Essays in Idleness

Over Easter we lost two old Idler magazine contributors, & one drinking companion. On Holy Saturday, David Dooley died, age 91: emeritus English professor in St Michael’s College. He was active to nearly the end in pro-life causes, & the Catholic Civil Rights League. He once wrote a few book reviews for the Idler. I first met him, back then a quarterish century ago, when he was already facing the university’s compulsory retirement requirement, enforced the more strictly in the humanities because modern universities were finding themselves seriously overstaffed in such departments, no longer in consumer demand. By now I should think their problem has been resolved.

A real professor, & Dooley was certainly one of those, comes into his own around age sixty-five. That is when he has amassed sufficient learning to begin teaching in earnest, as Dooley explained. He was a fighter by disposition, a good old-fashioned Irish Catlick scrapper, who was doing his best in a hopelessly lost cause. He was from the glory era at St Mike’s — when it had J.M. Cameron, Tom Langan, John Kelly, & many more; had Étienne Gilson & his Pontifical Institute; had Marshall McLuhan & his Media Studies; had the finest humanities library in the Province — not the biggest, but the most carefully chosen, book by book, & extensive archival holdings such as the Newman papers, heroically obtained. Today that campus is largely a waste of valuable downtown parking space. It has ceased to be a Catholic institution except in some obscure, nominal sense, & the Basilian Fathers who once provided impressive spiritual guidance have long since gone over to the other side. In my humble but fierce opinion.

Dooley was of the vintage that fought against the merger of St Mike’s into the University of Toronto. He understood why it was a lost cause. The staff who voted on this nasty question were willing to surrender all their independence, together with their Catholic identity, in return for an approximately 5 percent raise in their salaries, that would bring them into line with pay levels in the larger bureaucracy. They were openly bought, & they went cheaply: in a word, prostitutes. Dooley knew every historical detail of the once-proud St Michael’s University, built with the pennies of old Irish widows so their grandchildren could receive a superb education, & stand tall in this Protestant town; so that Catholics could have a cultivated clergy, ornaments to the Church. It was the splendid product of sacrifices over several generations, not least from faculty once ill-paid. All gone in the end for a contract settlement, for an extra 5 percent & the promise of better sports facilities.

God bless this man, God bless his spirit. A lot of people didn’t like him, he was a fusty old dog. This is just why I loved him, & his knowledge of English literature made him (even when I was just an Anglican) the sort of man to drink sherry with. He was one of the few I could entrust to review a book, who would actually read it; an interpreter of 20th-century “EngLit” who could supply so much by knowing its antecedents, by knowing the classics its authors knew. And thus, seldom welcome in the pages of the more fashionable reviews, where theory prevails & men like that are marked as “plodders.”

I remember him over at my house (I once lived in a house) scanning my bookshelves. He took down a volume of the first Keynes edition of Sir Thomas Browne, which had library markings in it.

“Did you steal this book?” he asked forthrightly.

“No, I bought the set for a couple of dollars in a library sale. You will find the discard stamp on the back endpaper.”

“O Lord, oh my blessed Lord,” was his observation. For yes, this was the sort of literature modern libraries were dumping. He said he would be happier had I stolen it.

*

“RIP Kildare Dobbs, the greatest & quietest of raconteurs,” as Richard Lubbock (the Idler‘s old Chief Cosmological Correspondent, now himself mid-eighties & nursing-homed) tweeted on Monday. That Kildare, in his ninetieth year, would die on April Fool’s Day, was of a piece with the rest of his life. It was his last gently mischievous wink.

One had to see Kildare’s eyes to follow his anecdotes, for his voice was so provocatively soft. The light in them provided important clues to the narrative. You had to sit very close, stare, & hope others in the room would shut up. For every anecdote was worth hearing, & most of them were side-splitting funny. Yet as the telling continued, the voice would become softer still. We see the result when these anecdotes are repeated among Kildare’s old friends: no two versions ever quite agree.

I asked him once what he’d done for a living when he first washed up in Canada (around 1953). He’d found a job teaching in some “godforsaken” two-room schoolhouse in northern Ontario, beyond Sudbury I think. He wasn’t at all suited to it, & his students were soon out of control. But the old man commanding the other classroom had all his charges smartly in order, & Kildare often wondered how that was done. He could never meet this colleague, who disappeared instantly at the end of each school day; till finally he spotted him in the town’s hotel bar. It turned out the man was an alcoholic, & could have been found any evening in there.

Searching for some way to endear himself to this frosty superior, young Kildare confessed that he had problems with class discipline, & had been deeply impressed by the punctiliously correct behaviour of every pupil in the other room. “How do you do it? How do you get them to behave?”

“I hate the little bastards. And they know it.”

That will have to do as a Kildare Dobbs anecdote. He collected stories everywhere. Some people become magnets for the memorable, because they put themselves consistently in harm’s way; though I doubt Kildare would ever have been so crass as to ruin a good tale with excessive fact-checking. He was a connoisseur of corruption & hypocrisy; a diligent observer of how the world really works, & people get what they want. He was delighted to discover a new swindle. He earned his living through much of his life as a travel writer, with frequent excursions to exotic places in search of “local colour.” He had a gift for discovering high life in the low places, & vice versa. Every artist needs patrons, & in his case, the patrons found were first-class hotels, airlines, & travel agencies. Knowing he would actually be read, such sponsors endured his little eccentricities, & let him live off the fat of the land.

