Essays in Idleness

Bad David: I truly failed to keep up and foster the fairly good training in classical (and modern) languages with which I was blessed in childhood; and with the passage of the lazy years, have become ever more dependent on my halting English as a medium of thought. This helps account for my shallowness and provincialism, mentioned by several discerning readers.

And yet I travelled the world, or at least accessible Eurasia. Compare me to an old schoolmate who only once overstepped the boundary of his native Ontario township. He kept the training up, writing as well as reading in Latin, for instance; for one must write in a language to read it with understanding. Thus he turned out rather more cosmopolitan.

Were we delivered to ancient Rome by some time machine, I’d be depending on him to give taxi directions.

Or should we go back only to old Weimar (I’d hope a little ahead of Napoleon’s “spoon guards”), not I but he would have to forge our letter of introduction to Goethe. I’d only be ogling his mistress, and trying to look smart.

But of course my old friend would hardly agree to step into the time machine in the first place. When last checked up with in a small-town tavern, I found his view of technology even darker than mine.

The like I have seen many times in my travels: that the learned are seldom in their nature tourist, though some have been travellers. The life of the mind, the life of books and poetry, of art and music, is a much broader thing than a life on the run. Perhaps I should be more thankful to God that my circumstances combined to ground me, more than a decade ago; leaving me in this mountain hut, or rather, high-rise apartment with a view of the sunsets over Greater Parkdale. And trying to catch up with everything I’ve missed.

Since, I have learnt that travel is unnecessary.

*

A decade has also passed since my poor parents were bundled (at their own wish) into “old folk” accommodations, and the contents of their house were dispersed. I became the quick inheritor of what could be grabbed of papa’s “stuff.” At intervals since, I have been whittling down to what seems most worth keeping, in light of the remorseless movement of time. In the end, one cannot carry so much as a satchel, into the Land where all are going.

Much of the bulk is already given to schools, libraries, relatives and others. Papa became, at about my age when his own father died, the inheritor of the previous generation of stuff — mostly books and papers — and an adept of genealogy on both his and my mama’s side. I cannot bring myself, for instance — and notwithstanding my disapproval of photography — to “dispose of” old glass negatives and silver chloride prints going well back into the Victorian era. I’ve been trying to re-organize what papa once had organized well; it all went to hell during his last move.

Photos are good, in one way. Even through sometimes rather stiff poses, one can see what one’s predecessors looked like; so that upon reading old letters and documents they begin to move. There were many vague old family stories I heard, and now they come into focus. These people were my own flesh and blood; sometimes I almost hear their voices. I find a portrait of a man who died a century ago. It is captionless. But immediately, I know who he is.

Or another dead for, lo, rather more than a hundred. Who is buried in some place called Bruce Mines, which eventually ran out of copper. But even before that, there was flooding and a cave-in (1876), and my relatives moved on. Here is a letter of one who went back, at the beginning of the last century, and found Bruce Mines the ghost of a ghost town. Today, says Internet, there is a village again, with a liquor store, motel, and short-order restaurant, for motorists along Highway 17; but for an interim there was nothing. My people are thus only to be found one layer down; a generation later, no grave could be found.

That was one branch; there were these various other branches, and fate pushed them all over the continent. Well into that last (twentieth) century, most lived in log cabins.

My great grandpa and great grandma died in one, in the wilds north of Edmonton, Alberta, before the last World War; two of my great uncles with their wives in the same “Rochester,” well after. I have a Waltham pocket watch that came down to me from one of them. And a note, to me, never previously delivered, from one whom I never met. Yet he writes as if he knows me. Great Uncle Ross apologizes for foolishly having had the innards replaced in the 1920s; since when the thing has never worked properly. Mechanical standards, he notes, have been in continuous decline, since the watch was made in Massachusetts in the 1850s. It had worked fine when he carried it across Normandy, with the Canadian Field Artillery during the Great War.

Another branch went off to Nebraska; we never heard from them again. Many crossed the border, or crossed back: you didn’t need a passport in those days, and there were no tax returns to file. The rails did not run to some of the places these people were going. They were migrants who had heard that there was “freedom” out West, and that a man could earn a living from honest work, pulling up the trees on, say, twenty acres. Yet they were not entirely “hicks”: they went out into the wilderness with their Bibles and their Shakespeares (to say nothing of their guns), as little beacons of civilization; and did what they had to do to survive.

*

And the stargate opens on the stories I could tell you: of Martha (“Mattie”) Warren, for example, farmed out in childhood to another house after her dad John (1811–61) had died in wretched poverty. He’d been building a stone bridge over a creek near Zanesville, Ohio; died coughing his guts out from some stone-dust lung disease. (His clients had neglected to pay him; a bank had foreclosed on everything he owned.) The family this Mattie was lodged with then up and flit town, leaving no word of where they had taken “that very cheerful little body,” then three years old. Her mother and siblings searched for her, not giving up through a score of years, following any lead with letters and newspaper advertisements. (Kindly publishers would run these for free.) “Lost girl” was the title, wherever they appeared.

Twenty-three years pass. The advertisements still ran, sometimes, and by a happy coincidence the grown woman, now “Mattie Stewart,” saw one of them in Springfield, Illinois. She’d been told she was an orphan, but putting everything together, realized that she was not. Understandably, she had to see her mother, and was well-placed to set out right away.

Her husband, the estimable J.K. Stewart, was a railwayman, with stocks. Mattie was very beautiful; he was uxorious. On their journey to Canada — to Derby Township, Ontario, where now lived her aging mother, no longer Mrs Warren but Eliza Christie by remarriage — he had the train stopped. This was because Mattie was admiring the wildflowers in a passing field. So while the train waited, he went out in the meadow to assemble a bouquet.

They’d tracked down Eliza to this Anthony Farm, where she now lived with this Captain Christie (more stories there), in the usual small log house. They arrived at Owen Sound, hiring coach and horses for the muddy sideroad drive. And suddenly there they were, in their city clothing and extravagant hats, standing by Eliza’s door.

