Essays in Idleness

Let us revise the “Benedict option,” named by Rod Dreher, and proposed by him and many others. They invite us, in effect, to head for the hills, or to the nearest virtual equivalents; to separate ourselves, in mind if not in body, from the depraved society in which we find ourselves immured. Christians should detach, so far as we are able, and go our own way. To some extent, we must always do this, or have always done, insofar as being sincerely and faithfully Christian puts one beyond the worship of worldly power. We have always been in one sense traitors to Caesar, and to his successors; in another, perhaps Caesar’s only real friends.

I, for instance, have already retreated to my ivory tower, or mountain hut, or small apartment, high about Parkdale. Unfortunately I can still hear things from the street; and must leave my sanctuary to do imperative things, such as go to the corner and buy cigarettes. And while I may have ninety square feet of balconata, plentiful sun, and a water tap still working, together with computer access to hydroponic, and even aeroponic methods, I frankly cannot feed myself by gardening. Others I know have found parallel constraints, in their attempts to disengage from the filth around them.

Sometimes I walk farther than the corner, and often to a small, blessed seminary where I teach “CatLit” (Roman not feline) to some impressive young men. They wear costumes that mark them apart from other denizens of Parkdale; and while none is yet a priest, nor fully launched on the life of monk or canon, all would appear to point in that direction. Often they astound me because they seem to have mastered, in scarcely a score of years, things on which I’m still working after three. They have, in the old hippie terminology, turned on and tuned in (to the Holy Trinity), and dropped out (of conventional society), in a way my contemporaries could not imagine when I was young.

This is partly, let me aver, because there are “options” available to them that weren’t there for young Catholics when I was (not Catholic but) young. Several had the luck to come from “underground” — from backward-looking, “traditional” Catholic families. A high proportion were home-schooled, in America or far abroad. But all through happy circumstance came in touch with a religious order that is rekindling our ancient Faith. Forty, and even fifty years ago, in my cultural orbit, monasticism was too busy collapsing to offer a plausible vocation to almost any young man. Today it is reviving, though not everywhere. But there are beacons in the desert of modern life, that have been lit by a small minority of Latinate “Traddies,” who are also filling churches that had emptied “in the spirit of Vatican II.”

It often happens — I am tempted to walk so far as, “it always happens” — that a small, almost invisible minority begin to grasp Truth by seeking it. The great majority are otherwise engaged. Catholic civilization was hardly built and rebuilt by some silent majority. The conversion of the rank and file of men and women, after their first movement away from the profane and towards the sacred, depends on the work of Peters and Pauls, often doing things that make no outward sense to bystanders.

A “Benedictine” option is my preferred revision, to acknowledge this mysterious call. The “still small voice” is beyond most hearing. Yet somehow it can still be heard even in a society like ours, heaped with noise and unspeakable vulgarity. The Holy Spirit has not ceased His whisper; and the ear of human conscience may not be quite deaf.

I blame the Church for many things — from allowing the Reformation to happen, to losing the Culture Wars today — by foolish retreat from her own divinely-appointed authority. She has, through five centuries of frequent failure (and not five decades as we glibly assume) let the “modern,” post-Christian world metastasize. Her task is now impossible, “with or without divine assistance,” most people believe.

Yet they are wrong. Anything once achieved is by definition achievable. Even within the modern world, impossible things (such as the Counter-Reformation) can be somehow pulled off. As the (Gospel) saying goes, “With God all things are possible.” But this is not so with man; and that is why politics have never ended well. We are radically mistaken to imagine that man can accomplish anything by himself, from his birth, forward.

The “Benedict option,” so far as I have seen it expounded, strikes me as one of the mistakes. It is a proposal for what we, as men, can do to make things better. The word “option” already gives the game away. We have created a society that is spiritually uninhabitable, with all our other options. This one will fail, too; fail even to get started.

In my youth, a few hippies went back to the land, and a few of those did stay there (becoming wild reactionaries sometimes, as they toughed it out). I applaud “back to the land,” myself, as a half measure. But it isn’t the solution to any real problem. Real options are presented only by God.

*

It happens in class we have read, in passing, the scientifictional “classic,” A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). I won’t go here into its virtues and flaws, how well it was composed, or whether it belongs in its assigned genre. The “idea” of it is spectacularly good: to cast light upon the nature of human history by projecting a parody of it, leaping forward about six centuries at a time. It was cleverly done, to attract the mass audiences it has enjoyed since it was first published; though its doctrinal core is lost on most. The author himself might perhaps be counted among his misreaders, for he ended by blowing his own brains out, after being unable to finish another book.

He seems to have written the one he did finish in memory of the military obliteration of Monte Cassino (founded by the original Benedict of Nursia), in which he had participated as an American soldier during the Second World War. He married a Catholic, and for a time his trauma was turned to good effect; then the trauma returned. I find in it the poignant story of a fragile man, trying to chart the intractable, with inadequate tools. There is, however, much to be learnt by considering his brave but hopeless attempt: to understand history in relation to a feeble yet weirdly indestructible Church.

The abbey at the centre of the novel (really three novellas, varied on a theme) is presented as a small unflagging island of civilization, in a desert both of space and of historical time. It is out in nowhere, as the Church it represents; yet somehow the world has revolved around it. Inside, the monks have done what monks have always done — kept alive things only they would or could, in retirement from the world. They have preserved tiny archaeological fragments, which they imperfectly understand, from our own era — which had then passed not only through the “Flame Deluge” of a nuclear war, but a subsequent murderous “Simplification,” darker than any Dark Age. And all their efforts are turned against them in the end, for the world has meanwhile grown no wiser, and makes the same mistakes again and again.

A monk in anno Domini 529 is not, in principle, different from a monk in 1960, or a monk in 3781: the same tasks, the same Mass, the same way of living, without “evolution.” And all this time the world goes round in circles. Walter M. Miller, Jr., presented this as fact — beneath the superficial facts of change. To the end, 1,765 years from now, the same old Church is still “blindly” resisting such peccadilloes as euthanasia and abortion; is still confessing the same unrevised Creed. Out there in the world, the “good guys” are still losing; and men still do not know what causes they serve, from out of the same old vanity that blinds them.

The Benedictine “option,” or rather calling, is to the few, not to the many. It is, and has often been, unimaginable to those who descend from parents, and leave children in their turn; or otherwise follow the louder calls of our human nature. Even to hermits, the obedience is hard to fathom: the aspiration to die unto self. Yet by the grace of God it will be heard in some quarters; and over time it is efficacious — not by human, but by divine will.

