Essays in Idleness

God designed our world to be extremely inefficient. I daresay this was intentional. In all the seeding and spawning functions, we see that one in a hundred, one in a thousand, one in a million, take root or otherwise grow to maturity. The rest goes to feed the birds and the fishes and the pigs. Almost everything they consume is in turn wasted, spewed away. And this is true down the line from biology to geology. Fossil fuels and the better building materials take countless centuries to form. Now, look up to see that a trillion trillion stars went to the making of one habitable planet. He (God) takes His time, and makes the necessary sea room.

“And yet it moves,” as Galileo didn’t say. It works, and in glorious moments we glimpse some aspect of how it fits together; how every particle is cycled and recycled — from the bloated cow to the wee dung beetle rolling his gleaming pellet away. There is extreme inefficiency, and no waste at all. Often I am staggered by the scale of the thing; by the universal attention to microscopic detail; by the adaptability of every constituent part; by the constant interweaving relaxation and restoration of a purposeful order.

Humans, on the other hand, are efficiency freaks. We are always looking for a way to slash the costs, to eliminate redundancy, control the outcome, guarantee success. And in the course of this we bind ourselves in tangles.

Let us take milk for today’s example. We have a little crisis at the moment, up this way, because we are producing it too efficiently. In an effort to secure their votes, our politicians created marketing boards to assure a price to dairy farmers. Perhaps it did not occur to them that other jurisdictions might do the same; that each would create immense competing milk lakes of surplus. That they would have to enforce quotas to limit over-production. That they would then have to subsidize the milk for which they were overpaying, to sell any of it abroad. That such nonsense would result in e.g. the current feud between Trudeau and Trump, over who’s cheating whom. Verily, as in all government schemes, everyone is now cheating everybody, and consumers are paying not a small extra amount, but double or triple what they would otherwise be paying for a pint of tasteless homogenized cream, or a hunk of tasteless pasteurized cheese. And that’s before taxes.

An immensely cumbersome and self-defeating apparatus has been created to advance the cause of efficiency. It soon includes sprawling commercial networks, in which even if there is no technical monopoly, the large buyers squeeze out the small ones. And the system cannot be peacefully dismantled, because by now it is inhabited by vested interests throughout, each with the expense of maintaining a lobby. And after every negotiation the arrangements become more complicated, and the authority expands, until the last independent operator becomes a piece of the machinery.

One could spend one’s working life trying to master these complexities, in the invariably disappointed hope of making the system more responsive and “humane.” Or one could do what Mr Trump appears to be doing, which is to march in with a sledgehammer, and make a mess of it. I think that the best and most godly method.

There is a subtle difference between guilt and shame. We ignore it today. Both involve “feelings,” which is good enough for us. For guilt, we must do something wrong. Infamy, disgrace, shame, is getting caught, whether we did it or not. And shame can be shared. The idea of “collective guilt” is rubbish. You either did it or you didn’t. It has naught to do with your precious self-esteem. Guilt requires atonement. Shame is just a form of social conditioning, that doesn’t seem to work any more. There is more, but let that stand as the start for some other essay.

Gentle reader may be aware that I have taken, and take, a dim view of old hack journalists (including, shamefully, myself). But I also feel a great affection for them. The older the flatfoot, the better. There was a time when most were at least fairly honest, before something resembling ideology swept the trade, and journalists became willing slaves to the “politically correct” conventions. I think of Charles Lewis, for instance.

“Charlie,” as he is known, spent decades filling the spaces between the advertisements in daily papers. He has a gift for plain prose and the telling detail, which puts him in the ninety-ninth percentile. He has principles, which are essentially Catholic. Latterly he became the religion reporter for the National Post, until disabled by his spine a few years ago. Rising through prayer above the question of excruciating pain (“Why me?”) he has since devoted his talents to the fight against “euthanasia.”

Lots of things drop into my inbox, but I found this item (here) exceptionally invigorating. Lewis comes to terms with polls that show the great majority of people who self-identify as Catholics — in Canada, as elsewhere through the contemporary West — have no idea what the faith entails. In Canada, for instance, the most recent poll showed seven in ten Catholics support “euthanasia” — a position that is absolutely impossible for a Catholic to take. Rather than quibbling with the way the question was phrased, or the counting was done, Lewis accepts the reality behind the numbers, and the implication.

