Essays in Idleness

While I risk agreeing with Voltaire (“we must cultivate our garden”) I should wish to do so in the cause of the organized religion that he was satirizing. The man had so many opinions, he could not help getting some right, and in Candide’s foolish and persistent optimism there is that seed of quixotic Hope which his author was determined to extinguish. Both views are correct. One should be eternally hopeful, and one’s hopes should be repeatedly crushed. This is how wine is made from grapes, if we add a certain ageing process.

Moreover, we should cultivate our homes and gardens. The shelter we seek from an unpleasant human world — growing worse in its unbelief and faithlessness — is a human shelter. That is to say, something better than the nest Bodo and Katrina (a pigeon couple of my over-acquaintance) have tried to build on my balconata, while I have tried to disrupt them. All is lost, all nests are lost in the end, and a time will come when no trace remains of pigeons or persons alike — ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The wine, too, will be spilt forever. That is how things are. Those without a view of Perfection, have, like the height-impaired in the old song, “no reason to live.” They only seek wretched transient pleasures, from which they will guiltily “move on.”

Last week I sat in a small and delightful fern garden; a little patch of paradise set apart yet within the crashing vulgarity of contemporary London, Ontario. I was house guest to my friends Herman Goodden and Kirtley Jarvis, both artists of some kind. Herman I first met thirty years ago: a talented essayist and playwright, stuck in the toilet of modern journalism. Kirtley is an inspired graphic artist, with an eagle eye for detail and chance.

You have a bowl of glass and porcelain marbles that no one plays with any more; and a gravel path through the ferns and flowers. What is more sensible than to scatter the marbles along the path? The effect was beautiful, and within the security of garden walls, it will remain for a generation. (Civilization starts with walls.)

The whole tiny yard is like that, made a vast space from found objects concealed and revealed: a garden of inscriptions. Kirtley’s tiny studio presides from the rear; a bicycle shed has been subtly accommodated. The bicycle that comes out is a dark red one-speed antique, that puts all high-tech bicycles to shame. For the slower one rides, the larger and more interesting the world becomes.

My friends are poor, by the minimum-wage standard. They have always been so — God meant artists to struggle — yet raised a flock of children with one closet-sized bathroom. They have never moved, and will never, voluntarily. Within, the bungalow is a mansion, every corner an exhilarating feast for the eyes. An art gallery, a big library, and multiple workplaces have been somehow fitted in. With the simplest market ingredients, banquets emerge from the kitchenette. For of course the place also serves as a guest house, and a modest community meeting hall.

Disaster will strike, and we must be ready. But meanwhile there is time for us to cultivate our garden. My friends are internal exiles from that old Puritan Ontario, who turned back into mediaeval Catholics; for also they rebelled against the deadly grim consumerist machine to which America’s dourness descended. With time and love it can be overthrown. For in time, ancient traditions are rekindled, and the mystical life is patiently restored. “Be still and know.”

I have known several such homes and gardens, and some like this still exist. They are the small centres of our renewal, walled in from the barbarity outside. But this has always been so, and as Mr Goodden says, he need not buy any spanking new “Benedict Option,” for he owned one already. The words, “Bless this house,” announced it from the start.

An image that sticks to mind is of the phosphorous shells.

Gentle reader must imagine himself a German soldier, in a bunker or pillbox atop the cliffs over the Normandy beaches; or elsewhere in the concrete maze of their “Atlantic Wall.” He could be young or old. If the latter, he has already served on the Eastern Front, and may be missing bits of finger from frostbite. Or he is sixteen and freshly enlisted. In either case he may be suffering from some further disability: slightly retarded, perhaps, or gimpish, or entirely lacking in family connexions.

Being sent to France had seemed pure luck. Of course, any place might be paradise, compared with Stalingrad. This place had French cheeses, fine asparagus, and all the other products of the Normandy farms; and pretty French girls, strangely addicted to German boiled sweets; officers, too, a little soft in the head; and, … taverns! Weeks would pass with no indication of war. Most days, no traffic whatever on the English Channel. Sometimes, through binoculars, a lonely destroyer could be seen hugging the English shore. Sometimes the Allies sent bombers — hit or miss. Mostly miss.

