Essays in Idleness

One of the grimmest activities in this world is that of “sex” (i.e. copulation) without eroticism. This would pertain to all sterile forms of the exercise, which is the crown of modern commerce and advertising. It is true, much disease is spread along with the depravity, but the real costs are steeply higher. For we are dealing with a profound denial: a refusal to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the human domain; a determination to live only in one sordid corner. This reduces us to parity with the other animals — the rats, for instance — a demotion that should be pointedly avoided.

For a man, it turns a woman from a mystery, into a cheap puzzle. I daresay less, the other way around. When we come to the genital interactions of any supplementary sexes, which fanciful human minds are capable of projecting — I don’t want to know.

I learn, from a question asked me in a public place, that the world is now “debating” who may use which toilets in North Carolina. The progressives, with support from major American corporations, demand that men be given access to the ladies’ plumbing chambers throughout that State. But not all males: only those who would have been characterized as “perverts” by almost everyone, everywhere, before this generation. Progressive women must pretend to be pleased; the rest are being taught to stay quiet.

The issue is nothing like “the last straw”; only another stick in the bundle of progressive theatrics. To my mind it cannot be understood except in the context of a far larger public campaign to suppress the erotic. This becomes clear when one realizes that it is the latest strange twist in the long ideological descent from the puritan iconoclasm of the Reformation — a kind of “permanent revolution” to reverse the Catholic sacramentalism of the Middle Ages. In the absence of creative capacity, this necessarily involves the institution of new, parody sacraments, like the old ones but turned upside down: “rights” for “rites” as it were.

Ultimately, this goes back to the rebellion of Lucifer; but I must try to limit the historical overview.

The project to de-eroticize “sex” (in both the current and former usages of this word), was implicit in feminism and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Copulation has since drawn level with barbells and jogging: something you gotta do to get your endorphin high. The usual liberal inversion of terms has masked this operation; e.g. the habit of describing pornography as “erotic literature.” This is false on both counts, for there is nothing erotic about pornography; and in so far as it may contain written words as well as ghastly pictures, lubricity cancels every literary effect. Currently we are surrounded by cynical tradesmen in this worthless “art.”

Why do they bother to attack Eros? Because it is godly, an aspect of Divine Love; the thing itself, in relation to the Creation. The degradation of Love, to synonymy with “sex,” was the underlying, and undermining, purpose of that sexual revolution. It has so succeeded that the words are now used interchangeably in the mass media.

Yet the effect is temporary. It is another bold assault on ein feste Burg, which in the end must fail — for God will not be mocked.

Genuine eroticism has slipped for now beyond reach of our mass culture. It is the reason most marriages end in divorce, whether or not legally notarized; why children are almost invariably “planned,” with the use of de-eroticizing technology; why the old are now encouraged to die.

It is the reason musical appreciation has decayed, so that there are men today who can hear the Prelude and Fugue in A-minor, and not know that it resounds with the leaping spiritual eroticism at the heart of all Creation.

Saint Catherine of Siena and I share a birthday, as I like to mention at least once a year. In my own case it was a birth into creaturedom, in hers the heavenly natale. We may lack much else in common — I fear the admiration goes only one way — but at a crude level we are both scrappers, and both on record for criticizing popes. Her own remarks were more excoriating; she had a gift for getting right to the point, which one reads not only in her hundreds of dictated letters, but also in her spiritual masterpiece, The Dialogue of Divine Providence, and in the Prayers transcribed at the end of her relatively short earthly life. (About as long as that of Jesus.)

But the “heat” from Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa (as she was known at the start) was a blaze of love I find unimaginable, though I have tried to imagine. Her relationship with Jesus Christ was extremely intimate: read her account of His foreskin as her “wedding ring”; or rather, don’t read it until you have thrown off the cloak of post-modern priggishness.

Her way of living, including the disconcerting habit of taking Christ’s commands as given, was a scandal sometimes even to her own generation, consisting as it did of humans like us who like to avoid directness, and would rather delegate their acts of mercy.

“The admonishment of sinners” is the act of mercy least appreciated in our age; and probably, too, in Catherine’s. In my own condition, I would shudder to receive a letter from her. In her own time, Princes of the Church shuddered to receive her letters. (She also went to Avignon herself.) As I said, she gets right to the point.

I like to beat around it for a while. I like to avoid direct confrontation. I would rather take a walk — go shadow-boxing — and remember eventually that I am in no position to mount a high horse.

But Saint Catherine of Siena was a knight in this respect; and put the fear of God into the Devil’s yes men. It is to the credit of her age that so many recognized the authority with which this frail young woman was speaking; who, after their initial shock, were inclined simply to obey, and thus change history. Who understood she was speaking for her Husband.

May she from Heaven pray for me, on my little birthday; and pray for all of us worldlings, so easily lost and confused.

