Essays in Idleness

DAVID WARREN
November 30, 2024

Saint Andrew

The Apostle, elder brother of Simon Peter, and patron of singers, fishermen and fishmongers, farm workers, and pregnant women, stands also before the gate of the new liturgical year.  (Tomorrow will be Advent Sunday.) He was the first disciple, the “Protokletos” to be called by Jesus. Saint Andrew left his nets by the Sea of Galilee to become a “fisher of men.” His earthly mission concluded on the Saltire Cross, at Patras in Achaia.

My apologies for being “down” through the month of November. Perhaps I am getting “up” again. Atypically, our weather has been glorious and warm, through the chill Canadian monsoon. But finally, we have received notice of winter.

My thoughts on the American election were published in the Catholic Thing, yesterday. They were pointedly inconsequential. I am not a democrat (upper or lower case), nor even not-a-one, but was mildly relieved by the defeat of the Woke Marxists. Also, mildly surprised, because I expected the fix would be in, again; apparently the Republicans mounted an effective ballot watch, at great expense. The Democrats spent their billion-and-a-half on Hollywood celebrities and other filth who, we learn, may not even have been voting for them.

As we have observed, previously, the future of our society does not depend on voting, but on the people. The task of Christianizing them remains urgent.

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POSTSCRIPTUM — The first thing I learn this morning, when cranking up the Internet to search for Saint Andrew, is that Catholic Online has been de-platformed by “Shopify,” one of the sponsors of Internet vileness. This was because they are pro-life, and thus not inclusive of child murderers. It is good to think that in the wake of the “far right” victory in the recent election, some retributive justice may be on the way. … Yesterday was Black Friday, which hardly matters with the Canadian post office on strike: I am anyway getting too old and feeble to beg for donations.

November 4, 2024

Time out

Perhaps I will take a little break from my Idleness, as it were, for a few days, or forever if my current illness develops unexpectedly into death. Less pleasantly, I, and we, are inundated by politics, via the American election, to the mental equivalent of a North Carolina flood. We will need some time to dry out, and make a few repairs, for instance to the buildings that floated off their foundations.

There is no point in commenting on the election. Nothing we do, or that anyone does, on our modest scale, can have an effect on “events.” It is all between cosmic forces of good and evil, and will be expressed in fresh human suffering. That is what politics can accomplish, in the Satanic strategy. Nor can the “misinformation” (or, lying) be overcome. I think the best way to understand the human dimension of this is in the Republican slogan: “No matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.”

November 2, 2024

All Souls

In memory of “Baggins the Pharmacist.”

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All Souls is a day in which we commemorate the dead — our dead, our own death to come, and death generally. We celebrate these things joyfully. …

A correspondent in Alberta, now deceased, wrote several years ago that he thought Joy had been overlooked “in the meejah.” He did not try to analyze Joy, in our modern manner, of formula-seeking. The subject is too simple for that. Everyone knows what Joy is, including those who deny knowing. It is just like: everyone knows what a girl is. I have written myself about this flip side of arrogance and wilful ignorance: that we not only claim to know what we don’t know, we also claim not to know what we do know, in this world around us. Examine the inside of your own head, and you may distinguish true Joy from its surrogates and proxies; quite easily, in fact.

Baggins was concerned with Joy in the choice of attachments. By attachments he might include everything from friends to consumer durables; to ideas and opinions and beliefs and commitments. His criterion for judgement was, “Does it spark Joy?”

I was reminded of my discovery of T. E. Hulme, in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a long time ago. Among his writings was a “Critique of Satisfaction.” Hulme tried very hard to be vulgar. In some ways he succeeded, while breaking through various intellectual obstacles and alternatives to Joy. Each he confronted with the question, “In what way is this satisfying?”

I, then very young and an atheist, could see where his argument was trending: straight to God. And to my horror, that it was irresistible.

In the end we can’t do with half-measures, among which we might include atheism. They are not, anyway, where we began, which was in an absolute state of Being. Birth itself is not a half-way arrangement: we already Were. And the capacity for Joy was within us. We grind away at this indestructible whole; and it is still there, after all our grinding.

Baggins looked back into his mental closet, to his stacks of old shoe boxes, containing “the little trash and trinkets of past lives and past modes of thought, past judgements, and past sins.” Was it yet time to dispose of them? Need he continue to carry them along? Did they spark Joy?

For instance, the accumulated daily wads of his “spin and opinions”?

“So months ago, I unhooked from Satellite TV, and all news programmes because they were all a near occasion of sin. I simply no longer accept any form of ‘streaming’ infotainment or fake news — which is almost everything that passes for ‘news’ these days. Yet I am no Luddite by any stretch.” …

He now found fairly joyful things, even on the Internet.

The young Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Albanian as one might guess, felt one day that she was drawn to God, perhaps called to be a Catholic nun. Intelligent and sceptical, she went to an intelligent nun for advice, on what to make of her “feelings,” on how “a calling” might be discerned. She was asked a simple question, which might be translated, “Does it spark Joy?” (Off to Ireland, first. Later she became Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)

We live, most of us, the life of Hallowe’en, “secularized” or desanctified from ancient religious practice, with results that may be seen. But now All Saints and All Souls have arrived. There is much to put in the trash behind us; but looking forward, how shall we be guided?

What of the criterion of Joy?