Essays in Idleness

There would be a very long post, if I tried to tell the history of second-hand book-dealing in Toronto, if only from my own temporally limited point of view. It is too early in the morning for whisky, however, so I will skip to the end.

Booksellers’ row along Queen Street West is now finished. There were thirteen of these “antiquarian” shops a generation ago, roughly in the stretch from University to Spadina. Steven Temple’s, now up steep stairs at 489 Queen West (pushed half-way to Bathurst), is the last. He opened in 1974, and will soon close forever. If gentle reader is currently present in the Greater Parkdale Area, he must go there immediately. The sell-off will end on St Andrew’s, next Saturday, during which any book 25 dollars and down will be 5 dollars, and those above, half price. Also, you must go to acquire one last loving glimpse of what a second-hand bookstore looked like — at how 50,000 mostly hardcovered books, many of considerable antiquity, could be fit into rooms without level floors, by the organic extension of makeshift shelving.

Steve himself is an old buddy of mine. He’s a crusty character, with a crusty wife: both magnificent souls. Modern book retailing, generally in decline, has no use for such people — who love what they sell, and know a great deal about it. Who work on guild principles. For whom competition is good news. Who take personal risks, and would rather starve than work in a cubicle. Who do not eschew hard physical labour: for endless lugging about of books, in big heavy boxes, is among the tougher proletarian vocations.

He’s an old Lefty, and Yank, from the Vietnam era, who kicked me out of his store for one good reason or another many years ago. I think it was something reactionary I said. Then meeting me a year later, gave me another tongue-lashing for not having visited his store recently. With advancing age Steve has mellowed some, and if I am not very mistaken, he has found God. (This usually makes a person easier to live with, but not always.) His wife Jennifer can scare even the people Steve can’t. She is completely lacking in hypocrisy, and allied soothing social qualities. Her scary ones are loyalty, truth, grit, fierce humour, and real charity. She neither speaks, nor listens, with the half-attention to which urban and suburban people are accustomed. Neither does her husband.

Steven Temple Books began a few blocks east, at street level. Four decades have suddenly passed. I think this has been his fourth location, as rising rents have pushed him westward ho, ever closer to the sunset. His specialties have long been Canadiana, and modern first editions. Neither is my bag, especially, but from his general stock in classics, philosophy, modern literature at large, travels and topography, I have always found prizes. One could spend hours making discoveries in any one section — at intervals dragged out on the sidewalk when Steve wants company for a smoking break.

He will retreat to Welland, Ontario, pension-free and laden with debt as all other retiring booksellers, and no doubt continue selling books through Abe & the Internet; but it will not be anything like the same. It will instead be “books for collectors.” (Spit.) It was that general stock — the presence of books for actual reading, including the obscure and the hard to find — that made second-hand bookstores what they were through the last many centuries. They were the meetingplaces of the literate — their agora, market and trading ground. In the strangest city, one would find such a bookstore, and it would be like an embassy from home.

“Anyone can translate Chinese,” according to the beautiful lady who was teaching the use of the brush. This was in a backward little British school in Bangkok, wherein I was enrolled at age eleven, almost half a century ago. The class met in a small, yellow-plastered room, that opened on the side of a narrow klong, or canal. Seldom used, this klong had become clogged with water lilies. It contained catfish, who were tumultuously grateful for the occasional modest lump of sticky rice. Like everything else in Bangkok, it is now paved over; but I remember it — the room, its decaying plaster, the low weathered wooden benches, the stone slabs they rested upon, the miracle of water and the bubbles from the tippling fishes — as a premonition of paradise. The elements assembled themselves in that way.

The name of this teacher has escaped me, and it is her own fault. She used different names in different situations, quite fancifully it seemed. This is a Chinese poetical conceit. But let me settle on “Miss Ping.”

I vividly remember her long face, her willowy and thus curving form, her extremely narrow eyes, and shy laughter (always covering her mouth when she giggled). The class was hardly mandatory, and was for the benefit of several Chinese students, but anyone could attend. One might call it a drop-in clinic for victims of Communism, which the parents of these children all seemed to be. It met once or twice in a fortnight. Miss Ping had regular employment elsewhere — I think as a translator in a bank. This, because I remember from her remark, that while anyone can translate from Chinese, the translation of commercial documents into Chinese was nearly impossible.

She engaged in calligraphy and decorative painting in order to maintain her sanity, I believe. She studied the old poets. She would carry around, in an Indian choli bag, cumbersomely large books, printed in Shanghai a long time ago and in advanced states of disintegration. These provided her with “text.”

Anyone can translate Chinese, as I learnt, thanks to the genius of the language. Or rather, no one from the West can hope to do it, until he has not only mastered a few characters, but thrown off some rather Western expectations of how they should arrange themselves. Greek and Latin made the barbarians of the far, far West instinctively attentive to grammar. But there is no grammar in Chinese. There are no tenses, either, nor number nor mood; or at least that is the first impression. Everything is contextual. One might construct a sentence in Chinese without realizing one had done so. But it would likely be a silly sentence, saying only one thing, at most. Miss Ping would giggle at it, and cover her mouth. A good Chinese sentence says something new every time you look at it. It does not need subsidiary clauses; they move along with it, as a train of ghosts.

Life at dusk, in careless quiet.
The tasks are done, my mind turned free:
No more career to plan for,
Only the hills have work for me.
Pine-winds blow on my loosened sash,
Moon lights upon my lute-plucking hand.
You asked about duty. All I know:
A fisherman’s tune drifts up from the river.

This would be the latest of many attempts to translate this reasonably famous poem by Wang Wei (701?–761?) composed, or so it implies, soon after his retirement from the court life of Chang-an. I tried it myself after consulting several previous versions, and looking up characters in Karlgren. I wanted to be sure that anyone could translate Chinese, before recommending this hobby to others.

For so I remember being told: “Anyone can do it.” But first he must put all the habits associated with not doing it at a distance from himself.

Gentle reader should not imagine I can read or write Chinese, and I’ve always been defeated by the tones when speaking. For the language is not spoken but sung. This eliminates the very possibility of rhetorical emphasis, or rather sublimates it, still deeper than French. For the words must be sung, while whispered. Only some kind of northern barbarian would pick words from a sentence and fling them in your face. Only a newspaper would desecrate a text with question and exclamation marks, to say nothing of those fiendish arabic numerals. It was my impression that Miss Ping was so gentle and soft because stepping through a world that was rife with barbarians; that she nevertheless giggled to herself, because we were so funny.

Classical Chinese is sung, and whispered, but also painted. The brush is the thing. “It grows from your hand.” Whereas, a pen is a crutch, held always at an angle. One must lean against the stalk of a pen. Step one: learn to feel the tip of the brush, as it dances on the paper; as the tip beyond your fingertips; as it stands, and kneels, and bows, and twirls, and leaps from one character to another. You are the mind and the brush is your body. But not in any Cartesian sense, since the mind and the body are one.

Perhaps it is only one of those falsely “recovered memories,” for I have just been looking at an old book containing translations from that Wang Wei, and it has suddenly reminded of the character, hsien. It is a visual portmanteau: framed with the character for a “gate,” with the character for “moon” inserted in the open space between the two “doors” and under the “bridge” of that “gate” character. It is one of several plausible words for “idle” in classical Chinese. The dictionary adds: “at ease, sauntering, leisurely, quiet, unoccupied.”

I love this word. I have always loved this word: Hsien.

I could even draw it with a brush. (Not here: I do not have the technology.)

I did draw it once for the benefit of a Western-educated Chinese scholar, who assured me that everything I explained to gentle reader, just above, is rubbish. I’m working from a “romantic” theory, he said — having bought into the sort of nonsense that could only be subscribed by e.g. Wang Wei, along with all the other poets. It is mere chance that many, if not all, Chinese characters are evocative. In reality, this PhD averred, they merely “evolved” in a random way, from bone scratches — like animals according to Darwin’s theory. There is no logic to them. All the meanings they have are arbitrary, and have been “assigned,” by chance.

“They are assigned, by Heaven,” replies my inner Wang Wei.

See the I Ching on “chance”; or Stéphane Mallarmé.