If we do not get our house in order, our influence on the society around us will continue to be nil.

The great majority of Catholics today, half-a-century after the Church embraced modernist innovations, are not really Catholic. They pretend to belong, and the Church pretends to accept them. They have never been catechized, and live in a state of moral, intellectual, and spiritual squalor. Few ever see the inside of a church, let alone the inside of a confessional. None in this state should be taking communion, for it can only compound their sins.

Lives and immortal souls are at stake: we must stop being nice about it. Bishops who can’t handle the heat of the front line, should find other jobs. We must all stop blathering pretty lies about “mercy,” and start telling people the truth. Christ came to save us. He did not come to approve our life choices.

And as for the people, it would be useless to “shame” them. Guilt is the issue. Either be Catholic, and throw yourself on the mercy of Our Lord. Or, stop abusing the term.

My mind wanders through reading. Currently I’m in the sixth century, and somewhere in the East of Christendom, in those happy days when we were rid of the Arians, holding the Sassanids at bay, and hadn’t faced the Arabs yet. Well, things look rosier from a distance. (This was God’s plan, to lift our spirits.) The closer one gets, the better one focuses, the worse things appear. I have come to the view that at every moment of history — if you are there — everything has gone to hell, and the end is near for the world as we know it. Too, Holy Church is in crisis. And yet life goes on.

Pannonia is where I am, in mind. It is the old Roman province tucked inside the great southward bend of the Danube, sufficiently spread to cross seven modern national borders as it squiggles towards the Euxine (Black Sea). Ethnically, it is the usual mess. Huns, Ostrogoths, Avars have settled and (God help us!) here come the Slavs. These are the days long before the great schism, East and West. The pope is in Rome, we think, but the emperor is definitely in Constantinople. Sirmium, the ancient provincial capital, has seen better days. Ammianus Marcellinus, who seldom wrote promotional copy, had called it “the glorious mother of cities” two centuries before. Now it is a dive.

One thinks of shepherds in the pastoral vein. The ancients, like us, were given to romantic Arcadian fancies, and their urban folk loved to depict the shepherds piping. But if one lived down on the farm in Pannonia, one was more likely to think of them as marauders; as delinquents and barbarians — latrones — and perhaps illegal immigrants, too.

In the spirit of Gibbon, we dream of the Roman Empire, ever falling, and the troops out at the wild frontiers, lonely and afraid. The reality was usually different. They minded the borders, but mostly they were employed in police functions, on the near side of it, trying to enforce some civilized order. This was true not only for the pagan Romans but for the Christian Byzantines who succeeded them. Both had a lot of “West Texas” to defend. Pannonia was a bit like that, and by the sixth century, becoming more so. The people there did not like to be ruled, preferring to select their own vigilantes. Often it was farmers versus ranchers (“shepherds”).

I have never entirely trusted the police — I have lived in too many countries — but I can see the need for ordering force, paramilitary if it comes to that. Dress anyone in a little authority, and he will be tempted to personalize it. Humans are like that, we tend to appropriate things. And as Paul Valéry explained, “Power without abuse loses its charm.”

My reflection for this morning is that this is always so. There can be no permanent security, only expedients of time and place. It follows that justice comes and goes, and is often rather murky. The Byzantines sent irenarchs (beautiful word): peacemakers to knock a few heads. They changed them frequently, if they survived.

Overlooking questions of race, creed, and colour, the world is divided between traders and raiders, between villagers and pillagers: enterprise will never be confined to one side. And though we live at the heart of Empire, our children will find themselves at the frontier. I have before me an old postcard with the Delacroix painting: “Attila the Hun and his Hordes overrun Italy and the Arts.”

Among the conceits of modern agnostic nominalist positivist scientism is the existence of facts. Mea culpa: for through inattention, I am often guilty of falling into this trap. “Facts and arguments,” or “facts and theories,” are phrases that convey a false opposition, yet are the tradestock alike of people who call themselves scientists, historians, journalists. They imagine there are “facts” on which everyone must agree (on pain of punishment), and that once they are “settled,” the fun starts. We can then explain them, or if we are technophiles, put them to work.