The mother did not recognize her little girl. It took some explaining. Then Eliza shrieked a shriek that her son would always remember.

Mattie would be my great-great-great aunt. Beautiful and wealthy: I had already heard that from my grandpa, long ago. Alas, no picture of her may be found in my gallery. By reputation, I had somehow gathered, she was badly spoilt by her rich fool of a husband. According to my papa’s chart: “Died childless in 1884.” It all fits together.

Better not to travel, except by necessity; and to die poor.

My priest — well, I think of him as mine, though actually I share him with some other people — has that wonderful gift for catching a person by surprise. This shows to best effect when that person — in this case, moi — has just said something stupid.

I was reflecting upon my unworthiness for Lent, and noted that I actually like beans (of various kinds and in various preparations) on rice. Also, little fishes from little tins, mooshed in rice. Also, — it was my latest example — aloo methi, with rice. (That is, potatoes chopped into fenugreek leaves, with some onion and tomato pulp and crushed cashews and curry spices, fried in bran or vegetable oil.) Or with naan, instead of rice. And a modest tumbler of, say, coconut water, to wash it down. Or some grapefruit juice, which I also adore.

Of course, in Lent there could easily be too much of a good thing. The meal must fit in one’s lenten bowl, and not spill over. The “seconds” go back in the fridge. Though in my case, I need the help of the angels to walk me back there. (And sometimes, they are busy.)

I love the monastic simplicity: just the bowl, the spoon, and the tumbler. The sight of these three things fills me with peace. And nothing improves the appetite like hunger, which can be a cleanser in itself. One can be made happy by such things.

So here I was saying to the priest that I enjoy Lent; that surely there is sin in it somewhere. What should I do, cut the fenugreek? the cumin? (The cashews I’d already resolved to omit.)

My train of self-regarding thought was brought to a stop at this point:

“That is not a sin, David. That is good luck.”

He was being gentle. He wasn’t shouting “Jansenist!” at me, the way he does sometimes. He went on to explain that Lent is not a celebration of masochism. It is fast, abstinence — obedience, to a glorious end.

Should I happen to like it, bully for me.

I used to dread Lent, because I would expect it to be painful. I still rather dread having to be extra charitable; or even just polite. I am not, after all, a very nice person. True charity makes one accept things, that one may be loath to accept. It makes one part with things, that one would rather keep; and to restrain in some measure one’s eyes, one’s lips, and the inflection of one’s nose. The abstinence from doing what is hateful — even on some days a complete fast — is what I find oppressive. It goes against my nature, my inner Adam, my “preferential option” for being a shit.

“Lord, if you don’t mind, I would rather cut even the potatoes.”

Now, there are good people who, it seems to me, are charitable by nature; glad in their charity, and delighted to give more. My papa was a bit like that; I could never understand it. Had he only been Catholic, he might have welcomed Lent. And I’ve met others even more, by a mysterious grace, given to confoundingly saintly behaviour.

Should they cut back on charity because they enjoy it?

Among my favourite potsherds from the ancient world are the ostraka of the Athenians. Although the surface may be inscribed only with one name, and that long forgotten, there is something exhilarating about them. Once, I held one in my hand.

Shards of earthenware, flakes of limestone, and other materials with messages written on them are a commonplace of archaeological sites throughout the Near East — from the age when papyrus was available, but too expensive for use as scrap paper. For which reason, we get a higher class of messaging from the deep past on that papyrus: things meant to be permanent.

On the ostraka we might get instead a simple prayer or invocation; an adage; a snippet from the lyrics of a song; a shopping list; a medical prescription; a curse or blessing, or magical spell; a desperate appeal for money; or a rude little caricature, very portable and perhaps intended to find its way to its subject. A hundred and one household uses. Such short notes improve in value after centuries of aging, and what they show, along with much else, is that the deadly sins practised today have always been popular.

There are papyrus fragments, too, marvellously preserved in the dry Egyptian sands. I have books up here in the High Doganate, transcribed from the better bits and pieces that floated up, including fragments of classical poetry and very high-class prose. An elitist myself, I am prone to collect such documentation of a time long ago and far, far away; and to weep for what was lost from the once grand private and public libraries. But this is not what I am thinking of, at this moment. For all the originals may be consulted in Heaven; and really it is just a question of getting there.

Still there is the thrill of holding an ostrakon in one’s hand, from old Athens that was full of sin, but also of a few brilliant ideas. For a moment, time out of mind, one queues in the Agora, to hand one’s fragmentary transient write-in ballot over to the counters.

For these were the ballots from the old Athenian democracy — that went the way our “representative” imitations of it are now going — but was in its own time small and personal, like something from a valley in the Swiss Alps.

Voting, prior to post-modernity, was always and everywhere restricted to a relatively small, aristocratic or at least upper-middle class of propertied free males, and thus carried the possibility its members would know each other; sometimes, know each other too well. In retrospect it seems a better idea than great masses of the lower classes, lacking charm or style, forming “yuge” voting blocks like virtual mobs, and ever threatening to descend into real ones. But everything — absolutely everything including the best-governed states — winds up on the trash heap of history. And who is to say there will always be archaeologists?

No, the potsherds that amuse me most carry the names of candidates for Ostracism. From time to time the “elite” of Athenians would pick someone to be exiled for a decade or so. Not hanged, not drawn, not quartered — not even merely blinded in the more humane Byzantine manner — but only invited to live abroad for a while. It was an honourable fate, by our modern standards. It showed people could at least spell your name; and that you had achieved your fifteen minutes of infamy in the public mind. Of course there was the death penalty, if the winner tried to return before his time was up. Meanwhile, he had ten days to get out of town.

It was about this time of year, in the old Athenian Assembly. Full citizens would vote on whether to hold another Ostracism. If they did, it was probable that they already had at least one promising candidate. Plutarch tells us a quorum of six thousand was required, to vote for having this vote; and another minimum of votes to win if it was held, a couple of months later. It was a way to send someone like “The Donald” on his way.