Well that’s it then, the last Super Tuesday for which I’ll stir myself to check the news. We’ve lost, as we usually lose. More precisely, we’re down ten goals with minutes to go, and I feel confident in my prediction. Trump has won. The current practice is to find someone to blame for this, other than ourselves; but really the whole team stinks, and their fans were just watching. To persist in the hockey metaphor, they should have been throwing their octopuses on the ice from the end of the first period.

I refer, of course, to Team Conservative, which took the battering from this glitzy goon, who didn’t need a “ground game” for his strategy was viral. The great majority of Americans, like a larger majority of Canadians, will actually vote for a Clinton or a Trump; even for a Trudeau. Who cares which huckster they choose? A gentleman like Cruz, who employs reason, and tries to complete his passes (ice hockey again) has no chance with such opponents. They aren’t playing the same game. They are playing instead some game in which winning (let’s switch to American football) is not the most important thing. It is the only thing.

No advice to Ted Cruz this morning. I have it on good induction that he does not read these Idleposts, and that will be my retaliation.

Guvmints come and go, not only in “democracies.” Replacing them by violence instead of elections appeals to me at this moment, but in the longer view, legitimate inheritance is best.

There is a photograph of our Queen, taken by Annie Leibovitz for her ninetieth birthday last week, showing her serene, and surrounded by a selection of her great-grandchildren, all properly washed. (Try here.) It broadcasts civilization, right down to the Hogarth touches (the one on her lap has Her Majesty’s spectacles, and the one to the left has her purse).

Now, I mention this to a constitutional purpose, but not the usual Loyalist one from up here in the Monarchy of the Far North — that the United Statists were wrong to rebel. (As my ancestors explained: “I choose one tyrant three thousand miles away, over three thousand tyrants one mile away.”)

Rather, I should like to advertise that our Canadian sovereign — for Elizabeth is she — has just the right amount of power, over me. It is limited by the fact that she does not know me (another non-reader, I’m afraid), and does not care if I live or die, provided that she isn’t obliged to endure the funeral. Better, she has no need to bother me with paperwork, in the meantime. I therefore hold her up as an example of good government: the very best.

Rather than ask if we continue to be worthy of her — the Jamaicans, for instance, like to flirt with republicanism, but a recent poll showed the great majority there would rather return to colonial status — we should give our attention to the rest of the executive. Are they necessary?

We need a military, to be sure, given the ways of this world; and police and prisons for the most obnoxious; but any competent caudillo can supply that, and the best caudillo is force of habit. (“Unalterable custom.”) I’m sure the Queen can appoint generals and admirals of a higher grade than any prime minister, wet behind the ears; could choose able and superbly-dressed men, to sit in her Star Chamber; and plumed servants to perfect her ceremonial. It is the rest of the bureaucracy we could do without.

So now the Yankees will get Trumpcare or Clintoncare on top of Obamacare, and a phalanx of other new jackboot “good intentions” by which to prove they can’t govern themselves. The common man will get farther and farther from taking responsibility for his own acts. Ridiculous suggestions will be put interminably to the vote.

I used to sign off, “bring back Franco,” but am reliably informed the man is dead. So let us instead restore the Queen to her proper office, or rather strip the ugly accretions from around it; say adieu to the tyranny of relativist politicians; continue to suffer their impositions, of course; but wherever life still happens to be permitted, get on with it.

“To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

The line is from the front poem (“A Brief for the Defence”) in the late Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, and was brought to my attention by an Idlepost reader. It distils a point I made yesterday, against the adepts of “progress,” and would go well with a beer chaser.

Of this poet, Jack Gilbert, I should say too little. I’ll have to read him now, I suppose. I had successfully avoided him till yesterday (though I knew vaguely who he was), and now I see from the Internet sources, and a few of his pieces electronically purloined, that he was some sort of reprobate, like the rest of us. But let us read one poem at a time, and then verse by verse:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. …

That, I would say, showed genuine inspiration, and a sudden, stumbling, theological depth. The line-breaks expose an astute argument, and the shameless didacticism could also be praised. For what I already take as his little foibles, and what looks like narrowness of range, Gilbert has taken poetry seriously. This is seldom done today, when poets so easily satisfy themselves with near approaches to cleverness, choose only among the popular vices, and flee beauty. They desperately jiggle for anyone’s attention; they position themselves for academic advancement; it does not occur to them to say, “Listen, for this is important.”

Turned another way, we omit the Gloria. We look only for where the Gloria is not, and flinch if by accident we see it.

Our world is rather ugly in certain respects, but as I saw from my balconata this evening, in a moment of cloud-break from an overcast day, there is indisputable backlight from Heaven. And on the streets this morning, a most happy scene, with a mother and a child.

We do not want to be always scolding, but sometimes showing the way. But if we must scold, we should scold the scolds, whose fingers are pointed incessantly downwards.

Having been called, in the very recent past, a “wattle-and-daub conservative” (and really, gentle reader, I prefer “reactionary” for my noun), I was put to the pain of responding.

My first reply was, naturally, “Yes, if we understand the framing is of oak, and the daub capillaried by the finest horse hair.”

My second was to explain the history of wattle-and-daub.