There is, I am persuaded by religious faith, such a thing as reality, and it is possible to distinguish what is external to ourselves. But I will not be reduced to a cogito-ergo-sum. I am also part of this reality, and in self-apprehension I become ever more aware that it is unified by the pre-existence of God, who made us, body and soul, out of nothing — as we may demonstrate from the evidence of a time before we were born.

To say that we “evolved” out of pre-existing matter is a grand evasion; an attempt to reinstate that material infallibility in which the Victorian agnostics put their trust. On misunderstood instructions from Kant, they constructed an imaginary universe from which only the Creator was excluded, because He was “unknowable.” Everything else could be known, at least potentially, through the dogmas of a sceptical empiricism.

From this they came to believe in the most extraordinary rot: the “settled science” of that age, long since blown away. Huxley, Stephen, Clifford, Spencer, Cockshut: the legion of High Victorian respectables. They were the fathers of a British Agnosticism which tried to omit the violent consequences of a more Continental Atheism, by creating something churchishly snug and bourgeois. They were seldom vicious. Their ambition was to save the world for “facts,” through disbelief in the monsters that revolutionary Frenchmen and other Europeans had summoned. Verily: their chief reason for denying Christ was that He preached the existence of demons. “Everyone knows better today.”

Not bad men — they were obsessed with the preservation of sound ethical behaviour, and all the good manners that could be lost through irreligion. Each was his own little sack of anxieties, but in the aggregate they were nothing at all. No one could want to read them today, yet we repeat their mistakes in a lazier fashion. For a belief in “facts” atomizes the consciousness. It makes us very boring. We need to be warned where it leads.

There is a marvellous book by Michael Polanyi, that does the “objective” fact-world in. Published in 1958, I think it among the great unacknowledged classics of twentieth-century thought. The title is, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. It is more than four hundred pages of continuous exposé, by a man who was himself among the greatest physical chemists, with a hold on all the other formal sciences that was remarkably broad and deep. He refuses to separate “scientific facts” from the arts by which they are known, or the purposes for which they are gathered, like flowers from the field to assemble our bouquets. He shows how the genuine scientific advances of our age refute the premisses from which they started.

We claim there is a “scientific method,” and teach some witless version to the young and naïve. Yet we know that, in practice, it is never followed. This is because it will never work. The world isn’t “facts.” It is not organized that way. No insight can be had by counting hairs or atoms.

Anti-blogging has been light, these last few days as, notwithstanding my dislike of business, I have been busy. As ever, it has been in a neglected cause. I consider a birthday the equivalent to a New Year, and thus the approach to my own as a time to clear decks. Rather a lot of unfinished tasks to sweep overboard this year, owing to my habitual procrastination. Still haven’t quite caught up, and soon after midnight I turn sixteen for the fourth time. Too, I might take another irresponsible holiday tomorrow, because it is my birthday.

Meanwhile, anyone suffering from a perverse hunger for additional David Warren Thought might consult the Catholic Thing (here), where I weigh in with my considered opinion on the first one hundred days of Mr Donald J. Trump. Actually, he is older than that, and like other commentators I’ve restricted myself to his first hundred days in presidential office.

I do wish the Americans would shift their inauguration date from January 20th every fourth year. They may not have considered that the hundredth day from that might clash with my birthday. I think this inconsiderate of them. Formerly they waited until March 4th, the anniversary of the invention of Congress in 1789. (Unless it was a Sunday.) And that year, Mr Washington wasn’t sworn in until the 30th of April, as I dimly recall.

Some time in May would be better. It would give the new gentleman most of the summer to repeal the previous gentleman’s fondest achievements, while people aren’t watching with overmuch attention.

We learn, from an article in Atlantic magazine, that the idiots have published 129,864,880 old-fashioned printed books. And this was as of August 2010; there must be more by now. By “the idiots” I of course refer to humankind, and express the view of all the other animals, who inwardly laugh at our madness, though not all the time. (Alone with a human in a confined space, they may instead be terrified.)

Apparently, Messrs Google got the idea of digitally copying every one, and making each available “at one click” through the Internet, for a modest fee. They got 25 million books and 400 million dollars into the project, before the lawyers stopped them, and now this linguistic stargate is locked away, like the chemical weapons in Syria, waiting for a more appropriate moment to come out again.