The night into June 6th, 1944, was disturbing, however. No one could recall such sustained bombing: from around midnight, wave after wave. But the ominous thing was when the bombing stopped: everywhere, at precisely 5:30 a.m. That, and the fact that thousands of vessels, of all sizes but many of them huge, were gradually approaching the French shore. No one had ever seen so many ships, and it remains the largest armada in history. Some day, each German had felt in his gut, this was going to happen. Just another Dieppe, his officers told him. Evidently it was happening today.

My details are from a new German “oral history” of the Normandy landings (this one), gathered from that side. My Chief Texas Correspondent sent me a copy when it came out last March. I found it gripping.

Now where were we? Ah yes, in that bunker, in that concrete maze, staring in amazement at the approaching Allied fleet. Binoculars no longer needed.

A most amazing thing was the amphibious tanks, dropped in the water then driving out onto the shingle. Was such a thing possible? Another was the Luftwaffe — oddly missing from this scene. An aeroplane requires a lot of vital parts, and shortages had grounded all but a few, quickly shot down when they attempted reconnaissance.

The German front line was there to slow and scramble the landings; the serious defences were a few hundred yards inland. It was now that the soldier realized that his function was to die in a hopeless cause. The strafing proper began.

A phosphorous shell lands in your chamber, among a dozen or so of your recent friends. At first you almost laugh. The effect is comic. You were bracing for the big bang; this thing just splashes what looks like white paint, all over the place. But you have perhaps three minutes to live; less, if you are lucky. Those who inhale burn from the inside out; those who don’t, from the outside in.

These munitions were most likely “made in USA,” but every side used them in this Total War. I’d rather have been at Hiroshima.

Trying to surrender was a hare-brained idea: stand up and you’re instantly a bullet bag. You gave the enemy everything you had, then laid down with your ancestors. By miracle, perhaps one in twenty, or one in a hundred, survived the frontal onslaught. It depended where you were. In that case you went to a prison camp: the best fate of all.

Spin forward a day or two. German prisoner is now in Allied troop boat, ferrying to England. Like a tourist, he takes in the view.

As far as he can see, along the beaches, a carpet of British, Canadian, American, and miscellaneous corpses. And in the water, this carpet floats, for the better part of a mile offshore. Tens of thousands of them, linked together in victory, face up or face down.

I am not the world’s quickest take-charge, get-things-done sort of guy — that’s why they named me after Fabius Cunctator. The agnomen of this Roman general and Censor (280–203 BC) was not “idler” but rather “lingerer” in its nearest English equivalent. But this is a variation on idling. He was famous for winning by putting decisions off, and hanging around instead of doing something. He was also known among the troops as “Wart Face,” incidentally.

This is a gift shared among few generals, or Censors for that matter. (Not warts, but the do-nothing skill.) The Censorship was a marvellous Roman office, the holder of which was wise to do as little as possible. He was a man with extraordinary power to say, “No.” True, he oversaw the public census, a wickedly activist enterprise. But at its most innocent its point was merely to find out what is going on. For the rest, our hero, when in the office of Censor, could stop things from happening, including stupid and vicious government programmes. How I wish our modern government had a Censor, and how I should like to have that job. (Cato the Censor is another of my heroes.)

Now, the person who seems to do nothing isn’t necessarily doing nothing. He might instead be doing something invisible. As a general during the Second Punic War, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (this last refers to his lemon scabs), my celebrated Cunctator, did quite a few invisible things. Badly outnumbered on any conceivable battlefield, he focused on whittling the Carthaginians down, with frequent, often quite devastating, commando attacks on their supply lines, and similar aggravations. Make the enemy punch the air, as it were. Deny him the big battle he so earnestly wants.

This is the strategy of that ancient Chinaman, Sun Tzu, praised recently in another context. The ideal is to patiently allow the enemy to defeat himself, while one appears only to be watching, or even not watching, from a distance.

As this is not a Roman History anti-blogue, I will not go into such details as I recall from school days; but Mrs Hansen, my Viking (Danish) sometime Latin teacher, was especially entertaining on Fabius. For you see, he was turning tables on opponents who were themselves adept in unconventional warfare, as Hannibal taking his elephants through the Alps to surprise the Romans during the same Mediterranean conflict. (I often have heroes on both sides of a good war.)

My purpose this morning, back in the High Doganate after a week of jet-setting, or more exactly omnibus-setting in the Upper Canadian hinterland, is to recall gentle reader to the virtue of inaction. Or more precisely, apparent inaction.