Properly mixed, by a correct recipe (including the purest bullock dung available), and adeptly applied to a basketry of willow or acacia, itself set into grooves in the wood, and then patiently cured, this is among the finest and most durable building materials. And when the exposed oak is allowed to breathe (not tarred, which seals in moisture), the well-maintained timber-frame building will outlast as many generations as one can supply with responsible descendants.

Now, here is the interesting thing, which I have learnt as I have grown.

In youth, I was told that, like everything else in our built environment, wattle-and-daub had “evolved” from earlier and more primitive practices, starting for instance from the sun-dried mud hut, and progressing through the admixture of hay, &c. And that it had in turn “evolved” into our modern building materials and techniques.

That was a lie.

Consult an archaeologist if you do not believe me, gentle reader. Across Eurasia, and beyond, the spade-wielders have discovered wattle-and-daub remains of extraordinary antiquity: decisively pre-dating the alternatives. It becomes obvious that the simpler frame fillings were selected in the absence of better materials; or that the builders were trying to cut corners.

As anything, poorly composed wattle-and-daub will soon disintegrate. Unlike the reactionary, who seeks excellence in every kind, the progressive mind fixates upon what is badly done, and unworthy, hoping finally to attribute mistakes to God. The instinct of Darwinism — the cosmological creed of the Enemy — is to see everything as a lesson in progress, from the more primitive to the more sophisticated creature, or method. He sneers at wattle-and-daub; he praises e.g. industrial drywall.

My father and I discussed this matter at length during my childhood. He was an industrial designer who, more honest than his contemporaries, could be made to admit that the “economic,” mass-produced item was never as good as the product it replaced. It was just quicker and cheaper to manufacture, once economies of scale had been conceded.

Yet even in mass production there is better and worse — in materials and design and habits of work. Papa preferred the better (and would decline much-needed contracts in the moment he discerned that his patron lacked moral dignity). In the end we agreed that even the best-made things in our environment were, almost invariably, the best of a botch.

The “almost” is an acknowledgement that one cannot make jet aeroplanes of wattle-and-daub. Side-stepping the question whether one should ever make them, I note this exception proves the rule. For those who make jet aeroplanes are compelled, from fear of ruinous lawsuits, to observe extremely high standards of craftsmanship and precision, whatever their machines. The human mind and hand is conscientiously involved at every stage.

But that is to distract us from wattle-and-daub, or rather the moral of this modest post.

There are right ways of doing things, and wrong ways of doing things, and the proponents of the wrong ways are anathema. Those who preach cut corners — and consistently prefer the new to the old only because it is newer — must be condemned.

As dead white males go, Shakespeare has got to be in the top ten. He has outlasted not only his rivals on the stage, but one after another of subsequent generations, and even in the rain of our own time, he is still running strong. Four hundred years from his death, on his fifty-second birthday, after a drinking bout with old buddies in a Stratford inn, he is perhaps the oldest profane author still widely read. This may be partly because he is still force-fed to the poor young geese in our secondary schools. Most remember him with bitterness, on that account, but a few notice that he is rather good, and peek back when teacher’s eyes are turned. Members of the drama club will be most likely to form a permanent attachment, as Shakespeare was an actor, but more, the playwright who is every actor’s best friend.

This shows through in translations, from what I can see. The poetry, which is often intense, cannot be successfully imitated in any other language; but the theatrical movement can be reproduced. From travelling companies through Germany, in the seventeenth century, to those crossing rural India in the twentieth, the plays have somehow “worked” on audiences that are not only culturally “other,” but don’t speak a word of English. Something seems to be happening, in every Shakespeare play, and even without a drumbeat of preparation, people respond to it. Something of extraordinary power is happening, and they just have to watch.

Which explains, in turn, why “the Bard” (I hate this term) could experiment so wildly with the language in his later plays. The earliest ones are strictly respectful of English syntax, and obedient with English grammar and vocabulary. The later ones break all the rules. Shakespeare knew he could hold an audience spellbound, whether they could follow his verbiage or not. He earned a freedom no subsequent poet in English till the twentieth century would dare to imitate; whenupon, those who tried, failed.

Yet he is a poet, a disciplined poet, and a thinker, too; and was a man of very broad if chaotic reading, as we are still discovering. His Latin was superb (he went to a first-rate grammar school), and what he comprehended from the Roman poets, Ovid especially, was of a higher quality than dribbling academics can imagine. His thefts from Plutarch are always astute, but also from Livy. What he learnt from the ancient comedians, however, was nothing on what he could teach them.

To call him “the Bard” is to subscribe to the common, ignorant view that he was a “noble savage,” an untutored force of nature. The French, in their formality, are mostly responsible for this error of the Enlightenment; it was among the many things Voltaire got wrong, as the insidious depth of the master dramatist undermined his poppet classicism.

Shakespeare meditated deeply on English history, and on history at large. He went beyond presenting it in narrative form. Like a documentary filmmaker, he takes what he needs from the historical record, discards the rest, and changes anything that does not fit his programme. It does not follow that he misunderstood his sources.