Thank God for lawyers. They went to work on behalf of that unsilent class of over-literate intellectuals, who were happy enough for Google to pay, but outraged that they might benefit. They were demanding a vast new tax-paid bureaucracy to regulate everything, and redistribute the income from dead authors to live ones (i.e. themselves). Having cost Google a few more million in legal fees, and having won the support of the malicious clowns in the Obama Justice Department, they tied the project up in so much tape and string, that the corporation finally cut its losses.

This, so far as I can see, is the only use for the progressive Left. By bundling every one of their crazed, idealistic schemes with minute, Kafkaesque requirements, they eventually defeat themselves. All Google’s opponents spastically declared in favour of the project “in principle.” But it would have to be done to their unworkable specifications. A beautiful “own goal” by the devils.

Whereas, I would oppose the principle itself. Nine in ten books should never have been published (at a very conservative estimate), and cannot be forgotten quickly enough. I note that merely turning the pages, to feed the cameras, required an army of the unskilled, working at sausage-factory speed. Clever algorithms were written to correct their sloppy work, and straighten the images of the pages. Lorry-loads of books from the participating libraries were driven through — innocent books that had never disturbed the peace of the world, quietly serving their turn as interior decoration, were subjected to this indignity. How many lovely old leather spines were cracked in the process?

Books should be treated with care. They contain innumerable errors, of doctrine and of fact. Incarcerated in physical libraries they may seem harmless, these days. Hardly anyone goes there. But caution is required in the use of them, and all those currently in vogue should be handled with tongs. Were it up to me, we would restore the Catholic Index, and ban all newly-published books without exception, for at least fifty years, allowing any heat in them to cool. Then, a committee of hoary and senescent elders could let a few through, having determined that they constituted no threat to public morality.

Though to be fair, making every book ever published easily available to anyone, is perhaps the next best thing. For it would reduce a grave public danger to just another desert of pixels.

Beware the salesmen who say, “It’s the soap in Duz that does it.” The statement is plausible, and therefore suspicious. The word itself may be noun in Azeri, verb in Luxembourgish, a numeral in Mauritian Creole; I am referring to the North American cleaning product, vaguely remembered from earliest childhood, more precisely recalled through the commercial jingle.

It was a lie. Duz wuz not a soap at all. It wuz an amphipathic detergent: one of those technological innovations of German laboratories, tasked with getting around the national shortage of oils during the late Great War. They found a surfactant more efficient than soap; one which did not waste effort binding the limestone and chalk in hard water to the dirt scum it was separating. Or so I understand.

Now, I do not propose to bring Messrs Procter and Gamble before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I can’t afford the lawyers. There is evidence in the Internet that the product was a powdered soap before it became a powdered detergent. Yet I distinctly remember that slogan, from a time well after the soap component must have been retired. And I have found confirmation for this memory on YouTube.

Quite frankly, such avowals are in the heart of modern life: assertions that are plausible, but not strictly true. I could give other examples. In some, such as the whole concept of “government investment,” they are not even slightly true; and in many fields, such as that of insurance (public or private, it makes little difference) a bottomless pit of moral jeopardy is concealed by the surface claims.

We have not truth, but approximations to truth, that will not bear investigation. This is what makes us so different from our mediaeval, or other pre-modern ancestors, whose circumstances freed them from what I will call (with apologies to Ratzinger) the “dictatorship of hype.” Or rather than fall into hype myself, I should say they simply lacked the machinery by which hype of this sort could be generated, and poetry abused.

For the line in question is poetry indeed: “The soap in Duz that does it.” But it is poetry degraded. Somewhere near the beginning of his penetrating commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas notes that poetry and philosophy share an origin in the apprehension of the wondrous. I say they expound, yet neither can “explain” the mysteries, including that mystery of an existence (our own) that comes out of nothing.

Yet upon consulting the Wicked Paedia I find that the operation of detergent is no wonder at all. It can all be explained to any specialist’s satisfaction, in words of twelve syllables or less.

Which takes us, naturally, to the stain of sin. How is it to be eradicated? Clearly, we must begin by understanding what it is, and there we encounter a modern “problem,” carried forward through all human ages. The very existence of sin is mysterious, and can be casually denied, for as we sin we become less conscious that sin is sin, and slide by degrees into the modern glibness. If the German laboratories cannot invent a product to wash it away, why don’t we just ignore it?

