Essays in Idleness

Reading Czeslaw Milosz through the afternoon; and now I realize I cannot set the “L with stroke” that would be necessary to spell his name correctly, or that of any other poet in Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, or some other language wherein a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative might be required. Worse, one cannot set verse in any language properly, in this WordPress computer program, and after more than a decade of trying to subvert it I have come to think they did this on purpose.

One can, however, reading through the Collected Milosz Poems, come to appreciate how many were written in Berkeley, California, where he settled into a perfessership after exiling himself from Stalinism. (Read: The Captive Mind.) A magnificent translator, too, back and forth through Polish and English, he has that poetic quality of translating himself as he wanders.

Now, the reader must pretend I could set this adequately:

“You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you” … until the sonnet ends with … “you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”

He wrote this three-quarters of a century ago, about when he first landed in the United States, as the cultural attaché of a “People’s Republic.” He was also a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, whose life was saved from the Nazis by a nun, and various other crises of modernity, often parallel to Saint John-Paul II. Their works yield many fine mottoes.

It is amusing to think that Milosz, and the father of Kamala Harris, were teaching at Berkeley about the same time — the one among the most learned and eloquent opponents of Communism; the other a moronic socialist activist. Indeed, Ms Harris was brought up in an academic home in Berkeley, but has substituted working-class Oakland in the family tradition of lying.

Her nature is revealed in her joyous cackle, … “bursting into laughter at the crime.”

Chatting with my priest, the late Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, about death — a topic on which he is so much better informed — I recall his warning. We, who have been in the habit of making a splash, whenever splashing was possible, look ahead to some glorious final play. We will be surrounded by our admirers or, almost as good, by the people who detest us as we are martyred. Either way, it will be a scene of victory.

But perhaps there will be no one watching, no living creature, not even a cat. No one will be in the least startled, not even the medical performers, who see this sort of thing every day. This is especially likely now, when family deathbed scenes have gone out of style, and the Batflu provisions (or whatever succeeds them) specify that everyone must die in isolation. Indeed, “Medical Assistance In Dying” is the only way to get an audience.

Among the advantages of being a “Far Right” person (apparently about three-quarters of the population) is that, short of some splash that will be recorded in “the media,” no one cares what happens to you. This means that, whether the audience is present or absent, you will be under no obligation to entertain them. This makes the impending conversation with Christ something on which you may focus entirely.

The more devastating if all He has to say is, “I do not know you.”

Note: one may not get His attention by “making a splash,” for instance by much moaning. Holiness doesn’t work like that.

Part of prudence is to care what will be the result of one’s ministrations. For if you don’t care, the results will be nearly opposite to what you are promising. Of course you care, but you are more careful about yourself, and to take credit, and so forth. In the course of which, your care for the results of your ministrations shrinks to the zero it usually does among politicians.

It would be unreasonable to expect perfect sanctity in public life. This is why only very, very stupid people, like President Biden, say that Kamala Harris “has the moral compass of a saint.” I don’t even think Donald Trump has the moral compass of a saint, and to their credit, I don’t think any Republicans do.

But does Trump, in addition to his narcissism and whatever, care for the results of his political actions? Is he actually trying to “make America great again”? (Or at least a little better?) Or is he largely indifferent to the pain and death he spreads about him, except for the personal political consequences? Yes, Trump is, along with his personality defects, above all but a few American politicians. And Ms Harris is well below them.

Politics, with its elections, comes very close to a “zero-sum” game in which such comparisons are necessary. It is also zero-sum long after the election. All a politician can do is negotiate some kind of trade-off, in which he will ideally try to get as much good as possible, in exchange for as little evil. He cannot deliver any absolute, and this is why all (not most, but all) socialists, “liberals,” progressives, &c, should be absolutely dismissed.

“The people” know nothing about how to run a state, and that’s why, in a democracy, we must have such foolish politicians. Their idea of a trade-off is more services for less taxes.

From this you may guess that I am not an “idealist” in politics, or in anything else this far away from God. The world works within the constraints that the world works within. Note the tautology. These constraints are real.

