Essays in Idleness

In his “treatise on human happiness,” deep within the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas reveals the desire for happiness that is found in the heart of every human soul. It is part of our “hard wiring,” and so outrivals such limiting accidents, as a person’s race, gender, IQ, or creed. Moreover, Saint Thomas thinks that it should not be compromised. For as a lawyer might say, an ambition of complete, rapturous bliss — “is indicated.”

To this, modern medicine has responded with the heart monitor, and other devices to measure everything from caloric intake, to the state of your finances. Indeed, tedious instructions from dieticians make us all into neurotics. I calculate that worrying about cancer, alone, took five years off the average life. And that was before climate change was invented.

Saint Thomas never dieted, so far as I can see. He would, however, observe church fasts. For the best form of dieting is, not to eat. This may be supplemented by not listening to the news. For have you heard? God alone is the answer to our vexatious public questions.

One should not look for happiness only in the pages of the Angelic Doctor, however.

No, you should also consider the works of the Czech composer, Jan Dismas Zelenka, at the court of Dresden (whose horns and whistles were supplied mostly from Bohemia).

Zelenka was just pinged to me, on this infernally modern machine: his Missa Charitatis (in D Major, ZMV 10). It arrived with a reproduction of his autograph score, from 1727 (I think). It gives the text for his thrilling exposition of God’s love and mercy.

The theological point is clinched, in the Benedictus — within an extraordinary conversation, that we may overhear. It is between a soprano and an alto, and two transverse flutes.

Among the excitements, during our repaganization of Western, formerly Christian, society, is the necessity of rewriting all our laws and customs. As an ancient English curse, cleverly attributed to the Chinese, had it, “May you live in interesting times.” It was the English who were capable of irony; and now we are cursed.

Marriage is one of the many institutions that have come up for review. It wasn’t really a legal institution. Only adultery was against the law. Nevertheless, the State kept a form of marriage register, and customary events, such as bridal showers and wild bachelor parties, accompanied the entries. “Natural” marriage continued to exist, in parallel with the formal sort, but without any protection against adultery.

Eventually the “welfare state” and homosexual demands began to dissolve the institution. It now appears to have reached complete dissolution, except that the State continues to invent matrimonial laws.

An understanding that marriage had permanently “evolved” occurred to me while attending a Roman Catholic church-wedding, as a friend of the bride. She came from a fearfully backward, conservative home, as did the groom, but the priest did not, apparently. He purposefully twisted the words in the Rite that he was awkwardly reading. Instead of “this man” and “this woman,” the marriage was between “two persons,” he proclaimed. This made it a same-sex marriage, even though both parties had explicitly requested a Christian service.

All marriages must now be same-sex marriages, I concluded, and cross-sexuality has been banned. (Still, the State enjoys making new laws, and the Church prides herself on her ability to catch up.)

Since our scheme of repaganization may quickly be supplanted by Islamic conquest and forcible conversion, and Islam has numerous laws and customs (for instance first-cousin marriage, and polygyny), there may not be much time in which to compose the new texts. These things, after all, require centuries to settle, and in the absence of an otherwise agreed religion, they will be settled in (ludicrously) different ways.

In the grand procession of idlers, to which I have always aspired, P’an Yüeh is a worthy exemplar, from the vicinity of the magnificent capital of Lo-yang, in the Three Kingdoms period of the third century — a little before it was sacked by the Hun.

While idleness is a universal, or “catholic” activity, it admits of several specializations; P’an Yüeh’s particular calling was “ineptness,” for which reason, after an undistinguished career as a government official in which he scored many failures, he retired to his family estate. He is quite amusing on the subject of his various professional catastrophes.

The fu is a kind of memoir-essay, which was ancient even in 300 AD; followed by a shih, or descriptive poem, longish by Far Asiatic standards. In a delightful fu-shih (translated by Burton Watson), P’an Yüeh describes the excellent trees he has planted, fishponds he has dug, rooms he has constructed around that family retreat (and the mill he owns to finance it all). He lives an idle life with his aged and delicate mother and various siblings, but no longer his wife. For in another poem I learnt that he was one of “a pair of birds nesting in the wood,” but woke one morning to find himself alone.