This is also his strategy in the Comedies and the Tragedies, never paying for a plot when he can steal one. For the world is full of plots, and one is like another. The world is full of mud and rock, but the master mason can shape and lay them. The master sculptor permits the stone to speak.

He did not have a theory of history, or a theory of anything else — a mediaeval mind does not think in “theories” — but a profound sense of how the world works, and of the contending spirits animating it. He summons spirits, and strange to say they come.

It is a great mystery when a poet or musician or artist, out of nothing we can see, reveals melodies, harmonies, rhythms, patterns, images, that cannot be forgotten. Shakespeare, unusually a poet of both eye and ear, simultaneously operates as painter and composer. Blind or deaf, he will lead us towards the heart of things. For also, in so many passages of his superlative opera of the senses, we touch. There is a delicacy that calls by “the tender inward of thy hand,” to vivid sudden revelations of the horror and beauty in all human scenes. Blindfold, we can trust he knows his way.

He was not of his age but for all ages, as Ben Jonson declared at the head of the First Folio. By this he does not speak of the future alone. Shakespeare is pre-eminently our poet of the past, lingering upon what is lost, or being lost, beyond salvage. He has among English writers the most exquisite knowledge of the transience of life. He is writing in an age, and to a society, swept by an unprecedented revolution. Yet he is not part of it.

For England he is the lingering ghost of the Middle Ages. The failure to see this is wilfully obtuse. His recusant native Arden is evoked, in fine botanical detail, as that lost paradise. It is an older and wiser England — that not of political ardour but of monasteries and quiet — which glows in his nostalgia. Nothing could be more Catholic, for England, than these lines (opening Sonnet 73), in which startled, we realize her banished Church is singing:

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hange
Upon those boughes which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d quiers, where late the sweet birds sang. …

Miguel de Cervantes died on the eve of Saint George’s, William Shakespeare on the day itself, in both cases precisely four hundred years ago. Curiously enough, if gentle reader will consult his perpetual calendar he will find that was also a Friday and a Saturday; and thanks to the Muslims (with their lunar calendars) I see it was at the full moon, too. Altogether, a very bad start to the weekend, back there in 1616.

We will consider Mr Shakespeare, not for the first time, on his fatal day tomorrow. Today, the obituary must be for that Spanish gentleman.

In a parallel existence, I have been teaching “Catholic novels” to brilliant young seminarians more familiar with Aristotle, perhaps, and the sacrae Scripturae. These are all modern works, and Cervantes has been called the author of “the first modern novel.” This assertion could be challenged. (Go ahead.) In fact the man was writing, more than a century after modernity began, in the form of a late mediaeval romance. But he was having fun with it, as all should be aware, and turning it against itself as satire.

His novel sometimes brings tears to my eyes, because it is noble. This is the paradox of satire, morally the purest literary genre, and thus to be found embedded within all the great works. One cannot write satire without an awareness of what the virtues are, to which the vices correspond. One dare not write it hypocritically. I always feel safe in the company of the satirical, so far as they are genuinely droll, and not merely cynical parodists.

The first thing to know about Don Quixote is that it is two books. Indeed, a decade passed between them. The second depends on a reading of the first, and follows another quixotic campaign, but with the protagonist now aware that he is a celebrity, whose fame was established in the earlier novel and many illicit and mediocre sequels (which Cervantes gleefully owns). The author has in fact performed a joke on his public, putting them in the same position as his knight errant, having himself created the new legends to which they are now addicted. His Quixote will end this second novel sane; his readers now under a confused enchantment.

Incidents throughout are famous; there are awkward summaries to be found on the Internet, which spoil everything, but hey, that is what the Internet is for. Most, as we know, end with the mad knight and his sidekick getting beaten up. In this sense, both novels can be classed as “picaresques.” In every story, however, the ludicrous denouement is the consequence of our hero’s having tried to do the right thing, in circumstances that had been, unfortunately, completely mistaken.

The earthy Sancho Panza sees through many of his lord’s hallucinations, but is nevertheless along for the ride, expecting it will somehow turn out to his advantage. He is the prole in all ages, and I do not think his author had so high an opinion of his “common sense” as English readers assume.

The trick beneath the satire is that Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who himself lived in many ways an heroic and quixotic life (present at Lepanto for three gunshot wounds; took his lumps at Corfu, and at Navarino, too; and at Tunis, and at La Goulette; captured by pirates and held at Algiers, &c), himself believed there are noble things. Various declarations of his, including one memorable after Lepanto, made clear his attachment to the Christian Faith. The world, to his eyes, might be a farce, and the ambitions of men might all be foolish, and yet strange to say, we are rising.

His genius, for the fullest appreciation of which I would guess a reader must master Golden Age Spanish, is to convey this without seeming to try. Alonso Quixano, the minor hidalgo who has dressed himself up as Don Quixote de la Mancha, is a good man. Were he not mad, he would be an ornament to any society. One comes to love him in the way God might, for all the knight’s little foibles, and the catastrophes that result from them.