I notice there has been yet another terror hit in my absence, by bad Muslims in the United Kingdom. I am of course appalled, though as Theresa May was pointlessly projecting, we’re getting sick of this kind of thing. I’m now sick of our characteristic response, which is to make fresh protestations of how brave and tolerant we are, while loudly bombing people elsewhere.

Whereas, I’m for quietly settling scores. Our enemy du jour benefits from our democratic lust for a puerile and showy activism. They are flies, and we are swatting flies like crazy. The bigger the fly-swatting operation they can inspire, the better for them. Indeed, for this enemy we are dumber than Carthaginians, who did not need to signal their virtue by encouraging Roman emigration to their native North Africa.

Our liberalism has deranged our minds, and it is a little-appreciated truth that the deranged are easier to sucker than the sane.

We should pay no more attention to the latest terror hit than to a grisly traffic accident. We should leave the minimum of flowers at the scene. The outpourings of grief should be kept decently private. We should never ever publicly announce what we are going to do in reply. Let our high-strung enemy discover what we have done, after the fact.

I am going upcountry through the week, blessedly without electronic connexions. Verily, I have never known how to upload an Idlepost, from anywhere except the High Doganate, being essentially unteachable, as my webmaster son will confirm. Meanwhile, I invite readers to peruse the 963 Idleposts in the thread below, which I have yet to summon the shame to delete. God willing, I shall return, as General MacArthur said, while fleeing the Philippines; except that, in his hurry, he left out the “God willing” part.

The hard way, because it is the only way left, we (the “we are the world” we) may gradually learn that abject dependency upon computer networks was a dumb idea. We’re not there yet, but getting closer, as a gentle reader near London reports, who wants to be in Cairo, notwithstanding the breakdown of the British Airways booking system, which has grounded their aeroplanes around the planet. An assiduous reader of news (which I try not to be) will have noticed the “ransonware” cyber attack which scrambled the British healthcare system a fortnight ago, together with various other bureaucracies in countries here and there. We are assured that bigger and better is coming, thanks to the improving skills and technology of the bad guys, many of whom are state-sponsored. And ditto the good guys, if you can tell them apart.

No system crashes forever; there will always be a way to get it up again, along with another way to take it down. This is an assertion of common sense, in the face of hopeful millenarians. My son the electronic engineer tells me that Luddites are needed, to spot the flaws: for only those who truly hate computers, but are condemned to deal with them anyway, will see that to which electronic engineers are characteristically blind. Moreover, the computer-illiterate are invaluable to the salesmen, for the “market” will always consist of people who are not adept with computers, whether they like them or not.

Hard copy has this virtue: that it can, depending on the medium, remain legible for hundreds or thousands of years. From my own experience, I would estimate the permanence of electronic records at less than a decade. This has immense cultural implications, about which the post-modern are incurious: for whatever is not considered sufficiently useful to be copied and reposted passes into the universe of lost socks.

An intelligent teenager of my acquaintance tells me he now buys old-fashioned physical books because, “you can keep them.” Too, the memory of a printed page is always greater than retention from electronic scrolls, which he has noticed is approximately zero. And this, regardless of attention levels, which of course plunge in a medium riddled with “links,” which scatter the attention wonderfully.

McLuhan was writing about this, half a century ago: about how the entire mindset of a culture can be twisted by the media in which it communicates. Through telephones and radio and television ours was already becoming “virtual,” and wisdom was being replaced with “information.” Since, we have been experimenting in the genre of tragic farce, for the condition of society becomes so artificial that it is possible to imagine e.g. that the baby in the mother’s womb is “fetal matter,” or that there are more than two sexes.

You see, we do not need throwbacks and back-up systems only to guarantee that flight into Egypt. They are also necessary to the ecology of the human mind. In addition to connexions with things that don’t exist, we should retain a few links with reality.

There are, if I count aright, three types or classes of military strategists: 1. The students of Sun Tzu. 2. The students of Carl von Clausewitz. And, 3. Total idiots. Never having been offered a general command, I’m still not sure which type I would be. But I do know which I’d prefer. Alas, almost all of our generals, since the “Enlightenment,” have been members of that third class, whose legacy is incredible heaps of bodies, usually for mixed or transient results.