His expertise in fruit and vegetable gardening I cannot judge, after 1,800 years, but his mention of pears from Lord Chang’s valley orchard, persimmons of Marquis Liang’s wu-pi strain, King Wen of Chou’s supple-limbed jujubes, and Chu Chung’s plums, suggests a formidable practice of silviculture, or a diligent thief. His inventory of legumes and herbs reveals a passionate foodie. He has retreated in contentment, yet still has pleasing distant views of the Yellow Riverside capital, whose temples he visits sometimes. He has made “ineptness” work for him.

Chou Jen is quoted in the Analects of Confucius: “He who can exert his strength steps into the ranks; he who cannot stays behind.”

Aware of this adage, and despite his perspicacity, P’an Yüeh accepted recall to official service. He was falsely accused of treason, by a powerful rival in the bureaucracy; then executed, together with his mother and all members of his family, in the tradition of oriental tyranny.

Moral: It is very dangerous for an inept person to fall into competent hands.

Culture is antecedent to politics, we are told by the people who have noticed, and religion in the broadest sense (including every religious impulse from the saintly to the satanic), is antecedent to that. Faith, of some kind, can be found, inspiring, throughout the diagram, but to say this is misleading, for we would have to include many kinds of faith that are false.

Expressionism, as an art movement, is associated with northern Europe, but expressionism as a universal, raw tendency also came from the northern wastes. Our non-expressive classicism is from the Mediterranean and Byzantium, not because they are geographical South, where the sun rises higher year-round, but because they were constitutionally anti-barbaric. The North can be anti-barbaric, too, but frank sentimentality and emotional excess — romanticism, at its most depraved — may be interpreted as a spastic effort to stay warm.

By contrast we have Piero della Francesca: the painter who was also a mathematician. He depicts the character of his subjects, in preference to their “narrative,” to the point where the innocent observer who has never heard the story will not guess what is going on.

If, as a young man (as I once was) you are mysteriously and powerfully attracted to, let us say, Piero, and Cézanne, it is because of this quality of “ineloquence” (Berenson’s term). They impress me as the most articulate expression of this anti-expressive quality, which has nothing to do with the history of art, per se. One may find it in every era when art has aspired to substance.

Yet the XXth century was home to the “Expressionist” movement, and the XXIst century continues from its bottom. The Wickedpedia uses Edward Munch’s panel, The Scream, to illustrate this in one glance. It is a spectacularly neurotic painting, infected with angst, that disturbs the viewer.

A notion, taught in our junior schools, that the purpose of art is to “express oneself,” must be condemned in any mature society. Ditto, the sort of poetry written by adolescent girls. Trash needs no encouragement.

The rightful artist, even when employed in self-portraiture, presents character in preference to feeling. The “selfie” impulse denies even the possibility of art.

It is a while since I cheated, and brought an old Idlepost forward. This is from Candlemas, ten years ago:

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Today, the fortieth and last of Christmas, is once again “Candlemas.” It commemorates the presentation of the child Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, along with the sacrifice of Joseph and Mary, who could not afford a lamb. The feast also commemorates the conclusion of the forty-day cycle for the purification of a mother, according to Hebraic custom. A poor Jewish couple with their firstborn, acting according to ancient Mosaic law; greeted by Anne, and by the prophetic Simeon, who utters the Nunc Dimittis:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

I was an Anglican too many years to abandon this splendid English rendering of the Scripture, the third of Saint Luke’s great canticles (after the Magnificat and the Benedictus). The Latin is good and the Greek is better. The poetry of the words is fully necessary. They are intended to convey the poignancy of the scene, in the face of this old man, who has recognized his Messiah, to the amazement of the child’s own parents.

It was from this canticle that the Greeks named the feast, Hypapante, referring to this moment of recognition by the Old, of the New. Tired and waiting for death, standing himself at the junction of worlds, the eyes of Simeon see that nothing will be the same. The Messiah has come, and the whole course of history that must follow flickers in the old man’s eyes, still bound in the breath of a moment to this blessed Earth, and the dimension of Time. It is the canticle I read over my own father’s grave, as we committed him, dust to dust.

There is, I am sure, theological significance in each of the events that combine to be celebrated within Candlemas — in the procession and the blessing of the candles. The fulfilment of that ancient law, drawn from the pages of Leviticus, is again before us.

I like to think on the two turtle doves: the gift to the Temple that this couple, Joseph and Mary, could actually afford. The simplicity of it, alongside the incomprehensible gift of Jesus.

