you too?” (There is nothing so Canadian as a blueberry, even dried.) In a video link with His Excellency, our Governor-General, Cmdr Hadfield shows Canadian schoolchildren how to wash their hands in zero gravity.

There are moments like these when all the stars align, & I feel as if I were at home in our world of high technology. And these are the moments when the technology falls away, & I glimpse the entranced faces of the schoolchildren, & the snow on the ancient mountains, & the serenity of the heavens.

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,” my uncle recited at my father’s funeral, “& danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. …”

           And while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
           The high untrespassed sanctity of space —
           Put out my hand & touched the face of God.

Awoke this morning, a little late from being up very late, with a fine Lenten feeling of desolation. His Holiness chose to resign with effect on a Thursday; the last day of a calendar month. He chose eight o’clock in the evening because this had been the end of his usual working day. From that moment the sedes vacans comes back into view, the empty place between papal reigns & in this case a Lent within Lent. Once again, I do not dispute Pope Benedict’s decision. I accept his authority in principle, but more fundamentally I trust it.

Nor, really, do I resent the malice & ignorance of much of the world’s media, in covering the event as they have done, & as they are likely to do today, & throughout the Conclave, & when they will express their practised surprise & disgust at the “backwardness of the Church” when the new Pope is chosen. They are what they are, & that must also be accepted.

As a “pundit” of some kind, or let us say “Essayist” now for it sounds more distinguished, I often feel like a kid pointing a battery torch to the heavens & declaring, “Let there be Light!” This was especially so on this Friday morning, the last of the pontificate of my greatest living Catholic hero; one who had the curious habit of speaking & writing only on topics he knew something about, & trying never to strike a pose. A man whose actions consistently displayed serenity, whether refusing to retaliate in kind to low attacks, or acting promptly & boldly when circumstances required such courage.

This has been evident even in the last fortnight, through which he has been making administrative decisions that could so easily have been shirked, & left to his successor; while leaving to his successor what will require consecutive action over much longer stretches of time. He has shown the best, the very best, of the German & Bavarian qualities mixed into his Catholic formation. His successor is bound to find that, whatever they contain, the files will be in good & conscientious order. This is a moral virtue, & remains so however it is parodied or satirized: the cultivation of mind & habits capable of making crisp distinctions, & doing what is necessary without sloth, & without pride.

He has been condemned by the world for many petty things, & many imaginary. He has been condemned even for not being someone else; for knowing himself & knowing his limitations, & making them his strengths.

This is something I’ve found again & again when the media have condemned some outrageous thing he is supposed to have said; or quoted with exulting approval something even more outrageous. I go to the text & find that he said no such thing. Nor, upon thinking it through, may I condemn him for failing to anticipate the media reaction. For one may successfully locate & disarm a thousand bombs in a thickly-laid minefield. There is no foreseeing number one thousand & one.

I expect, over time, we will learn much more of the history of his papacy — the actual history as opposed to the “first draught.” If there has been one most exemplary virtue, allied with a profound insight into the management of human affairs, it has been a function of Pope Benedict’s humility. It is the virtue of understanding how much can be achieved when one has no wish to take the credit. So many good things are attempted by politicians, for instance, that go badly wrong because of this moral oversight. They will “do the right thing,” but demand to be seen doing it. And that little demand alone unravels all the good. To serve is to serve, interests beyond one’s own; one cannot serve the “two gods” of conflicting interests. His Holiness has been, to my view, a most exhilarating example of a man without guile, of a man who long ago tamed the natural propensity towards self-service.

Fortunately he has left some books behind him; quite a few, & everywhere in them more than is apparent to a first reading. I returned, in recent weeks, to reading some of his Wednesday “talks” or homilies on the holy men & women of Catholic history. At first I thought them as brief & casual as any scheduled weekly “sermon” he must “do,” as part of a busy & distracting schedule; as “throwaway” by comparison to his major, longer tracts; as learned & dogmatically sound but nevertheless, passing chatter. They are not. Themes have been carried from week to week, & subtle yet very important points recalled successively from many angles. Returning to them, I found something like an “autobiography of the Church” had been taught: one in which the key events are not the outward ones of history. The major historical events are placed for orientation only in the background. It is the inward history that is being told, a most remarkable narrative in which we are looking at events through what I can only describe as “the medium of holiness.” Not, as it were, “through the eyes of the Saints,” as simple hagiography; Benedict is instead trying to trace through them the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit. It is not “intellectualism” he has offered. An extraordinary learning is required for it, but put entirely at the service of an act of meditation.