Quietly, it may be, God is resupplying the monks and nuns we so desperately need: to pray for us, constantly, and actually to preserve us, against an Enemy we can’t even see.

Though we might exempt poets and philosophers, what people do is usually more important than what they say. Though sometimes, even among the unpoetical and unphilosophical, speech can be a crude action; or actionable, depending on the angle. One must consider these things case by case.

Sandro Magister gave examples yesterday (here). I had noticed over the past three years that the rhetoric of “a Church that is poor and for the poor” rings hollow. Reading Laudato Sí, I sometimes thought it meant, “a Church of the Left and for the Left.” Posturing on behalf of “the poor,” while doing photo-ops with their more fashionable “oppressors,” is among the many things Christ avoided. He was under watch as a revolutionist in Roman Palestine, not least by co-religionists; but the charge was false.

He neither proposed demagogic “reforms,” nor schmoozed with the rich and famous. So much was He not a politician, He could say, “They have their reward.” He addressed explicitly “the poor in spirit” — distinguishing thereby from the poor in cash.

When it came to His Crucifixion, He found no special interests on His side; only a few disciples who, in the main, thought it safer to pretend that they didn’t know Him.

There is no class formula in the Christian religion. In its (par excellence) Catholic form, we have endured many political operators. But too, “we” (the historical “we,” the “we” of two thousand years) have invariably returned to our origins in which, “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female.” There is the soul in the confessional; there is the soul who kneels anxiously at the railing. There is a “preferential option” for unfeigned holiness.

Always, this is true, but especially on the verge of the holiest weeks in the Christian calendar, when we recall what Christ did to save us, transcending pain and death. For we will not be living in this world forever.

At a time when this world is (characteristically) going to Hell, I think it is best to ignore the politicians of church and state, and focus instead on the foundational simplicity. Christ instituted His Church that we might belong to no earthly cause, rather, immortally to Him.

Yairs, yairs, gentle readers, well spotted. I refer to the apparent howler yesterday, on the tail of my seventh paragraph, which read, “I only fired people for being useless.” It was to be taken more in the tone of spiritual confession, than in that of professional pride. But since not one of you has read the (unpublished) memoir of my years before reception in Holy Church — The Half Life: Fifty Years of Sin and Error — you may have missed the context. I was young then.

Much retrospective confusion attends my editorship of Business in Thailand (and allied publications, 1978–80), a literary journal posing as a glossy business magazine in order to reap subscriptions and advertisements. I look back on the adventure mostly with regret. It was a time when I sincerely believed in “economic growth,” to alleviate material poverty. I was a maven for “development economics.” I thought capitalism could fix the Third World; and indeed it fixed, everywhere it was tried; but not in the way I expected. It destroyed much good worth conserving. It did not replace with better.

Thailand was an odd place to be advocating wealth. “There is rice in the fields and fish in the streams,” according to an old Siamese proverb; on which the gloss might be, “except during monsoon, when there is fish in the fields and rice in the streams.” It is one of those countries richly blessed by nature, where nothing short of socialism could ever bring about starvation.

How could I miss what was plain before me (as it had been from childhood, when my father also worked there): that here was a country at ease. Any more wealth would be redundant. The generals were already driving in Mercedes, and all the major roads were paved. They had imposed a corrupt pseudo-democracy; but the people adored their gracious King. Except those schooled in modern Western values, they were kindly, generous, and content. Ask any of them what was wrong with their country and they might say, “Too hot.” Otherwise, they couldn’t think of anything.

When I left for the last time, Bangkok, “the Venice of the East,” was already a hell-hole of progress. The klongs (canals) were being filled for expressways; skyscrapers were beginning to ascend; the air was such that one had to smoke, in order to avail of a filter. A few more decades have passed, of what became a playground for whores and tourists. From what I can see through Google-goggling, nothing has been added that is not vile.

God save the King (Rama IX), God save the people. And God save me, as I reflect on my own tiny role in this dystopic transformation.

But to the point, I remember the three people I did actually fire from the publishing enterprise in which I was complicit. All useless, for the purposes of the enterprise, but at least two of them more perfectly “useless men.” To understand this term as I presently use it, gentle reader must consult a previous Idlepost (here). I now take it for high praise.

I remember today the aptly-named Dr Tin Aye, elderly Burmese exile, who seemed to know everything that could be known about the geology of his native (and adjoining) land. Compassionate, benevolent, courteous Tin Aye; obsolete child of the Raj; appointed as our mining correspondent. Though educated in English, he could write nothing that was not incomprehensibly dated. Nor, as he casually admitted, could he understand any innovation in mining that had occurred since the Second World War; let alone, “development economics.” Yet he was a fund of intriguing oral tales from the lore of mining before that time.

The day I sacked him, he smiled, thanked me for the term of his employment, peacefully cleared his desk and made off. He never cashed the severance cheque I’d had cut for him. It was only because I brutishly insisted, that he’d taken this document at all. He said he hadn’t earned it; that he ought to be refunding his salary instead.

I can still close my eyes, and see him shuffling away: carrying his unravelling school bag, and some tattered map rolls under his arms; his left foot conspicuously dragging. From the little I could guess, perhaps a Catholic saint, known only to Christ and a few aging children. No use to “the modern world”; today his doctors might prescribe euthanasia.

A beautiful man, whom I fired, on my own initiative without instruction. But my boss congratulated me, when he heard what I had done. He said we have to be ruthless, “to protect the bottom line.”

“Why?” I thought, even at that moment. What fanatic puritanism could limit the purpose of a business to that, alone?

The business was flourishing. We had a hundred reasonably productive employees. We could easily carry a dozen lowly-paid more, who added to the charm and character of the place. And who reminded all young that tomorrow will come, as today we must respect our elders. And who sat as quiet guardians of order. Let all know, too, that they are working for a company that does not abandon its people to bureaucracy and chance; that does not throw human beings away.

I saw the old guy limping off; but in a dream of judgement I might turn with him, and look back upon the young executive jackass, drest in silk tie and “a little brief authority.”