As Sun Tzu said, and Archimedes of Syracuse would have understood, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Next best is to subdue the enemy with the unavoidable minimum of bloodshed, on both sides. Suicidal heroism is all very well, to the partisans of fame, but victory is sweeter.

It has been years since I re-fought the War in Vietnam with my buddies. I am delighted to see that the views I held forty years ago might now possibly pass for mainstream. This I gather from an article in the New York Times, by Mark Moyar, which plugs his own works (especially, Triumph Forsaken), and those of other revisionist scholars, such as Lewis Sorley and H. R. McMaster.

Let me present my original view. The Americans made three catastrophic mistakes: 1. They sent ten times as many troops as were needed. 2. They sent them to the wrong country. And, 3. They forgot to keep what they were doing secret. Instead, they actually encouraged a media extravaganza, which their enemy joyfully exploited.

In war, no news is better than good news. Don’t let the enemy know what you are doing.

Some things can’t be kept secret, of course, but when that happens, Mr President’s job is to justify the war with tremendous enthusiasm. Dubya Bush was like Lyndon Johnson in this respect. He was above correcting the lies and disinformation spread by anti-war liberals and progressives. But there are three things which must always be defended: 1. Mom. 2. Apple pie. And, 3. Western Civ. And never with the slightest hesitation, lest the devils get their wind.

The war could have been won, before Nixon even came to office, had the Americans sent their best-trained soldiers into Laos, to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail; while making frequent irritating incursions into North Vietnam itself, underground as well as over. Bombing should have been restricted to unambiguously military targets, avoiding pain to non-combatants. (Food drops to them would have made more sense.) The chief immediate task was, however, to prevent the Communists from inserting and supplying a guerrilla army in the South.

We had many natural allies in this task, including: 1. The Hmong and all other tribal interests throughout this mountainous terrain. 2. The Vietnamese in the South, more than a million of whom were already refugees from the North. And, 3. The Vietnamese in the North, suffering under a totalitarian dictatorship.

Now, the endgame should have been Vietnamese reunification after regime collapse in Hanoi. For in war, you never play for a draw. Unless, of course, you are a commander of that third sort.

I notice from photographs (it is unnecessary to read media texts) that Melania Trump, who declined the headscarf in Arabia, was wearing a fulsome mantilla in the Vatican. A nice Catholic girl from Slovenia (married only once, if irregularly) she knew what she was about. The pope might want to discuss her husband’s diet, but Melania was there to have her Rosary blessed. Ivanka, too, was all in black, and veiled: a student of protocol. These ladies are restoring some small degree of order in the West.

Alas, the men aren’t helping. The Donald failed to button his jacket for the papal audience, as Italian journalists were quick to observe. And while Trump arrived in a suitably august motorcade, Pope Francis greeted it in a Ford Escort. (Okay, I read some of the captions.)

Everyone loves a parade, and the place of pageantry in public life ought to be secure. But that is not to reckon, today, with the Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, as my late hero Nirad Chaudhuri called them. In a book he wrote to celebrate his own centenary (1997), he identified Individualism, Nationalism, and Democracy as these Horsemen. He said they were the root cause of our post-modern decadence, which differs from the decadence of the past in having these ideological drivers.

Let me add a line of argument he did not pursue. It is because of this that our contemporary decadence is so boring. All three of these Horsemen are tedious. Each is arbitrary and abstract. The Individualist denies his own past; the Nationalist his country’s; the Democrat the peculiarities of the actual people he claims to represent. All are thus opposed to Tradition, which acknowledges real things, and builds creatively upon them.

It will be seen from this list that Trump cannot be my ideal politician; moreover, that from this vantage, he shares an outlook with our current pope. They might quibble, privately or publicly, over the party line they ought to be advancing, but are agreed that something ought to be advanced, that breaks with all the “errors of the past.”

Now the Church herself, and the ladies who accompany these great men, have somehow retained the instinctive understanding that dresses properly for the occasion, and arrives in the appropriate vehicle — not to make a “personal statement,” but to avoid doing so. A man is not what he does, but what he is. This includes a woman.