On this much we were agreed: that the moon, glowing through the city gate — beckoning the poet from the griefs of the city, in a Keatsian sort of way — is an idea containing no logic at all. Poetry does not work like math; though it would be true to say that math sometimes works like poetry. Both are essentially incomprehensible, because they reach beyond human comprehension. But I have come to the conclusion, alas contra Miss Ping, that there is a certain class of idiots who cannot follow language even to the poetical equivalent of two plus two. They cannot see the point, & thus, anything they touch comes apart in their hands.

*

Really I am responding to a criticism posted to some squib I wrote elsewhere last Saturday. A gentleman who signed himself Adeodatus — a name he chose meaning “gift of God” — complained that my columns always ramble. He repeated several of my points, with mild sarcasm, then said he could not see the connexions. “I’m just picking at a few threads that I see in this essay,” he reports, “but they unravel if I try to pull at one for a coherent progression of thought.”

One might reply that it is a function of prose, to ramble. Too, if one starts pulling at threads, any composition will come apart. This is equally true of silk gowns, whether of fine or coarse manufacture; and as Whitehead and Russell eventually discovered (to Russell’s horror and Whitehead’s delight), also of the Principia Mathematica. It is moreover true, that if you pull the legs off ants, they will be unable to make any coherent progression; and that if you pull the wings off flies, it will be seen that they are incapable of flight.

Sometimes we see things, according at least to Wang Wei and Miss Ping, by seeing them — and not by some other method. We see them, as it were, when they are shown — arranged, perhaps, in relations like a painting, where the eye moves from one thing to another, then returns upon itself. Not a syllogism, but what the Greeks called a “syndrome” — things that go together because they belong together (tautologically enough). Painters, like poets, do not argue but arrange. Of course, one may be shown something and still not see it. One thinks, for instance, of a moon in a gate.

The modern, analytical, reductionist mind is “just like that” — like the boy who pulls the wings off flies. It has no use whatever for literature, or art. Nor, I have noticed, for klongs and water lilies.

As Wallace Stevens — perhaps the most Chinese of American poets — openly confessed in “Gubbinal,” his own point of view could be easily confuted. “That strange flower, the sun, / Is just what you say, / Have it your way,” the little poem begins. And concludes: “The world is ugly, and the people are sad.”

Toronto, or “Toto” for short, is once again in world news, thanks to our beloved mayor, Rob Ford. It is nearly a year since I mentioned him in a post I should have deleted by now, for being merely topical. I explained why every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

I am in receipt of several emails querying the judgement of the fine people of Toronto for having elected this giant of a man. And as, despite my distaste for democracy, I voted for him myself, I feel some sort of reply may be indicated.

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

I would have thought drug abuse would give our esteemed mayor credibility with the Left. After all, the Trudeau boy proudly announces that he’s been toking marijuana around Parliament Hill, & the media kiss him for it. And how is a man to maintain his Chestertonian girth without beer & bacon? Moreover, it appears that our accomplished mayor was altering his consciousness in the company of bona fide members of Canada’s celebrated multicultural communities. Indeed, visible minorities if my eyes do not deceive me. They may have been wanted by the cops, but at least they weren’t bourgeois, tedious, white scolds. And note well: our admirable mayor has single-handedly brought the smug levels in this city way down.

Alas, even the Toronto Sun — the tearsheet of “Ford Nation” — is now calling on the poor beleaguered fellow to resign. (Not my fault: it is one of the large media organizations I do not presently own.)

Don’t do it, Robbie! Stand your ground! … And here’s hoping the wheels break off, when they come to cart you away!

One of my upcountry correspondents wrote this in response to my “All Souls” column (published this morning at Catholic Thing):

“Whenever our choir performs the Mozart Requiem, with its magnificent showcasing of the Dies irae, we sell out. Up here, in redneck country-&-western Grey-Bruce, we sell out: 700 tickets for a one-night stand. People are hungry for the truth that their decisions, their conduct, their lives, have eternal meaning, even if the only way they can enunciate that truth is by buying a ticket to a concert.”

It is just so, & I have long noticed that as the post-modern (or more precisely, post-conciliar) Church has been putting her legacy out in the trash, the secular world has been picking through the pieces. The incomparably magnificent musical heritage of Holy Church survives, for the most part no longer in the churches, from where it was banished after Vatican II; but outside, on things like CDs. It has become “classical” music, & against all expectations, holds some considerable ground in competition with the “popular” music of the street & the gutter. Churches that have been emptied out by the liturgical “reforms,” fill up again for secular concerts of the music that was discarded.

There is mystery in the thing itself — the mystery of evil, & its defeat — but no mystery in a phenomenon that has been known throughout history. People are drawn to beauty, but also often repelled by it. In either case, they know what beauty is. Indeed, public authorities in many cities have discovered that they can drive thugs & vandals out of dangerous passageways, simply by piping in Bach & Mozart. Conversely, raucuous noise can be used to attract the same to locales for drugs, violence, & fornication.

Beauty, truth, goodness, are allied; as too, their opposites. It is important to remember this in a Christian way. In a difficult passage (Matthew 12:26 et seq., but parse the Greek carefully) our Lord warned that spirits not working for him were working against him. But speaking of people (in Mark 9) He turned this around: “those who are not against me are for me.” Bear this constantly in mind, when speaking with non-Christians: that the unchurched sheep still hunger.

We needn’t judge what we do not understand. But we must be fiercely on our guard against what is very plain to the understanding. For we live in a fallen world, in which the good, the true, & the beautiful, need defence.

That extraordinary sequence, Dies irae, going back I now learn to the 12th century, & not the 13th as I previously understood, gathers together the strands of a Catholic teaching now half-remembered. It presents the reality of Purgation, in an appropriately visionary way. That trumpet makes no uncertain sound. It calls us to battle. It flies upon Satan’s greatest lie: that our lives are inconsequential. It attacks all the corollaries of that lie: that we are helpless in ourselves, that we cannot help each other, that we cannot bolster one another in prayer; that our dead lie beyond the reach of our love, & we beyond theirs. It provides a vision of the Last Judgement in which all of the consequences of our acts coalesce. And by necessity, it is terrifying: because life is not a dream, & death is not its ending.

This is the truth, to be accepted or ignored, to be lived or hidden from. It was the wisdom of the Church through the ages to teach this with great clarity. Yet today she prefers to teach in a half-hearted way, as if to children who must not be frightened, omitting or disguising the scary bits.

Without the Black Mass, without the black vestments, without the clarion call to repentance, of course the churches empty out. Why bother listening to preachers who are not sure what they have to say? Who dress a part they cannot play? Who, standing even before the altar, turn their backs towards our Christ. And play their nursery tunes, & speak as if we were a kindergarten class.

But take heart. The little men cannot keep the Rex tremendae majestatis out of our chapels. They haven’t the strength. They cannot hide our Lord from us, for we can look past them. For consider, that the trumpet will sound, through all the sepulchres of this earth; & the sheep & the goats will be parted.

I wake this morning to find that some Texan has littered my electronic inbox with pictures of “Will & Kate,” in the bath suds with Prince George of Cambridge (age three months). A quick Internet check, to the filthy Daily Mirror, yields the explanation: “The pictures were taken by artist Alison Jackson who is renowned for her spoof reproductions of palace and celebrity life.”

In other words, they were faked.

This little joke was perpetrated for the day Prince George was to be christened. (Today.) It thus creates an association in the public mind, between this Holy Sacrament, & nude royals cavorting in the bath. I do not know whether this was the conscious intention of the “artist.” Nor do I need to know.

For reasons mysterious even to me, I continue boffering with email correspondents. (The term “boffer” refers to a foam weapon, used in simulated hand-to-hand combat.) In this case, adjusting the argument to the mentality of my opponent, who is viscerally contemptuous of British royalty but earnestly respectful of Tea Party media stars, I compared the case to that of Sarah Palin. She was brought down from a suddenly powerful political position by a series of foolish quotes & gestures. Each was actually scripted for Tina Fey, “spoofing” her on the television programme, Saturday Night Live.  Anyone could see the “joke” being played. But in little time the lines were being mockingly recited as if they were genuine; & soon after, in the settled conviction that they were.

Please don’t try to correct what I report from first-hand experience. This included an impromptu “debate,” on one occasion, with graduate students from a Toronto philosophy department. One young woman in particular had the Alaska accent down, & persisted in repeating the Tina Fey lines (“I can see Russia from here,” &c). Her friends were equally convinced that these fairly represented Ms Palin’s point of view. There was no correcting them. Their indifference to fact was too perfect.

