Essays in Idleness

One of the many disadvantages of having money, is that it exposes the keeper to paranoid impulses. For instance, he fears it might all be taken away. Some of these impulses are currently on exposition in the stock market, where more damage to goods and services, if not to healthy soap-loving lives, is now being performed than by any pandemic. Or at least, this is the purport of reports, which present the bull market as a form of collateral damage from a health panic. Whether Natted States Mericans are panicking, in fact, is a separate question: my correspondents assure me there is no sign of it anywhere they live; but clearly they are panicking on Wall Street.

This might be taken as a sequel to my last Idlepost, as gentle readers may surmise. This is because I write only from my own slow-moving experience. Consider Tuesday’s opening line, from Ibn Hazm. I recommend that you consider it carefully, for it offers the key to happiness, as he says.

Now suppose that you are very rich, and have a million, billion, trillion or whatever in equities. It would be clumsy to lose it, by your own mistakes, but sometimes there is no choice. In my own case, with a fortune that might be more conveniently measured in the thousands, it was all taken away. This was twenty years ago, and I have been in the North American state of penury ever since, thanks to actions by others I will not describe. At no point was I accused of breaking any law, but could be “cleaned out” regardless, thanks to recent, trendy laws. Superficially, it was an outrage, and truth to tell, I grumbled on several occasions.

But in the clear light of retrospect, I am grateful, to have been freed from the trap of my bourgeois existence, and modest accumulation of wealth. I can now pray sincerely for the people who took it from me, though not yet for the bureaucracies.

As we learn from the Gospels, great wealth is a terrible burden, but as we might discover by extension, any comfort can have this effect. To worry about money is taken as bad, and it is, though not for the reason assumed. It reveals to the comfortable — and the uncomfortable, in parallel — that they are prey to the wrong kind of worry. It would make more sense (vide: the same Gospels) to worry about the fires of Hell. Many of our ancestors were more rational than we are, in this respect.

Given the great burden of human life — that things sometimes go bad — it makes further sense to discharge lighter burdens so we may concentrate upon such heavier ones, as sin and death.

I don’t like to burden myself with envy, for example. I have nothing against great wealth, per se. I don’t mind if my neighbour is filthy, stinking rich. Modern politics is based on cultivating this envy, and I am eager to have no part of that. But I will allow some pity to fill the space that envy has evacuated: I feel sorry for people who must rise every day, and consult the Dow Jones Index for hints of what they have lost. It is a miserable fate, and in many cases without compensating joys, such as spring sunshine. They are working too hard to notice.

Should gentle reader himself be quite rich, he might understand me better than a poor person. It is a little too late, however, for those who leapt from high buildings, after their fortunes evaporated. (Did you know it is easier to lose a large fortune, than to give up cigarettes?)

But some will claim that being rich makes them happy. There are moments when it might do so, but almost by definition, such happiness is shallow. This is a Christian reflection (borrowed from a Muslim sage): for what kind of happiness is it, that involves the loss of one’s freedom?

“If you wish to live happy, never be in a condition that would not allow you to be satisfied with another.”

The book, Hispano-Arabic Poetry (Baltimore, 1946) fell into my hands years ago, and I have since failed to part with it. It is by Alois Richard Nykl — dead these last sixty years or so, but prior to that a remarkably learned man. The point of his book was to show the relation between Muslim Spanish poets and the Troubadours of Aquitaine; that in many ways, the former precursed the latter. He was an assiduous translator, and in the course of his survey we take glimpses of the last moments of Granada, and the periods that passed before: the Almohad, the Almoravid, the Muluk At-Tawaif, the Emirate, and Khalifate, looking backwards. For the generous Christian reader, there are moments of nobility to be treasured in their own right, throughout; too, of wine and song.

Some know of the previous Visigothic (and Christian) polity that was conquered by the Arabs, and therefore understand that polities come and go; or they might know of the cultured pagan Roman Hispania which preceded that, with its own famed dramatists and poets; or of the fascinating Iberian caves and prehistory. History flows, we might say, always downhill, but along many paths.

We are often told, by scolds, to appreciate the Andalusian glory, and to remember when an inferior Europe drew inspiration from it. In our attitudes, curiously Islamic ourselves, we celebrate their philosophers principally, both Muslim and Jewish, yet ignore a fine lyrical inheritance. (The Arabs did the same thing with the ancient Greeks. They were mesmerized by Plato and Aristotle, yet from Homer forward the Greek poets were ignored.) We attribute to them a wise tolerance, which they would never have attributed to themselves; for everyone tolerates what he has learned to love.