So he is not really going away, & quite apart from the Gethsemane of prayer into which he enters, & the unearthly Life that follows, we are not finished with him yet. He has taught what he will continue teaching: not, for the most part, through formal encyclicals & proclamations but in a kindly, & slightly aloof manner, from out of the chastity in Love — as Father Ratzinger of the Vatican.

Sardines must of course be originally from the ancient Kingdom of Sardinia. They are little fellows, small herrings, that come in perhaps two dozen choice species, among more than three hundred that swim the open seas. “Sardines” are smaller & “pilchards” are larger; often different stages of exactly the same fish — all from the clupeiod family. Which is to say, herrings: a symbol of Lent. Brislings & sprats are from a more northern sub-family, but not inedible for that. The little sardines & their allies travel the world’s oceans, in their schools; & when they have tired of that, they swim into large nets, & are lifted, high. And then they continue their journeys, now at their ease in little tin boxes. There are kindly people who live by the seashore, & help arrange our little fishy friends, all cosily according to their size. They may fit two, or five, or even fifteen or more of them in each berth.

There is a famous painting by Goya — a real masterpiece, every brush stroke of genius — depicting “The Burial of the Sardine,” El entierro de la sardina. You may have difficulty finding the sardine in the composition, because he is very small. The painting is a mischievous work for, as ever with Goya, he is commenting on the human condition, & we are a mischievous race; especially compared with the innocent sardines. The people are shown masked, & frenzied. From the dark, grinning mascot on the banner they carry, a malign quality infuses the parade. It is a mob, & their intention must be sacrilegious.

My own understanding of the ceremony, however, is different from this. It varies, or varied, in different parts of Spain, attached in some places to the beginning of Lent, & in others to the end.  There is a great procession; the mourners weep & wail. The deceased sardine is carried in his little casket, under a large doll, called the pellele. Inland, he may be buried; but by the sea he is cremated, then carried out by the fishermen in a solemn fleet — his ashes scattered upon the waves. (I love the Spaniards; but of course they are all mad.)

In Aubrey somewhere, there is reference to an English culinary custom: the “herring on horseback,” by which, on Easter Sunday, the fish rides away. Through Europe, many similar Mediaeval customs survived until the other day; festivals often not of the Church, but of the people. Yet by proximity to Lent, they seemed less likely to be “pagan survivals” — as the idiots are constantly explaining to us — than rather imaginative & charming ways to express the idea that one is very sick of fish. I am told that, by the year 1960, when the Quiet Revolution came noisily to the Province of Quebec, the people were so sick of fish that they vowed never to look at another one again, until the end of time. This is given as the reason that per capita fish consumption in that province remains, to this day, lower than in Central Asia.

Up here in the High Doganate, we are well disposed to fish, & would not have them slighted. I rather look forward to Lent, for this reason, & for several like it. For I am, too, genuinely partial to bean dishes, on rice or some other grain — the staple of most of the world’s poor, who cannot afford meat, & are inclined to find luxury even in a little dab of fishpaste. God has blessed these humble with the tropical spices, & with the genius they have used to concoct a million ways to vary this frugal yet perfectly balanced, nutritious cuisine.

But let me not stray from the little fishes. Sardines may even be purchased fresh, from fishmongers in the Greater Parkdale Area. Grilled, they are exquisite; & the fattiest may be deep fried, with batters. But Edouard de Pomiane gave the best ten-minute approach. Run cold water over them, immediately on coming home, to wash away the salt. Pull off the heads, & the intestines will follow. Dry them. Fry, without dipping in flour, in a pan of smoking oil or very hot butter. Do not salt. Serve with curls of butter & a half lemon.