Christ has come to fulfil the laws of Moses, and the Law behind all law. It makes no sense that He should be here, that He should arrive in this human form, in the arms of this young mother. The ancient imagination demanded that a Saviour come in timpani and trumpets. Here is this small child, and these impoverished parents, with their brace of pigeons in a stick cage. They stand at the intersection of all Time.

The Author of all we know, has sent so personal a Gift, by such messengers, as the fulfilment of His promise to Abraham. I find this astonishing; indeed, too preposterous not to be true. That He is presenting Himself, helpless at the Temple, in fulfilment of an ancient vow. I find it very odd. For what does this gesture suggest?

The humility of a Lover.

There is, arguably, such a thing as real democracy — which is, people voting with their feet. For instance, in the States, there is significant net internal migration from “blue states” to “red states,” and from big blue cities to anywhere else. International refugee movements display which are the “shitty little countries” (I quote a prominent foreign policy wonk), and which countries are most attractive. Foolish inhabitants may vote in elections for their own impoverishment and cultural decline; they often do. But their migration patterns display a contrary knowledge. They move consistently “to the right,” politically; and away from Islam towards Christianity whenever possible.

Childbirth is a vote, too, but in time instead of space; and here the woman’s choice prevails. They vote with the feet of their little babies, or by eliminating them. I try not to pay too much attention to these trends, for they have become spectacularly depressing; but note, the Canadian birth rate has now officially shrunk to its lowest level in recorded history. This indicates that Canadians would, on balance, prefer not to be alive. They have other ways to show this preference, and have acted on all of them, but the decline in the birthrate is the second-most definitive. (Suicide is tops.)

The previous record low-birth performance was achieved in the previous year. This statistic is misunderstood, however: for Canada’s population is simultaneously growing, at well over a million a year, due to record immigration. But the people who used to live here — mostly of French, British, miscellaneous European, and native Indian ancestry — have been dying off. White women are mostly sterile, apparently, for those who enter the adventure of mothering are, in most cases, from races we did not formerly import. This means the per-woman birthrate, which has dropped to 1.33 overall, understates the predicament. It may still be close to 2.1 (the replacement level) among the “new Canadians.” It is closer to zero among Canadians of the ancien regime.

Well: “Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.”

“The times, they are a-changin” was among the governing slogans of my boomer generation, when we were younger and friskier, though now that they have changed, we do not dwell on it. We look back, in my case over seven decades of dubious and often painful alterations, and realize that although things may have changed, profusely, the assumption that we would have something to do with it had been unsound.

Nevertheless, it is not true that one man does not have the ability to change the world. Consider Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. Had each of them never been born, a lot of others might not have perished so abruptly, and the timeline of history might have, comparatively, lacked variation; though we keep the counterfactual argument in reserve. What else might of, would have, had to happen? Any of those gentlemen could have been knocked out by a childhood disease but then, perhaps, even greater monsters were naturally annihilated, instead.

“Be careful what you wish for” is another epigraph, tried and true, but as we cannot actually know what we have wished for, we are unable to be careful enough.

By many public commentators I have been informed, recently, that the times are changing again. “Woke” is going out of style, I am told, and “DEI” is dying. The scandal is that we have lived in an age when such idiocies have thriven. But we will always live in such an age, and in consequence, the times will always be changing.

Apparently, I am not the first to notice that a substantial portion of the state in which I am a national (“Canada”) is uninhabited. I think the last person to notice was the late John George Diefenbaker, a politician who pursued a “northern vision.” Visions seldom outlast the sunrise, but as well, Dief-the-Chief was a self-confessed Tory, therefore quickly run out of office by the Grit voting machine. (It did not flourish on smearing and lies to the extent that it does today, but even in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, that was the essence of the Liberal Party.)

The Arctic, by which I refer to all those latitudes above 60 degrees North, is prevented from inhabitation and economic growth by government edicts. It is almost entirely “federal” land, on which any sort of investment, except large socialist-capitalist megaprojects with substantial political kickbacks, is legally unwelcome. The people who live there, despite the cold, owe their existence to government subsidy.