The word, “untenable,” is not frequently used. Perhaps it is too philosophical for an age that is as unphilosophical as it is irreligious. Which is to say, our age of “science,” undermined by scientism, and mediated by a “logic” that is demonstrably insane. We lack the ability to abandon ideas that are untenable — that do not lead anywhere, because founded on premisses that are liquid, and drift. One may float or sink upon them, but they can lead us neither to wisdom, nor to Heaven. “Reason,” for the moderns, is only a “how-to” for trivialities — a “progress” of disconnected inventions and minor, cumulative, technical improvements that provide only more to consume, and bloat us. They have nothing to say on such primary questions as, how to live, and what to do; on, “the meaning of life,” if I may be so pretentious.

Consider: the Chinese, much our intellectual superiors, invented clocks and many other things long before us. And then left them on the junk pile of their material history, proving themselves more astute, too. We moderns assume they were foolish to do so — to take such inventions and treat them as toys, for a brief period while they remained in fashion. Then to forget them when some other vogue came along.

The Jamaicans used to have a saying about punctuality: “Is the clock for the man or the man for the clock?”

In Bangkok, when I was confronted by a new time machine, and told that the staff of a magazine I was editing must use it to check in and out every day, I created a decorative placard that briefly hung above it:

“The Hours of Folly are measur’d by the Clock; but of Wisdom no Clock can measure.”

The aphorism is of course from William Blake; I used it as a motto for my magazine, The Idler, later on. But in the meantime I encouraged a technically adept member of the staff at Business in Thailand to find a way to trick the new time machine, so that it would record our checkings out before our checkings in, thus puzzling the timekeepers who had, originally, intended the machine pour encourager des esclaves in other departments.

We were accused of arrogance, of setting a bad example; I was suitably chastised. But I wanted to make clear that my writers and editors were not chain-gang, nine-to-five people; that “one size does not fit all.” If one of my scriveners could do in one hour better than another in eight, I had no objection if he worked only four. I only fired people for being useless.

Count me as Chinese, in this respect. Keep your eye on the task, not on the clock. We can rely on the time to keep moving forward.

Though really I am a man of the thirteenth century. This was about when Western man began taking clocks seriously, yet before he began dispensing with his marbles. The monks invented both foliot and escapement about 1275. But it was to a purpose: the more careful regulation of the Hours of Prayer in monasteries and abbeys.

Too, like the Chinese, they were amused by the idea of an armillary sphere, that might mechanically parody the movement of the heavens.

Alas, the monks’ timepieces escaped into the “secular” or profane world, and began appearing on the towers not only of churches but of town halls and the like (at first with only an hour hand). These had (at first) their innocent uses — for instance to signal the public recitation of the Angelus, by automatic chiming of the bells. One hardly needs a mechanical device, however, to determine when it is dawn, noon, or sunset. By posting the unnecessary intervening times, in plain public view, the secular authorities were providing an early example of “too much information.”

For remember: Christ will come to judgement in a day when we look not for Him, and at an hour when we are unaware. The idea of a countdown, or worse, an alarm clock, is rather silly. And rather than contributing to, the ticking thing actually distracts us from, any contemplation of Time in its deepest mysteries. I would have been dead set against it.

If we need a device to limit the lucubrations of lawyers, rhetors, homilists, and prattlers, a sand-bulb or clepsydra (water clock) will do. And it will measure the time without this confounded ticking. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, indeed everyone had this problem — of vain speakers who go on and on — and all soon discovered the remedy. Mechanical devices should be kept simple; the more elaborate, restricted to use as toys.

I might embark on a wider critique of the nonsensical notions that began to clutter our world about the fourteenth century, and became more and more intrusive as the centuries proceeded. By increments, sound philosophy and diligent religion were replaced by tedious circus games. But I haven’t the patience or the time, today. I will content myself with this aspersion upon our modern chronographic fetishes, and again recommend — as I may have done before — that we ignore the “progress” of the last few centuries, and instead fixate on recovering our mind.

One strives for a Christian view of words that start with V, such as Vampirism; or, Violence; or, Vulgarity. And Visions, too, for sometimes folk have bad ones. To say nothing of, Valls, or rather, Walls, for I think that takes a double V. Or, Misogyny, in which we have two Vs, but both are in-Verted.

To my Catholic mind, each of these things is good for something or someone or in some situation: I don’t want to go all negative, here.

Vampirism, for instance, has worked out well for mosquitoes, fleas, bedbugs and the like; for leeches and many other small haematophagous creatures — such as the tiny blood-sucking finches of the Galapagos, the rasping lamprey eels of the Great Lakes, the torpedo snails of the eastern Pacific. And of course, “in your dreams,” the discreet Desmodontinae, or vampire bats.

Omnivores like us tend to sneer at such over-specialized diners, but note that, unlike us, they hardly kill anything. They mean only to tax, the way the government does, while spreading their physical (or moral) infections here and there. Surely every liberal or progressive must identify, in his heart, with the vampirists in nature.

And it is after all a question of degree. The larger creatures can easily bear the loss of blood, and by taxation, it is only the smaller businesses that are killed, like the smaller fishes by the lampreys in Lake Ontario. The bigger fish have, as it were, skilled accountants. People think the lampreys should take more blood from the bigger fish, so they can die, too. (This is the first principle of socialism.) But again, the lampreys make their own decisions.

Misogyny gives us another example. Among the ways I once found, to get myself out of further media appearances, was to say, of this apparent vice, “I think there are societies in which there is far too much misogyny. A number of Muslim societies come to mind. But we might have societies, such as in the West today, in which there is too little.”

I’d thought it an innocent remark, equivalent to saying, “I’m not against taxes, but I think some are too high.”

I would have said the same about the reverse misandry, of course; and rather grandly and generally for my own democratic misanthropy, of which I think there is too little everywhere. I think all races, classes, ages, “genders,” and what have you, could benefit from ridicule. It depends where one begins, I suppose, whether something will sound politically correct, or just the opposite; though one has said exactly the same thing. I think this is the same for all the V words, single or doubled, and upright or inverted.

For Violence and Visions and, better, Visionary Violence, I could perhaps make an argument, but limited to extreme cases. One is a “force multiplier” on the other. That is to say, if one scores 7 in 10 on an argument for violence, and another 7 in 10 for the quality of the vision, by addition we get 14 out of 20, which is 70 percent. But if we multiply one by the other we get only 49 percent. That tells me 7 out of 10 on both the What and the Why isn’t quite good enough for a “regime change.” Though close.

These “force multipliers” of mine are like that: they tend to sink a cause. Note that a 10 for “let’s have some violence,” but only a 1 for the, “and here’s why,” yields a 10 percent “go for it,” not a 55 as in the usual calculation. At least, in my policy universe.