In the spring there were, & still are in many creeks emptying into Lake Ontario, smelt runs that turn the waters silver. Among my happiest childhood moments, in Georgetown, Ont., was helping old Mrs Pattenden gut & jar the harvest her old husband had brought home: great baskets full, by Saint Peter! A beloved old lady, salt of the earth, wearing a baseball cap over her white hair wild; & a thick hand-knitted cardigan, becoming waterproofed by fish oil. She had an errant daughter who once ran away, quite literally with the milkman. And so Mr & Mrs Pattenden did just what gentle reader would expect. They took in their abandoned son-in-law, & his two abandoned hockey-playing boys, to their very small brick cottage. (The boys, my contemporaries, slept in the rafters.) The yard of this cottage was a “victory garden”; its strawberries the finest in the world. They made a paradise on their small town lot, indifferent to the opinions of their middle-class neighbours, & in defiance of all the municipal by-laws. All gone under the asphalt, now.

The Lake Ontario fisheries are still in business, incidentally, under elaborate, multiple layers of regulation. (The need for ever greater regulation being paradoxically “proved” by the consistently catastrophic effects of all past regulation, to the present day.) One may buy their harvest of whitefish, trout, perch, in the Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx. Around here it doesn’t sell, thanks to the success of depraved scaremongering about mercury levels, which started in the 1960s, & has since entered into our provincial folklore. In fact, the mercury levels were not lethally high, & have since been reduced to a tiny fraction of the danger levels for the human metabolism. And so the “environmentally aware” eat freshwater fish from afar, caught or farmed in places where the waters are grievously polluted, & the fish are refrigerated & shipped at huge expenditure in fossil fuels. And meanwhile, the environmental regulation is controlled by the sport fishing interests, whose ability to pose as “friends of the earth” is unsurpassed; while the “First Nations” win court decisions to let them flout all rules. A massive bureaucratic machinery, with enormous investments in hatchery infrastructure, stocks the Great Lakes with Pacific salmon & other exotic species for the sportsmen, carefully monitoring the commercial fishermen, to be sure they don’t touch any of it. This status quo is reinforced by the lobbying efforts of the many vested interests established & enriched by the political process: the charter boat operators, tackle shops, marinas, & shills for the tourist industry. On the plus side, the American bureaucrats have driven their own commercial fisheries into extinction; so that what little remains of the industry is now our proud Canadian monopoly.

But that was just an aside. The real purpose of this Essay is to celebrate the little fish in little tins, from wherever they may hail; the joys of Lent. Why, for dinner just now we opened a tin of the most delicious sardines from Messrs Hyacinthe Parmentier in France, in olive oil with peppers; mixing this with peas into a bowl of white rice. These people know their little fishes. May I further recommend their grilled sardines, delivered “dry” in their beautiful yellow tins. (With sardines, I have found it a general rule, that the prettier & more tastefully typographed the tin, the better the fish inside it.) But that is not to overlook La Quiberonnaise, a brand from Brittany I have tasted but once, & found extraordinary. The French do almost everything better.

And the tinning of sardines was itself a French invention. It was a happy combination of three things: the landing of the exquisite Clupea pilchardus Walbaum by Nantais fishermen; the tradition of preserving them in sealed clay jars called oules, after frying in their fabulous Breton butters, & olive oils imported from Provence; & the introduction of François Appert’s canning process, inspired by Napoleon’s prize to find new methods of food preservation to serve his troops in the field. (The adored Elizabeth David explained all this in an article for the Spectator, half a century ago.)

Joseph Colin, a confectioner of Nantes, brought these three together. The process he developed was by no means simple. Sardines being among the most perishable of fish, the canning must be done immediately ashore, by a series of very quick processes — the sorting by size; the beheading & gutting; the rinsing; the plunging in mild brine; the rinsing again; the drying in warm air; the sudden frying; the draining, & packing, & covering with an olive oil specially married to the qualities of the fish, so they may mature happily together; the sterilizing — each stage timed to the minute or second, adjusted to the size of the fish.

Different but parallel methods have been developed for other species of sardine, in other locations; but anywhere it must be a careful art. The Europeans have understood this, but alas on this side of the Atlantic our canners are not so discerning. Our idea of art is economy of scale. We choose the cheapest available raw materials, & use industrial methods that eliminate the requirement for human skill, or any other scope for the dignity of labour. For quality we substitute a fanatic obsession with hygiene, enforced by our bureaucratic apes. Love & pride in craft is systematically replaced with impudent salesmanship. That is why North American sardines are, today — unless I am blind to some exception — the same rubbish they have always been. (But of course, the big European concerns have copied “American standards,” to compete with our knock-down prices.)