For there are noble standards, transcending this world. And one has to be somewhat mad to perceive them. Alas, humans that we are, we tend to get the wrong end of each stick as it is passed to us.

And this is because we are all idiot romantics.

Don Quixote has of course many other dimensions — nothing stands up to more than four centuries of reading without the kaleidoscopic quality — but I think all Cervantes’ work follows from this premiss: the backlight of Heaven in this fallen world. (Yes, I omitted the verb.)

The author, too, of the pastoral Galatea, of the sublime Exemplary Novels, and of the Persiles just completed at his death (which haunted our English Jacobean drama, but has failed to be engaged with since), Cervantes invented the modern novel (if he did) entirely by accident. In this writer we encounter a rich and untwisted philosophical mind, nurtured alike in battle and in the forced leisure of confinement.

English-speaking people sometimes like Don Quixote, but seem culturally unable to take it seriously. Which is why, I think, they miss much of the humour. If they could take it seriously they might find it a key to a Spanish civilization much higher than ours, which flourished once not only in Castilla, but in the viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, and Peru, centuries before our prim-browed puritans made their best efforts at Harvard and Yale. It is a key worth turning.

Awakening from an extravagant dream this morning, I found a new collective noun in my head. It was, “an affliction of bishops.” The dream, gentle reader will surmise, was something about synods.

We have survived much through the last twenty centuries or so. We will survive more.

*

To Mass, and the celebration today of Saint Anselm, among the greatest Archbishops of Canterbury, along with Augustine the original “Apostle to the English,” and of course the assassinated Thomas à Becket. (All Romans, and two of them Italian.)

Anselm was everything we seek in a bishop, though seldom get, because we do not pray hard enough. He was a man of deep learning, a philosophical and theological genius, a talented administrator, a simple pastor, and an obvious saint. He had also the guts to stand up to kings, and was twice exiled from England for his rock-like opposition to legislative depravities we’d think nothing of today. Twice, too, he was restored to office, because he was too large to ignore.

For it wasn’t just Henry the VIIIth. Previous English kings had tried their luck, in appropriating to themselves what belonged to Christ and His Church, only.

“Nothing in this earth is dearer to Christ,” Anselm said, “than the freedom of His Church.”

Let no Christian forget that, in this world that swelters from political arrogance. Saint Anselm of Canterbury pray for us.

A great number of things are not going to change, no matter what the hopey-changelings decide. I touched on one of them yesterday. We may project some “ideal” system of education that will turn everybody into intellectuals, who read difficult books right through; who with standardized, methodical training can become “anything they want to be.” But the “common man” may not take to it; notwithstanding his own vague goal of self-improvement. He may endure college for the meal ticket; but not as a means to discovery and wisdom. Give him a challenging book to read, and no prospect of a test, and he will get to about page six.

Verily, we have tried to do this, since the last World War, in North America: to put anyone who thinks it might be to his advantage through college. The politicians are still promising to let more in, or to cover the debts of the last lot who took their advice. But not one in ten university students today benefit from higher education. They have neither the equipment nor the calling for mental work, so that standards must be constantly lowered to accommodate them. And that is before remembering that most of our universities have been taken over by the whacko Left, who think in vicious slogans, and whose only interests are in recruitment and brain-washing.

I do not think that the social teaching of the Church is founded upon rot about human nature. Men are of much different capacities, and their callings are as many as there are men; they are not interchangeable. No scheme of social engineering, and especially not universal schooling, will answer to men’s inmost needs. It can only try to turn the man into what he is not; help him to aspire to things beyond his reach, and to neglect what is within it.

“Germany is a nation of aristocrats,” said a gentleman who was once in the habit of annoying me. He was of German ancestry, yet did not seem to have absorbed lessons of his own national history. His German ethnicity I could not hold against him: jingo nationalism has no national home. My point to him was that the great majority of people everywhere are called to humble stations, and contentment lies in the root of happiness.

National myths — beliefs in “exceptionalism” — are all essentially contrary to Christian teaching, and pitted against it. The people of one nation are not intrinsically better than those of another. They improve or worsen by cultural traits, which are beyond the remit of the nation state, and its calculating politicians. They do not belong in a national machine, premissed on some abstract “equality,” but by nature to a family and a landscape and an inevitably hierarchical order. No one is abstractly “free”; the nature of each is instead “subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

I am not condemning the common man, nor despairing of human nature. I am merely pointing out that our “systems of education,” directed from central bureaucracies by liberal-progressive goons — “engineers of human souls,” like Stalin — is advanced and promoted by manipulation of human weakness, to the end of their own mercenary gain, power, and prestige. For this reason it is entirely politicized.