Macula, guilt, is left over. We are soiled; it will not go away. Freud and other shrinks thought they could isolate it in their laboratories — explain it away — yet after more than a century of attempts we still feel it, like the itchy pyjamas that Duz promised to soften. Drugs may suppress it, temporarily, but at an hideous cost. For even when the sense of sin is gone, the guilt obstinately remains. Paradoxically, we have reduced this “problem” to the mystery again.

After a fortnight of reading the words “First Class” in my Saint Andrew’s Missal each day — violet fading through black into white — we come to Low Sunday, and thus back to a life that is “normal,” if anything in the Easter season can be so. The contemporary Catholic, insofar as he is observant — and many will at least observe Easter Day, as we saw last week in the packed-out churches — may feel “churched-out” eventually. The more if he had made a passing effort to fulfil his modest Lenten covenants, and had been living slightly hungry. Three hours or more, of the Easter Vigil, after Tenebrae, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the frightful blank of last Saturday morning, on hardwood pews and kneelers, is enough to finish off a person who spent his earlier life not attending church, except for certain social obligations. (Marriages; funerals; perhaps even a baptism once upon a time.) And we, the converts and reverts, are the ones with the zeal.

We lack the stamina of the early Christians, who filled the entire night before Easter with their vigilant devotions, timing the baptisms for dawn. Those who have tasted the Christianity of the East may have some notion how this works in practice. In the West, too, there are chance survivals: I have seen people with their knees on concrete floors for hours without break, in a state that resembles a fugue. I look on in amazement. Some of the Filipinos in my Parkdale parish are of their spiritual company. They make me feel not only very Western, but quite inadequate.

The notion that “one ought to go to church” is not dead among us. It revives wherever the faith has been rekindled, in its otherworldly (“Ghostly”) way. It perishes among those who have made their concessions to the world, and to its “values,” so that the Church exists only for her value in political schemes. Hence the common atheist desire to have some sort of church-like organization, for the pleasure of delivering homilies to a captive audience. Or so they imagine, for as I’ve seen in our own “liberal” parishes, the audience for “Sandinista sermons” soon disappears; and not even canned Beethoven could hold the loyalty of Unitarians I once knew. In the absence of sincere belief in the practice and presence of Our Lord, playing dress-up starts to feel silly.

Instead, that irrepressible sense of awe is transferred to, for instance, high-class restaurants, with the candles on the table and the reverent “servers” chanting, almost liturgically, items from the menu. For the religious impulse will never go away, with its longing for a certain elevation and tone. If not foodie, every man and woman born will find something holy, and be outraged by blasphemies against it. The codes of speech and gesture that now govern our public behaviour are “spilt religion” of an obvious kind. Those who dare breach them are the new Infidels.

This distinction between religion still in the vessel, and spilt over the side, follows us through the narthex. Our motives for entering a church are often mixed.

A priest, whose remarkably short homily I heard some days ago, provided the simple explanation. There are those who, perhaps from some neurotic suspicion that Christ is really there, feel bound to drop in on Him once in a while, as one might visit the oldies occasionally in “the home.” And there are those who understand that, whether or not they are currently in the mood, Christ wants to see them.

The one form of rebellion I support — by crabbed age or youth — is rebellion against the Big Lie. Hence my passing delight in gratuitous political incorrectitude. It is an act of resistance, which could have unpleasant consequences; but this was always so. Alternatively, smile. The age is as a neighbour’s pet, which one is obliged to host for the weekend. One will brush it off Monday.

It is vain to consider our generation somehow worthy of the Parousia, as if our skins were so valuable, or our sins more impressive, than those of any previous generation. We are small and squalid and statistical today, hardly worth punishing except by a loving God. Our men are not men and our women are not women. Look at the vacant faces.

We direct our unhappiness at miscellaneous targets, in an unfocused way. We locate ourselves within the smear of a “democratic” order — an immense dovecote meant as the expression of The People, not God. Inside, the guano is accreting. If something is wrong, we will vote on whom to blame, in our sleepy, pigeon-like way.