But let us now consider Vulgarity, in politics and public life. (It is harder to be vulgar in private; one needs an audience.) I wrote about this over the weekend, but decided no one should read it. Hence the empty space, where there might have been an exceptionally long and pointless essay on Saturday, weighed down by too many examples. Moreover, my fine philosophical distinctions between the vulgar, the coarse, the crass, the rude, the crude, the impudent, the indecent, and the merely “common” — all examples taken from Donald J. Trump — struck me as sophistical, in review.

I tend to think Vulgarity — examples of which gentle reader might supply — is something like Misogyny. That is to say, something that should be used sparingly; but none would be too little. It follows, I should think, that when one complains about too much vulgarity, one isn’t necessarily condemning vulgarity tout court. There are moments when it might be “appropriate,” as we say today, when we try to avoid terms such as “good” and “evil.” For one must reply to an argument using the same vocabulary.

That, anyway, was the conclusion of this meandering, invisible essay, which I present today, reassembled as a Pure Thought. It was to defend vulgarity, but only with the superaddition of wit; to prefer a kind of “directness” (not a V word, I admit) in which the realities of flesh and blood are frankly evoked or implied, but daintily treated in flushing conceits — not dumped into the street down the vvalls from a high bedchamber. And without the prim, traditional warning, “Gardez l’eau!”

Thus I will not condemn a man for being sometimes vulgar. Rather, my objection is, when he lacks or loses the capacity to be anything else.

So many years have passed since my last good argument over Hannah Arendt, I’ve forgotten which side I was on. Her pregnant phrase, “the banality of evil,” from her book on the Eichmann trial (published 1962), was usually under attack from the “intellectuals.” So I probably defended it. I even read the book, as I recall, for Arendt’s characterization of the SS-Obersturmbannführer, who had organized logistics for Nazi death camps. The Mossad kidnapped him from Argentina, to put him on public trial at Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion apparently thought Israel would benefit from this propaganda stunt, at a time when people were beginning to forget why the country existed. (Perhaps we forget, that David Ben-Gurion was a politician.)

According to Arendt, Eichmann cut an unimpressive figure on the stand. The audience was looking for a bug-eyed, psychopathic monster. Instead this fellow was middle class. He wasn’t terribly smart, either, and his vain exaggeration of his rank, apart from sabotaging his own defence, made him seem the smaller. His offer of a moral argument (that he had always followed Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which simple as it is he could not understand), was lamer still. His conversation was a clutter of semi-military jargon, damp euphemisms, and clichés. He could not construct a competent sentence in any language.

The truth was he had been following orders, since a young man — when he flunked out even of vocational school. But with family connexions, he still found a job; and was a loyal employee. He had always been a joiner. The YMCA, the Wandervogels, the Freemasons, the Nazi Party — whatever. He wanted to belong, and always tried to fit in.

He had been shown to half a dozen psychologists, in preparation for his “show trial.” None of the shrinks could find the slightest evidence of mental illness.

The Nazis were bores, and in Adolf Eichmann the Israelis had caught themselves a typical Nazi. The publicity would have been more favourable to them, had they somehow found an eccentric one.

Eichmann could tell them about the day his boss, Heydrich, sprang the proposed “Final Solution” on the Wannsee Conference, to senior civil servants. He “stunned” them with the ambitious plan to exterminate all the Jews in German-controlled realms. Except, they were not stunned. They reacted just as bureaucrats, to this initiative. No outrage, but no great enthusiasm, either; rather the professional upbeat of, “When do we start?”

Reinhard Heydrich himself, the “man with the iron heart,” the “darkest figure in the whole Nazi elite” — lacked visible fangs. He was a capable amateur violist, from an operatic family; he showed real organizational skills, from Kristallnacht forward. He dressed sharply. He was popular with the women. But to the men, he seemed only a company man, getting on with his departmental agenda: at the time, annihilating Jews. (There was jargon for this, including the term, euthanasia.)

The phrase, “I was only following orders” — or giving them, as the case might be — became famous from the post-war Nuremberg trials. It seemed so glib, in light of what the Nazis had done: the great mountain of bodies. It was assumed to conceal the most horrible secrets. But it was meant straightforwardly. That’s what they were all doing — following orders. And getting their paperwork in on time. It was glib.

The camp guards, too, had a job to do, and managed to make it routine. They might be feeding human beings down the chutes, into the ovens. But it was nothing personal. Sure, a few of them may have been sadists; but no more proportionally than in, say, the Canadian tax department.

Here we are considering the bureaucratic “mindset,” and while it may benefit from a Prussian pride in efficiency, it is common alike to Italy and Spain, to India and China, to Britain and Australia and all fifty United States. As well, to any large private enterprise: one has a job to do, and a head to keep down, and a nose assigned to whichever grindstone.

I think of these things when I consider the 80 percent of North Americans who favour “euthanasia” in the polls (see yesterday’s Idlepost). And the men and women who will do the killings, when instructed by their superiors in the organizational chain. They aren’t the “monsters” it would be convenient for the opponents of “mercy killing” to depict. They are dull people, of “average” intelligence (which is to say, pretty low), with a work ethic. I’m sure 80 percent of Germans agreed there was “a Jewish problem” when Hitler was at his apogee. (Though later: “We did not know what was happening.”)

And we, of course, have our own demographic “problem,” with the disabled and the aged — more of the people Hitler killed off, “for their own good,” and to free up their beleaguered guardians.

He, too, from what I have heard, was on the personal level, rather boring. No particular interests, talents, skills; a failed Sunday painter. A few obsessions, perhaps. It took considerable stagecraft to make him look big — much bigger than some troublesome Alpine peasant. But a patriot, determined to “make Germany great again”; and “a man of the people,” who could command obedience — according to his rank.

Evil is so banal. Only sanctity is interesting.

At Mass today, across the Archdiocese of Toronto, all homilies were suspended so that a statement could be read by our Cardinal Collins against the Ottawa government’s impending “euthanasia” legislation. This our Parliament was ordered to write and pass by Canada’s Supreme Court: a junto of nine who are a law unto themselves. The Parliamentary Committee discussing the matter, now dominated by the Liberal Party, has made recommendations such as forcing all doctors and other medical staff to participate in the killings; and arranging for children and the mentally ill to be terminated on the advice of one “care giver” or another. It is a monstrous, unambiguously evil measure they are contemplating — which, like abortion, targets the defenceless.