He could keep his hotels and office blocks, and get them back on his return; or whatever else he happened to own before departure. It was thus not an opportunity for envious, punitive taxation. But God be praised, there might be one less potential tyrant, or bogeyman to deal with, in the interval of his absence, after he had been sent off “to make Athens great again” — in Phrygia, or wherever. Meanwhile, his irritating supporters would have time to cool their heads; and his opponents would be spared the inconvenience and risk of arranging an assassination.

Not a bad idea at all, at all; but like so many other fairly good ideas, it would not work in an “advanced modern democracy.” For in no time, with the help of computers, we’d be holding instant Ostracisms every day. And this would only lead to fresh refugee crises.

Maimonides, quoting Alexander of Aphrodisias (who was commenting on Aristotle) says there are three significant causes of human ignorance; then adds a fourth. This is in chapter 31 of the first part of the Guide to the Perplexed, in my old Friedlander translation.

Arrogance and vainglory lead the list. We are too full of ourselves to fit any new thing into our gorged heads; too cocky to see what is outside us; and indifferent to the movement that would lead us out. In many other ways gentle reader could supply for himself, and probably from self-experience, we are defeated by our own swagger.

Second, the subject itself will prove more subtle, deeper and more difficult than we imagined, so that when we come to examine it we are overwhelmed. Failures of training and education come into this: we don’t know where to start, and have not acquired the equipment to continue. Fools are those, who come to the battle naked.

Only third need we consider our animal limitations. Our own native freedom from information and want of capacity prevents us from comprehending even what is perfectly comprehensible. Our native sloth comes into this, to my mind; by which I mean not sinful acedia, but the slowness of wit that makes anything hard for us to follow, when finally we come round to trying. We are stupid like that; God did not endow us all with superior candlepower.

Each category of foolishness of course redounds on each other, and by combination we may square or cube the effect of forms of ignorance that were more modest in isolation.

Maimonides adds custom and habit to this Aristotelian list. He illustrates this with an unfortunate attack on rural people, which makes me fear he has liberal tendencies. The villager is used to his privations; he does not desire the pleasures of city life because he does not know what they are; but hardly through vainglory. He is accustomed from youth to play the hick, to take almost anything over-literally; for instance to take God as if He were one of His own creatures.

Yet big-city propagandists for atheism (Richard Dawkins provides an especially juicy example) tend to display exactly this sort of supposed village idiocy.

Here the later Sephardic philosopher Falaquera (a man of the thirteenth century) is more pointed. He extends the critique of this peasant gormlessness specifically to scientists never exposed to religion or philosophy, and thus prey to a materialism that would be, on a little thought, self-refuting. Whereas, the peasant has at least some chance of encountering a good rabbi.

Perhaps the twelfth-century Maimonides thought he had already anticipated that, in previous remarks about the kind of shmendrick who disputes what has been demonstrably proved. “Thus you find men who deny the spherical form of the Earth, or the circular path in which the stars move.” To his mind, such characters, who might also confuse God with the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, are not worth considering. I must say I find this a blindness on his part, for it is only a variation on the peasant kind of ignorance.

Now, I would invite gentle reader to consider each of these four sources of ignorance (which I have expounded in my own way) in light of the traditional, conventional Lenten practices of Holy Church.

They begin from the bottom by breaking up habit; catching us when we reach for things we would normally consume without thinking, when we remember that we have vowed to avoid them for forty days. This in turn quickens our apprehension of matters we are not in the habit of considering. We begin to realize that what seemed simple and easy is actually rather simple and hard. Our repeated failures provide a cure for the vanities in which we usually luxuriate. The often painful discovery that we are not great, but small, feeds our humility at the foot of wisdom.

And yet, in the memory of Our Lord, we need not be defeated. The whole experience, through seven weeks, is a course of setbacks; and stands, with Jesus, in that wilderness where he confronted the temptations of the Devil, directly. We pick ourselves up from the dust, after each slip; and our better angel tells us to confess it, and that we must resume trying.

Our bodies, but also our minds, are in His boot camp through this period, repeated once a year. Sincerely engaged, we cannot help but come out of it a little smarter than we were, going in.

I had the strangest dream, that Justice Scalia had died. As the dream occurred the night after news reports of his death, I may have been influenced by them. Often my dreams are clairvoyant in that way.

Last June, speaking with beloved Cardinal Burke in Ottawa (our greatest living canon lawyer), I asked for an opinion on Justice Scalia. It turned out the two of them were friends; not surprising. They shared an attachment to the Latin Mass, especially in the Usus Antiquior — Scalia, for instance, though a busy man throughout his life, often driving long distances with his family of a Sunday to attend the nearest available. Too, they shared great respect for legal traditions — both Roman and American — being deeply learned in each, respectively, but neither unfamiliar with the other. His Eminence mentioned, when asked, that they did not agree on everything; that Justice Scalia, while admirably originalist with respect to the USA Constitution, was prone to overlook the larger conditions of its existence.

Not only must we ask, before we start, what the authors of those laws plainly meant by their language, in the context of their era and in the genius of the language itself. To fully understand them, we must hear the resonations of more ancient legal concepts, from the Common Law back to Roman Law; of the philosophers from earlier modern periods, back through thirteenth-century Padua and before; of thinking and “discoveries” in natural law from Christian back through Hebraic, and in the many universal echoes of the same. One must move backwards in order to get a fuller view.

To look on Law in this way is to be more than a scholar, capable of better understanding. It is to be made modest and humble and cautious and conservative and thus: appreciative of distinctions between what positive law can accomplish, and what it cannot. It is to put positive written law in its right place, as the best effort of fallible men; men who may be wise, but may instead be narrow and headstrong; shallow, intemperate, even vicious; and terribly impatient, as if the world relied only on them.

Bad law often triumphs over good, and worse over better interpretations. This is why Justice Scalia so readily told his colleagues on the high Washington bench that they should acknowledge their mistakes, and the mistakes of their predecessors, and explain publicly why they were mistakes. Though confined himself to positive law in a revolutionary tradition, he would instead step beyond it in brilliant analogies and sharp logical thrusts.