Iberia is a place, with ghosts as well as people; she leaves her mark on all who pass through. Someone should eventually write on the influence of ancient pagan and Christian Spain upon the later Muslim occupiers: how it made their civilization different from the classical Arabic; how it brought the best (and sometimes the worst) out of them; how it put them in a new encounter with Europe, which persisted for centuries, and persists still, even within the phantasies of Al Qaeda terrorists.

The verse maxim I have cited is both lyrical and philosophical. It falls out of a body of work to rival the great Persian Islamic tradition in literature, music (nota bene), architecture, painting. The thundering truth embodied in that line is intensely Islamic, and could have been Persian, or have come from anywhere in that realm. It also happens to be intensely Christian, and could have come from anywhere in ours. By stealing it, however, I risk the wrath of another mediaeval Muslim Hispanic poet, who would suggest that my tongue be cut out, as it is “the right hand of the verse thief.” (The Islamic propensity to chop right hands off thieves is well attested over space and time.)

All I wished was to hold it up, and consider it for itself. It is a good question for worldlings of all faiths and denominations. Happy, perhaps, for the moment, could we be happy in another, when everything in our surroundings has changed? Or are we just like frogs, instead, blissful only in one corner of a pond, and apt anyway to be eaten if we move?

“For the days of man’s life consist of brief moments, / They pass as quickly as the lightning flash: / And I, now prepared to unload my burden, / Like the camel who hurtles me towards death. …”

I have perhaps taken liberties with my re-translation.

Not being gentle reader’s “news hound,” I have nothing to add, nor even subtract, from mass media reports of the coronavirus pandemic. (In China, Iran, and Italy, we already have three dispersed regions to justify that label.) I have my suspicions on how it started, and even how it first spread, but these could not be useful, now. I lack exact medical knowledge of the pathogen and its behaviour, and have otherwise no way of guessing its future course. No one yet knows the death rate, or can master the epidemiology, until the disease has run more of its course.

From the (partly legendary) history of “plagues,” I know that human efforts to stop them will generally be counter-productive, and that confidence in new methods is misplaced. Some, today, are impressive, nevertheless, and the speed at which medical labs have been responding creatively in the United States, Israel, and other free countries, is encouraging: within months we may have working firewalls and a “cure.” But within weeks the whole population of our “globalized,” “interactive,” “synergetic” world will have been infected. The virus has already landed in hundreds of global locations, and that was all it needed.

We can know that panic is, not seldom, but never helpful, and we live in a time when the technical means of spreading panic have advanced suddenly and tremendously. They are intentionally abetted. The crisis will be — is being — used for political ends, which must necessarily undermine the blesséd “stay calm and carry on” impulse. On the other hand, there is no more way to stop a panic, until it has burnt itself out, than to stop a novel virus; at best we can slow it if the public authorities are factual and candid. But what will be, will be. Such pain as may be coming, will come.

Pain, in the broadest sense, including the imaginary, is the issue. Our modern societies have been, we might say, trained to cope with it poorly. Our anxieties about quite modest forms of physical discomfort, are often no longer in our control. All traditional societies were better in this respect: both Christian and non-Christian. Without being explicitly stoic, people were raised to embrace “coping mechanisms” which range from purposeful distraction from the pain at hand, to fatalist assumptions.

We were once raised to expect pain, to accept it as part of having a living body. It came with nature, and so, living there, we were prepared to endure it. A distinction between pain, which may or may not be “objective,” and suffering, which involves a commanding element of choice, is common to all previous societies; ours are actually innovative in this regard. We want instant relief, and even demand it, propelled by our absurd faith in technology. We distribute blame when it doesn’t arrive, as if every disaster were the product of a plot. I get this from the tone of so much media reporting: malicious allegations of malice. I’ve been guilty of it myself.

For us, the virus is a useful growing up experience. The world is still the world, though we thought we had changed it. Events happen which we didn’t foresee. Live with them, or die, as necessary. For Christians, neither should impinge upon our overriding joy.

First, we reduce everything to numbers. Next, we lose the ability to do math. I’m not sure what comes next after that.

I was thinking this when informed that 500 million dollars, divided by 327 million Americans, makes $1 million per American, with enough left over for lunch. This insight, working from a twittertweet, was provided by a member of the editorial board of the New York Times — always a malicious newspaper, but once a respected one. I learn from a blog that at least one prominent TV personality leapt upon it, too, and many lesser souls then copied. The “500 million” was the number these polymaths had taken, on the usual hearsay, as the amount rich meejah-mogul Bloomberg had blown on his badly failed attempt to buy the Democrat primaries. People, they imagined, would have preferred to take his cash directly. (At $1.53 actual, per head, it might buy them each a coffee, but they’d have to shill out for the doughnut.)