In reading of the Maoist revolution, years ago, my attention was riveted on the massacres. In villages across China, a quota of persons were to be exterminated, by way of establishing the absolute power of the new Communist dictatorship. The Reds did little of this work, however. They instead compelled the neighbours of accused petty landowners and the like, to do the actual murdering. This was not because the Reds were squeamish. It was to make sure every surviving citizen of China was morally and memorably implicated in what the Communists had done. It was a policy expressly designed to erase “conscience.”

This is what most strikes me about the impending measures: the power to compel doctors and nurses to perform the killings. It is to make conscience itself a career-ending choice; to implicate every single member of the medical profession in murder. Any one you visit might have blood on his hands.

Archbishop Collins, a good man so far as I can see, cannot be criticized for raising the temperature of the public “debate.” He has the guts to make statements when they need to be made; then speaks very softly. One may listen to him read the statement we heard in church today (here). It sounded more fiery when our own priest read it, so one might also consult the text (here). Links to the issue are easy enough to find; and Collins tells his audience how to write their Members of Parliament, “respectfully.” The governing Liberal MPs — all of whom were vetted for their pro-abortion views before the last election — will reply with form letters. If that.

Unless, by a miracle, many millions write in, and a few hundred thousand storm Parliament Hill, I cannot expect the government to change its satanic direction. For in my knowledge of this benighted country, it is only a small minority of Catholics, and others, who much care about the issue, at any given moment; and not all of those are opposed to “euthanasia.” (The replacement euphemism is “assisted dying,” truly worthy of Orwell.)

Emotion trumps thought among those who have witnessed the lonely suffering of the afflicted; and the idea of “mercy” has been so cheapened that they are able to confuse it with murder and suicide. (“Here, dear, press this button if you want a nurse, and this one if you feel like dying. I’ll tell all your visitors which is which.”)

Those who demand, instead of killings, attentive palliative care, also expect the Nanny State to provide it. They have been raised to look for a technical solution in any grim situation, and to react to all stimuli as pure consumers. Indeed, much unnecessary physical suffering is caused by very expensive medical technology which helps to prolong life, artificially. This also creates consumer demand for artificial means to shorten it.

One cannot argue with what is now the great majority of “the people,” to any immediate effect, because they no longer accept the sanctity of human life (including their own) — on which not only our retreating Christian religion, but all the laws of this country were premissed. You do not push ailing granny off a cliff, even if she is asking for it. The case does not change, morally, if you choose a more presentable way to kill her. In the grave new world of our “Culture of Death,” our “Dictatorship of Relativism,” appearances matter, and substance does not.

Less than a generation ago, there would have been a public outcry against what our courts and legislatures are attempting. What will they do in another generation?

That is clear enough. Taking care of the old, and enfeebled; the seriously ill, and disabled; the depressed, and hopeless; the demented, the rude, and the improvident; is something that will remain beyond the means of bureaucracy — especially as fellow-suffering Love, of the toughest least bankable kinds, is the principal requirement in each of these cases. You cannot buy Love, even at the price of an unimaginably large, unionized labour force.

Families, in the first instance, and in the second, institutions that inspire voluntary labour and gifts, are the means by which this “social problem” — that has been and always will be with us — can be assuaged. There never was an alternative. Only the mad, in the deepest sense, could propose and then insist upon “policies” that can never work, in which Man, through massive Kafkaesque public agencies, tries to overwrite both natural and divine commandment. The sane already know where that must end.

Canada’s Liberals and their allies, and their power-seeking colleagues in every other Western country, have formed the equivalent to an international coalition of the “progressively” mad, and madder, to advance this unholy cause. We will see where it will go, next. It makes its appeal to the mindless and glib, who now dominate every Western electorate, and make decisions of profound consequence on less than a minute’s thought. We have, in effect, electorates which demand to be lied to, about the most fundamental facts of life. Who don’t want to think about it (to paraphrase Housman), “because thinking is hard, and a minute is a long time.”

Nor can the few remaining Catholics and others, still animated by the “traditional” human decency, hope to disentangle or separate ourselves, in a time when centralized government is increasingly able to track every individual, and control his behaviour and fate by external means.

Eventually the burden of overwhelming cost will inspire our keepers to cut their expenses by eliminating all their more expensive “clients,” whether they request it or not. The latest proposed legislation will surely be found insufficiently “inclusive” in a few more years. As we see, the great rush of Liberalism is accelerating. It is that of the Gadarene swine.

We cannot stop this “trend” except by growing more faithful and courageous; by raising children with the knowledge and backbone to resist the Devil’s works. We can, at best, struggle to recreate families that will take care of their own, without poisoned government assistance, and persist in doing so — until the jackboots burst in, and the matter is out of our hands, and into God’s.

One wonders if watching the Republican nomination debates on TV is confessable. Well, not on television, but in jerking, flickery videos in one’s laptop. This may or may not compound the sin, by making it semi-interactive. (At least I don’t post tweets any more.)

Certainly one feels dirty after the experience. I may have mentioned this was less so during the Iowa debate, when Mr Trump for some reason did not turn up. The standard of civility rose several storeys. Now it has descended again, to somewhere in the parking vaults, as Trump’s rivals, such as “Little Marco,” desperately excavate to Trump’s level. And this in the old Foxtown movie theatre, restored to its full original glitz, in the Grand Circus district of “beautiful downtown Detroit.” (It was built on the eve of the great stockmarket crash in the late ’twenties.) What a stage for trumpery!

And I watched this, after earlier in the day watching the Mormon, Romney, telling us that in addition to his being a fraud and a con-man (true, true), should Trump be elected, “America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.” … Pulease, Mr Romney.

Perhaps I have previously imparted what I think, in my Biblical way, of politicians who use “American dream” rhetoric, or the equivalent jingo in every other popular-franchise country, without exceptionalism. Quite frankly, I find the standard of all post-modern epideixis absurdly low. As Aristotle would add, it’s because of the audience.

So why did I make myself part of it?

Well, gentle reader may be thinking: if that is the best you have to confess, go and do it. The priest in his box is getting lonely.