Pageantry is something “normal,” in the old sense opposed to “common.” It is an “is.” True, it “evolves” over time, along with all of our mannerisms, but for any given time one can know the ropes. Tradition is art, not some crazy science. It is an expression of human and social dignity; it requires beauty in disciplined display. The clothes worn by high statesmen, as the clothes worn by priests, bespeak an office or station. They are not meant for expressions of personal style. They belong to the pageant — which formerly descended to the uniforms of everyday life.

One may move in grand palaces as Saint Thomas More, decked in the trappings of Court and Ecclesia, yet wear a hairshirt underneath. One may live in fine simplicity therein.

Sir Elton John, in a characteristically vulgar, ignorant, and gratuitous attack on the Pope Emeritus, said he wouldn’t dress like that in Las Vegas. In his vanity, he perfectly expresses the degenerate, post-modern mind, in which everything is taken as a fashion statement, and becomes by that measure monotonously showy, ugly, and cheap.

I know a young lady with an interesting obsession. Since her mother died, she is charged with the notion that her mother can see everything she does. She hasn’t much changed her ways, she reports, but feels a new accession of guilt, or more accurately, shame.

“Belinda,” let us call her, for that is not her name. Both she and her late mother could pass for Christians — the daughter perhaps less splendidly so. She says her mother was some kind of saint, and this is also my memory of the lady, who died a horrible death in consistently good cheer. Belinda calls herself a “bad” Christian, so perhaps she is a good Christian, after all, since a good Christian will always think of herself as a bad Christian. Though on the other hand, she might be right.

Recent casual remarks in these Idleposts return to haunt me in this context. Several correspondents have kindly provided their own “theories” on time travel, in response to e.g. my desire to set out on a book-hunting tour around the Classical Mediterranean. I have a theory, too, which I will surely impart. But first I should mention that all of our theories must make terms with a hard metaphysical fact. The past cannot be changed. Or if it can, we are at sea, truly, and post-modernity begins to make sense.

Now, supposing Belinda’s mother to be a saint, or otherwise an eventual graduate of Purgatory, I find it quite plausible that she can see, from outside earthly Time, just what her earthy daughter is doing within it. And, not only what she is now doing, but what she has ever done, including what she will by her free will come to do, and that from every conceivable angle.

Whether she may now read her daughter’s mind is quite another question. My guess is that only God can do that, or will ever be able to do that; I speculate only on the externals.

Imagine us living still in Flatland, but Belinda’s mother in the Fullness of Space. What is there now for her not to see? Or perhaps I may invoke the fish tank, to add a frisson of subtlety. We know what our goldfish are up to, in their aquarium dimension, but they can only guess at what is happening outside it. As they are fish of little brain, their thoughts on our behaviour — or even on whether we really exist — are of little interest. Indeed: gentle reader is currently indulging what, from a divine point of view, could be described as a “goldfish theory.”

And yet the “two worlds” interact. Fish food drops occasionally into the tank, as manna from Heaven. The Cyprinidae below may think this happens by an entirely natural process, but we who hold the tin know better.

History is unalterable, or will be unalterable as it comes to pass, and is thus “recorded,” in an absolute sense. The dead, or rather, those dead who did not choose to get as far away from God as they could, and thus to “the other place” where they cannot see Him, may walk into His “movie” at any point. They may, according to this morning’s goldfish theory, move around every set at will, invisible to, and undetected by the actors; watch the flick backwards, forwards, sideways, or in stills. But they cannot change a thing.

There is no hiding from the holy dead, it follows; and of course, no hiding from the all-seeing Eye of God. It strikes me that Belinda might as well behave, remembering that in addition to her Creator, her mother may be watching from Eternity, out there.

The Bronx is a borough of New York City which houses, as we say in India, 14 lakh inhabitants. (A lakh is 10 to the 5th, written 1,00,000.) This is a large number, according to me. For most of the known planetary history, that would make it the world’s biggest city. I am including several conurbations that came and went from eastern Asia, leaving considerable ruins; and of course old Rome, and Alexandria, the great megapoleis of the pagan West, which at their largest probably did not clear one million.

I make these comparisons because I think we sometimes fail to be appropriately gobsmacked by the demographic scales; the sheer number of enfleshed human souls at this time, who wake each morning as you or I, gentle reader, not wishing for a violent or painful death, but instead seeking breakfast. Many want coffee.