Like all the greatest judges of whom I am aware, Scalia’s judgments were readable, his reasonings clear, and his dissents especially exhilarating. No mouse, he did not shy from delicious sarcasm, and hilarious parody of his own colleagues, of whom, currently, at least four are idiots. But this strictly in a professional capacity, where he would have no friends. Socially, among his human fellows, he was thoughtful kind and generous; and even towards the idiots, sunny and forbearing.

The great judges do not tolerate the hairsplit jargon and professorial bafflegab behind which mediocrities hide what is specious. Nor will they descend into the cheap bathos and sentimentality with which the “reformers” play to the mob. They are not seeking personal popularity, but justice in Truth. And where it can be found it requires a trumpet, singing crisp notes.

I loved the man; he was quite lovable. A good Catholic, with an impressive courageous wife, and nine children by what he called “Vatican roulette.” (Thirty-six grandchildren.) All turned out well. One of them is a priest, on whose prayers for his father we may depend. In my dream the good judge was ascending to the Judge of all judges, in Heaven.

Oh, dear. Yesterday once again I filed a longish Idlepost which I returned to in the night, making it longer still in the hope of clarity. Gentle readers complain whenever I do this. It is not in the spirit of idleness, after all, and I’m sure my beloved Kenko, author of the original Tsurezuregusa (“Essays in Idleness,” or more exactly, “The With-nothing-better-to-do Book”), is sneering at me from his Buddhist heaven. Neither is daily posting, for that matter, consistent with this spirit, though it is quite consistent with the demands of contemporary blogging.

Yoshida no Kaneyoshi (the original name of that fourteenth-century Japanese recluse) had a better plan. He would splash down some thought with his brush on whatever paper came to hand, then paste it on the wall of his cottage in the mountains. His “essays” were in no particular order. After his death, this wallpaper was transcribed, starting from a doorpost.

I have his book, here, which I personally rebound (many years ago): an English translation by Donald Keene, with many useful explanatory notes.

“How could anyone have removed all the hollyhock leaves, when it was sad enough that they should wither of themselves?”

What a fine sentiment I discover upon reopening it.

For the rest, I do not know which essays to quote, I should like to quote them all. But that would not be in the correct spirit. It is enough to read one or two at a sitting. Better yet, not to read but to remember, and paraphrase even when the book is in your hand:

“Although I am now free of entanglements, there are some things I’d be sorry to give up. The beauty of the sky.”

Such admirable dicta are varied with good anecdotes and short memoirs. These include excellent advice Kenko recalls from great experts and high priests. For example, he quotes a backgammon champion on how to win at that game. “Do not try to win, you will lose.” Instead, in each move, study the board and, “try to lose more slowly.”

Or from the High Priest, Honen, on how to get to Heaven:

“Sometimes as I am saying the nembutsu I am seized by drowsiness and I neglect my devotions. How can I overcome this obstacle?” he is asked.

The priest replies, “Say the nembutsu as long as you are awake.”

Another of his penitents is uncertain that he will go to Heaven, and is told that it is indeed quite uncertain. But then the priest adds: “Even if you have doubts, you will go to Heaven, provided that you say the nembutsu.”

I love Kenko’s contradictions, for example his diatribe one day against men who get married; and on another, his defence of fatherhood, since only men with children can have any feelings. Too, he provides an invigorating catalogue of things that are insufferable in social life, each of which has parallels in the Greater Parkdale Area. This includes his exasperation with people who may go to Hell, because they are always playing backgammon.

He condemns the “Four Great Crimes” as well (fornication, theft, murder, false witness), but more gently.

*

Though now I live up here in the mountains — or more precisely, up here in the High Doganate — I am not yet free of worldly entanglements. There are rough days, for instance, when I simply have to make enough money to buy food and pay rent. It is most inconvenient. I would rather have a large pension, but there is none in view.

I began writing my own Tsurezuregusa every day, about four hundred and fifty Idleposts ago. They are not very good, as I am reminded whenever I look over old ones. There would be more than seven hundred of these postings altogether by now — about the length of The Tale of Genji, or of, À la recherche du temps perdu — had I not quietly deleted a few dozen of the worst. (Compare Kenko, who covered his walls with only two hundred and forty-three.) Mendicant that I am, kind donors have sent me gifts in the proportion of nearly three cents per word. I notice, however, that this is declining.

I will continue writing my pieces, almost every day, because I have nothing better to do. But I think “every day” is too ambitious. I should skip some days, without explanation, especially during Lent.

My Chief Irish Veterinary Correspondent put it most succinctly: “Didn’t Gödel drive a stake through the heart of the concept of a ‘Theory of Everything’?” (See yesterday.) This is also my understanding: that the Austrian logician demonstrated in his two “incompleteness theorems,” published in 1931, why no such thing can work. But we are dealing today with the kind of zombie that doesn’t notice when a stake has been driven through its heart.

Let me try briefly to review both ends of that sharp stick.

Gödel’s first theorem proved that any formal system of axioms subtle and complex enough to describe even so apparently straightforward a thing as a set of numbers must contain at least one “undecidable” statement, such that even if we are certain that statement is true, the system can’t prove it. It must therefore be logically “incomplete.”

And his second theorem was like unto it:

No one can prove, from inside any formal system, that it is self-consistent. Not, “some day,” not, “maybe we missed something,” not, “give us more time” — but can’t, won’t, jamais de la vie — and in the way you can’t be a man and a teapot at the same time.

Or put this another way (and there are many, many other ways to put it). Any logical account we may want to give of the totality of our wee, finite Universe (and we know darn well it is finite, today) requires a view from outside our Universe, that is indispensable to fully understand it.

Or consider: there will always be things that one knows to be true, but cannot be strictly proved, in logic; which rise, as it were, above the rational, in an ultimately demonstrable way; which present some (often beautiful) paradox.

It follows that the mathematician, the scientist, even the engineer and technologist, and everybody else, must work on blind faith, even within their own trades. And what is reasonable is not always rational: merely consistent with reason. Blind spots must necessarily remain, for us finite creatures. What we know by common sense is thus affirmed at the highest available rational level: that we cannot know everything.