In Republican comments, the comparison was of 500 million, to the hundred thousand or so that semi-literate Russian Facebook trolls had supposedly spent, to swing the last election to Donald J. Trump. But a voter would have to be a more sophisticated arithmetician to follow this joke.

Up here in the High Doganate, where we currently lack a panel of experts, but once got a prize for doing sums in school, we (in the sense of, “I”) are seldom surprised. We’re used to progressive, non-binary, politically correct mathematics, and the many headlines they generate. We’re used to blocking them out, and only wonder why the general electorate hasn’t developed this skill. But when told that “the rich” are going to pay for whatever The Peeple wish to appropriate today, they are quickly gulled.

This is a minor matter, however, compared to the numbering itself. Their world — ours — is now apprehended through a thick fog of digit(al)ized numerals. These have replaced things. Judgements, on everything, have been simplified, by reducing each thing, absurdly, to a composition of numbers. We have little machines to do any requested calculations. (“Statistics don’t lie.”) This is called scientific reasoning. True, some of us are still locked in pre-scientific boxes, wherein numbers only bounce off the walls, and things are still apprehended in and of themselves.

It is a poet’s world, if gentle reader relearns the use of his eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch, et cetera. The late Marshall, then his late son Eric McLuhan also counted. They were trying to enumerate how many senses were acknowledged by mediaeval men. The number was in the dozens when I last checked with Eric.

By means of this backward way of looking, our distant ancestors could detect subtleties that made each thing unique. They, like artists, could know plenty that we would judge to be of no importance.

In order to recover this exalted state, under present intellectual conditions, one must try very hard to ignore numbers. Try instead to “see” things, just as they are. Even within numbers, the felt distinction between big and little was worth noting. (This was one of those “senses.”) That anything with more zeroes after it than one has fingers to count, is meaningless to the human observer, was once understood.

For instance the question, “How far away are the stars?” was grasped as irrelevant. They were known to be very, very far away. (The “sense of distance.”) They also knew the Earth was, comparatively, very small. That we couldn’t visit the immensity, was no occasion for regret.

But once we have numbers, the “how to” spirit surfaces. The desire to extend our control over things that are, in their nature, none of our business, comes with the new techniques of calculation. (How many sea miles west, from Huelva to China?)

It is interesting (to me) that about the time Columbus was reporting on the Indies, Queen Isabella was presented with a proposal to establish an academy, that would regulate the Spanish language. She rejected it, not on grounds of what it would cost, but because unlike Latin, or Greek, Spanish was “the language of the people.” Therefore it didn’t concern her. It was instead something outside her reach, a “thing” apart, like the circumference of the earth. Some things, irreducibly, were.

Canadians are, as the Irish were described by Jonathan Swift in his day, “A servile race, in folly nursed, who truckle most when treated worst.” Whether either were always so, I will open to debate; my experience is more with the (former) Dominion of Canada.

As has been confirmed, by the recent interruptions in our transport system, or the government’s extension of the “MAiD” (euthanasia) programme to kill off the least convenient portion of our population, we will stand for anything. We take pride in our obedience to the authorities of misrule, so long as their measures come with the fatuous label, “progressive.” We will even condemn what we’re told to condemn, should anyone express an intelligent objection, for it is a country where, as David Frum once explained, “There is always one side to every question.”

Our police will not even put out a fire, set by “native peoples” along a railway track that most certainly does not belong to them, for fear of a political incorrectitude. (The term in quotes is a malicious falsehood; it is designed to apply only to a select racial group.)

While I think it is over-polite, this statement from Archbishop Collins describes the latest expansion of the country’s horrific “euthanasia” laws. (Again, quotes around a poisonous euphemism.) Yet there was no Lenten appeal to Christians, for conspicuous penitential prayer. Must he assume that we are all saltless?

This item, by the Canadian poet and thinker David Solway, makes a summary of our situation, five years into the management of a contemptible prime minister. The statement on our “Dead Country Walking” has not the fault of excessive politeness. I endorse every line.

Through all my adult life, which began in the age of Trudeaumania, Canada has been in the forefront of “progressive” innovations. Indeed, an American deacon long in residence here, commented that the craziest Democrat pipe-dreamers back home, proposed policies that were legislated in Canada decades ago — such as a “single payer” medical bureaucracy, and compelling taxpayers unambiguously opposed to pay for abortion-on-demand. Objections of conscience are simply no longer acknowledged up here, and the old saw, that this is a “free country,” is now in disuse.