My information this morning comes via the Beeb. I’m told that not one bookstore survives in the Bronx. Some enterprising lady proposes to spoil this unique achievement, however, by opening one in the fall. Her name is Noelle Santos, and she is no fool, for her shop (to sell books on “race” and “gender”) will double as a wine bar.

Among the reasons I would time-plane if I could — to Rome, to Alexandria, to Antioch, Pergamon, Byzantium, Athens — is to visit the booksellers. I should probably find papyrus rolls vexing, I’m more of a vellum and codex kind of guy (call me hyper-modern). But I’d surely return with a capsa (cylindrical like an old hat-box) full of scrolls and sillybi, plus inkpots and styli stuffed in my equipage.

Of course there would be problems at Customs, as I’ve found when previously trying to import non-paperback books into Canada. We have agents who’ve never seen such things, and don’t know how to tax them.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arido modo pumice expolitum?

These lines were at the opening of the Veronensis Liber — found corking up a wine jar in an ancient monastery somewhere in the Italian mountains. (“To whom shall I present my pretty new book, freshly smoothed with dry pumice?”) It was also the beginning of my own love for Catullus, which continues to the present day. I found that, from the Latin words, I could smell the volume; as I could touch the Loeb, first handled at Ferozsons, along the Mall in Lahore.

Actually, this Idlepost wasn’t meant to be about books directly, rather about propositions. (Every proposition in Catullus is sharp.)

I direct gentle reader to the series Father Hunwicke is uploading to his Mutual Enrichment blogue. (“Is the Pope a heretic?”) Or to Mrs Mullarkey’s Studio Matters: her items on the Saint Faustina imposture. Or to the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, which contains the latest statistics on the sudden fall of vocations (especially female vocations) in the Roman Church. Or to the announcement of the latest batch of liberal, progressive Cardinals, with whom Bergoglio has been stacking the Conclave that will choose his successor. Or to several other places I have bookmarked in my little machine here, freshly wiped with an alcohol-dampened cloth.

For all these strands wind into the rope from which we dangle, in a world that is losing its ability to reason, and in a Church under the rule of a captain who buys into the void with both feet. But no heretic.

As Father Hunwicke says, it isn’t heresy until one constructs a sentence which contains an intelligible proposition. (And let me add, there is no heresy in Parkdale, or the Bronx.)

O Lord come soon and smack us all upside the head.

One imagines the disembodied souls of the schoolchildren, wandering the streets of Parkdale while they sleep.

“Give me Dante! Give me Petrarch!” they cry.

But instead, when their souls return and they wake, they will be given a stone.

Gentle reader may take this as a criticism of our education system, which carries on through the media, cradle to grave. Its principal purpose is to kill poetry in the children, and keep it dead through old age. The drilling starts in kindergarten, and by the age of seven they are already spouting the industrial oils. The State (fully integrated with big business) insists on this.

Our rulers want a citizenry that is regulation-compliant, a drone force that will work their shifts and pay their taxes. They need obedient subjects for their scheme of progressive social engineering. Whether in peace or war, they need cannon-fodder.

I do not restrict poetry to Dante and Petrarch, though I’m inclined to, while reading them.

Amor, non già per mia poca bontate,
Ma per sua nobiltate,
Mi pose in vita si dolce e soave …

“Love, not indeed for my slight goodness, but of his nobility, placed me in life so sweet and calm …”

The Creator hath endowed us with poetical minds, and we have been trying to rewire them as adding machines.

A few essential things must be taught to children, after which they may learn anything on their own. How to draw, how to paint and colour; how to carve from wood and mould from clay; how to dance, and how to sing, with beauty; how to read music, and play an instrument; how to read, and to write with a legible and elegant hand; and too, how to count and play with numbers.

What else? My curriculum is already rather full.

Add a few languages to this, starting with Latin. Their native language will thus be improved. And there is a wonderful opportunity, while they are still very young and joyfully mnemonic, to cram them full of declensions and conjugations, of exotic vocabulary and the syntactic techniques to put their new words into motion. Let them memorize thousands of verses, whether or not they fully understand them, while they still can. The capacity will begin to evaporate as they ripen in years. Let them absorb into their souls the rules of scansion, the rhythms of prose.

I’ve left out the field trips and the nature study.

Let them find, in the poetry of this world, the rudiments of their respective vocations.