True, Gödel’s “proofs” require some brains to understand. But they also take some brains to misunderstand: to defy something that comes down, in the end, to the Law of Non-Contradiction. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too; you cannot be both A and not-A. Not even God can contradict this Law of Non-Contradiction, and anyway wouldn’t try. He never contradicts Himself because (unlike other gods) He never has to.

It was this theological insight that made Christianity the guide to empirical science: that God is self-consistent, that His deeds will always finally make sense; that although God is far beyond human reason, He has from every direction left a trail of divine light.

And note this paradox: that the condition for the nurture and mastery and growth of empirical science, was blind faith. That, among other things, God is no trickster. He is immanent, and transcendent, but distinct from his own Creation — all such things as we can know, by faith.

So to explain the Universe, the set of all sets, no matter how big it happens to be — and even if it includes a bubble bath of “multiverses” — we must step outside the Whole Thing. And this would be necessary, no matter which bubble we might happen to be locked inside.

Gödel also developed, unsurprisingly, a version of Anselm’s cosmological argument for the existence of God, expressed in slam-dunk post-Euclidean logic, that was theist like Leibniz and not polytheist like Spinoza. And yes, he was extremely familiar with Kant’s naïve attempt at refutation. (Kant, who never read mediaeval philosophy, did not actually understand Anselm’s argument, let alone the improvement on it by Thomas Aquinas.)

I’m acquainted with raw, drooling ignorance in myself. I’m surprised to find it institutionalized today, and frequently enforced, though perhaps only because I am at heart a man of the thirteenth century (like Gödel, 1906–78), and thus perhaps too easily repugned of smug atheist fools.

Einstein, incidentally, once said he only worked at Princeton so he could have the opportunity to take walks with Gödel. They often went on long ones.

*

Now let us return over the sea, to the (once) Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, and to Monsignor Georges Lemaître (1894–1966). About the same time the young Gödel was formulating his incompleteness theorems as a doctoral dissertation at Vienna, or a few years before, Lemaître was playing with Einstein’s field equations of relativity, and realizing a funny little thing. The Universe is not static. It is expanding. He did everything for which Edwin Hubble is now credited by the pop science writers, except, he did it before Hubble. And then he did an even better thing: he accounted for it.

Lemaître is the true and only author of the “Big Bang” hypothesis, which in wake of yesterday’s “gravity wave” announcement is once more confirmed to be at the heart of all astrophysics. The priest himself called it the hypothesis of the Cosmic Egg: that our universe began as a “primaeval atom”: an extremely small fraction of the radius of a proton which, oddly enough, blew out to its present, rather larger size.

For this he was ignored, or mocked. The expression “Big Bang” was itself coined by the atheist Fred Hoyle to make fun of it, and has stuck because it still appeals to the craving of materialists for a static Universe, infinite in scale. They can’t handle something that began; there must be something before that “just happened,” to no good end, for no good reason, in the infinite regression of a hall of mirrors. They must absolutely insist on the meaninglessness of it all; a succession of nothings. For otherwise they must face down the very God that they have been avoiding.

But that Cosmic Egg was quite a something; quite a nuanced, profound something; and rather consequential, as we have come to see. For it carried the possibility of our own biological existence.

The primaeval atom; the egg; the Seed, as I think of it myself, implanted in the soil of the Holy Spirit. Which burst forth in a million stars; in a million million million of them. I can understand this in a way consistent with both reason and faith; I cannot understand it in a way consistent with a long yawn. As Einstein said (to much subsequent ridicule), “God does not play dice with the universe.” The Maker of that Seed knew what He was doing; this certainly is what Georges Lemaître understood.

I’ve mentioned Lemaître in Idleposts before (there’s a search function in this website, y’know); he is perhaps my biggest modern scientific hero, after Pierre Duhem. As other truly penetrating intellects, he cannot be properly appreciated by the post-modern mind, which accepts only Prometheans as heroes — i.e. men who seem to stand against God in rebellion; tricksters angling to steal His fire, and repeat the sin of Adam. Whereas, Lemaître merely served God, with real distinction.

The hypothesis of the Cosmic Egg found the light of day in the same year of grace 1931 (as Gödel’s key publication). And like Gödel, Lemaître stood modestly, yet also bravely athwart the crass metaphysical assumptions of “modernity.” It wasn’t his egg that was so provocative, in itself. Rather, it was what the egg said.

It said that our Universe is finite. Generations of the cleverest scientific minds had taken material infinitude for granted. It was necessary to all their thinking: an infinite amount of space and time in which anything we see could have gradually “evolved,” like Darwin’s beasts, by pure happenstance at their infinite leisure.

Cut the time-line short and we are dealing with “miracles” instead — with things that happen not slowly but suddenly, while casually ignoring all our human expectations. And these not small things, either.

Well, sometimes you just have to tough it out. There is currently no way home to an infinite Universe, and no way foreseeable. The “multiverse” conjecture does not get us there, it only displaces the question — kicks it a little farther down the road. Human reason can run, but it cannot hide: sooner or later it is staring once again at the inescapable, ineluctable, Fact of God.

Einstein himself was at first scandalized, by Lemaître’s hypothesis, when Eddington (who’d been among Lemaître’s teachers, and thought him the brightest student he’d ever had) brought it to his attention. “Your math is correct, but your physics is abominable,” Einstein told the priest.

But within a couple of years he had come around, and realized that his own unspoken assumption of a static, infinite Universe was unsustainable. Indeed he came to call that Cosmic Egg “the most beautiful thing” he’d ever seen. Other fine minds likewise came around, though as I recall, by the 1960s, some were still fighting, still defending the body that was dead in the cosmic water.

Since the 1990s, we have known that the Universe is not only expanding, but accelerating outward. It is icing on old Lemaître’s cake. We have also come to realize there are irregularities in the rate at which the stars recede; that there are mysterious Great Attractors scattered here and there through intergalactic space. Indeed, yesterday’s formal announcement of the demonstration of “gravity waves” lets us hope for insights into these irregularities.