*

A Canadian friend (of USA origin) forwarded to me the speaking notes of a certain Morton Blackwell, invited up here to explain to a (“conservative”) conference how to win elections, from the grassroots up. It is full of useful suggestions. The American “conservative movement,” only now cracking up after winning then losing its hold on the “mind” of the Republican Party, had a good half-century run. Blackwell explains, to anyone who doubts it, the amount and nature of organized work it takes, or took, with unwilting pharaonic stamina through the decades, to get someone like Reagan elected. From my own cruelly limited knowledge of politics, it is all true, too true. Effete people (like me) think ourselves “above” all this mindbending, backbreaking work — going “door to door” through hyperspace as well as along the street — all to erect one limp windbreak against the Nanny State, and win one lousy Cold War.

But Blackwell is right: that’s what it takes. The millions of sweet young things who utter the cliché, “ideas have consequences,” and therefore think in their soft little heads that the ideas themselves should win — that they need only articulate them — are, shall we say, naïve.

Glancing through his notes (I think I’d seen them before), and admiring their contrast to the electoral methods proposed by the demon, Saul Alinsky, I nevertheless noticed a mistake. This was Blackwell’s assertion that the “technology” used in mass politics is “neutral.” For while he makes good points against yawning arrogance and strumming hubris — sins to which most are tempted — we have a fatal problem. The technology is not neutral. It actually favours the other side, because the other side is glibber — whether one is up against a Clinton, an Obama, or a Trump. (Or a junior Trudeau, as up here in the snows.)

As my countryman Marshall McLuhan once said, “ye medium is ye message,” and it is no coincidence the mass media are overwhelmingly airhead Left.

Our “ideas with consequences” — such as civic freedom and autonomy, voluntarism, subsidiarity, personal responsibility, “traditional values,” and ultimately the Love of God — cannot be readily communicated to a mass audience through mass media, because a mass is not a man.

Swiss democracy flourished because there were Swiss peasants living in high mountain valleys cut off from each other. American democracy worked in small, pioneering, frontier towns, &c. In which the townsfolk could remove a cad from office, with or without an election.

In both of these obvious cases, and in the guided aristocratic British form, “democracy” sort-of worked for a while after various good habits had been formed. In none of these places is it working now. And the cause of this is, mostly, “mass” communications. (Note the limiting adjective; I am hardly against “communication” per se. And anyone who doubts my wholesomeness should observe that I designed this Idleblog expressly to subvert any possibility of a mass audience.)

“All politics are local,” according to another cliché, but we are dealing now with a locality that is, if not global, extremely large; and in which the human atoms become, quite inevitably, statistics. You cannot preach moral nobility, or personal independence, to a statistic.

The people themselves must be previously infused with this spirit of liberty, and disposition to received wisdom, to hear the political call. So aligned, the preaching would be easy. A man in focused relation to a family, to his neighbours, and to God, has no trouble understanding that he doesn’t need “guvmint” to control his life. He does not require a libertarian ideology; he is simply a man with a chest. Or a woman, as may be: free of chimeras, and the delusions of crowds.

Trump is winning because millions of Evangelicals, novus Catholics, mainlining Protestants, and countless others learnt their “conservatism” from mass media. They think and act not as voters, but as masses. One cannot “lead” them for long, and those who think they can be led with fine principles should take a good look at Trump. (Then go to Confession and wash it off.)

Newman had this exactly right: the faith and “values” we treasure are communicated parent to child, person to person, heart to heart; and thus, slowly. Tree-roots, not grassroots, as it were. The very Enemy exerts hisself through the peer pressure of passing fashions. Cor ad cor loquitur — “heart speaks unto heart.” Or else, does not speak, but shrivels.

This is why I think we cannot win in the foreseeable future: there is no there there, in the “heart” of mass society. Against impossible odds, we must re-establish Christ. But He will help if that is our focus, and we are weak but He is strong.

Or let me put this in a profane way. In order to “sell” what is called a “conservative” agenda, we need a “market” predisposed to buy. And the only imaginable way to forge this, is by a route into the heart of each and every social unit or cell. We must appeal, thus, to the Man and not to men, in their scattering. Man to man, or one cell to another.

So far as we take this exercise onto the political stage, the best we can hope is to lose with more dignity, and to a more convincing exemplary effect: by appealing to that small minority of independent mind, who notice when the mocked soul has better manners, and some good arguments.

Oremus.

Attendees of the Holy Mass, in its “extraordinary” form, will have been reminded that today is the twentieth of Lent, which is to say, half way through. Anciently, it was half-celebrated, and the liturgy is full of miraculous healings, including the expulsion of devils. Salvation means “healing,” among its other associations; and in recovery, a whole new life. “Laetere Sunday,” the mid-Lent rejoicing, is almost here, and soon the sprinting to the empty tomb. Verily, if I am not mistaken (and how could I be, after checking with the Catholic Encyclopaedia?) signage from today’s Thursday Mass was transferred to the Sunday, centuries ago — including rose vestments, flowers on the altar, dalmatics on the deacons, and some organ music.

The life of Penance continues, but the joyful are reminded that the season is not a test of Will. The fast which we keep, or fail to keep, is not the equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution. That is because it is not all about moi. It is a common activity, and as for the individuals participating, it is continuous and “determinating” (a word from a kid), being all about Him.

A typical human resolution, such as one of mine to do something silly like stop smoking, lasts perhaps five hours. There are year-end monsters of Olympian fortitude who have been known to keep a vow until January 3rd. Hints of the Prussianization of Lent are to be seen on humourlessly Jansenist faces. One tries to be especially frivolous and jocular in Lent, if only to lighten them up. No one is actually encouraged to fail, but surely it is understood that the average faithful Christian falls off one rail or another in a repetitively comic way. And each little bounce reminds, that our beloved Saint Peter went zero-for-three with a rooster.

Which is the thing about Lenten observance. You don’t do it from Ash Wednesday to the next morning, and then give up. You fall, and you get up again. And then you fall again, and rise. Seven times down, and eight times up, according to a fine, thirteenth-century rabbi I was reading. (He’s a beaut; more on him later.)

It is rather like skating, as I recall from earlier in my continuing childhood. And somewhere along the way, you learn to laugh at yourself — the way Christ laughs at you, or Our Lady laughs — or your own mom and dad used to laugh, unless perhaps you had hurt yourself badly. But even then, they had to suppress a giggle, given what they’d just seen.

Now, I am thinking of some girl, a prize-winning figure skater I once saw in action. And of her father, who brought her up alone, after her mother died. And of the tears in his eyes when she won the honour — of joy, honest pride, and remembrance.

“I remember her at three, falling on her ass,” is what he said to me.

So, I should think, the angels in Heaven, when another Christian has, finally, got his act together.