We are in the vanguard of public evil; yet in saying so I imply that the same “trends” have advanced throughout the Western world. The innovations are rarely if ever voted upon, here or elsewhere. Instead, the public are exhaustively “re-educated” to the new position, by organized propagandists in media and state. The “debate” on each issue consists of demonizing and smearing the few who offer any kind of argument. They are few because they know what happened to the last person who stood up — for what had through thousands of years in all human cultures been accepted as the good and the true.

In the end, each innovation is effectively confirmed by the great tide of “low-information, low-intelligence” voters. They confirm the agents of “progress” in power, on the basis of their own virtue-signalling postures. Those who express the slightest reservations, such as Canada’s retiring parliamentary opposition leader, are drummed out. (Although he promised not to do anything about them, he was accused of harbouring non-progressive views.)

My only reason to vote “Conservative” is to keep the “Liberals” out of power, thus slowing the rate at which new affronts to civilization are introduced. In some other Western countries, something more ambitious is being offered by the “Conservative” parties, and is proving quite successful. But even our “progressive” pope has openly condemned such “populists,” demanding that government bureaux and international organizations ignore them and press ahead on “climate change” socialism, ruinously open immigration, and so forth.

I cannot think of a response besides, don’t fall asleep. It was the agony Christ conveyed to his disciples in the garden at Gethsemane. The worst may yet happen, but will be transformed.

Jean Vanier is the latest Catholic hero to go down. No sooner had we begun to name schools after him, but an internal investigation revealed an “inconvenient truth.” Not all of his relations with young attractive female volunteers had been chaste. Nor was he just slipping.

The grisly details may be found on the Internet. I have made no effort to examine the charge-sheet, case by case, though I can see it looks bad enough. Not McCarrick class (Vanier seems to have molested only technically adult women), but darkly hypocritical all the same. I seem to have misplaced my enthusiasm for smut, as part of my retreat from hack journalism, or I would provide more details.

Our hero came from a good family. (His father was Canada’s last plausibly viceregal governor-general, if that means anything to anyone anymore.) The institution founded by his son, L’Arche, with the play on his mother’s maiden surname, did commendable works for those with “developmental disabilities,” by all accounts I’ve heard: hundreds of outlets in dozens of countries. Jean Vanier was also internationally respected as a philosopher and theologian: some thirty books. I’ve never read one, so must pretend to have no opinion.

He was a repository for trust and adulation. He cultivated a “look” which I would describe as aggressively benign. He played the saint in public, well: he was a master of publicity. Owing, no doubt, to my personal nastiness, I was suspicious of him all along.

When a Catholic in his position systematically avoids such an unpleasant topic as abortion, and speaks of everything else with a cloying niceness, my suspicions are aroused. Though I kept my views politely to myself, it was only because he was none of my business, and I’ve seldom had a need for more enemies. He didn’t seem to have any, however.

“If the biographers of the saints would write of their defects as well as of their virtues, their biographies would be longer.” So said Saint Alphonsus Liguori to one of his novices.

Another of his nuggets, from Naples a quarter millennium ago, was, “Everybody has defects of character. I have more than others.” It was a pre-modern boast.

What they were I am unable to ascertain; even a modern Irish biographer finds only tepid ones. But God would find more. Too, let it be said, that one makes one’s confession to Him, not to the rabble.

But the irritation, with the late Jean Vanier, is that he kept his “little foible” up for too many decades. Moreover, and more damning, I gather he had developed a theological patter as part of his seduction routine.

Good taste, if nothing else, requires the sinner not to make godly claims. This is, arguably, the worst feature of sexual and all other exploitation. It is cruelty, of a vicious kind, for when the victim is abandoned he or she will be alienated not only from the figure of authority, but also from the God for whom he presumed to speak. Terrible harm is done to a soul who was trusting.

Terrible things happen: we must be “comfortable” with that. We cannot know to what depths of depravity another human is capable of sinking — it is always lower than we surmised. Yet we can know, with assurance, exactly what we have ourselves done, or intended; and we ought to know that forgiveness can come only from the Witness of all our crimes. For He is also the ultimate Victim.

A man like Vanier now serves as a dire warning. You think you are a nice guy? You’re not.

Thanks to juxtaposition, the Christian feasts and fasts, both Western and Eastern, have not only kept the observant on their toes. The liturgical schedule also teaches, by increments, as all of the liturgy has been doing (or, “had” for the cynical) these last many centuries. The juxtaposition of “Mardi Gras” with “Ash Wednesday” is meant to be abrupt. Not meant, perhaps, by designing liturgists, but by the believers themselves.