Beyond those we continue to find, Horatio, that there are “more things in Heaven and Earth.” Our choice is to take this with awe; or with the deathly grin of those whose faith is not in God, but in their glib, sorry, mechanistic contraptions — in a scientism that real science continues to kick away.

As the theoretical physicists have set up so impressive a cheering section for themselves (see today’s announcement in media, passim), I will save my throat for some other hurrah. The first detection of “gravity waves” by the academy, tending to confirm an hypothesis of Einstein’s from one hundred years ago (that he later disavowed), required many billions-worth in gear from the taxpayers of several countries, and several decades of dedicated work by a small army of the exquisitely trained.

The happy result is a confirmation of several assumptions on which physicists had already been working through much of that last century; plus, I should think, Nobel prizes all round; and extraordinary hype for further big spending on scientific research. Already, for instance, the Italians have announced that they will get back in action with their own interferometer (the “Virgo” with arms nearly two miles in length), and I daresay everyone will now want to have one. A wonderful way to pile-on each national debt.

The accomplishment has been compared to Galileo’s first sighting of the moons of Jupiter through a 30-power telescope in early January, 1610. It was a prototype of the modern refractor. He does not tell us in his book, The Starry Messenger, how much the instrument cost him, but he did spend years mastering the optician’s art, grinding away.

Spy-glasses were all the rage in the Europe of his generation, and Galileo deserved praise for his patience in improving on them. Soon we could see the phases of Venus, and the rings of Saturn, and confirm a shy hypothesis of Copernicus from one century before (that repeated one from the Alexandrians, nearly two thousand years before that). Indeed, I noticed that the observing run on the Americans’ pair of upgraded “LIGO” interferometers was actually completed on 12th January. That would be the 406th anniversary of the completion of Galileo’s first observing run.

With the detection of gravity waves, we may soon be able to see previously invisible astrophysical objects and stellar remnants; to have another go in the field of “dark matter”; eventually, to see with gravity waves into formative moments of the universe (towards 13.8 billion years ago) still impenetrable through waves of radio or light. Let me not suggest we will have no fun.

Part of this fun will consist of watching large areas of “alternative” conjectural physics fade into extinction. Between what was announced today, and the nailing of the Higgs’ boson four years ago, the Standard Model of physics stands quite secure. Conversely, the truly arcane speculations of the really cool physicists through the last few decades look time-worn and pointless. I used sometimes to dine with certain particle physicists (“stringers,” more precisely) of huge self-regard. I think back on their arrogance, in passing.

At both the quantum end, and now the macroscopic end, unconjectural physics is back in vogue. Strike three has come from new mathematics to prove that there is no way to predict the more remarkable and consequential behaviour of sub-atomic particles, for which the axioms of mathematics could be any use. (See here, for instance.) “They will do what they do do and there’s no doing anything about it.”

Each new discovery is hailed as the “holy grail” of physics, but an impending Theory of Everything, long touted, remains not finitely, but infinitely beyond us. In the end, all we can do is observe, and act only in our tiny temporal spaces. There is so much more only dead men can know.

Notwithstanding, our view today of the signature of two irrefutably black holes, each equivalent to many times the mass of our Sun, spinning about each other many times a second at something approaching to the speed of light, then merging to release a gravitational radiation in a “dark flash” brighter than all the light in the universe, for a quarter second in time, does provide a moment of perspective. To God, that would be the twinkle of a firefly.

A common mistake is to explain oneself, when one has not been asked to do so; or asked, but not by those who care to hear the answer.

“Never complain, never explain,” as Benjamin Disraeli explained, and Churchill would quote, smiling knavishly. Of course both meant never in the sense of, “seldom.” For there are times when one had better explain oneself: to the policeman, the jury, the wife, or whomever; to those entitled to respect. Yet even to them, elaboration may not be required. “Guilty as charged” might be sufficient. From this, a penance will follow naturally.

Wearing ashes will do for the rest; the better when they will find it incomprehensible.

“Judgement is of the Lord, and not of the children in the playground,” as my father once patiently explained, after I had made a fool of myself, in the yard of Saint Anthony’s. He was quoting my grandfather, as I came to understand. (Grandpa had been quoting some older authorities.) “Take yer lumps,” would be a paraphrase. I have not yet mastered this advice myself, but can see that it is wise. So much of the power of “political correctness” comes from this wincing action, to which human beings are inclined: to explain what doesn’t need explaining. Let one’s statement stand, without explication, so long as it was heartfelt and true. Let the critic worm resume his furrow.

Or saith the divine, through the daemon of Blake: “Always be willing to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.”

“Shake the dust off your feet,” was Christ’s own instruction, recalled by Paul and Barnabas when parting from Pisidian Antioch; and we may imagine they had cause to clap their sandals together, many times more. “Amen I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that town.”

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: this is a side of Christ’s teaching that seems particularly lost on many who claim to hear Him today. He was not a “nice” Saviour. Except in appeal to the Father, He offered no forgiveness to those who did not ask, no mercy to those who did not want it. He was not, as now described even in Rome, the prophet of free lunch.

We owe our explanations to Him; and likewise our penitence. Not to the mob.

Well, perhaps it has started. In Vellore, south India, we learn that a man was struck dead by a meteorite on Saturday. He was a bus driver; for all we know, a rude one. Two gardeners and a student were also injured in the strike: already we discern a pattern. Officials of the Tamil Nadu government found the crater (5 feet in diameter, 2 in depth), and have recovered from it a charred stone, of some 180 grains, more or less. That would be the weight of an old silver rupee. It was glassy black, and had pockmarks — like a meteor. The size, its likely speed, and the damage fit together nicely: windows blown or cracked to a modest distance; dead leaves ignited. These officials expressed willingness to pay out one lakh of current paper rupees to the family of the deceased, as a kind of prize. Then less, proportionately, to the injured bystanders.

“Scientists,” so-called, doubt the story. They claim long odds against anyone getting hit by a meteor (“astronomical”), and insist no one had been previously so impacted in recorded history. Besides, they need those meteors themselves, for their own fond accounts of how the world came to be.