That is the work of the primary schools, where through childhood boys and girls might mix. The work of the secondary schools is more technical, more focused, more specialized, more “optional.” By this I mean voluntary, for those not cut out for academic work should go off to fish instead, to plough, to milk cows, or apprentice as auto mechanics. They must not be pulled, nor the “high schools” dragged by unwilling learners. From puberty, too, the sexes must be segregated, to keep the little ones’ eyes on their work; and preserve their innocence as long as we can.

What I’m suggesting has been touted before, from Plato onward. It used to be called, Education through Art. Herbert Read even wrote a textbook on it (3rd ed., 1958), starting with that old chestnut by George Bernard Shaw, to the effect that poetry (which he called, “fine art”) is the only teacher except torture.

The castle is stormed, since yesterday’s Idlepost, by ladies denying that they are bibliophobes, liberphobes, libellumphobes, volumenphobes, chartaphobes, codexphobes, or book haters. Several make good arguments for themselves. My chief correspondente in western Massachusetts reports that every room in her man-free house is book-dominated, and the hallways were lined, too, before she began “downsizing.” So would have been the bathrooms, were they not so small. (I do not keep books in my shower stall, either.)

She is the real deal, for her downsizing, which comes with age sometimes, includes “de-thinging” as well as de-booking, and as she has discovered, the “things” are easier to part with. Notwithstanding she declares 20 boxes or more on topics like gardening and theology to a local monastery, 15 of the murder mysteries she no longer reads to another still addicted, and innumerable books possibly suitable for children to her daughter across the pond — whom I also know as a bibliophile. Too, she has not stopped buying books, which is the decisive indicator.

There is another woman in the Far East (Halifax) whose kitchen cupboards are stuffed with books, and who finds them set down in her refrigerator. Moreover, I am told that there are female librarians, though I doubt this proves any sympathy with the creatures. (With Coleridge, I count books as living, speaking, wingéd things.)

It is true, some women are bookish, and many men are not, as another correspondente insists. Very well, I find this easy to admit, but do not stand corrected. I did write, “in my experience,” which includes several harrowing cases.

“I need clothes more than you need books,” is a phrase I recall from several “starter” marriages. And among those more prolonged, I include a woman who drove her husband to a mental asylum (quite literally, for he did not have a driver’s licence), then dumpstered all his books while he was trapped inside. (He was, to his consternation, released a few days later.) And another, the wife of a prominent university professor, seen present and gleefully smiling soon after his death, through the auction that dispersed his library in big lots arranged by size and colour. She personally thanked the book scouts for carting the horrible things away.

Tolstoy said he would tell the truth about women, but only when he had one foot in the grave.

It happens I have other anecdotes, of book-friendly women, with which I might have created an illusion of balance and equality. But the times are not right for them. We live in an age when the art of generalization has been lost, and no “fact” unillustrated by statistical charts will be admitted. And should the stereotype indeed be statistically validated, there will be riots on campus.

So we must stick to our guns, and generalize bravely.

Behind the eagle eyes, and elephantine ears of our progressive gestapo, we still find examples of affectionate sexism, racism, and the like. (An unaffectionate misandry, on the other hand, is publicly promoted and reinforced by law, along with quotas to restrict the advancement of white people, as the State consolidates its monopoly on prejudice.) It is a proof that some feist still lurks in our old bag of a civilization. For misanthropy is the backbone of Reaction, and targeted misanthropy is the most exhilarating kind.

Since Holy Week, up here in the High Doganate, we have been doing the most ambitious spring cleaning that we can recall ever having done, voluntarily. I say “we,” but I got no help at all from Bodo and Katrina (the pigeon couple I mentioned last week), my purpled finches have been absent without leave, and the fluffy cat (“Mildred”) who sometimes lodges here for vacations has stayed well away. (She is invaluable for dusting those hard-to-reach corners.)

Now, the High Doganate isn’t large: 600 square feet, including the balconata, where the plurality of its inhabitants seem to live. (A big infusion of illegal-immigrant mayflies recently; then the Trump spiders came to round them up.) Which is to say, just less than the seventieth part of an acre.

I know a couple who occupy 30 acres, at least one of which must be indoors, and they never complain about upkeep, so what am I?

One of nature’s whiners, I’m afraid.

Another friend, who has just moved as far away from Washington as he could get, consistent with keeping a job there, reports that he has also been shifting “mountains of books,” some of which he admits exist in two or more copies. His wife will surely have noted this fact.