Sometimes, supposing the will, I have imagined how it would be done. How would we make Canada “north of 60” a magnet for immigration? Successful political reform will require violence, or an election like the one they had in Argentina recently, in which the immutable élite is exterminated in a scrupulously vegetarian way. But then what?

My own vision involves glasshouses. Under the sun of the arctic summer, a tremendous amount of growth could occur, of vegetables and the like. (Even salads — lordy, lordy.) By design, these glasshouses would float upon the permafrost, while being anchored by geothermal pipes. Once passive solar energy was lost to the long, dark season, micro-aggressive solar panels would continue to shine light on the winter seedbeds. Persons and livestock might also benefit from geothermal warmth.

The whole strategy would be clinched by allowing people to own things, and to trade, without the intervention of “planners” and environmental bureaux. Further encouragement could come with a universal tax break for the North, to be gradually extended through the rest of the Dominion.

Stephen Leacock has receded from the literary history of Canada and the world, though like Chesterton, he retains many readers. He might have retained more, I venture, had he been more brutal in satirizing contemporary stupidities; but he was determined to be gentle. He thought that was the rôle of the humourist, and he assumed the rôle, from a native capacity for wit and drollery; and perhaps paradoxically, from courage. He knew that it takes more courage to state a platitude, than to invent a paradox (and less to utter a blasphemy, than defend a truth), and so he deviated just for fun. Too, he was by training an economist; where’s the fun in that?

I’ve been reading Leacock’s more serious popular books (he wrote some real drudge for the classroom), which I find more entertaining than his less serious books, produced every year at Christmas. Towards my age, he wrote Too Much College. He says what might as well be repeated today, and again be ignored. He looks back over many decades of college lecturing, after several decades of formal schooling, and many centuries of formal higher education since the Middle Ages.

We have, Leacock gently hints, created a mostly useless, but partly counter-productive, enforced educational bureaucracy, proceeding at the speed of the slowest pupil, year by tedious year. The idea that “college” is an appropriate place to study any of the number of things, that need doing before studying then doing again just after, is exhibited as farce; but also the sedentary topics are extended until, by the time the student has obtained a marketable degree, he is approaching retirement.

Education has been eating up life. The book appeared in 1939, even before the post-War inflation of “educational privilege,” but already the institutions of learning had swelled immoderately. They offered a service that “gentleman don’t need, and the poor cannot afford.” Their best, most splendid graduates are taught to speak subjunctively.

Leacock describes the evangelization of his own discipline, when it spread beyond the Manchester School to the East India Company’s school at Haileybury. “Their cadets were supposed to need it, and work it on the Hindu. The first lecturer was Malthus, the apostle of the empty cradle; but he had a hare-lip; the students couldn’t understand him; so no harm was done.” But by now, we have conferred degrees even on “masters of business administration.”

The moral damage rapidly spread from an essentially Malthusian, hare-lipped approach to reality, to the patient procedural destruction of our youth, as they are taught to think that they know something. Alas, the dear children.

I celebrate, for instance, the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, pseudonym Lenin, the day after the event, rather than on the day itself. This has nothing to do with the old Julian calendar, which was formerly observed in Russia. (It has now been almost universally replaced by Pope Gregory’s calendar of 1582, which has made New Year’s since the most explicitly Catholic festival.) Rather, my celebration is of the fact that Lenin’s anniversary is over, and all anticipation of it can end.

Lenin, and his archetypal successor, Stalin, were among the greatest monsters in human history — with far more victims than Hitler, but less than Mao. Those who embrace Communism, to this day, must explain the accumulation of tens of millions of corpses, in exchange for nothing gained.

Does God have a plan to save murderers like these? It would have to be “secret,” for it is not mentioned in any document He inspired. God, I should think, does not do “secrets” like that. But, perhaps theology is as far above my head as it is over “Tucho” Fernández’s.

More than half-a-century has passed since my most memorable disappointment, which involved horses. At the age of fifteen I had fallen in love, at first sight, and decided — spontaneously but irrevocably — that I must pursue her. But she, who did not at first seem to prefer another boy to me, did, apparently, prefer horses. I could pretend to like them, but not to the same degree. Consider: as a child of seven, I had had the experience of being thrown by a horse, into some nasty thorn-bushes. This horse was not opposed in principle to taking a rider, I was assured; only to carrying me. Though my goodwill continued, I became permanently sceptical of horses.