He was also a poet, & among my regrets, the Idler went down before we could publish a selection of his hendecasyllables. (They have since appeared in a book, The Eleventh Hour.) This is a reasonably obscure, classical, quantitative measure, nearly impossible to manage in English. (I know because I’ve tried.) Developed in ancient Alexandria, it takes the sapphic, essentially lyric rhythm, & extends it towards narrative — floating it, as it were, on the air. Kildare daringly rejected the standard models, to turn the measure back again, towards lyric. To my knowledge, no one had ever tried this before, in English. Somehow Kildare, with the ear of an Alfred Lord Tennyson, pulled it off: made hendecasyllables sound natural, almost conversational in English, while restoring the sapphic clip. I still have the manuscript marked with typesetting instructions, somewhere in the High Doganate. If I could find it I would give an example.

The 17th-century Thomas Browne was mentioned above, famed as a model for English prose style. Kildare was — & I mean this — the best prose writer of his generation in English, up here in America’s mad attic. By some genetic freak, his nearest rival was his cousin, John Muggeridge (son of Kitty, née Dobbs, the wife of Malcolm Muggeridge). John was as infallible, except, one could seldom extract copy from him, for all one’s pleading & begging. He’d think too much about what he ought to say. But Kildare was spot on deadline. Neither ever constructed a sentence that a subeditor could improve. (Not to say the idiots didn’t try.) It must be something in the water from the River Liffey: from that Ireland entirely within the Pale. It makes prose perfect, immortal. Indeed, the day Kildare made a spelling error, our whole office rejoiced.

I gave Kildare a very poorly-paid, extended regular column in the Idler, entitled “The Rambler.” It was an opportunity for him to write memoirs of his travels, without having to acknowledge sponsors, or take much care over fine little points that might offend them. Happily for me, he leapt at opportunities like that, doing his best work for the smallest sums.

We used to use Dobbs copy at the Idler in training some of our younger writers. I recall telling a certain fellow, now an august media pundit, but then an over-ambitious subliterate nobody of twenty-two, to read Kildare’s columns through again & again with only one thing in mind: where he had placed his commas. For they were a guide to his “perfect pitch” — the musical (as opposed to quasi-logical) pauses that prose rhythm requires, to achieve sublimity. A beautiful bird, or flowering plant in nature, is seen to be lovely at first glance. Yet it is only when it is examined that one begins to appreciate how lovely, how intricately & how exquisitely the whole creature is designed; what a universe of incredible detail has gone into the unified overall effect. That is when we see where God has placed the commas.

Kildare was a patient artist, making his way in our impatient world. And this he did artfully, presenting himself as a rogue, dropping hints that he was not to be trusted, that he was selfish & conniving. Typical was the profession of love remembered by the wife who survives him. (His third wife, but a love-match that endured.) “It has been my experience that beautiful women usually have unworthy men in their lives,” he wrote to the young painter, Linda Kooluris. “I want you to know I’m as worthless as the next.”

This irony was the reverse of modern: Kildare was not really such a rogue (notwithstanding the shocking & self-deprecating anecdotes), nor the coward he professed to be (witness military medals). He was extremely reliable, & secretly generous in a reckless, uncalculating way. He was, in fact, a gentle man, with real empathy for human suffering: a genuine carrier of other’s pain. The eyes, once again, told much, for he could laugh merrily at the bloody farce of it all, tell jokes in the darkest black humour, but in his eyes the wince could be seen.

Christian he was not. He loved the outward artifice of religion, by which he was inwardly puzzled. I got from him good-natured mockery for my own entry into the Catholic Church, during his 80th birthday party (combined, in a pub, with John Muggeridge’s 70th). To him, dogmatic certainty was the normal cause of bloodshed & uncharity, of which he’d seen enough in his youth. He was Japanese in his religious disposition: a faith inexplicably transformed into an aloof aestheticism, a cherry-blossom exhalation upon the transience of things.

Nor was he in any sense a political “conservative,” except perhaps in my intensely apolitical sense. He despised the doctrinaire proponents of “economic freedom,” just as he despised Marxists & all other ideologues. But he loved the thing itself: the buy & sell. He would explain that for real capitalism, one must go to the bazaars of the East, for what we have in the West is only stage-show competition, fake at every level.

Canadian letters had no better friend. Kildare Dobbs, the immigrant, quietly “discovered” a great deal of fine Canadian writing that had been overlooked; quietly ignored what was coarse & over-celebrated. He played a major, mostly unacknowledged role in the “gardening” of our literature, both in the backrooms of publishing (at Macmillan’s of Canada in the 1950s, in the founding of the Tamarack Review & at the magazine Saturday Night in the 1960s), & later in the foreground, as genial advocate in newspapers & broadcasting.