On the contrary, I believe the overwhelming majority of men (a term which includes women, incidentally) are quite capable of horse sense, and a certain basic decency. But they are also weak, through sin, often unexamined. The function of mass advertising — the primary tool of modern innovation, whether in the service of politics or commerce — is to tamper with them: to arouse and exploit envy, pride, greed, wrath, gluttony, lust, and sloth, by the “scientific” mastery of temptation. It is to lead people astray from their own real interests.

Each is endowed with an immortal soul, and the lowest wage slave is as likely, or more, than the chiefest executive to find Heaven. We know this from Christian teaching, which through the centuries has been pitched at a level that the simplest could understand, and has sought to free men from the very sins the advertiser is trying to encourage. It was thus the opposite of populist.

Christianity is about how things are, not about how things can be altered.

My political observation is that the great majority, except perhaps among the hardier folk in the mountains, do not care much for civic freedom, and never did. It is not a comfortable thing. They want to be taken care of; they want someone looking out for them; they want to feel part of something; they would like to avoid hard work and intelligent thinking.

All these are legitimate desires, in their proper contexts. But a man with the rat cunning of, say, a Trump, or an Obama, knows how to exploit these desires, with sparkledust dreams and empty promises. Those who care little for freedom they enslave.

The “mass man” of our post-modernity is not different from a European peasant of, say, the thirteenth century, except that he is told more lies, and is lost in their maze. Through cynical flattery, he believes ridiculous lies even about himself, such as that he is his own Maker. It was from the beginning a purpose of the Church to free him from exploitation, by revealing the emptiness of what the world offers. Our treasure lies elsewhere.

*

There is a very good article by Sandro Magister today (here). He touches upon something I would, if I could, broadly expand upon: the spiritual catastrophe that follows when the Church herself turns from her otherworldly mission, to false, pseudo-mystical abstractions about “the people,” and to hyping very worldly political causes. It has helped me clarify in my own mind the spontaneous revulsion I felt when first told, from the Throne of Peter, that, “The word ‘people’ is not a logical category, it is a mystical category.” For this is not what Christ taught at all.

God is God and man is man. The man has a face, and we must not lie to him.

Do people ever read books right through?

I think they must in the case of pulp fiction. I often see someone, on a trolley or elsewhere, more than half way through some paperback with a lurid cover, and I would swear from the movement of his eyes that he is reading it, and bet that he will get to the end.

Or he’ll be part way through a shiny oblong microbiology textbook, and may be reading it, or may instead be covering all the words with yellow highlighter. I find this practice odd, for a black felt marker would conceal them more effectively.

He is like an amateur photographer on a sightseeing tour. He may see things that appear through the viewfinder, briefly; and return home with evidence that he was there. He has “covered” the place in the same way, so he won’t have to go there again. Still, it would have been better for him if some greasy, moustached local had stolen his camera on the first day. Then he’d have something to think about for the rest of his vacation.

Whereas, the use of a commonplace book, to transcribe passages, or of a sketchbook, to transcribe scenes, might contribute to actual human experience.

It is another question with those “serious” books. Having since adolescence bought almost all my books second-hand, I am familiar with text markings. If they are in light pencil on stout paper, and the book is otherwise hard to find, I will sometimes buy it anyway. I have a good supply of erasers, and a sharp penknife with which delicately to lift any untoward shiver of ink. (In a very few cases, I have bought a book because it was annotated by a known scholar.)

Here is what I’ve learnt. The average reader of a serious book gets to page six. Some flag before that, some make it to the end of the preface, or the editor’s introduction. A few brave souls proceed a page or two into the text proper. But from the crack of a binding I can tell that most never opened the book at all, beyond the fly-leaf where they inscribed their wretched signatures.

By the way, I am not attacking post-modernity (today). My observation applies about equally to people who bought books in 1996, and those who bought them in 1857, or 1642. Civilizations come and go, but people never seem to change. They only read the first few pages.

This is also the case with highbrow novels, and of course, verse. Here there may be no marks, but soiling to suggest a quick stab. The poetical works will fall open at one frequently anthologized piece, forever; or the first thirty pages of the novel will have subtle finger smears (the rest will be virgin). This latter indicates a noble attempt at self-education.

Self-respecting novelists do their best to throw off these readers, and usually succeed. They will pack their first thirty pages so thickly with new characters and fresh information, as to induce despair. Only from about page thirty-two is it clean sailing.

I do not object to any such reader. If he has paid for the book, he has made himself useful. His task is to keep it in print, or in circulation, until the person who truly wants it finally comes along.

There is a point to this ramble, gentle reader. Perhaps I will get to it tomorrow.

[This item, written in a hurry, continues the flittermouse series that began
here, and continued, here. As Idleposts go, it is not very good.]

*

Bats have long been objects of fascination to me; verily, since I first encountered them in considerable dusk numbers, as a wee lad in Lahore. At this diurnal signal they would drop from trees in which they’d been invisible all day, and launch for the mosquito hunt, airborne upon their incomparably lean, membraned fingers. This was in the Lawrence Gardens, across The Mall from my home in those days — a botanical garden, adjoining a zoological garden, and as I recall, the seat of Paradise. The grounds contained, too, Montgomery Hall, a grand club and library from the Raj times, wherein my father once bought me a camel sandwich.