Frustrations associated with longer commuting times or diminishing real wages trigger a response. We are like union members in a company whose managers are too obviously incompetent to sustain their arrogance. So we call a strike; vote for Trump or Le Pen or whomever. In the end they give us more of the same.

It will make a difference when, by nature, masculine qualities re-emerge in the men, feminine qualities in the women; and when both turn from politics to God.

There was a lad in a bookstore of university age. He had been experimenting with independent thought; the proprietor taxed him with “conservative” tendencies. He had given his opinion that the welfare system entraps the lower orders, and could not be “reformed.” Instead it should be abandoned. He thought, with Saint Paul, that those able to work should earn their keep. As to the imagined hordes of unemployed social workers, “let them do the jobs we import immigrants to do.”

Pressed on this point, and asked how we should help the dependent poor, he said, “Maybe bring back workhouses.”

On the old and infirm: “Maybe their families should be taking care of them. Maybe they would be, if they didn’t have a choice.”

He was of course against public daycare. Warned that this position might be labelled “misogynist,” he escalated.

“Yeah. I suppose the idea that mothers should put their own daughters ahead of their careers seems misogynist to you. Well, you’re a white male, you have a right to your opinion.”

“What kind of politics is that?” he was asked.

And the young man replied: “I think I must be a fascist. Everyone tells me I am turning into a fascist, so that must be the word.”

This left his interlocutor speechless.

A young woman nearby spoke up: “Yes, you’re a fascist, that’s what you are! … I think I’m a fascist, too.”

____________

Several readers mentioned that they’d heard this anecdote before, from me, but could not find the initial version in any computer search. That is because I deleted it. It was from a much longer piece I posted four years ago, and have since regretted, because it contained traces of political optimism. Still, I wanted to preserve the anecdote, so I brought it forward. I do this kind of thing fecklessly, and only sometimes own up. No “text” in this site is guaranteed stable. Mistakes, especially, may be subject to amendment. Fresh mistakes may be inserted in their place. The whole thing is a “work in progress,” and would change faster if I could find the time.

One is nailed in modern journalism by the staccato of fact, fact, fact. Many of these facts are untrue, of course, and others have the same effect as hollow dumdum bullets — expanding on contact with flesh. It is a war out there, between adversaries named Fact and Truth. I am reminded of this every time I look in the news, and see that “studies have shown,” when they have shown nothing more than a valiant attempt on the part of the devil to undermine the obvious.

I mentioned journalism, but the phenomenon has spread to lexicography, if not farther afield. While explaining the Canadianism, Dogan (for “a Roman Catholic,” ideally of the Irish persuasion), I was recently shot down by a pert young tyro. She had taken the trouble to look it up in some supposed authority, such as the COD (Canadian Oxford Dictionary). The etymology there was in conflict with what I habitually supply. I’d have been more impressed had she cited, for instance, the more venerable Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (ed. Avis et al., 1967) where she would have found the same answer: that it originates in some Irishman’s surname.

My mother had a much better account. It is a Cape Bretonism, she gently insisted, from the days when Presbyterian missionaries were sent into West Africa. They came to the tribe of Dogans, and sent home eager anthropological reports. From these it emerged that the Dogans worshipped some female idol, which the missionaries mischievously conflated with Mariolatry. Cackling with glee, as would be their wont, the people back home in Glace Bay, or wherever, began calling their Catholic neighbours “Dogans.” The Catholics themselves rather enjoyed the slight, and so the term quickly spread through the island, up the fishing coasts of Newfoundland, down to Antigonish (a Catholic citadel), then west at least to Pictou. On reaching Halifax it jumped to Montreal, &c, while quietly penetrating the Boston States.

I refuse to stand corrected. Nor will my Gaelic mama be corrected, now that she has doyed. My corrector cannot be corrected, either, for nothing is as irrefutable as the testimony of an exceptionally attractive young blonde. Notwithstanding, all facts being equal, I prefer the better story.

People keep asking me, “What is the High Doganate?” I trust that, when combined with the information that my quarters float one hundred feet above the streets of beautiful downtown Parkdale (or, Vallis Hortensis, as I’ve come to prefer), all is now clear. Or may be for a few Idleposts. (Gentle reader might try his search engine next time.)