Women, in my experience, hate books — they see them for what they are, a dusting nightmare — and I could back this assertion with innumerable anecdotes. Instead of a wife, I now have a French paintbrush — the wall variety, in badger hair — which has proved just the thing for cleaning the top edges. (The old practice of gilding the top edges of books made perfect sense: it prevents grime from working into the naked pages.) If women only knew this, so many marriages could be saved.

I have been accused of “book collecting,” but there is no truth in this. They merely accumulate, of their own free will. Indeed, while installing a few new bookcases, which necessitated the juggling of several old (and bookcases are hard to juggle, believe me), I was able to identify several hundred works that could be “recirculated.” Gentle reader may be shocked to learn that my principle parodies that of the abortionists: “Every book a wanted book.” Another principle is to avoid having them pile up on floors, which creates physical obstructions to peripatetic philosophizing.

From previous exercises in librarianship, I have found that one comes down in the end to the same clump of six redundant tatty paperbacks, which can’t be parted with, no matter how ruthless one is feeling. These six have followed one about since adolescence. Three are little art books, providing crisp, matt, colour reproductions of, respectively: Spanish frescoes of the Romanesque period; Russian icons from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries; and, Persian miniatures from ancient manuscripts.

Two others are Penguins: Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists; and Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind.

Finally, Céline, Journey to the End of the Night.

Many other books entertained my youth; a few stitched hardcovers also survive, but fade into the background woodwork. These six stand out because they are so obviously disposable, and have survived every purge through the last half-century.

I stare at them, together, and realize that an entire worldview could be constructed from them, and that it was my own, in formation.

One is often told “you cannot live in the past,” or, by way of self-contradiction, that one is doing so. I would if I could, though of course I should like to choose which past to live in. Meanwhile, what is one to say for those who aspire to live in the future? Can they do it? Should they wish even to try? (Consider: only the dead are “ahead of their time.”) For my part I am convinced that if I wait patiently, the future will come of its own accord. Too, I doubt my capacity to hurry it.

Some days time seems to move faster than others — I frankly prefer the slow time days — but I notice that events remain tightly coordinated, and the tune is the same regardless of the tempo. Many are the tasks I could perform more smoothly if I could will slow-motion. I often thought this as a cricket batsman. But if the opposing bowler could will it, too, I’d be done for a duck just the same.

Those who cannot live in the future would nevertheless like to see the movie. I understand the attraction — how curiosity killed the cat — but not what good it will do me. If I knew the day and hour of anything unscheduled, it would follow that I could not change it. I would find myself watching in mute horror. Only my powerlessness could be enhanced. Alternatively, I would have been shown only a hypothetical future, extending from present trends, in which case, what was the point?

Bad behaviour leads to bad ends, shall we say, and good to good. In which case I don’t need to know the end, only the means.

The children at Fatima, a century ago, were not told by Our Lady what would happen in the future. Or if they were, they were much too young to understand. A great deal was happening in the world of 1917, one did not require heavenly visitation to see that it was fateful. From what I’ve read, one would not even have required a newspaper subscription, to know that the West was turning from God. Not being the Mother of God, ourselves, we are poorly placed to understand Why she would come, to that then, to that there, to those particular children. We cannot “understand” the apparitions as we might try to understand the plot of a novel, or the narrative sequence in news reports.

Instead the children, and by extension all the children of the Church, were told to pray, urgently. We were told to abandon our sins, make restitution, and look in Hope, liturgically, to the East (from where Mary came, and to where she returned, literally, in the memoirs). We were told, in effect, that the Kingdom was at hand, yet from the philosophical perspective, it is always so. We were told not what will happen, but what to do, and that immediately.

Prophecy must necessarily involve a breach in time, it seems to me. This, because our world in time comes in contact with a world beyond it. In this sense the daily Mass is invincibly prophetic. But it is not prognostic.

One does not go to the altar as to the weather report; or as the pagans did to a marble slab, to examine the entrails of birds. The childish human tendency, to ignore what we are told and ask instead what will happen, is exhibited in so much well-meaning reverence towards this anniversary of the Fatima apparitions.

With respect to God, and to all divine manifestation, I think we should grow up a bit — stop asking “Why?” and, “What is going to happen?” — and instead more simply do as we are told.