For reasons I gave yesterday, it is often better to write before something happens, than after. For then we have the advantage that it hasn’t happened yet. We are free of a weight not yet imposed.

We are told by most, if not all of the pundits, that Mister Trump will sweep the Super Tuesday primaries today, to become the inevitable Republican nominee for “Potus” — the improved, abbreviated designation for the more dragging, “President Of The United States.” Well, maybe he won’t quite take Texas, where I gather my preferred Cruz still has a chance, though rather short of the winner-take-all trigger. So that Trump appears “poised” (strange term) to carry off jumbo cartloads of delegates and momentum to the Republican National Convention in July; with “coat-tails” long and swirly enough to trip many of the most useful congressional incumbents in Texas and the South. Kevin Brady, for instance, if de-nominated, will lose Texas the House Ways and Means chairmanship, for just one passing example. And this on the Feast of Saint David, which, notwithstanding Lent, I feel bound to take with a little whisky.

Young “first-time voters” — a category which overlaps almost entirely with “low information voters” — are expected to clinch the result. They, and other hormonally challenged (I won’t say which sex) brought Boy Trudeau to power up here, in our Dominion election last October. But of course, the USA was ahead of us with Obama.

Though with Obama, it was still possible to predict which foolish and mindlessly tyrannical, leftwing policies he was likely to try on. The same might be said for his (criminally indictable) replacement, Misses Clinton: that the degree of American self-destruction and recess can be approximately calculated. (So much for the first term, then doubled for a second.)

With Trump, no one knows. Once in power, he could do anything. His mind is made from moment to moment, depending on what he thinks the market will buy; and on his own crass, kindergarten rages.

Compare our own prime ministerial child, at sea except when discussing marijuana, but carefully controlled from the Liberal back rooms. One might hope they will be satisfied to load their pockets, while euthanizing only their competitors at the public trough.

Little Trudeau disturbs me for the incredible lightness of his being; Big Trump because he appears to be smart, as well as extremely wilful, and ruthlessly indifferent to consistency and fact. You can get rich in real estate that way; I notice everything else he touched in business concluded in smoke and ashes. And one may make a reasonable inference from this — while observing that USA is not some minor country.

I may be writing of the fate of one planet only — albeit the one on which I live, with no other currently accessible to me. And true, I will be dead soon enough; but I will leave children and friends. Rather more than to pundits, one turns to God, for advice in such situations.

According to the inhabitants of Seta (or Cette, in the old, disintegrating book I am reading) — a city on a hill about three leagues west of Montpellier — it is possible with the simpler wines of Catalonia and Roussillon, the excellent inexpensive local brandy, and plentiful springwater, to make “Port, Sherry, Clarets, Burgundy, Champaigne, Hock” and almost any other wine, to a very low standard. The town was bursting with enterprise. Barely two centuries ago, they were supplying all Europe (except England which had high customs duties) with inferior imitations of these beverages. Yes, except for England (and the cruel efficiency of her Revenue Cutters), free trade and capitalism were flourishing, and “the people” everywhere liked “cheap.”

Some things do not change, except in crude volume.

The town of Besièrs (or Béziers, or Bezières, but I prefer the Occitan spelling), mid way between Montpellier and beloved Carcassonne, is among the towns I wish I had visited during my longish Continental walks, earlier in life. It was the principal source of this good, cheap brandy, and too, from what I’ve read, a beautiful town just inland of the cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea.

Granted, there was much destruction, in July of 1209, so that monuments before that date are damaged if not extinct. The inhabitants refused to hand over their Cathar heretics, when the assembled Crusaders asked politely at their gates. Instead they dug in. Yet there were known to be faithful Catholics in the town, including priests, in addition to the many excitables.

It was indeed the place where the Albigensian Crusade began. Gentle reader may recall an historical sound-bite associated with this event. Arnaud Amalric, the Abbot of Cîteaux (or Cistaux if we want to be old-fashioned) — the papal legate advising the Crusaders — was asked by a conscientious soldier how to tell the heretics apart from the faithful when they stormed the town.

“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius,” the good abbot replied. Or in English, “Kill them all; God will know his own.”

Whether or not he agrees with this approach or stratagem, I’m sure gentle reader will join me in admiring how succinctly it was expressed; and in reflecting that this decisive action had a very positive result, postponing the Reformation for another three hundred years.

Besièrs, almost as old as Marseilles (founded six centuries before Christ), and known to sportsmen as a centre of French bullfighting, is not my topic today. Instead we visit a smaller town, approaching from the east. The author, Derwent Conway (nom de plume of Henry David Inglis) does not name it in the book I am reading.

His own tour, of 1830, begins with a circuit of Switzerland; descends the Rhône, to wander across southern France; ascends the Pyrenees; then comes down through Bordeaux; ending with an itinerary along the Loire. It was published at Edinburgh the next year, in the two pocket volumes I now have from a Greater Parkdale flea market. There was an old letter tucked inside, to the book’s former owner, recommending it for remarks on French wines, which the writer found astute after more than a century. The correspondents were apparently serious imbibers, and the work was given in return for a fine Chambertin ’28, two cases of which had been “liberated” in 1944.

But that is to take us off the road to Besièrs in 1830. This Conway, or Inglis — a Scottish advocate who became bored, and exchanged his trade for journalism and travel — must have been a quick walker. I do not think I could have covered his route in a single season, even in my prime; though it must be said he resorted to coaches and horses, river boats and ferries, through some sections of his journey. Most of it would have been “pedestrianism,” however; which is still possible if one’s legs will permit the exercise. I took the occasional motor autobus myself; but will insist the only way to notice the country one tours, is to walk across it. …

To Lourdes, for example, twenty-eight years before the Marian apparitions. Through many other towns, before other things happened — if one can read, and thus return to a time when the open road was a genuine adventure. It remains so in some places today, I suppose, but only if one is following the footpath rights of way, parish to parish, off the thunder’d pavement. Anything over four miles per hour (between halts) will blur all the gorgeous details. Except the thrill from heights, air travel is insupportable.

The English-speaking peoples were once renowned, or condemned, as persistent travellers. An explanation for this is provided by a French gentleman in whose company the author found himself at the table d’hôte in this unnamed little town. The Frenchman called it, la maladie noir — a restless desire to move from one place to another, as if in search of some cure. Conway admits that this is exactly what afflicted him before he left home. “Itchy feet,” we call it, with pretended innocence. (My own feet still itch terribly, as my mind succumbs to elderly nostalgia.)