Ms Palin is herself a mass-market politician, & neither genius nor sage. Yet I admired her for common sense, & a refreshing detachment from the cynicism that plagues our political life. She was reasonably honest & straightforward, unlike her rivals. On this ground alone, I thought her worth defending. Had she not been attacked so unworthily, I might myself have dismissed her as a lightweight. But in the context of the U.S. presidential election of 2008, it was worth noting that she had more native smarts, saner attitudes, more impressive personal accomplishments, & rather more executive experience than, say, Barack Obama. The one thing she lacked was the “cool” factor. She was too “authentic,” too salt-of-the-earth, had too much starch & integrity, to survive long in democratic politics. The gliberal infotainment media went urgently to work on trashing her lest she appeal to voters (women especially) over their heads. They had little trouble scoring points, however: for they can invent & widely publicize specious charges faster than anyone can refute them.

But back to my philosophy majors. On reviewing the preceding discussion, before the name Palin had been gratuitously raised, I noted that their whole view of Western intellectual history was of the same quality: cheap & extremely misleading parodies of thinkers vastly beyond their understanding, delivered with the same smug self-satisfaction. For these unpleasant children were the shallow products of our “democratized” higher education — against whom one finds oneself defending even David Hume.

It would be wrong to hold them responsible for public opinion; they are symptoms not causes of the disease. It would be wrong to assign to any human being (Obama certainly included) the responsibility for contaminating our public life with lies & misdirections. There is not & has never been a plot on any significant scale. Sleaze has never required much calculation.

“For our wrestling is not against flesh & blood; but against principalities & powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

Note that by “high places,” Saint Paul was not referring to Caesar’s court at Rome.

*

The replacement of aristocratic with democratic forms of government, & with that the politicization & depravation of every dimension of human life, is an old story. We have been on this slide for well over two centuries, arguably for much longer. The basic egalitarian notion, that “I’m as good as you are,” plays to the vanity of the peasant class, that has provided the bulk in every human society: whether in their old agricultural, or in their newer industrial & post-industrial masses. Jacob Burckhardt was astute in attributing the success of the French Revolution to this: you win the peasants over by promising them the rich man’s possessions. It’s not the vote they crave, nor intellectual freedom; the peasants were never so stupid as that. The rich man’s possessions are the allurement. But more, too, the chance to get even with men so spectacularly superior to themselves, & bring them down to the common level, by means of riot & the guillotine. This is so much easier than raising oneself up.

The politician must appeal to the vanity of low human nature, through the flattery implicit in all demagogic speech. The class resentment, that is unambiguously at the heart of Marxism, is also at the heart of democracy in its less violent forms; the demand for equality because, “I’m as good as you are.” Finally it pulls down not only the rich from their stations — the landed, the responsible, the titled — but with them every noble aspiration a natural hierarchy exists to serve. In its place, & to assuage their iconic longings, the crass are provided with a theatre of “celebrities” instead; of the morally worthless, “famous for being famous.” Monarchy, where it survives, itself descends to the Hollywood level, in the vagrant hope of appeasing this mob.

Après eux, le déluge. One returns to the Age of Enlightenment to recall the prescience of those not in the bag. In for instance his old essay series, entitled The Idler, Samuel Johnson explored from many successive angles the exploitation of human vanity, at the root of all politics — the putting of one’s betters in their place, by the presumptuous, acting upon others both above & below them in actual social position. Jane Austen was another subtle student of the means, in her elegant Toryism, examining the matter at the sparkling microcosmic scale; rather than at the macro, where we see only the crudely homogenized results. Pressing against the natural order, was the spirit of “whiggery,” or Cain. To the mind of those infected by the lust for power, all nobility of aspiration is hypocritical affectation. It cannot be quantified. They have no use for it.

Families rise & families fall, over time, maintaining a balance within the larger society which, undisturbed, would last for long ages. No hierarchy depends on any individual member, in such an organic order. It would be wrong anyway to expect too little, or too much, from the representative of a moment. It is enough to keep up the pressure for improvement — by setting good example from wherever one may stand; by putting obstacles in the path of bad behaviour. Then let the failures fail. It will never be necessary to smear individuals, to make one’s envious, egalitarian point. There will always be real examples, if one has the low journalistic impulse to seek them out; or even the slightly higher impulse to expose a fraud.

I am expounding a view of society almost incomprehensible to the present day, accustomed as it is to social engineering, & organization by written law. The idea of an order legitimated by nature, of acceptance in the vicissitudes of life, of the freedom that comes with this acceptance, is foreign to us. Let me put it in terms likeliest to ignite the gasbags of equality: “A place for everyone, & everyone in his place.” For this is what I have seen in every backward, essentially joyful community, East or West.

My Loyalist ancestors were not unaware of foibles among the British ruling élite. Yet they held it better to endure, what would be resolved in the course of nature, than to turn the world over, & deliver the government into the hands of the ideologues of a humanly-engineered “Enlightenment.” It made more sense to get on with one’s life, than to meddle systematically in the lives of others; hence their old saying, “Better one tyrant three thousand miles away, than three thousand tyrants one mile away.” They were defeated, of course; but they did put up a fight for their lives & their property, before they were dispossessed. In their bones, but also in their neighbours’ eyes, they saw the menace of “Revolution.” They knew their Shakespeare; their Wat Tyler & Jack Cade. I like to think they could see Obamacare coming.

But alas the Revolution followed them everywhere, & in our contemporary world there is no place to hide from the arrogance of “democracy.” It is globalized now. The principle of unhappiness has been made universal.

*

I cheered myself the other day by re-reading Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse — by Nirad Chaudhuri, written in 1997, in his ninety-ninth year. There is a wonderful rant against Princess Diana, published just moments before she died. He says she never had the class to be a royal; then extends his remarks to the rest of the Spencer family, whose decline into unspeakable vulgarity he adumbrates (witness her brother, &c). It is really quite forceful.

Chaudhuri, as I have surely mentioned in the past, was pretty much my favourite Subcontinental. This is because he was an extraordinarily perceptive teller of home truths, who would never give his persecutors the satisfaction of shutting up. He had also been a member of India’s rising political class, personally familiar with all Nehrus & Gandhis, & able thus to tell us, with considerable precision, just what was wrong with them.

He waited until he was almost my age to have his first book published: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). It is a penetrating account of the stages by which India was suckered into misery & destruction by the adepts of Progress. The book was hardly read, but from the sharp promise in its splendidly paradoxical dedication (to the departed British Raj), it was immediately attacked. Chaudhuri was blackballed, pursued, stripped of livelihood & pension by India’s new democratic champions of “free speech.”

There is more to it than that, as always in any book by Chaudhuri. He makes me weep with nostalgia for the Calcutta of a century ago, upon realizing I had seen its ghost, three generations later. He makes one see the utterly unwestern beauty in the flat, sodden, village-ridden landscape of the vast Gangetic delta, so intensely green, sky blue, & river grey. He makes us love the very people he chastises, & chastise the very people he loves.

Altogether, he spent about seventy-five years making enemies by telling the truth about India, the whole truth & nothing but the truth; plus about twenty-five telling the truth about England, from his Bengali sense of fair play.

My personal acquaintance with him — after he had migrated to England in old age — was too brief. He was among the most inspiring men I have met: for his learning, as much as for his courage; for the poetry in his reasoning, as well as the scathing wit. He embodied, to my mind, a real nobility of spirit, formed in a very broad acquaintance with the Classics, both Eastern & Western. Perhaps only an Indian, in his position, could see the secular realities of our world with such clarity. And nothing & no one could buy him off.

Not to give away the plot, but the Three Horsemen are taken to be Individualism, Nationalism, & Democracy. Death would be the fourth, but Chaudhuri leaves it out as self-explanatory.

Don’t worry, I’m “fiiiiine,” as me mother would say. (Several have inquired. As I mentioned in the Comments to my last post, she died peacefully on Thursday: Requiescat in pace et in amore.)

My particular gratitude for the surprising number who have paid hard cash to have my mama remembered in a Mass. I do not present myself as a priest or an expert on these cosmic things, but I would think if it were possible to get someone into Heaven by main force, mama is there. Knowing her as I do, I’d guess she is likely to be embarrassed by all the attention. (As she once observed, “guilt” is for acculturated Catholics & Jews. Whereas, “embarrassment” is the Protestant thing.)

(Any word italicized in this post, is to be pronounced in an exaggerated Scottish manner.)