A German, Father Bruno of Cologne, founded the first holy brace of Carthusian monasteries. One would usually say, of this XIth-century saint, that he was “founder of the Carthusians,” except, I don’t think that’s how monasteries work. They may be started by anybody, and indeed, back in the East, many monasteries were started by Buddhists. But in Christendom they have been, necessarily, under the patronage of Our Lord. This we can know from the many miracles that have attended their foundation. And what depends on God only lasts until God’s patronage ceases. I think that is what happens in Buddhist monasteries, too, for as Christ said, “I have other flocks,” and will have these “gentiles” brought into His fold.

Father Bruno was among our greatest saints, and if you will, a model for how to be a saint in all ages. He was surrounded by famously good men, and some famously bad ones, had pope and cardinals as his pupils, and various passing rôles in the Church, yet was consistently humble and aloof from power. He had courage and decision; without hesitation boldly sacking the corrupt, declining an episcopal appointment for himself, and in many other ways “being his own man.” Within the Grand Chartreuse, and other enclosures of the Ordo Cartusiensis (we call them “Charterhouses” in English) his spiritual echo is still heard, after a millennium of adventure, including violent persecutions in “Reformations” and “Enlightenments.”

They were warmly hated. (But, “Know that the world hated me first.”) Their priories were the source of much charity, and of course this led to multiple conversions.

What appeals to me in Saint Bruno and the Carthusians is an unhurried focus on contemplation and art. They do arduous toil, too, in silence, and they do not intersect with “the community.” They are not missionaries or preachers, except perhaps through their works, for they have been the manuscriptorialists.

They are opposite to what is promoted today, through apps and Internet. They are not a virus or infection.

O ye of little faith, and much stupidity! … There are atheist assumptions in modern atheist science and philosophy. I cite a scientific and philosophical tautology. I include the self-proclaimed “agnostics,” who also study the world from behind blinders, blacking out or censoring evidence of the Creator, and the miraculous in everyday life (such as, that people get up in the morning). For the moment I pretend to be a “theist,” which is to say, the opposite of an atheist. By me, and the other theists, the evidence for God is received.

This does not mean it is quackishly insisted upon. Natural theology does not offer only “proofs” that God, or any other person, exists. It is instead quite comfortable with reality. It is a game we sometimes play, idly, with God.

Faith is not formally rejected in modern, high-tech-pagan investigations. Neutrality on belief systems is assumed, as if the investigator had no stake in his inquiries. He has the higher indifference to his fellow beings. But it is not complete indifference, for what makes him atheistical is that he expects, eventually, to be freed from all irritations, and not even to remember the divine. God will not be necessary for him to get up in the morning.

But meanwhile, he has, like the Marquis de Laplace, “no use for that hypothesis.”

The advance and proliferation of neuroscience and artificial intelligence gives the children of Laplace, and the rest of nature’s behaviourists, a fond hope. Christian and all other theistical beliefs are necessarily vague, as scientific statements, and logic can attack them with sharp precision. They may be used to throw the believer into doubt and confusion.

But they may also be used the other way.

As Auden observed: “Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.”

The “arts” of printing and typography, of paper-making, and inks, and book-binding, have been delighting and distracting me since my father first slipped into my hands an edition of Pookie, some time ago. The page was abnormally large for a two-or-three-year-old (though now, measuring it, I find it was only ten inches high); so I paid it abnormal attention; especially I attended the letter “g,” which resembled my grandma’s eye-glasses, turned sideways. Within less than a year, I had learnt all the other letters. (Perhaps I am prideful.) Within two, I had written my first book, in manuscript.

John Ryder’s very tasteful (illustrated) manual for amateur printers (only seven inches high) came out in the same era. After seventy years, I do not think I can do it much good by reviewing it, but I would like to mention a point made in the introduction. Mr Ryder recommends that the amateur not take up printing as a money-making sideline. This, like most money-making, is drudgery, and a distraction from the pure pleasure of type arrangement. Indeed, he recommends the production only of ephemera, because setting line after line for hundreds of pages can get boring. Instead, have the ambition to make each item very beautiful.

To be practical, could two or more poets share the cost of some type-setting and printing machinery, and set their respective texts from it? No, definitely not! They would never get along.

The idea of doing things, which count as labour, and not charging for them, which counts as business, has been lost on the contemporary world. (In this respect alone, we are too masculine.) At least nine in ten advertisements I see on the Internet, for instance, are for “products” that should never have been made, let alone advertised. There is a great noise about things that are “free,” and are not, or are available too cheaply.

We should try to annihilate all the producers of such goods.