Which leaves me with the embarrassment of explaining my headline. It seemed to promise more than I have delivered, today. True, I selected it to get attention. But as a gentleman I feel compelled to acquit myself of any charge of evasion. So let me add that the Dogans come in two sexes, male and female. And that, in the more colloquial sense of the term, those who are single “must not.”

Everyone knows that everything George does, ends badly. (From charity, I conceal his real name.) We might not know how badly, were he not always whining about his fate. I raised a laugh at a public drinking table, by referring to him as, “a lucky man.” That might mean many things, but in this case it meant, “bad lucky.” Normally, “lucky” implies good luck, but context is all.

The two conditions do not fail to be ambiguous. What is good luck for some, may be bad luck for others. Or good luck in prospect may prove bad luck in retrospect, for the same man. I have often lamented my own good luck, upon harvesting its fruit. The angel that led me turned demon, as I should have expected.

Aeschylus may be right, that the gods are with the willing and eager. But he did not intend this as a moral axiom. There are bad wills, and good, and the gods are often demons, as Plato observed. The sort of luck that leads to any sort of worldly success is, generally speaking, a jilt, and while there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, one is more often lost at sea.

Hence my solemn commitment to Idleness. Many are the stupid things one might not do. The world would be a better place if they were not done. We should try harder not to do them. We should set an example, in resisting temptation.

In my days as a hack pundit for the gutter press, annually some time around my birthday, I would write a self-indulgent column touching on some aspect of “why I write.” George Orwell got me started; I blame him. He wrote the inaugural essay in this subtle form of moral posturing; or perhaps it was Luther in 1517. Adam, we are sure, did not write columns.

I can’t remember ever having hit upon a good reason. The best, I reflect, was never tried: that I had a family to support at the time. My duties seem since to have contracted. Doctor Johnson, my Virgil in the English hack trade, said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” By which he meant earning, not thieving it, I suppose.

He also said, “Only a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Elsewhere he glossed: “A man who writes a book thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.”

Looking back over these Idleposts, from the height of a short Easter vacation, I find it hard to discern how they could make me any money. By acts of purest charity, some strangely trickles in. I’ve been told that the long ones are particularly ignored, and so I am trying to write shorter. Really, I am lucky to survive at all.

[I propose to fall silent for the rest of Holy Week, to Easter Tuesday or so; except a piece I owe to Catholic Thing for Maundy Thursday. So here is my opportunity to wish gentle reader a blesséd and serene celebration. In the words of this morning’s Introit: “Nos autem gloriari oportet in cruce Domini nostri Jesu Christi: in quo est salus, vita et resurrectio nostra: per quem salvati et liberati sumus. … Nos autem!”]

*

“But of course we had running water. How often we went running for it!”

As mentioned in yesterday’s Idlepost, I am haunted by the ghosts of my ancestors, especially those I once knew alive, but also those whose most memorable acts and sayings were conducted through them. The line quoted goes back only two or three generations, on my mother’s side, and looks beyond to a day when indoor plumbing was not even a novelty. It had never been seen in certain Scottish realms, which included the Outer Hebrides, and pre-industrial Cape Breton. The very idea of it would have been revolting; and that among people who thought nothing of sharing their small homes with cattle and sheep.

They built them in the hollows, in the Western Highlands, Skye, Lewis, the Uists. Today they build houses on the knolls. This is so the “summer people” can look out at the scenery through their large, pre-fabricated windows. The windows in the old crofts were small: to let light in and not the eyes out. If you wanted to look at the great outdoors, you could go outside. You went inside for shelter from it. A “brisk brattle of wind” was often blowing (“howling gale” to the tourist), and by building in the hollow, it passed unfelt overhead. The modern windows rattle, and though the people inside are kept warm enough, by invisible devices, there is a security they will never know, huddled next the hearth and behind thick walls.

These were people who sang and danced, played fiddles and pipes, entirely without cash payment. Whose storybook was chiefly the Bible.

Our outdoors have now been monetized, as a form of entertainment. Perhaps the outdoors were less entertaining to the dead folk, although they have left much poetical evidence that they could see its stark beauty, under sun, moon, stars; under moist blankets of overcast, or diffused in mists and fog.