Please note her name, as entered on her birth certificate back in 1920, is “Florrie,” which is Scotch. She would correct anyone who called her “Florence,” which is a Limey name. As she was for many years a nursing matron, of the old starched-apron school, she had to make this correction often. The other name to avoid, if you want to stay on mama’s good side, would be “Flora,” which is Scottish enough (her grandmother carried it), but in an Anglicizing way (Fionnghal would be more correct). My paternal grandpa tried that, as a kind of Lowland compromise. He was no match for her will, however.

My sense is that what could be done was done, in the human way, & God knows that’s not good enough, but hey.

Death is anyway for our benefit. As lessons go in spiritual biology, it is the great teacher. And as a great teacher, it commands one’s attention.

I am naturally opposed to the glib school, among our modern behavioural hygienists. Guilt, regret, & mourning: all good. Even an occasional round of embarrassment. There’s a lot of crap out there on “closure” & the like: pop psychology from the moral & intellectual goons, embedded now in our statist, institutional psychology. Death is a great teacher, & should not be shut up.

It makes a rich field for humour, because it eliminates the “happyface” attitude, or better, reveals it as an exceptionally idiotic form of psychosis. For what the devil & the “happyface” have in common, is the inability to find anything funny, especially the ridiculous in their own behaviour. Laughter is their scourge; it stings them like holy water. And it is deepened in the presence of death, when the apprehension of the comic stands, often strangely reverent, just where it finds the intersection with the “tragic view of life.”

There are no eulogies at Catholic funerals, or at least, none were tolerated before the “happyface” reforms were made to the liturgy in the wake of Vatican II. The “uncertainty principle” is also a part of the “all good” in this case. We cannot know, except through miracle (recognized by the Church in the beatification of saints), that any one of our dead has been translated to Heaven. Not one of us, however intimately we knew the deceased, can speak with authority on such matters. “Thy will be done” is, to my mind, the hardest part of the Lord’s Prayer, harder than the forgiveness of transgressors. For it is His will, not mine. The theological virtue of Hope is not so easy for us humans as may first appear; & like Faith, & Love, may require more stoicism than the Stoics ever offered to dispense. It cannot be a theological virtue, except by proximity to the divine mystery, which is bottomless. It is not even thinkable, without Grace.

Notwithstanding, our Lord was given to paradox: “For my yoke is easy, & my burden is light.”

And this is certainly true of death, which, conversely, may look hard, but is actually quite easy. It requires, indeed, no effort whatever on our part. It is breathing that requires some effort. My poor mama feared death terribly, but was also the kind of guardian spirit who could keep up a front. For as she said herself, in a moment of shaking from Parkinson’s symptoms, & an internal disorientation that must be worse than pain:

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

Knowing my mother’s mind, I replied, “You will perish from it, in which case, you are well out of this ghastly nursing home.”

“I suppose you are right, dear.”

She was nevertheless irritated when I began to recite, from schoolboy memory, the reflective sonnet of Musidorus from the fifth act of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia:

“Since nature’s workes be good, & death doth serve / As nature’s worke: why should we feare to dye? / Since feare is vain, but when it may preserve, / Why should we feare that which we cannot flye? / Feare is more paine than is the paine it fears,” … &c, &c. For there is something about even Sir Philip Sidney’s rationalism that misses the whole point.

*

It is a paradox of Love that, like God, those who truly know another character must necessarily know them at their weakest. Yet only by knowing a person at her weakest, can we see & appreciate her at her strongest, too, as high mountain above low valley.

I was spooked, on Friday morning, when my telephone went off very early. “It must be my mother,” I thought, without thinking, while leaping out of bed. (At the time, she had been dead for less than eighteen hours.) We had a kind of ritual, early many a Friday morning. She would call me to announce, “I’m dying, I’m dying.”

This was less melodramatic than might seem. My sister often went up to her cottage Thursday night, & this was mama’s way of informing that I was now on call. As week followed week, it became more Gaelic. I was expected to reply:

“Oh poor mama, please don’t die today. For if you do, I will have to make arrangements.”

At which we’d laugh. For she had taught me to say that, by example. (“You must never take death lightly, my dear. There is a lot of paperwork, & you must make arrangements.”)

She taught other people much different things, for she looked upon each as a unique sensibility, requiring almost a new vocabulary. But me she took as the direct inheritor of that droll line, which passes back to North Uist in the Western Isles, from where (via the harbour at Stornoway, of course) our people floated to the New World. (Had they come from Benbecula, the next island south, across an easily swum channel, if the tide is out, they’d have arrived as Catholic refugees from the Highland Clearances, not Presbyterian refugees from the same.)

Each character a new challenge, to be dealt with in a different way.

This included a bottle to the head of a man who was violently assaulting his mistress, on one occasion; & on another, talking down a prospective rapist by persuading him she had an incurable disease. At age about six, I witnessed one of her more brilliant bluffs, that got us both out of serious danger at a remote location in Pakistan.

Likewise, during the Halifax riots on V.E. Day, back in ‘forty-five, she helped save the virginity of several young nursing students by getting responsible sailors from the Royal Canadian Navy to throw them — quite against their will — into the back of a truck. (There was no time for explanation, & they had to be driven immediately to safety, ten miles out of town.)

Alternatively, she could be very sweet, with very sweet people.

It is worth perhaps mentioning how she became an Atheist, as a nurse in training at the age of nineteen. Prior to that she had been a hard-praying, God-fearing, zealous though perhaps over-literal Calvinist girl. There was a boy in her ward, in great pain from a horrible spinal injury. She prayed & prayed for him every night. His condition got worse. So she prayed & prayed again, harder. Finally the boy died.

And to that she responded not by praying more, but by becoming very angry with God. She accused Him of conning her, of setting her up, of having lied to her throughout her childhood; of just ignoring her prayers because maybe He had better things to do. She was so angry, she told Him that He did not exist. Seventy years later I could still detect the outrage; even as I reflected that so many acquired their Atheism from some event in adolescence, which they had never outgrown.

She was taken aback when I argued, that anger with God at that level of intensity might itself be taken as sincere prayer. (One thinks of St Teresa of Ávila who said, to Jesus, that she didn’t wonder at how few friends He had, when she saw how He treated them.)

It is a mistake, a huge mistake, an unforgivable mistake, a millstone mistake, to the uttermost depths of the sea, to teach a “happyface” religion that seeks to avoid all the horrors of this world. And in this sense, I could argue that my mother was a victim of “happyface” religion, even in 1939.

To nearly the end, mama was arguing that religion is good, if it gives anyone some comfort, & makes them behave a little better than they might otherwise do. But she said it didn’t give any comfort to her, & that the only thing she knew that would make her behave any better was will, pure will. For she thought one ought to be a good person, God or no God; & that that involved refusing to do bad things, even when tempted. Moreover, that being good is not “a tight-assed proposition” — that it requires a bit of creative imagination, & that sometimes, just sometimes, doing the right thing means lie, cheat, & steal.

*

“Be bwave, mama.” This is what she wanted to hear from her son. She said I’d said it to her when I was a wee thing, & my father was apparently dying of a tropical disease in a very foreign country, leaving us penniless, or rather, anna-less & starving. So I pronounced it always in the small childish way. (And without mama praying, papa survived.)

She was bwave, because she was told that was the right thing to do. Sometimes one takes orders from little children, hearing no orders from above. And mama, as I said, adjusted words & behaviour alike to her interlocutor.

So here is some ground for a sneaking confidence, to put some green on the hillside of Hope. What, I have wondered, would my mama do if she suddenly found herself, not in some duet with the undertaker, but to her inordinate surprise, in the presence of Christ Crucified & Resurrected?

I daresay she would adapt her conversation, accordingly, & rather quickly acknowledge her error, as she had taught both her children to do.

For there is one teacher who is greater than Death.

Readers of this anti-blog may notice that I am more than usually idle. This is because I have a mother, one Florrie Alice Warren. She has not been at all well these last few years, & now, approaching only her ninety-third birthday, is certainly on her deathbed. The doctors gave her up last Thursday, but she is still, characteristically, fighting along with us, nearly five days later: unable to talk, or to see, but communicating by hand-squeeze gestures. I learn from a knowledgeable nurse that the most anyone has done in her condition is three weeks. So I would think in my mama’s case, five weeks is possible. Or five minutes: we shall see. But any way you look at it, her son will be distracted, & comments may wait some time to be posted.