Better to read these older ambulators than the newer, for after all, the parts we want to see are invariably those which were built before modernity and suburbanism drowned them in “diversity” (i.e. total sameness), and the invasion of monied mass tourism rendered even the surviving good bits so tourist-crowded and glib. Visitez les plus belles régions de France before Alphonse de Lamartine has laid down his confounded railways, and all the noise and ugliness is edited away. The wonders of this world are all now museums, and until the Islamists blow them up, will only “make your feet hot.” (Whistler’s comment after a frenetic afternoon in the Uffizi.)

I should also like to read Conway’s tour of Scandinavia; his Solitary Walks through many Lands; his Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote; his journeys through the Tyrol “with a glance at Bavaria”; his observations on Ireland. He is a masterfully attentive journalist, interactive with all passing life; and the composer of innumerable wonderful asides, including analyses worthy of a Tocqueville. (For instance his explanation of why the best brandy comes from places like Besièrs, which are the worst wine districts.)

He commanded such illustrators as George Cruikshank (for the book on Spain), in the days before photography ruined everything. He was quoted in Parliament as an authority on foreign and even Irish affairs. He is an admirable prose writer, comparable to the novelists of his generation. Unlike our better “magazine” writers of today, he is not merely bigoted, ignorant, illiterate, vain, pandering, quarrelsome, and thick.

Perhaps I am a little giddy from recent illness, and should avoid making magisterial statements until I am elected pope, but I have found that an effective way to avoid the Sin of Wrath is to read the blog, Eccles is Saved (here), before turning to the other ecclesiastical news. This is especially useful in Lent, when the sin in question might easily be provoked as an ancillary to one’s lust for e.g. a thick juicy hamburger with swiss cheese and bacon rashers. Gentle reader will of course form his own judgement. He often does.

For as our crusading ancestors learnt: never attack a Saracen encampment during Ramadan, while the sun shines. Wait until two hours after it has set.

It was by means of this device (prophylactic reading of the blog in question) that I was able to prevent myself all week from commenting on a certain attempt to encourage deviation from the perpetually established Church teaching on contraception by citing a precedent, irrelevant in itself, based on an urban legend about Blessed Pope Paul VI (something to do with nuns in the Congo). Which was not then corrected upon landing in Rome. I could easily have slipped into mentioning the case, or any of several others that arose during a recent trans-Atlantic “presser” at an altitude of more than 30,000 feet. I was also able to avoid using the medical term, hypoxia, in a satirical way.

For as the saying goes, “Who am I to judge?”

No, no, I leave that sort of thing to gentle reader.

Some forty years ago, and for a couple of years before and after — which is to say, once upon a time — I lived in a small workman’s cottage at Vauxhall — which is to say, towards the middle of the Great Wen of London. I often think back on this “squat,” which I occupied semi-legally until the socialist Borough of Lambeth got the money together to demolish and replace it — together with the rest of what had once been a flourishing neighbourhood of home-owning working class people — with subsidized “public housing.” Happily, it took them a long time.

Pure luck, for me; the house fell into my hands through the usual series of coincidences. I would never have found it on my own.

By my standards for the world, I was a very lucky person — until towards the age of thirty, when I began to seriously “engage” with it. Whatever I wanted seemed to fall into my hands. And at this time I was still in my early twenties. Fortunately, I had little desire for money, for then I would have had to “get a job.” My interest was instead in the acquisition of knowledge. My vanity was such that I imagined myself a budding poet and philosopher.

I am thinking of that place today, because of a pleasant event yesterday. A Czech couple, among my oldest friends, were visiting Greater Parkdale, and brought me copies of three photographs they had taken when they visited me in London about 1976. I had no other photographic evidence that “65, Wilcox Road” had ever existed. All the detailed memories that flood back, from small corners of a few old pictures!

The house was, by American standards, quite tiny indeed, with low ceilings, no cellar, but two modest bedrooms’ worth of upper floor. There was a small kitchen extension into a miniature brick-walled garden at back, with an outdoor toilet. There were working hearths or fire-boxes in each room, and gas for a kitchen cooker still supplied through a meter in which one deposited old shilling coins. Wood for heating could be obtained from the tips of local demolition contractors. Any bill for water or electricity would have been charged by the Borough as a proportion of rent, but there was no rent. (I did not use the electricity anyway, and was chintsy on the water.) The total cost of operation for the house was thus five “new pence” in the gas meter, every month or so. Plus food, but as the photographs attest, I was pale and skinny.

My largest expense was in fact an annual subscription to the London Library in St James’s Square. That was eighteen pounds, then thirty. (It is now about five hundred.) I still have the treasured card, with which I could borrow ten books at a time. There was a choice of hundred thousands, most rather erudite, and I could also spend the length of days tucked away in an obscure quiet nook, which had a window and a school desk. My own little library at home, chiefly of poets, filled never more than four shelves.

There I am, in the pictures. Shy, very serious, and in my uniform: beige canvas trousers and grey wool cardigan; clean shirt, done up to the top button; but no tie. (I didn’t own one.) Hair flaming red and self-cut. Everything washed in cold water.

I had stripped all paper from all walls down to (nearly) indestructible Victorian horse-hair plaster; and all linoleum from the floors to the original wide floorboards; and placed all branded goods in timeless baskets and canisters; so that from any angle the interior would look like it might come from any century, except perhaps the twentieth. Mail might fall through the front door, but there was no telephone. It was paradise in there.

Too, I was operating on a vow of sexual and emotional continence, made prior to Christian conversion — meant to last until I had finished reading Aristotle and “everything that went into and came out of him” (which turned out to include Thomas Aquinas). I realized that would take a long time. I was a wilful lad, and kept this vow through a few close calls, along with a certain tranquility of mind. My hippiesque neighbours (but not so hippie as an American reader might imagine) called me “The Vicar,” and showed their disapproval by ignoring me. It was an urban hermitage, near the centre of what I considered (with its libraries and galleries and theatres and museums) to be my Athens.

All pictures are of a certain date. Wander too far from these ones, and my pictures are not so edifying. These photographs were taken, I now realize, soon after my conversion to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. The adventure had transformed me and, I think, this shows in my face; an adventure in peace, towards peace. I look so still and untroubled.

Now, when with the encroachment of age I think back on a life that is running out, I detect God’s grace: to have arranged for me the time and setting in which I could be parsed. It is what I would wish for any student today: a “safe space” of just that nature.