My disappointment was when another young man, with excessive charm, unnecessarily handsome, dangerously smart, fibrously athletic, and from a wealthy family, invited the uncommonly beautiful Sylvia to a dance. He was also, for his age, an accomplished equestrian. The tragedy of this affected me deeply.

I have gradually overcome my acquired prejudice against the equidae, however.

The question of whether horses, too, have emotions, has been subject to debate since the time of Albertus Magnus, at least. He believed they had none. Most girls, I think, would disagree with him; among the boys, only the “scientific” types would be strongly opposed to anthropomorphizing. Christians might be mildly opposed; but tend to agree that even fish can suffer. (It is the ability to articulate suffering that they lack.)

The sage of Cologne — the great Albert — did not ride on horses, ever. As many of the Dominicans of his generation, he disapproved of the blazing hotshots on their saddles, and though he travelled afar, he made a point of doing so on foot. This wasn’t to spare the horses’ feelings. He just wasn’t a hotshot.

In my own view (“settled science”), the cowboys who ride should endure our displeasure, when they stray beyond the ranch.

The philosophical man is peripatetic. He proceeds at the natural walking pace for animals of his kind. When transported faster, he will likely expire.

The re-awakening fault along the mid-Atlantic ridge under Iceland, after some centuries of dormancy, should remind “environmentalists” and the other smuglies that, even if there is No God, He still controls our material environment — to say nothing of the spiritual. The upheaval on the Reykjanes Peninsula does not proceed on any earthly schedule, detectable by our geological scientists. We are just as much at a loss, listening to their account, as we were when listening to Dr Fauci about the Batflu.

Similarly along the Noto Peninsula, in Japan: where the New Year’s earthquake caused landslides while rearranging the landscape, extending the coast by hundreds of yards out to sea; people and their equipage were washed away. Impressive aftershocks have restricted relief efforts.

Neither was among the more memorable subduction earthquakes, above, say, magnitude 9. But the history has only been recorded on our clever instruments since the end of the XIXth century. And because the shaking can be “improved” by countryside and urban conditions, the casualties do not accord with the Richter numbers.

“Megathrust earthquakes” occur generally undersea, where they generate very high and continuous tsunami waves. Quite apart from extending or reducing a coastline, these also accentuate ocean trenches, and build mountains on their forward side. A quick glance at the Himalayas reveals the scale that is possible, and may suggest the question, Who needs asteroids?

Though we happily waste trillions of dollars and euros and yuan on our extravagant government schemes, to make the earth more suitable for robot inhabitation, all may be rendered pointless in a moment. That is because it was pointless to begin.

One of the principles which the craftsman learns, when he is developing the skills of a book-restorer, resembles the primary principle in (legitimate) medicine. “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm,” says the oath in Greek in my Loeb Classical Library edition, usually translated from Latin as “first do no harm.” This is attributed to the sage, Hippocrates. A careful reader of the entire oath will realize that the doctor who performs an abortion, or a mercy killing, deserves very grave punishment; but also a doctor who counsels the same. Of course, ethical standards are not what they once were.

In book repair, one is instructed not to do what was done to many older works I have seen in both public and private libraries. The book has been trimmed or mechanically cross-bound or otherwise desecrated, usually by a well-intended moron. No subsequent book-binder would be able to undo the befoulment.

By comparison, the affixing of a paper cover around contents that remain intact, while it may look flimsy, is not a criminal act. When the book’s owner becomes a little richer, or sells to someone who is, fuller decorative justice can be done. But that competent craftsman must also provide that stitched gatherings be resewn properly, that the book will open flat on a table, that endpapers have not been glued irresponsibly, covering vital clues to the book’s provenance. A book plate or other alteration must not be added, that cannot be removed cleanly by a later hand: or the earlier book-binder is guilty of vandalism.

While it is not customary for book dealers to invoke Apollo, Asclepius, Panacea, or other gods and goddesses, they should nevertheless be aware that angels are watching, and as my father used frequently to remind me: “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail.”

I should wish that this moral principle, of taking care, were extended to all of our creative tasks, and to the repair even of our inferior creations. I consider it to be the primary conservative principle. The designers of office towers, apartment blocks, vile sprawling subdivisions — and the landscape litter of solar panels and electric windmills — should give more thought to how these things will be removed, when a higher civilization comes along.