This is the same mama to whom I may have alluded, as one of the Gaelic persuasion from Cape Breton,  Nova Scotia. Her grandmother spoke Gaelic only; her mother “both national languages” (Gaelic & Latin); my mama alas only Gaelic enough to handle standard Presbyterian hymns. (A magnificent mezzo-soprano voice, in her prime.) She has been an Atheist since the age of nineteen; of a peculiarly Calvinist sort. Her view of Catholics has always been a generous mixture of affection & pity.

So that now she cannot shut me up, we are learning to pray our Rosary together, & play some fine Catholic music for the Mass. I do the speaking.

She lost her husband five years ago (& I my father at the same time). They were a very successful couple, perfectly complementary, with nothing whatever in common. Wit I absorbed from the example of my father, but the dark Gaelic humour from mama. It was she, for instance, who taught me on leave-taking to say, “Now don’t you kill anyone!” … Then add, “Unless they are on the List.”

It was in fact her mother, who doubled as my grandma Annie Graham, who taught me from a very early age, while bouncing on her knee, the importance of song, & within that, the importance of recognizing our tribal enemies, & terminating them whenever possible. The old Scotland, much like Afghanistan in many ways, enjoyed a phase of human experience that preceded nationalism, & was really much more attractive. “Another for Hector,” as we say.

I could say more, but not now, for I am busy. I have a little request for gentle reader — Catlick, Prottie, even Chews & Muzzies if it comes to that. Pray for her. She fears death, which is why she fights it so wilfully, notwithstanding her present condition. I understand that, for I have often tried to avoid death, myself. But her denial of Christ is eccentric & unreasonable, & for all my reservations about “democracy,” I am still hoping to overcome it by sheer force of numbers.

Trust me. If you knew her you would like her. She is a character, & I am really very seriously hoping they make special arrangements for characters, up there.

Let us applaud sheer genius in those United States. With concealed but effective bipartisan consensus, the President & Congressmen have succeeded in the ultimate patriotic act: shutting down most of their counter-productive Government. True, there are messy bits in the arrangement. Obamacare has not been completely annihilated, & there is some confusion over national parks. But the attention to detail is otherwise superb. For instance, an arrangement was found to continue paying the military. This is wise, because unpaid soldiers can be trouble; as Harry Truman used to say, “Read your history.” And you may need them to discourage zeal in those less well armed.

It is not really a shutdown, but a “slim-down,” according to the cooler heads. “Essential services,” including the goons who mind the borders, are left in place. There’s probably room for additional savings in Homeland Security & the like. But in broad outline it would seem the U.S. Government has been downsized to what it should have been all along, in a single brilliant stroke.

Democrats generously credit the Republicans, Republicans generously credit the Democrats, for this impressive accomplishment. For years I’ve been moaning about the Nanny State. It took a century to build, I reasoned, it might take half-a-century to dismantle. But ho: the American politicians have done it in a day. I must have been wrong about them. Let me therefore praise them now, & cheer both parties to stand their ground. Keep that “slim-down” going for months, years, decades, until everyone has forgotten what the “fat-up” was about.

The histrionic reception in gliberal media is also to be celebrated. Anything that makes the devil shriek is good, & the very foulness of their language assures us that the news has not been faked. For a few weeks they may shift the polls, but the longer the slim-down can be kept in place, the more their purchase slips on public opinion.

Verily: the demonic power, alike of journalists & terrorists, depends upon the human disposition to panic. Refuse to panic, & they are suddenly enfeebled. “Fear not,” as our Lord saith.

I should salute, too, the framers of the U.S. Constitution. On our Westminster model, no slim-down could be so easily obtained in Canada, or Britain, or India, or Australia. It required the exceptional American system of “checks & balances,” in which the checks disturb the balances, & then the balances stop the checks. The Europeans might pull it off, somehow, but even they lack the constitutional means to “mutually assured destruction.” Across Asia, Africa, Latin America we find governments that would require impossibly strenuous & purposeful acts to close themselves down. Only in America (& arguably Somalia) can it be done by casual impasse.

Were it not for my Chief Texas Correspondent, I might perhaps have missed a squib by Diane Francis in this morning’s National Post. Fortunately that newspaper lacks an effective pay-wall, & I was quickly able to learn about this lady’s proposal to merge Canada with the United States. Full details would require the acquisition of her “controversial new book,” but the excerpt outlines the financial arrangements. Ms Francis consulted a Geneva-based accountant with extensive merger & acquisition experience, who flagged Canada’s disproportionate contribution. With only 10 percent of combined population, we’d provide 18 percent of net asset values, once our rich natural resources were factored in. That worked out to a $17 trillion settlement, or $492,529 cash for each Canadian.

The pull-out heading with the article seemed to offer this sum as a lump payment, & I must admit I considered it for a moment. That would certainly cover my rent for a while. But on careful examination of the fine print, I found: “The payout would be stretched over two or more decades.”

One thinks of the Newfoundland Lottery, whose first prize is advertised as $1,000,000. (“A dollar a year for a million years.”)

*

Dear Diane. It is now a quarter-century since the last time I participated in a national election campaign, selling Brian Mulroney’s Free Trade Agreement with the USA. She was among others by my side, debating Liberals, Socialists, & Protectionists of all stripes, before sceptical Canadian audiences. Much of my own time, in these “town halls,” was spent explaining some of the more extravagant claims of my excitable allies. My own pitch was simpler: to destroy as much federal bureaucracy as we can, in the time available. And if the Niagara wine industry went down with the rest of the carnage, all the better. For as I pointed out, its then leading product, with a brand name something like “Cold Baby Duck,” was drinkable only as an alternative to after-shave.

Anticipating some last-minute pushback from Canada’s smug-Left literati — the usual full-page ad in the Mope & Wail, paid for by the United Auto Workers, & signed by Margaret Atwood & her friends  — I passed round the hat & got a larger bunch of artsies with recognizable names to sign one entitled,

We Are Not Fragile!

“There is no threat to our national identity anywhere in the Agreement. Nor is there a threat to any form of Canadian cultural expression. As artists & writers, we reject the suggestion that our ability to create depends upon the denial of economic opportunities to our fellow citizens.”

It was fun. We won the election. And how was I to know that what I’d actually been selling was a vast new “free trade” bureaucracy, to cumber the perpetuated protectionist one?

Today is again Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels — of Michael, physician, and general in war; commander of the Jews, patron of the Nile, archistrategos of the Greeks, defender of the Romans; rescuer of souls. On this day in old Normandy, and England, the husbandman’s season ended, and another began; as too, the terms in colleges and courts. Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael — who bring the autumn to the North, and spring to the South, and through whom we pray as our battle continues against the Prince of Darkness in this fallen world — heavenly martials of our Victory.

It is thus a year since I began this anti-blog, whose purpose is not yet clear to me, although the intention was indicated at the launch. For of course, this is war. The title chosen invoked “Idleness,” and in the most bellicose sense. In the words of the prayer, not my will but, “Thy will be done.” Let us stand bravely against all human industry, not directed to its proper end. Let us down the tools of our illegitimate masters. Let us “stand athwart history,” refuse to let it pass.

I had been reading through the closing Questiones of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologica, where the guardianship of the angels is expounded, and our hidden government is touched upon. From Boethius, Saint Thomas Aquinas inherits both the ancient idea of fate, and its Christian transformation — in which the influence of the astral is ever acknowledged, for good and evil; but along with the immutable fact of our human freedom. For no angel will dictate our acts, and no devil can force our obedience.

An apprehension of celestial war, and of the necessity of angels, has been among men of all religious doctrines and traditions, since time out of mind. Yet it would go without saying today, that the slaves of empirical reason deny the possibility of such persons as angels and devils; as also the events in which they take part. The very idea of an angel is mocked, after it has been misrepresented, in the “demythologizing” school that flourishes even within the Church. Yet we know the angels; and intimately so, for we know instinctively which we should obey. But also that we do not have to obey. No angel, aloft or fallen, can compel the smallest action on our part. The former may inspire, the latter tempt, but we, under God, are the captains of our souls, and sovereign within our domain. Notwithstanding, it is war, and we are well to take our orders.