But Indian authorities reply, the scientific claims are reckless. An American woman was hit by a meteor at Sylacauga, Alabama, in November 1954. They have a back number of the National Geographic to prove it.

I shall be checking Drudge and the Times of India for further such reports, against a list of likely targets — e.g. trolley drivers in the Greater Parkdale Area; cab drivers and passengers alike; horn-blowers attempting to make heretical left turns in rush-hour traffic; errant cheesemongers in the Kensington Market; talk-show radio hosts, and so on. One expects thunderbolts, usually; but these are times when more may be required.

For it is my suspicion that things have gone too far; that we have reached a point where unambiguously cosmic interventions may be necessary. And my beloved Hilaire Belloc — a sound theological mind if anyone ever had one — did suggest that one of the pleasures of Heaven will be throwing rocks at the damned. It is a topic on which I have sometimes meditated.

*

A good modern mind will not see the humour here; just as he will be unable to see any of the humour in Rabelais, or in the preceding Catholic generations, back through Middle and Dark Ages — when people were often laughing, at things the modern mind has since ruled to be, “Not Funny.” For as our children are taught to think, so compassionately, today: “Oh, the poor fellow, how he hurts: all suffering is evil!”

To the victim, yes, I should think pain is evil; one might even say, pain and death are evils in themselves; but not always to the contextual observer. Rather, I am convinced that a cheap sentimental “compassion,” broadcast especially in literature and art, was among the most destructive contrivances of “The Enlightenment” — designed to make us wince at pain alone, and thus purposefully aimed at all objective moral judgement.

By strict contrast, to your mediaeval mind, or your genuinely Catholic one in all times and places, suffering has a use. That would certainly include one’s own suffering. Compassion, or “empathy” in its updated, mind-reading form, is to be engaged for the Good, and not to undermine it; satire keeps it from wandering off course. Thus, the frustration and thwartment of real evil, however brutal the means to that end, is held to have a lighter side. (So many of the oldest of the old Christian jokes mock the Devil hisself, for his little miscalculations.)

The traditional Catholic stands frequently accused of indulging “black,” or, shall we say, “sick” humour. Such as the kind spontaneously expressed by the four well-raised daughters of a household dear to me, when they discovered that the hole in the fuselage of a (safely landed) Somali airliner was created by a terrorist who managed to blow only himself out of the plane. Their response was to roll on the floor laughing. It was a classic Rabelaisian skit, in addition to being factually true.

Now, we could go into the deep argument for the necessary existence of Hell, via Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. (Or, check out Socrates at the end of the Gorgias.) Impenitent immortal commitment to evil requires its equal and opposite, in the balance of things. And of course, Our Lord warns repeatedly of Hell in Scripture. It is not Catholic to correct Him. But a meteor could strike me before I go to the trouble of digging out all the references today. Suffice to say, the modern mind thinks sentimentally about things that are not, in their nature, sentimental. But might just possibly be funny, as the angle of reason is slightly flexed.

I have many times been called to account for snickering out of place. One does not, for instance, make a joke, even about the demise of a Saddam Hussein, or an Osama bin Laden, if one is a good liberal. It is in the poorest possible taste. (As Malcolm Muggeridge once explained, humour is by definition in bad taste.)

“No one must ever make light of a death,” the trolls advise, with their stern judgemental faces. On the other hand, when Margaret Thatcher dies of natural causes, they lighten right up. (See this excellent psychological study of the liberal mind and character in action: here.)

*

The Chinese Hell, or Dìyù, is much like ours in its architecture, having eighteen levels (a pair for each circle in Dante’s). The punishments get worse as one goes down: this much is in common between folk animist, Taoist, and Buddhist accounts, which vary slightly in their particulars. In all, the tortures are pretty gruesome. Not even at the top level could one wish to be.

Indeed, the modern liberal mind is unique, in doubting the existence of Hell and Heaven. For they are known, so far as I can see, to all cultures. The differences of view on fine points of layout, or on the quickest routes up and down, are quibbles in light of such general agreement.

By way of shout-out to my Chinese friends, I mention this today on their New Year’s. The year of the Fire Monkey is upon us, for a fact. Watch where ye go, while ye can, says the Monkey; and when ye can no longer, don’t bother to dodge. For we have what is coming to us, in a universe that will be proved Just, exactly; to incredible units of astronomical accuracy.

“Scientists,” as they like to call themselves, have reached a new frontier: the computer analysis of what is now called in our urban dictionaries, “resting bitch face,” or “RBF.” (See here, or here.) This is the phenomenon, common to royalty, Hollywood stars, and all the columnists in The Guardian newspaper, of a face that broadcasts “bitch” from any distance, when in fact it is only at rest, or perhaps trying to communicate emotional serenity. Such a breakthrough!

In their moments off trying to prove Darwinism, breed monstrous human-animal hybrids, extend the reach of “social media,” and assemble new weapons of mass destruction, the scientists have discovered a means to monitor 500 points on a photographic portrait and then, by applying whatever algorithms, find the statistical correlative to what most people can see at one glance. They intended, I think, an attack on Her Majesty the Queen, in her “we are not amused” moments; but Kristen Stewart, Victoria Beckham, and Kanye West are among the collateral damage. This last seems to have made “the list” thanks to software designed to eliminate “gender bias,” which is apparently exhibited even by machines.

Now curiously enough, independently of pop culture and “science,” I began noticing the phenomenon myself in early childhood. Naively, I attributed it to the old notion that, “the face is the mirror of the soul.” Since, I have developed my observation into a method for identifying liberals, and other deeply unhappy people, even before they start talking. I cannot afford new computer apparatus, so will stick with my instincts.

I suppose the scientists will now propose plastic surgery to correct what Nature fully intended, through her kit-bag of warnings. Technology is the great Corrector, in this respect. The world wags on.

Let me add, to the piece I wrote for Catholic Thing today (here), that were it continued for a few more thousand words, I might make several other points touching on our contemporary lawlessness, both sacred and profane. But as Father Hunwicke says, I type with only one finger, and it is getting tired. (Well actually I type with three, and sometimes use my thumb on the space bar, which is why my pieces often come out longer.)