What, really, do I think of bats? My love for them is enhanced by a delicious terror. I was amazed by their sudden numbers, broadcasting from the darkness beneath the trees, wildly acrobatic, dancing in the air at hyperbolic dervish speed. At six, I was afraid of them, but drawn back to their spectacle again and again, assured that no bat would ever collide with something so big and blatant as a boy. A bat can avoid a wire thin as a hair in the dark. By the twirling of those umbrella fingers his flight is more nimble than any bird’s.

While writing yesterday my protest against despotic city by-laws, I mentioned bats. We have plenty in the Greater Parkdale Area, mostly small brown items, barely thumb size until the wings are twitching, and the chiroptophobe’s imagination gets working on enlargement. Much smaller than the bats of my childhood, which were yuge, I assure you.

Our subpolar bats must be out of hibernation now. Saw some just this evening. Aha, I thought, the first bat of spring.

It is true, as I wrote yesterday, that one may not keep bats as pets in Toronto; let alone as a highly inefficient dairy herd. Though I can’t see how you could keep a bat, without killing the little thing to no purpose. Bat dormitories, on the analogy of dovecotes, perhaps?

My old office in Saint Nicholas Street I also mentioned yesterday. It was the location of my only adventure in bat-herding. This wasn’t intentional, I should explain, to avoid takedown by the local vegan posse comitatus (who seem to compete with fruitbats for their food supply).

It was, you see, in the heat of summer, that I went off for a few days, leaving my fifth-storey window open. I returned to find a starter colony of brown bats in a corner of my ceiling. They were sleeping, and only one agreed to be disturbed, briefly, until returning to his hang. They left of their own free will at dusk, and I resolved to get a screen for the window, being opposed to any further accumulation of bat guano.

Now while a bat is quite sharp-witted when awake, he spends most of his day asleeping, and the late night, too. At least these brown bats do. And when, finally, he awakes, he does not ask for coffee. Instead he stays groggy for a while. That is when the cats get him, or other preying beasts. Out and flittering, a bat is immune to capture, since he can spot anything that moves, and out-fly, or at a pinch, out-manoeuvre. I am told that bats who have found safe shelters may live for decades, even in the city.

I love their pointy little ears, equipped to provide surround-sound for their echolocation. The eyes, of course, are not so good, but they only need them to check their watches. Assuming of course that bats have watches, which, if they have them, must be very very small.

N.B. nothing in this post is to be interpreted as a criticism of Pope Francis, or Bernie Sanders.

It would be difficult to keep a goat in the post-modern city. I’ve frankly never tried. A cat is about as high as I have gone in the great chain of being, here in the Greater Parkdale Area. A cat has charm, and an inspiring spirit of independence, but a goat could be more useful.

Unfortunately, goats are on “Schedule A.” I refer to the notorious anti-livestock by-laws, to be found in Chapter 349 of the City of Toronto Municipal Code.

And it’s not just goats. Other ungulates are equally denied us. No cattle, no sheep, no pigs may be kept, by the supposedly free citizens of this city. No marsupials either, even if you are carrying an Australian passport. No horses, no donkeys, no mules, … nor jackasses, unless they have seats on City Council. No alligators, no crocodiles. No lizards at all, that grow longer than two metres in adulthood. (Do they count the tail?) No felines that grow larger than house cats, and no canines that look like wolves. No bats, no sloths, no armadillos. The list goes on and on. You may not keep an elephant within the city limits of Toronto. (But what are you to ride if you cannot keep a horse?) You aren’t even allowed to keep a live chicken in this gawdforsaken town.

I cannot find a “Schedule B.” The tyrants lacked the imagination for that. Worse, they give a three-digit number anyone may call, who suspects his neighbour harbours an illicit animal. Decency prevents me from publishing what it is.

There is an office I used to rent on Saint Nicholas Street: a back lane the property developers have alas now discovered. It was right behind Yonge and south of Bloor, thus, close to the middle of our conurbation. It was a beautiful building, before they destroyed it; and it was an egg hatchery as recently as 1895. That was when, I gather, the communists must have come to power, and started to ban things every day.

Until then, not only poultry, but most of the city’s dairy consumption was from urban (and presumably urbane) cows.

The horse-drawn trolleys disappeared in 1891; the buggies were soon replaced with demonic motor cars. And then, the despots had the audacity to prevent one going out in one’s own buggy, whether or not it were pulled by a team of gallant ostriches.

I leave it there: I don’t want to depress gentle reader.

But I do want to protest against the generation of my great-grandfather, which began to legislate how people should live, or more precisely, what they should live without.

Communists, capitalists: they’re all the same to me. I think they work in tandem. I daresay the capitalists were in on the action, preventing people from feeding themselves, and thus forcing them to buy packaged goods from their stores, with cash they’d have to work for. Monopolists, slavemongers. And killjoys, the lot of them.