I have myself been aware, in key moments, of the presence of what is called a “guardian angel.” It was this angel, for instance, who shouted in alarm, when once I was tempted into an act which would have brought quite terrible consequences, and not only to me. I recall the shock that came with the instruction: “Get out of here!” It was as if I had surrendered my will in the matter — following the path of least resistance as it led down into the mire — until this instant of awakening. And I was told, sharply and exactly, just what to do.

Many, I’d say most, perhaps all human persons have had this experience at some point or points, and will recall the like whether or not they can imagine the celestial dynamics. The instruction comes with the authority of a divine order — not, as it were, to the brain, but to the heart of one’s being — resonating through body & soul. It is no fey “categorical imperative.” It comes in a rush, on wings.

Could an angel drop you dead? Of course he could; or raise you high into the air, then set you down safely; or part the sea, or liquify the soil under an invading army; raise mountains up in their folds, or move them like waves on the sea. When the first creature stirred on this earth, there was the presiding angel; and when the last dies, so he will watch, in the mysterious power of divine mercy.

In such cases there are physical effects: but not from the will of the angel. For they in their ranks, from Chayot to Cherubim, are agents of the heavenly power, who act only upon its command, as mediaries between God and his Creation — echoing through our universe, “Thy will be done.”

We cannot pretend to be Christian — or Jewish, or Muslim, or even Buddhist for that matter — without acknowledging the present reality of angels. From the first memory of man, this truth has been acknowledged, that there are spiritual beyond the physical forces, that they are personal in their nature, that they could even be named. Our modern anthropologists have great difficulty interpreting this “primitive” mind, for it does not personalize impersonal forces. It discerns the personal, apart. And so with the gods of pre-Christian mythology: detached, always, from what they control.

Nature is a drudge, without angelic forces. She has only her entropies to obey, and the dead to bury her dead. Life itself stands testimony to the operation of the divine Will, acting through angelic mediation.

We cannot take the Scripture to heart, nor the Fathers, nor Doctors, nor Saints of the Church, while overlooking this “detail.” Christ himself is vividly aware, as we may read throughout the Gospels, of this angelic order. They announced his coming to the shepherds by Bethlehem; to the wise men afar; to the ancient world in the anticipation of Christ, and within the Temple of the Hebrews. All from God is announced through angels; all men of faith are led to this awareness, and faith itself engages with a supernatural strength.

Yet no more than gravity can it be seen through the eyes, nor heard through the ears, nor touched with the fingers, nor smelled with the nose, nor tasted with the tongue — unless God will the manifestation. Grace itself is apparent invisibly, through its effects, and the apprehension of our very being is not restricted by our senses five. They are our openings into this sensual world, in which we have taken the form of animals, but we remain so only for a time. We are the creature at our pupal stage, the chrysalis enclosed, the pharate within — who in due course will shuffle out, leaving an exuvium. We look to the Resurrection as to another world that we do not yet inhabit. I think it may be a development of this one; an incomprehensible development of what was already a realm of miracle. But this I cannot know, only glimpse in prayer, as through a glass, darkly.

In his “Vision of the Last Judgement,” from a notebook in which his great lost painting is described, William Blake shows an unearthly comprehension, of what is a person through every metamorphosis; of what does not change, through change. And consider:

“It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels, but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another, but from God only.”

Likewise, as Blake patiently explains, they are not happier than men and devils because they are better, but because they do not pry at the Tree of Knowledge for the gratification of Satan. For knowledge can be no end in itself, and power is not their game. Rather, they are figures of a perfect intellection, and messengers of supernatural joy.

And so our Michael, assigned and assigning, in the command of celestial forces, who “rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm” — archistrategos in the glorious battle, in the joyful war. He, in the battle, at the front line, which runs through every human heart, where the stand is made with angelic armies.

Defend us in battle! Be our protection against the wickedness and snares!

We take a grim view of statistics up here in the High Doganate, polls especially, & election results in particular. But that does not mean we don’t throw numbers about. One cites them by way of confirming the obvious, when the obvious is being denied. Advocates of “democracy” like to say that voting beats violence as a way to change a government (I don’t have a number for that), but become so mesmerized by this glib nostrum, they cannot see it is possible to have both. Or, that the one may lead to the other, as in Greece, Egypt, &c. Or, that mass murder is also compatible with statistics. Or, that citing statistics is often the first stage in what our generals like to call “graduated escalation.” (I love such pleonasms; “hack journalist” is another favourite.)

An alternative way of avoid violence, as we were mentioning in Comments the other day, is to chemically lobotomize anyone who looks angry all the time. “Anger management” courses may be specified for those who have a good reason to be angry, & are able to explain it. This serves as a useful warning to them, that they had better regulate their emotions in a more passive-aggressive way, if they are going to get results in a modern democratic system, wherein the provocateur enjoys the moral high ground.

These are for the special, stand-alone cases. For the population at large, the Internet has become, on balance, the most effective pacifier. Those who become addicted to, & dependant upon, are neutralized in a hypnotic state, even better than television because aethereally interactive. Thanks to hand-held & other miniaturized technology, they progressively withdraw from interaction with the biological environment, & hardly notice the provocations. I’ve seen this on trolleys in the Greater Parkdale Area, where it is now possible to pack hundreds into a car which seats forty-seven: the people who are wired feel no pain.

I call this phenomenon “electronic” or “virtual death,” to distinguish from biological death, which presents fewer symptoms. The subject mimics death in the sense that he is always elsewhere, with respect to space & time. The power of suggestion continues to work, but involves zombification. Sex & violence continue, but in a distracted way, at greater & greater distance from intention. Take an email from him, & you find he isn’t really there, either, but constantly “moving on.” This is “progress” in its most poignant form.

But I started by mischievously hinting I might offer a statistic, & here it is. One-in-seven Americans, according to the Pew polling organization, not only aren’t on the Internet, but refuse to get aboard. The proportion is higher for the dirt poor, & the geriatric, but even among the young & hip, better than one-in-eight stay intentionally offline.

This contrasts with the situation one full generation ago when, basically, no one was on the Internet except computer nerds. The trend was sharply upward in the interim, but as we like to say, all trends are reversible, & this one hit ceiling a few years ago. We are dealing with people who are no longer “not on the Internet yet,” but positively failing to queue. Their numbers could be slightly enhanced if we added those who have jobs, & are thus compelled to connect with the Internet at the office, but walk at the end of the day.

Such refuseniks offer a challenge to government & industry, for how can they be monitored? How can they even be reached with demographically-targeted, mass advertising? I suppose at some point with electronic anklets & forced implants. Meanwhile, video cameras are being installed all over the place, to catch those who have, in fragrante delicto, strayed offline.

*

Not statistics, but proportions, have long intrigued me. The proportion one-in-seven corresponds, I would guess from the extent of my inquiries, to the number of Christians who opted for some version of the monastic life in the High Middle Ages, when it was generally available & a visible alternative to the more worldly familial calling. Then, too, there may have been a disproportion of geriatrics, & the dirt poor in need of some wardship, but the monasteries also attracted many of the young & hip. It is a little-known fact, at least to our contemporary world — one might almost call it a scandal to the worldly — that many actually prefer the celibate, eremitical life, & would choose it if they could. Others, though goaded by sexual desire, sometimes rather intense, might nevertheless take celibacy as their least bad option, on a broad view of life, love, Heaven, Hell, & so forth. This is to reduce the religious mind to a view of sexuality: but I am addressing my contemporary world.

On the modern view, the erotic & the sexual are interchangeable terms. In the pre-modern view, they were not, nor did they much overlap. The relation between teacher & student, for instance, is erotic but not sexual; or else it may become sexual but not erotic. Eros drives art, & much spirituality, of just the kind sexuality kills. Let me recall the case of Michelangelo, as an obvious example; beyond him, many other great artists, craftsmen, thinkers, perhaps even saints who were, disproportionately, of the homosexual inclination. Indeed, our modern toleration, nay encouragement of homosexual practice, has had a devastating effect on the production of art. So, too, through previous generations, the dispersal of (often “heterosexual”) monks & nuns.

The recent triumphs of homosexual activism have depended on this background social condition, in which it is inconceivable that persons who suffer from sexual desires would keep their pants on. They are now “expressing themselves,” & of course they are helped by the detachment of sex from childbirth in the popular imagination. By a subtle hocus-pocus, or not so subtle, an Ought is derived from an Is, & the people are instructed to “go to.”