Shrove Tuesday was, in its ramifications I think, an invention of the people. We will have a big party and joyously clear away the clutter from our barnyard lives; then we will face the morrow with ash on our foreheads. Both adventures are fully Catholic, “in spirit.” But one would be meaningless without the other. It is not merely cynical, but impoverishing, to take only the one we prefer.

We do this “secularly” (i.e. profanely) at the New Year. On the Eve we drink merrily and pig out. We used to extend this with indoor garden parties, to a levée upon the next day, up here in the frozen North. The governor or mayor would be waiting for us. That seemed too formidable and disciplined, however, so now we just do the headaches, quietly privatized — those of us who were young and animate.

My own recollection of having drunk Southern Comfort too copiously of a Near Year’s, for the first and very last time, comes back to me after half-a-century. I am still trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I am still trying to account for the girl in whose strange bed I awoke next day — we were both fully clothed I must assure gentle reader — and who possibly hadn’t been my only mistake. I mustn’t have been thinking ahead. I don’t actually remember what I was thinking. My only defence was being a teenager. I knew immediately that it wouldn’t work.

But on New Year’s Eve, thought of the morrow is generally “abstract.” Such items as Resolutions are, as most of us realize, “for the record.” We might label them “fake news” in advance. We know ourselves well enough not to believe them. As Mister Wilde said, “I can withstand anything except temptation.” We forgot to anticipate, how our Resolutions would be enforced.

Ash Wednesday is, for the faithful Western Christian, not a joke, however. It is, to the believer in Christ and His Church, scarily specific. No matter what one’s capacity for pancakes and sausages, we know what is coming. There will be forty days of it — morning, afternoon, and night. This is what I mean by “foreboding.” To one of saintly disposition, there is joy in this, too: in the simplicity and purification; in the looking forward to Ends. This disposition does not come naturally to me, however.

There are moments, perhaps, when I feel that my appetites are conquered. This is a ruse of the Devil; and one of his cleverest at that. Imagine one’s subsequent surprise, when the double-dose of temptation arrives, and one has neglected to request divine help in facing it down. Or alternatively, one was a humble Christian, and cautious about playing the hero. We have learnt to try without the expectation of success, and therefore without boasting, even to ourselves. For how many times have we failed?

Hence the self-knowledge, never to be abandoned, in our preparation for the annual fight with the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. We will try to accomplish what seems within our modest powers, assisted by a Lord who knows that we are toddlers, learning, as it were, to walk. Let’s get that right, for now. But some day we will run — into His arms.

My old friend George Jonas, now forcibly confined within the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, observed of the times:

“In the not too distant past, people who were illiterate could neither read nor write. These days they can, with disastrous results for the culture.”

He quoted his own old friend Stephen Vizinczey:

“No amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.”

On stupidity itself, I like to quote Robert Musil:

“If it were not so hard to distinguish stupidity from talent, progress, hope, or improvement, no one would want to be stupid.”

How often we revert to the dispersion from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, when craving for a little common sense.

Over here in Canada, where the last few surviving reactionaries sometimes meet for whisky and a smoke, I was glad to discover myself not the only gentle reader who noticed the connexion between my last two Idleposts.

Some — not Catholic, I noticed — took me to be subtly criticizing the bible-thumping impulse. This showed discernment, on their part. From Gospel-printing by the million in a thousand languages, to Bible “apps” on your “smart phone,” our common religion does not suffer from lack of texts. Let me say for the record, folks, that I have no objection to Scripture, per se, only to the glibness with which it is so commonly received.

Can people accurately interpret the original substance of works translated after thousands of years? And on one quick reading? On its face, this question answers itself. They cannot possibly, without much help, and a patient humility far beyond the normal.

But if Jesus is God, and if he really founded a Church as He said, and introduced the sacrifice of the Mass, with a liturgy formed and steeped in her Scriptures, there must be some way in. When Our Saviour told his Apostles to disseminate the Word to the ends of the earth, I frankly doubt he was anticipating either moveable or digital type.

Cor ad cor loquitur, as Saint John Henry Newman took for his motto, from Saint Francis de Sales and much older sources. It is a phrase that contains many dimensions, explanatory yet inexplicable as many Christian things. (Newman himself did not try to explain it.)

We are not distributing a text, although it is Holy Scripture — whether the part written before He came down from Heaven, or the part that was written after He returned — in the largest possible number of copies at the lowest possible price. This is not a commercial enterprise, with missionary salesmen. As an exercise in communication, it is conducted from heart to heart and is — miserable word — ineffable.

The function of our evangelism is not promotional nor statistical. There is no formula. Men are not converted by syllogisms, Newman said. We do not tell the story of Christ, except to children. We distribute Him.