This is why, in turn, it makes no sense to buy a tin of sardines, or almost anything else, from a North American supermarket, which offers myriad interchangeably artificial brands, each “product” reduced to a bulk commodity, & democratically pitched at the lowest common denominator to people themselves considered interchangeable. (Capitalism’s answer to the promise of Communism.) Buy what you need, instead, from the small family & ethnic groceries — or more precisely, from those shopkeepers who know their goods. This will always cost you more, in money & possibly unwanted human contact. But should the prices seem too high, there is a simple remedy. It is to eat less.

The French make the best, & have brands of sardines at stratospheric prices, which I will not mention. These are sardines for the connoisseurs; the truly monied who will pay whatever is asked for the correct or fashionable “vintage.” I am willing to settle for mere excellence.

Beyond France, let me mention the Pinhais company in Portugal, their “Nuri” brand; but look also for the names Idamar, & Gonsalves. From Spain, Ortiz, & Arroyabe, are the grand family fish-tinning firms, knowledgeably working the Cantabrian Sea; but their specialties are more tuna & anchovies. (Ortiz “Ventresca” belly meat of albacore, packed in olive oil, is so delicate & tender, so sublime, that I would avoid it in Lent, except on Sundays. It may be eaten in the Spanish style: which is, straight from the tin, with a good wine beside it; a Corvo, though Sicilian, would be the right idea; perhaps even a dry sherry.) Matiz Gallego are I think the Spanish sardine specialists.

From Italy, Angelo Parodi, & also Bertozzi, I can recommend from direct experience (the latter also for their tinned squid, & octopus in ink). John West, from Scotland, could be mentioned, with hesitation, for brisling. I have heard good things about sardines from Freemantle in Western Australia, but never had the chance to try them. I have tasted quite fabulous iwashi (“sardines” in Japanese), packed in shoyu & teriyaki marinades; & niboshi (sun-dried sardines) in a stock with kelp; but I can no longer recall the best tinned brands of Japan; or Taiwan. Red China I will not mention, except to say I read “Product of China” on any package in the same way I’d read a skull & crossbones.

As a general direction, let me add that sardines packed in tomato & mustard sauces are invariably refuse; they need these strong distractions to conceal the taste of the fish. “Vegetable oil” should also be avoided; it should be olive oil, or water. Marketing claims such as “wild sardines” & “organic” should be treated with contempt. All sardines continue to be harvested wild; & the “organic” can refer only to the sauce ingredients.

On the other hand, try herbed & spiced varieties, which can be marvellous. The flavour combinations depend on prolonged steeping within the tin, & cannot be reproduced by last-minute additions. In the case of chilli partisans (& I am often one) do not look for heat in the tin. The sweeter, milder chillies make the more subtle flavouring agents, & more heat is better added at the end.

*

Now, I was taught in the newspaper business that one does not end a culinary article without supplying some kind of recipe suggestion; so let me mention Stargazey Pie. It is a speciality of my paternal grandmother’s native county of Devon. The heads of the sardines, or better larger pilchards, are left on for this, & the tails, too, but the rest of the fish boned & stripped for eating. A shortcrust pastry is applied, thin to the bottom, thick across the top. The filling will be a mash of boiled potatoes, with any available herring flesh, cream, eggs, chopped onion, perhaps a splash of white wine.

The whole pilchards are stuffed with herbs, samphire, apple. They are inserted so that their tails rise at the centre of the pie, through the top crust, & their heads likewise through the crust, around the edges. Or vice versa: tails at the circumference, heads in the middle. In either case the heads must emerge from the oven, gazing up towards the stars in wonderment.

According to the global village explainers, the reason they were so arranged is that the excess oils, in the heads especially, drip down, adding flavour to the pie. This is nonsense, however. Tests have been conducted to prove it makes no difference at all. The real reason the heads & tails are arranged in that unusual way is something that the post-modern man cannot quite remember. It is for the sheer blooming joy of it.