Sex is also presented as prophylactic against anger, by an extension of the “make love not war” propaganda, disseminated in the 1960s; though again, as in the case of voting & violence, it is quite possible to have both. Verily, the older school of psychological wizardry was given to observe that wrath & lust are related conditions, sometimes two sides of a spinning coin. Look around, & gentle reader might see this duality in action among the hormonally charged.

We all know this, at least in our hearts, but there is another fact to which we are blinded by that very knowledge, in its current form. What I see all around me is the young forced into sex, often against their weak wills & better judgements. Virginity is rejected on the analogy of illiteracy; sex is assigned as part of education. Quite literally, as it were: for the idea is reinforced by the constant extension of “sex education” to younger & younger children in our schools. When teacher says it is “natural” he really means it is mandatory. Violence is also perfectly “natural,” to human nature. When teacher says violence is “unnatural,” however, he means that it is banned.

The Internet is a teaching medium. What it teaches, we might want to discuss. We might actually be appalled by what it teaches. The idea that teaching anything is good, is yet another of those strange, indefensible notions, necessary to the sustenance of the progressive mind, & to the general emancipation from reason. The older notion, which survives in parody, was that teaching requires moral intelligence; that right & wrong must be carefully distinguished; that character & good habits should be instilled. On this view, the essential education is “home schooling”; classroom instruction is supplementary, specialized. Thanks to “democracy,” this is now reversed, & it is the task of public education to instil the new “public values,” such as self-expression through sex, & the need for violence to be sublimated. Moreover, to overwrite any “private virtues” that may have been contracted from old-fashioned parents, or by reading non-approved highbrow literature.

Note the opposition of “values,” which are transient, to “virtues,” which are non-transient. Our politicians discuss “values” only. I have even noticed that the more progressive the politician, the more he will blather on about “values.” The vacuity of the term is appealing, for the purpose of conning the simple-minded, when they are unsure how to vote. Note further, that the Internet has proved a useful & important teaching aid, for while it may inculcate little in the way of general understanding, & nothing in the way of self-knowledge, it is an exemplary source of “values.” It shows the student that depravity is perfectly natural, & widely available, & that by suppuration he can fit right in. It is why we need computers in our schools. The Zeitgeist absolutely demands it.

But what to do with that minority of kids who refuse to “hook up” — in every current sense of that term? Who are, by the received modern definition, anti-social? Who, even after generations of progressive indoctrination, persist in living life in the raw, in the flesh as it were, without access to pornography? Who may be privately indulging in celibacy, or other forms of chastity, & thus intentionally cultivating independence of mind in defiance of our “community values”? And what if they aren’t paying their taxes?

Surely the government will have to intervene.

The Greeks, as I once learned through Leo Strauss, had a wonderful word for vulgarity. They called it apeirokalia — that is, a lack of experience in beautiful things. At the heart of liberal education (“liberal” in the pre-modern sense), is a project to rescue men from this condition. It gives them the experience they need, among beautiful things. It puts them in contact with the finest minds, the finest works, this world has to offer. As Strauss said, this is to make them humble, & to make them bold. Humble: to discover their place in an intellectual order, among minds more learned & wiser than their own. Bold: to break with “the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair.”

What we have today, in the governing heights of Western society, is not liberal education. Rather it is the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals — the class, the herd, the swine in many ways, who have come to dominate the intellectual trades. In academia, in media, in law, in bureaucracy, in religion (broadly considered to include “secular humanism”), we have people who are credentialled, to be sure, but who have not been educated. In particular, the education they have not received is liberal education, which requires nearly the polar opposite of the kind of training they have successfully endured.

Liberal education is not specialized. The word “university” once conveyed this. It had many faculties, but was in that sense alone multifarious. It was an aggregation of teachers & scholars gathered in one place, to consider matters “in the whole.” It offered training in many disciplines, but to a common end.

Well, who am I to judge? “I have a Grade X education,” as I was explaining to a gentleman the other day, by way of excusing myself from an opinion on some monsterpiece of advanced “textual criticism” by an academic star, which he proposed to study as a project in self-improvement. “I can hardly read & write. You have a Doctorate in Philosophy, I’m sure it will make sense to you.”

He could not imagine I had read the book. He was, I assume, assuming I had seen the reviews. That is how most of us form our opinions, having delegated the homework to the specialists.

Pressed on the matter, I recalled the moment of vivid clarity I had experienced at the age of sixteen, when I suddenly decided to leave High School. It was like an impulse to leap off a train, upon realizing where it was going. Somehow I grasped, perhaps through older friends, that it was taking me to a University, to a modern one — to a kind of cemetery for the philosophical mind; to a place where the love of wisdom had been replaced with the demands of industry; to an institution in which everything I myself loved would become desiccated & tedious. Somehow I saw that the humanities had been “professionalized,” that the adepts of the ancillary disciplines had taken over. The brain had rebelled & deposed the heart; mind had itself been displaced by a revolutionary committee of sparky little neurons.

This wasn’t a Left/Right thing, incidentally. I was anyway much more “liberal” in those days (in the modern sense). Rather, the technocrats had removed the thinkers. This must have moral & political consequences; shallowness always does. No doubt it all began with a suggestion from the Devil; but I’m sure the pioneers of modern higher education were well-meaning people, who considered themselves perfectly humane. (They were, as I understand, the people who pioneered modern textual criticism of the Bible, in Protestant England then Protestant Germany, from the later 17th century forward; their sceptical techniques spreading incrementally through other fields, making each in turn ever more specialized & self-referential.)

In the olden time — to which I was already semi-consciously adhering — the introduction to a classical work might tell you what it was about, who wrote it, when & why; things of this nature. That the book was written at some time, by someone, & had been preserved in some apparent even if fragmentary order, might go without saying. After all, men had loved it, & gone to the trouble of copying & re-copying, time out of mind. This in itself showed it must be worth visiting. The teacher’s job was to focus the excitement; to show a way in.

In the modern time, the introduction begins with the textual history. What the book is & why one should read it is the afterthought. It is the part that is taken for granted, for the scholars are working assiduously on the text. This is an enterprise like coal mining, in diminishing seams. Advancement comes of scraping lignite off the walls, in ever smaller chips with ever greater precision. Then, as we arrive at “literary theory,” polishing the nothing that remains.

This, anyway, was my juvenile rebellion: “You are not going to send me down that mine!” My general idea was to read instead, from love of learning; to travel & find what professors I could on the open road. Yes, there were some left, & they always took me in. I had only to write to an impressive teacher, & he would immediately agree to see me. I never suffered from lack of teachers; though I could have done better on the point of discipline & self-organization, for I have always been a reckless lover.

Here is the motto I discovered near the front of a book that my high-school Latin teacher lent to me, it seems yesterday, but now long ago. It is by Emil Staiger:

“The organs of recognition, without which no true reading is possible, are reverence & love. Knowledge cannot dispense with them, for it can grasp & analyse only what love takes possession of, & without love it is empty.”

Let me add that the teacher, the late Mrs Jessie Glynn, is exempt from all criticism, textual or otherwise. She was a real teacher, of classics to anyone who wished to learn; a remarkable product of the old rural (& very Protestant) Ontario; the last of her tribe. She was herself approaching her last year of schoolteaching, a subject that would be cancelled as irrelevant to modern needs. The other teachers told me I must stay in school for my own good; she alone told me I’d be better off leaving. They understood small things, she understood large. They were employees; she went on teaching privately without charge to anyone who came to her — through four decades, as an old widow woman, past the age of one hundred. God rest her beloved soul!

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On the other hand, most students in the drive-in universities of today — the ones which were built in the profligacy of the post-War — are not channelled into the advanced technocratic realms. These colleges take in the great mass of kids who simply lack the equipment to benefit from a university education. Instead they are fed the equivalent of paperback blurbs, on books beyond their reading comprehension. The little they must ingest is supplied (once by mimeo, later xerox, later PDF, &c), to spare them the effort & expense of tracking anything down. They are marked on their ability to spew back what has been spewed forth, to standards constantly adjusted downward by a process of inflation so that no one will suffer the ignominy of failure, & thus a first painful prick of self-knowledge. The whole scheme was conceived in the spirit of reductionism, to what is (mistakenly) called the lowest common denominator. It is a process more like pumping gas than mining coal; by comparison it makes going down the mine seem attractive.