It wasn’t even a major-league goat I thought of acquiring. They do leap fences, and climb walls, and I can allow there might be some passing physical danger, from falling goats. For I can visualize a claustrophobic billygoat, overleaping a highrise balcony rail, in a mistaken break for freedom. (Where a nannygoat might show more foresight and patience.)

What I had in mind for the High Doganate was instead a Nigerian Dwarf. These goats rise to less than two feet at the withers, are affectionate and make good family pets. Properly curried, they can also be delicious.

Just one of the little females can provide more than a quart of milk a day (Imperial, not these wee United Statist quarts); and “freshened” (allowed to kid occasionally) she can be pushed towards a gallon. And this is splendid, high butterfat milk, ideal for your cheese-making.

Or if you live in a house, with a lawn, you can discard your evil-sounding lawnmower.

As I say, they are kindly, agreeable animals, easily trained and bonding (though some folk find them clingy). They take to a leash, so your children can have the pleasure of walking them — for instance, to “show-and-tell” at school. Were it not that some other parent’s monstrous child, or some unionized thug of a teacher, might rat you out by calling that city number. And then the swat team arrives from “Toronto Animal Services,” and you’re in the Drudge Report next morning.

Yet if, say, a few thousand of us got together, and simultaneously obtained Nigerian Dwarf goats, the city’s zoological gestapo might not know what to do.

It is spring, you know, up here in the Northern Hemisphere (par excellence). Surely it is time we set our minds to reclaiming some of our ancient liberties.

Sin looks better in prospect than in retrospect, I have heard it said, and part of the maturing process for humans should be mastery of this truism.

It is hard, I know, for I am still trying to learn it myself. The ideas of “forward” and “backward” are much confused in our culture. We easily reverse them. That is why I keep pointing backward: because I think it might actually be forward, morally and intellectually and spiritually. Only technology is running “forward” the other way: towards Hell, so far as I can see.

But yes, we all agree on cause and effect, or at least give it lip service. We only disagree on the examples. Let me take sin for my example.

In a piece I wrote for Catholic Thing tomorrow (now here), I touch on this truism: that sin makes us sad. Curiously, the knowledge that our sin is the cause of our unhappiness, is often lacking. We think there must be some other cause; that we are victims of oppression. This, for most people, is a pretty long stretch. Our political economy is now based on whining, as means to a reward. This is a direct effect of the loss and twisting of religion, in both our public and our private lives.

True, we can be oppressed by the sins of others, including sins that are passed down generations, but this problem is seldom correctly sourced. Take the suicide pacts among the young on the Indian reservation of Attawapiskat, big news just now in Canada. It triggered an emergency session of our Parliament. Curiously, while large numbers are reported to be “attempting suicide,” none seem to be succeeding. More curiously, the “right” to assisted suicide has just come before the same Parliament.

I doubt very much government underfunding is the source of this misery, although that is what every report in the media implies. Billions upon billions have been poured into Canada’s Indian reservations — remarkable amounts per head — yet conditions do not seem to improve on them. Squalor persists, partly of course from fiscal corruption on a massive scale. But worse is bad living, as a small minority of truly persecuted, but brave Indians continue to insist. These suicidal kids have parents who are bounders, encouraged in every wickedness by government largesse.

You can’t say, incidentally, what I just said, in any mainstream media.

You can’t say, anywhere, a lot of things, that challenge nanny-state lies and distortions, unless you are willing to face some hysteria. (The entire, dominant, liberal-progressive worldview is founded on the vapours.)

And ultimately, you can’t say that sin makes you sad. It is an affront to the amour-propre of those who deny, especially to themselves, that they live in sin. Having denied the cause, they must then find some other explanation for their unhappiness, external to themselves.

The Christian demand that people be cheerful, and cultivate the virtue of Hope, itself then becomes part of the oppression.

“How dare they demand that we exhibit Hope, when we are living like this? When instead of paying out, again, they tell us to get our lives together? Who do those Christians think that they are?”

Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no such complaint, because the Christians don’t dare tell anyone what is what.

Politicians — and I think our current pope is an accomplished one — know better than to experiment with tough love on their “clients.” Success comes with “empathy” for them; and constant pay-outs in one form or another; and by indulging what amounts to their own voting fodder. But this is not love, any more than fattening the beast for the kill is love.

Sin makes us sad. That is what I think our Church should be teaching, rather than what it is teaching now, in many documents, including the latest, Amoris Laetitia. But authentic, as opposed to fake empathy, does not abandon a friend to his vices.

“You have made a mess, and the only way out is to unmake it. This may require considerable sacrifice. But there is joy in the sacrifice you must make, and in the redemption towards which you are called, by the Grace of God.

“This leaves you with two choices. One is to kneel before Our Lord on His Cross, and comprehend His Passion. The other is to scamp off whining to your death. It is the choice between joy and sadness.”

Correct me if I’m wrong. There is nothing like that in the apostolic exhortation. Instead we read e.g. demands that the State increase the pay-outs.