Today we can buy a cottage, with all the suburban fixtures, among other cottages of increasingly monstrous size, gathered round each scenic spot, progressively blotting it away. It is there for the weekends. It is empty most weekdays. Here and there an old fusspot enjoys cramped quarters, and what we now call “minimalism.” But mostly the minimalists have selected a style: big rooms empty except for a few expensive objects. Indoor hollows, undisturbed by children.

Whatever you can afford: you write a cheque. It could be electronic. You get a mortgage from the bank, you can get bank loans for the contents; you don’t have to wait. By increments, you become indentured, to work it off. Your hands stay clean, and it’s good for the economy. Is there a cottage without a wide-screen TV? Perhaps, somewhere. The media follow, wherever you go. Who can argue against “options” that are taken by nine in ten, as a matter of right? Of course, vacationers may bundle into aeroplanes for Florida, instead. And there are other consumer options, to get away from the psychic hellhole of office life, into alternative hellholes for variety. All are lovingly described by the little devils who write advertising copy. We are rich in the poetry of their “choices.”

Yet, there is no shelter. I mean this in more than the material sense, for through this Holy Week we are reminded that the concept extends beyond this world, in which we must die.

These ancestors were riveted to “kirk” and to what we would call their “superstitions”; that is, to a worship quite different from ours for money and the shopped stuff. Imagine seeking shelter in the arms of the Cross!

And yet that is the only place where one may hope to find it.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the day after the four divisions of the Canadian Corps launched their assault up Vimy Ridge, and stormed to the top, as part of the Battle of Arras in the Great War. This was a task the British and French armies had failed to accomplish. In the national mythology, it was the day we truly became a nation, at the cost of more than ten thousand casualties, including three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight dead; and rather more, I should say, among the Sixth German Army. The engagement was essentially settled in the first light hours of April 9th, which was Easter Monday. The mop-up continued until the 12th, when we took “The Pimple,” silencing the enemy’s last artillery.

One cannot argue with mythology, and I was not arguing with my grandfather, Harry Roy Warren, when he appeared to me in a dream last night. This helped me recall what he had had to say about the whole affair, when he still lived. He said that the gods were with us, in the form of the magnificent British artillery and logistics that lay behind us; the remarkable generalship of the very British “Bungo” Byng, and of our beloved Canadian, Arthur Currie; and most importantly, the sky. After an unusually cold and prolonged winter, it was hurling snow and sleet into the faces of the defenders, who were often shooting blind. But to our farm boys, from across the fair Dominion, it was, if one could overlook the shell-bursts, just like home.

Grandpa was more impressed with the casualties. It was the first in a long string of engagements in which the Canadians were used as shock troops — Hill 70! Amiens! Cambrai! — as the allies broke the German lines, setting stage for the rest of the twentieth century.

“We did our share of the damage,” was his Canadian way of putting it. He recounted his own experience in an understated manuscript entitled, “Up the Line with the Best o’Luck.” Somewhere along that line he ceased calling the enemy “Jerry,” “Heinie Hun,” and “The Bosch,” and started calling them “Bavarians,” and “Germans.” Finally, his heart went out to the poor bastards, in occupation duty. Both he and his flyboy son from the Second instalment of World War raised me with a curious affection for “them”; and a patriotism with no jingo in it.

Grandpa was never a pacifist, nor ever a mythologist. “We did what we had to do.” It was hardly for the sake of making Canada independent, for in his view we were already independent enough. He fought with his horse, and with his band of brothers; for them and for the nursing sisters; for Byng and Currie. Those were real things, and the need to stop the Kaiser was a real thing, too.

But: “It would have been better had the whole damned mess not happened.”

The glory of war belongs finally to the politicians who brought it on, and to their eloquence in appropriating the results. I have an instinctive aversion to wreath-laying speeches by men who weren’t there. My eyes are on the vets.

Grandpa’s finest moment, post-war, was when a troop of young reservists marched by his front lawn at Port Credit; and he an old codger in his eighties. Year of grace, 1977. In the faces of those boys he remembered the faces of the boys with whom he had once marched. With great difficulty, he had dressed himself once again in full uniform for Armistice Day, campaign medals dangling. As they passed, the troop leader called, “Halt!” As one man, they turned to grandpa and saluted. He saluted back.