The modern world “prioritizes,” the way manuscripts are prioritized by the competent textual scholar. This one comes before that. For sure it does, if it did, & let me not say the textual history of a book is uninteresting. Nor would I suggest that the acquisition of basic reading skills in Latin or Greek — the sort of thing redbrick universities don’t encourage — is unimportant. They are not important in themselves, but for the larger purpose of assimilating a classical heritage, or as much as one can within the limits of a human life. For either we do that, in each generation, or the heritage is lost.

As Jacob Burkhardt was quoted, in the same long-ago borrowed book: “We can never be free of the ancient world, unless we become barbarians again.”

Grammar & vocabulary are where we begin — where the child begins with a capacity for rote that will leave him as he grows. Our ancestors understood, that we must catch them young, before that native ability is transformed, during adolescence, into a new power to reason on things, & the old delight in rhythmic recitation becomes dreary & a trial. It is not a “priority,” to start with the declensions & conjugations, it is carpe diem, as Horace used to say.

Ancillary disciplines are not lower in “priority.” That is how the liberals (in their modern version) think. Reality does not work that way. One must become a crack Latinist (& I to my shame never became one) to capture nuance in that language; one must be able to dream in Greek to fully appreciate the use of the old Attic or even the later New Testament rhetorical figures — to actually understand what one is reading. Though let me add that a mind attuned by poetry in any language will be open to the possibilities of nuance in another, so that with a certain genius (in the ancient Greek sense) insufficient training in the ancillary discipline can be overcome. Great scholars of classical Chinese, for instance, have admitted that the irresponsible Ezra Pound did better translations of Li Po; great Thomists have admitted that the hack journalist, G.K. Chesterton, wrote arguably the best book on Thomas Aquinas. Life is unfair.

The ancillary disciplines are specialized, but strictly crucial, means to a general understanding. They can never be discounted, yet they cannot be the end to which we strive. So it is within e.g. Christianity, where moral perfection is not an end in itself, but the means of advance towards the beatific vision. This does not mean it has some lower priority, that it can be safely ignored or bypassed. Only liberals think like that. For the sincere Christian, good behaviour is not optional. It is the only possible path to the destination.

All this I have mentioned in order to make clear what I mean & what I do not mean. To this day, I have nothing against textual scholarship, & have benefited immensely from the coal miner’s work: especially that which was done centuries ago, in the monasteries by men no longer named, when the veins were much richer. Yet those were not specialists. They compared manuscripts, they sought out the best, in the spirit of Saint Jerome: out of hunger for the truth, for the whole of the truth, or for as much as they could get their eyes on. They sought books because they wanted to read them, & their commentaries engaged with the authors of those books. They were men, not apes.

The apes are specialized, each species for its niche; men, to the contrary, were designed to be generalists, in the image of our Maker. That is how we went forth & multiplied & subdued the earth: as masters upon entering the home prepared for us. We were not, Darwinists & Marxians notwithstanding, just a new design of monkey. It is therefore to be regretted that the modern university is, for the most part, graduating apes, not men. Except, those which do not even try to train their innocent charges to the survivalist level, & graduate not independent apes, but interchangeable cyphers for the machinery of perdition, to be ruled by apes.

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The demand for “relevance” in education has been throbbing since at least the 1960s. Among the vulgar, it was in demand long before. Expressions such as, “merely academic,” have a long & curious history. So far as I can make out they were a product of reductionism from the era of Reformation propaganda; but a book could be written on this. “Relevance” is for the apes, who delete from observation anything that does not serve the proximate utilitarian end. Human beings were distinguished by idle & irrelevant behaviour — from strange ritual acts of worship, to painting on cave walls, to the very mysterious burial of their dead. Tools could be fashioned by many animals, & apes were especially clever with them. It was the use to which the tools were put that revealed our unique elevation, above nature.

I am making this short observation today, by way of lament for our Church. A commentator on my last post, the Canadian poet, Robert Eady, made what I considered an astute remark. He said, “I think what has been missed for the past fifty years or so is that Christianity is a revealed religion.” This was, in its subtle simplicity, the sort of remark that requires a liberal education. It may be too simple for an illiberal mind to grasp — it could be dismissed as something obvious, & irrelevant. It could be taken glibly, when it is not glib. The entire orientation of our Church is to Christ, alive & available in the Eucharist. This is the unifying centre of our Christian life; not one thing among many in any sort of list. Everything we must do follows from that singular act of Communion, in which the mystery of the Creation is taken whole.

We had bishops, once, of liberal education; men who were not narrow, & reductionist; who had cultivated the habit of seeing things whole. Beyond them we had throughout the Church teachers & scholars of real breadth, whose interpretation of our revealed religion was not constrained by the “power-point” mindset we are now getting, from Rome down. We had clergy & laity alike, broadened daily by the experience of the beautiful old Mass, before it was remodelled by the apes of the ICEL to make it “relevant” to the times. We had a Church that consciously made its appeal to all manner of men & women, & which was in that sense catholic, universal; which was not tempted to pitch away whatever might seem “irrelevant” in the moment. That Church had found her way into the hearts of men of goodwill in every known human culture.

A hideous, ape-like, destructive force has been at large in our world for generations, & through the hierarchy of our Church for at least the last two. It is in its animal nature always lurking; it had emerged within the Church before; but in the time since Vatican II it has often seemed to have broken its chains. It cannot be defeated, within this world; therefore must ever be contained.

The Catholic Church teaches a revealed religion, not a religion limited by specialized human inquiry. It is, further, a mystical religion, & irreducibly so — “for men do not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God.” The Church reaches out not to “the poor,” but to “the poor in spirit,” a much different, & not narrowly material idea. She is there to accommodate sinners & saints, not those of any preferred rank or class. Her works of mercy & charity follow from the Revelation, & out of the mystery of divine Love. They are not a political programme; Christ kept himself aloof from Caesar.

Literalism, reductionism, point-scoring, prioritizing, are marks of the poorly educated mind. The consequences are too easily foreseeable. But the cure is also foreseeable. Prudence itself, queen of the cardinal virtues, requires something in the nature of a liberal education, & we must learn to value that again. It can begin with the restoration of reverence in the Mass, & with the re-apprehension of living beauty; with the re-acquisition of our enchantment with a Creation that is not reducible to parts in a machine. The whole is more than its parts. It is animated by the breath of the Spirit, & it is innate with poetry.

Or as Pope Francis put it yesterday, we must “bear witness to, & disseminate, this ‘culture of life’,” against that culture of death everywhere encroaching.

The Church, to my mind, has a profound problem, which she has had from her beginning, & yet it could be mistaken for a modern problem. She aspires to convert & inspire all folk, & has within herself the means to reach into the heart of every human culture. But in practice, the pews are empty, & the people stay away. There may have been times when the pews were full, but possibly they were full only in practice. For in the testimony we receive from every generation, so many were, in spirit, not there. They would go off & act just as if they were really just a pack of angry & selfish heathen.

I have not written lately about my discouragement at several things said or done at or near the top of the Roman hierarchy. As an old Czech friend used to say, in the depths of the 1970s squalor, “Whatever they do in the Vatican, I’m staying Catholic.” Newman said as much on behalf of the faithful in the time of the Arian heresy, when the Church was apparently saved not by the big but by the little people. (See, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.)

Men are men, & they make very poor bishops indeed. And they are generally at their worst when they are playing to the gallery — when, for instance, perhaps out of a desire to bring in the numbers, they begin to display what I (& Theodore Dalrymple) like to condemn as “moral exhibitionism”; or otherwise adapt the message to the market; or in the old neo-conservative phrase, “define deviancy down” to make everyone more comfortable. In my view, for instance, sentences that begin, “Who am I to judge?” never end well, & oh could I go on.

It may even transpire, that men of high ecclesiastical station play at humility, waving a hairshirt about where all may see, when really they should wear it invisibly under their garments. An example would be a lord who disparages the outward trappings of his office. He may have forgotten that these trappings belong to the office, not to him, & that in the end “dressing down” is like defining deviancy down. It is to call attention to oneself, not the office.

Such things are discouraging, & yet we were instructed by our Founder, even from the Garden of Gethsemane, not to be discouraged.

For it cannot possibly do to give up the struggle, to fill the pews not only with warm bodies but with the genuinely reverent & faithful — not to some passing fashion of the times, but to Our Lord. This starts, of course, with asking God’s help with one’s own case, yet cannot end there, given the specific Christian instruction to “go forth among all nations.”

This, anyway, is my thought for the day.