Disrespect for the law grows from many causes, but one of terrible effect is the quantity of legislation. When I last checked, for instance, a few years ago, the Obamacare arrangements had filled 20,202 pages. Since, by executive order and the like, this has grown considerably, and of course, this not-quite-randomly selected Act and its attachments comprise only a miniscule portion of current USA law overall. I am unaware of page counts for Canadian legislation and orders-in-council (the federal and provincial Gazettes congest with them, every day). In comparison, the Ten Commandments of Moses were easier to remember; and note that Jesus boiled those down to Two.

As I learnt to my cost some years ago, after I criticized a previous Liberal government in perhaps too harsh and public a way, the Income Tax Code is a kind of star-gate, and once one’s file is transferred for audit from Scarborough, Ontario to, say, the notorious office in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, the [omitted] can get you in a million ways; and any appeal to the Tax Court will cost you another million. (Received a letter this week to suggest they are coming for me again, and my only pleasure is that it must cost them a hundred barrels for every pint of blood they can hope to suck from me.)

The modern citizen is a trained wuss when it comes to such things. He will take any tyranny for granted, so long as it comes with the “democracy” label. He has been taking it for a long time, as for instance through the income tax department, which, long before my personal experience of its sick, sadistic ways, I opposed in principle. The department was created not only to pick our pockets, but to give the State access to our most intimate private lives, together with a presumption of guilt in all investigations. The receipts are then applied to leverage debt-based expenditure to purposes themselves, far more often than not, intrinsically evil.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the bigger economic players, who can afford whole accounting departments to find existing loopholes, and lobbyists to fetch more when they are wanted, consider themselves to be above criticism if their lawyers can argue they have stayed within the law. But these arguments are useless, should the political powers take a dislike to them. For the government always has larger accounting and legal departments; and when it comes to “lawyering” they hold all the cards.

I laugh, for instance, when anyone proposes a comprehensible “flat tax.” The codes and regulations are immensely complex by design and intention. The purpose was explained to me by a successful businessman once, with whom I happened to be allied, briefly. He said, that whenever he negotiates a contract, he instructs his lawyers to make it hard to understand, by inserting and then insisting upon a myriad of petty little clauses, all of which will appear to be irrelevant. Indeed, he said, all of them may be, but in aggregate they are bound to provide the “wiggle room” should later he decide to welch upon the deal — “legally,” as he put it.

Am I cynical and misanthropic on matters like these? I would think so.

Centralization of human authority in the modern Nanny State is, in its nature, totalitarian. We have governments in control of huge populations, passing the equivalent of municipal by-laws, that apply to the whole country. And these with the full power of police and army to enforce them should any question arise. This is obviously a recipe from Kafka. (Not Barbara; Franz.)

These laws of man make mockery of the Law of Heaven.

But God will have to deal with it, I am too small.

My standards for politicians are low. This has finally naught to do with my general objections to “democracy.” My standards for courtiers are low, too; and I’ve found most kings and even some queens disappointing — while allowing that someone must rule. My experience of life is that human beings make a hash of most things they touch, and my belief is that if it weren’t for Divine Grace, our whole race would have extinguished itself, long ago.

Only against this background can I say how impressed I have been with the evaporating field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve watched some of the televised “debates” (which I’d rather call “vaudevilles”), and have some idea from where most of the candidates are coming. Donald Trump is an exception: the man who received more than half of nationwide media attention for more than six months, got one-quarter of the Iowa caucus vote, which was I thought at least twenty-five times what he had earned. I only hope U.S. Americans are now half as tired of this coarse, malevolent buffoon as I am.

But by my standards, the rest of the field (including candidates now dropped out) are impressive. I do not remember a previous nomination campaign in which as many as a dozen candidates were each worth considering. The contrast with the Democratic Party race, which could be caricatured as the Witch versus the Commie, is staggering: two candidates whom no fully sane and intelligent person would dream of keeping in public life.

With Trump happily absent from the last vaudeville, the strength of the field became more apparent. Except Trump, I could not see a single candidate who would offer nothing of value to a national executive. Even such an inexperienced candidate as Carson, for instance, would be in his element at, say, Health and Human Services, if only for the task of dismantling it in a wise, merciful, and orderly way; Fiorina might, ditto, competently close down the Department of Education, or drain some other unnecessary bureaucratic quagmire. Governors Bush, Christie, Huckabee, Jindal, Kasich, Perry, Walker, all struck me as serious and accomplished men, with real experience of the issues on which they touched; Graham, Paul, Santorum, as principled, thoughtful, and determined. Cruz and Rubio are sterling — though again remembering my modest expectations. I never expect gold.

Lord Grenville’s “ministry of all the talents” (1806) came to mind. Although the term could be used facetiously (and was), it did succeed in e.g. formally abolishing the slave trade, and some other ambitious but achievable tasks, before disintegrating, as a consequence of having crossed too many party or factional lines. Churchill’s wartime cabinet had something of the same qualities, and held together until the end of the Second World War while British independence was at stake.

For the very reason the Democrats now offer only a constantly expanding moral, intellectual, and fiscal black hole, there would be some prospect of holding a contrary administration together, for perhaps one full term; long enough to reverse a few trends. Paradoxically Cruz, who is not a “team player,” but commands both horse-sense and logical capacity, might make the best choreographer; Rubio might prove (like Grenville) too cautious and accommodating, at a time when major decisions must be made and not retreated from, to avoid a form of national collapse.

The fact a man (or woman) wants to be president should disqualify him, of course; but as there is no prospect of return to the original Electoral College, envisioned by the American Founding Fathers, the responsibility to eliminate quacks, demagogues, criminals, careerists, the unteachably stupid, and the insane, falls on the public at large. As those Founders realized, “the people” would make an extremely unreliable “safety net,” for the preservation of their own liberties. Men of some character and understanding would be indispensable.

Oddly enough, the USA does seem to have some. Could they be raised to a view above personal ambition, and put to work as a phalanx? Probably not, but the idea is intriguing.