This week’s plunge into the mass meejah has yielded more obvious things to say than any since last week. Consider, if you please, the phenomenon of selfie deaths. According to a “global survey,” which I will believe if I’m in the mood, there have been hundreds of them. Personal biological extinction may follow from trying to get a picture at cliff edge, in proximity to waterfalls, with wild voracious animals, from moving vehicles, &c. A distinction is made between events that were foreseeable; and those which were not, such as the selfie-taker in Lebanon who got blown up by a car bomb that had been contrived for another cause entirely.

A young lady who is depicted cavorting atop the Pedra da Gávea by Rio de Janeiro — about half a mile of sheer drop — is the Twitterish heroine of the moment. She was able to creep down the steeply sloping side an improbable distance, then wave her arms. But many in her Instagram audience were able to post photos of themselves doing exactly the same thing, while they were in Rio, so we may have to yawn. At first glance, the story seemed to report that 259 had died in this way; but on more careful reading the number declined to zero. It was that “global survey” — apparently done by Google search, then dressed up to look “scientific.”

Still, who needs to master mountain-climbing if you can risk your life without any skills whatever? All you need is a toke of marijuana and a “smart phone.” You can even omit the weed, if you have no brains at all. The mean age of a selfie death is 22.94, it says here, and most accidents visit the 18-to-24 demographic (“millennials”). The overwhelming majority of defunct selfie-takers are boys (i.e. cisgender males), and India alone hosts one-half of fatalities. (America, however, proudly leads in selfie firearm accidents.) Most selfies — or koolfies, restaurantfies, musclefies, dentisfies, &c, to use the latest terms of art — end uneventfully, we learn. So much for our statistical overview.

There appears to be an international effort to reduce selfie deaths, by banning access to almost everything. It is probably led by a Canadian.

When an acquaintance leapt off the Bloor Viaduct (this was before selfies were a thing) the city fathers and mothers spent, I think it was, seven million dollars to put a tall, high-tech fence on the bridge, which would seriously delay the next person to try it (though give him some extra height). This figure would not include the cost of their endless studies and committee meetings.

Had I been in charge, we would have put up a sign, requesting those committing suicide to avoid traffic, underpassing in the ravine. In English and French. Total cost, derisory. But then I would be criticized for heartlessness, when in fact I was guilty of heartless black humour. The funny thing is, the sign would have worked, most likely. For laughter precludes suicide, in most instances. And if they don’t see the humour in it, well, we tried our best.

Surely, gentle reader is against printing. Although it may have some legitimate uses, it contributes to literacy in irresponsible ways. Generally, I’m opposed to making copies, whether we are stamping out car fenders or restaurant menus today. It even looks like cheating.

Blueberries are also produced in volume, along with corn cobs and mice, with some human intervention; it is true that, from one moment to the next, we want one thing or another. And it is true that I have felt somewhat paganized by a bowl of blueberries (plus maple syrup and thick cream). But never, to my knowledge, by a single blueberry; whereas, a single sheet of printed book may cause all kinds of mischief.

The Chinese noted the difficulty, not so much from inking stone in the Han Dynasty, and pressing cloth over it; nor when woodblocks were first employed in the T’ang; but later among the Sung elect. From laziness, I assume, they introduced moveable characters in carved wood or clay. (In a dangerous innovation, the Koreans soon cast type in metal.) Learned books were printed in runs of one hundred copies or less. They would (at first) find their ways only into the studies of reliable, backward-looking, Confucian scholars.

But the impartial observer would notice that thousands were printed from some of these blocks, for “pop lit” including Chinese novels. In cities, especially, whole populations were at risk of becoming prosaic. Outside entertainment had invaded previously innocent minds. Within another eight centuries or so, there’d be radio, television, Internet, fake news; to say nothing of repeating floorplans in skyscrapers.

A Chinese sage slipped out of a book on my shelf — I think it was Volume Five, Part One of Needham. He had been warning of the consequences even at the time. It was like gunpowder. The Orientals had discovered that, too, but had the decency not to use it (at first). Printing was also a kind of explosion.

People’s lives were seriously disturbed. Primary schools became commonplace, and literacy was spread, recklessly among the urban masses. As books became very numerous and cheap, they were read quite casually. Soon there were catalogues and advertising flyers. Trade manuals encouraged wild, do-it-yourself attitudes. The artisan class bought in heavily; many set up print shops to advance their own wealth and prestige. Men of humble origin would rise in society. Spoilt, discontented children would trail in their wake. Printing has much to answer for.

Europeans are slow, and more centuries would pass until the Catholic Church made perhaps her greatest error. This was to allow Gutenberg and others to spring moveable type on Europe, and actually to encourage it. Within mere decades we had the Protestant Reformation on our hands. By now we are almost used to this chaos.

Mea culpa: I early formed the habit of reading books myself, and by the age of five had acquired an addiction. It hardly improved my behaviour; in fact it put all sorts of ideas into my head. Compounding this, I also learnt to write. And I continue to do it, day after day, because, quite frankly, I cannot help myself.

Who knows what the bankruptcy point should be in public accounts? (I am trying to write a “lede” that will shake off all my readers.)

Certainly not oeconomists. (That first “o” was inserted out of euphoria.) The old-fashioned, “classic” ones, who wrote on this topic in ways that could be understood, and thus disagreed with, had the notion that when a person, human or corporate, reached the point where he could not pay his debts, he was bankrupt. There were laws to formalize this, so that customers could avoid being cheated, investors ditto, and creditors might grab what they could. The bankrupt entity would cease to have a good trading reputation. This is because it would be extinct.

Or perhaps we might backtrack to the term “insolvency.” This is a condition even poor people can participate in, without the ponderous intervention of the law. Poor person goes to corner store, tries to buy something on credit. Proprietor says, no. The police only come if the scene gets out of hand. (Or, used to come. The withdrawal of police protection from “little people” is a sign of our times.)

What interests me at this moment, and some others, is the bankruptcy of huge national states. Play with such words as “unfunded liabilities,” or even compare revenue and expenditures, and one is soon in wonderland. At what point do the “service costs” on public debt reach the point of no return? Why does nothing happen at that point? (It seems to still happen in private companies.)

All my adult life, in Canada and the other English-speaking countries, our political masters have been running up debt. This is true of all parties. There were laments about this, many years ago, from the rightwing parties, but at the moment they are, as it were, leading the charge. And while it is true that several countries still publish annual budgets, they don’t mean anything. In Natted States Merica, they may not even be published.

Now, gentle reader may be aware that my career in oeconomic journalism lapsed nearly forty years ago. But there was a time when I had the fondest clue. I used to look at the published figures, and try to make sense of them. It was a joyless existence. Still, I was able to provide myself with the illusion that there could be a responsible government. Just none that I examined.

Recently I wrote an Idlepost in defence of materialism. Granted, it was paradoxical. Today I would like to add a word in defence of money. We should ignore it at times, and I often do. The proud Aristotle says the magnificent man “does not count the cost.” Yet I’m in favour of having something real to ignore, rather than having to ignore things that are imaginary anyway.

Years ago I advocated a return to the gold standard, or some equivalent basket of commodities, for the same reason I still advocate the former (though distrust the latter). I don’t like money to be abstract. And my reason for this is moral rather than practical, or practical, but in a moral way. I should wish people and governments alike to endure consequences from going bankrupt, and therefore to avoid it more often.

In a similar way, I would like morality not to be abstract. I should want it to be fixed, like old-fashioned money, when Kings or Parliaments weren’t tampering with it.

Current Canadian example: when you block the railroad on purpose, you go to gaol. You pay, so to speak, and since you know that you will pay, you are less likely to do it. But now that all you fear is “negotiations,” it is like bankruptcy. It becomes a question of how big you are, and whom you can intimidate, with the help of such demonic powers as “the meejah.”

Though I’d hate to criticize a holy father, I’m not sure Pope Gelasius knew what he was doing when he declared the Feast of Valentine, towards the end of the fifth century. For one thing, it would never be clear which Valentine we should celebrate. We had so many Roman martyrs by that name, and two centuries had already passed since we could have gotten to the bottom of it. Even at the time there was confusion between Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni; although they might have been the same. A previous pope (the first Julius, scourge of Arians) built a basilica on the Flaminian Way, at the place where whichever Valentine was martyred, and this was a popular site of pilgrimage (it says here, in my St Andrew’s missal).

Perhaps we will discover that the two men were indeed one, should we have leisure to investigate in the hereafter. For worldly purposes now, it doesn’t matter. I am content with the legend of his miraculous gift of sight to the judge’s blind daughter — that judge who had condemned him — sending her a note signed “Your Valentine” as a farewell. This would be a fine act of Christian retribution.

For Christian love is a strange thing. One might almost call it paradoxical. How are you to get even with him who has done you an ill turn? With those who hate and curse and despitefully use you? Who persecute you? Saint Valentine shows the way.

As weapons go, it is extremely efficacious. I’ve had it used on me, and gosh does it sting. Years later, I am still feeling painfully guilty.

I even tried it on one occasion when I was feeling uncharacteristically pure. But not being a saint — as gentle reader may have noticed — I added a nasty little barb. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed what my “persecutor” had done, when doing him a big favour. He would now be condemned to wondering about me; to wondering if he could cover his traces. He’d be thinking that he owed me, in the moral bazaar of life, when really I owed him. For his ill turn proved to be, for me, a net benefit.

This is not so surprising. Those capable of candour, with themselves, will acknowledge many such unintended boons. They begin with graduation from the school of hard knocks, and may continue until God has determined that martyrdom is the only way to save you. Those who said “please” and “thank you” along the road, had no effect upon you at all. Those who actually took the trouble to hurt you did favours that you could not have received in any other way. Why shouldn’t you bless them?

But still we haven’t got near to the strangest factor, Love, itself. It makes a mess of everything. It disturbs every routine. It is, I fear to say, revolutionary. We do things, out of Love, that no one enjoying a comfortable life would dream of doing. Enduring Love is a splendid form of enduring madness.

And it is not a Valentine’s card. Those, for the most part, are self-interested. Flowers, too, are often just contractual. Nothing wrong with self-interest, in itself — our very Salvation is in our self-interest — but it mustn’t be in conflict with an incomparably greater interest, that ought to delete the craven. A plan of seduction, for example, isn’t intended to do another any good. Rather it is meant to enslave another person, for one’s temporary pleasure.

This is why chastity till marriage is so important. My younger gentle readers are invited to think this through. And to consider how often the true Valentine is a gesture of farewell.

Why did the Romans decline and fall? Well, there’s an easy answer to begin with. The Romans declined because they spoke an inflected language. They declined because they had nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. They also conjugated, but we won’t go there. Ablatives and “locatives” were challenge enough (they promised me sex, but here was a seventh declension), and while I can hardly speak for gentle reader, the irregular nouns used to drive me squirrelly. Still do.

But why did they fall?

For the same reason everybody falls, is the easy answer. No one is biologically immortal, and nations, empires, are just like them. Sooner or later something fatal hits them. Some, like the Egyptians, live to a very great age, and some, like the European Union, are stillborn. Wipe your tears.

Lead plumbing can be a killer, it is said: people might hit each other over the head with the pipes. A number of other “environmental” causes have been adduced on the Internet. Decadence is often cited. The possibility that there was no single cause has yet to be examined; for it would complicate the question. Whether the Romans should be defined as an Empire, or a Notion, might be spilled across the table. The Empire is almost certainly gone, but the Notion survives in the world of Notions, vaguely mixed with other ones. For years now, I have been living in the Roman Church, which has been in ruins. But she is used to that.

It was the Empire that went, because Empires go. One dynasty succeeds another, until we get to the last. Then we have new management, usually savage. I am, as it were, a fan of empires, for within their territories there is often peace, and a desire for order. Those who have experienced the contrary, savage arrangements, may pine for the old imperialist days. A little nation may be safe within an empire; on its own it is likely to be eaten. Whereas, semi-voluntary assimilation is a less painful fate.

My own theory, presented in public bars, is that the pagan Romans fell because of rationalism. They had too much, and it gradually poisoned them. Glibness is lethal, according to me, and it sneaks up on you. Confidence in “reason” leads to taking things for granted. Eventually, even the irrational have to pay. The Romans thought anyone in his right mind would want to be a Roman; the Americans get like that sometimes. They didn’t realize that most people are in their wrong minds, including them.

Take, for example, the old pagan Roman religion. A cliché tells us that they were legalistic. In their worship, they made elaborate contractual arrangements with the gods. “We do this” (worship the gods correctly, down to the most tedious and finical details), “and you do that” (bring a fine harvest, or whatever). But all societies are legalistic in this way, from the least to the most sophisticated. It is one of those things hard-wired into the human brain. We all hope to control what is beyond our control, except a tiny minority of the wise. The worst fools believe in technology.

What made the Romans special was that they believed in law. They did not follow formulae irrationally, and blindly out of stubborn tradition; but rationally, out of calculation. Rationalism makes madness really stand out.

You wouldn’t have caught the Greeks doing this. They always knew they were done for, no matter how clever they happened to be. Unconscious prejudice was good enough for them. For the Romans, the end came more as a surprise.

Was this why the (western) Roman Empire collapsed? Partly, I think: a certain cocky over-confidence in their ability to handle and regulate things, that they should leave alone; an incipient quasi-socialist powerlust. A lot of empires went down that way, and the more rational, the quicker.

The other reason was snapping turtles.

Now granted, all European snapping turtles were extinct long before the Romans, but you know what I mean. For as a child hiking along the western branch of the Credit River, I learnt not to mess with them. So maybe it wasn’t snapping turtles, precisely, but the Romans liked to mess.