Thus he fully deserved the Order of Canada he finally received, in January. (Immobilized by his congestive heart, & a hundred other ailments, Kildare could not visit Ottawa to receive it. So our governor-general, the Right Honourable David Johnston, came to him, delivering it in person to his Toronto apartment.) They give these things out by the hundred each year; two or three are often quite deserved.

*

Selwyn Owen died Tuesday. He was one of a pub table of drinking buddies, who have been meeting Tuesdays since well back in the last century. We are all defunct artists of one kind or another, from the convenor down — Paul Young, before his retirement the last skilled drawing master at the Ontario College of Art (since renamed to increase its pretension). Selwyn was only in his sixties. He made his way as a realtor, while secretly persisting as an abstract painter. Others at the table retired from art more completely, at an early age, becoming bank managers, storekeepers, office workers, lawyers, lexicographers, whatever; I can remember most from when they were giddy young aspiring poets & artists, before “reality” set in. Selwyn’s kids came to work with him in the real estate business; he found some happiness there. He ended up withered on a hospital bed, in the unspeakable final stage of Lou Gehrig’s disease. A granddaughter “checked in” to the planet at East General, just as Selwyn was “checking out.” That was, he said when he could last speak, what he was still living for: to see that little girl if he could, perhaps hold her in his dying arms.

I did not know him so well, for I am among the least regular of the regulars at that table; but did know him for a modest & kindly, thoughtful man, who gave little glimpses into a sensibility that was amazingly colourful, behind an outward reserve. He could articulate connexions between visual art & music, that struck me as brilliant. Few have the gift of listening as well as speaking, & Selwyn was one of those, staying remorselessly on topic. A Londoner by birth, another Canadian by immigration, he discarded the accent but retained the manners of a well-bred Englishman. Not all artists are buffoons.

My sense of things, when Pope Benedict resigned, is my sense now: that we have rounded the cape, that we are in a new ocean. There is a new man at the helm of our barque: the first to have become a priest after Vatican II, the first Jesuit, the first from the New World, &c. That his “style” is a radical break from the last is already apparent. His choice of the name “Francis,” unused by popes over all these centuries, was our first indication. It is as if the polarities were reversed at Rome, & the strange dishevelled saint of Assisi, who was absolutely loyal to the resplendent papacy, now receives the fealty of the robes. I am convinced there is a Hand on the hand of our tiller.

There will, perhaps, be other popes from Europe, but Benedict XVI may still come to be remembered as the “last European pope,” & his resignation to be pregnant with that spiritual message. Here I am not using the term “Europe” geographically; nor would I dream of dismissing the popes who came before, now a heritage to all ages. It is to Europe as the Christian culture I am referring. It began destroying itself in the Reformation of the 16th century; in the time since 1914 it has completed this task, with greater & greater urgency. I am at one with Hilaire Belloc, & Pat Buchanan, & many others in taking this view.

But it does not make me giddy with excitement. I will myself live & die a “European,” for I was formed in that shape; & even though so much of my own earlier life was lived in farther Asia, from my parentage I could not have become anything but a man of the West. It will be the same for most of my readers: we are what we are.

It is a bit like being an old Jew in the early Church, in this New World full of Gentiles. The European, the American sense of being the “chosen people,” the specially enlightened, adheres to us still. But the old Temple is gone; has crumbed, & will be buried in an archaeological stratum. Europe has gone, & in its going scattered the seed of Christianity to the ends of the Earth. Many peculiar customs of Europe will persist, but transformed in new soils & new climates; & we will not live to glimpse some dear familiar folds in the faces of the children of our children’s children.

Here is a son of Piedmont: removed somehow to Buenos Aires, “to the ends of the Earth.” Tied to Italy by one last thread, he still speaks some words in the old Occitan. The thread is inseverable; but a time will come when we can no longer trace it along its full length.

“Religion” & “culture” are two different, though closely & mutually related things. Christianity could not account for all the differences between Spaniards & Englishmen, Germans & Italians, Frenchmen & Poles, Europeans & Americans, even within the Catholic Church. Religion unifies, culture diversifies. The “highest” culture will always be religious, because religion, revelation, God, penetrate most deeply the soul of man qua man. Religion is the music; culture is our song. The culture fashions the religion into a new song. But religion raises & inspires & is its principle of life. A culture freed of religion dies; falls into silence, as if the music were taken out of the song, the soul out of the body. Europe, in freeing itself “progressively” from its Christian heritage, has performed its suicide, for centuries in slow motion, ever quicker towards its end. Over the last several decades it has fully embraced what an old pope called “the culture of death,” & the next called “the dictatorship of relativism”: the culture of glibness; of pure self-adornment; the nihilism that whispers, “one thing is as good as another,” then howls its last out of empty despair.

The seed is now planted abroad; Christ has moved on from where He is not wanted. Yet, too, He remains in our midst, wherever He is wanted. The Europe within Europe is not entirely dead, as we are reminded by the gatherings in St Peter’s Square, by the “youth days,” & by the life that continues in the churches where the Mass is still sung with reverence — even before tiny congregations. There is still some spark of life in the old girl; she is still refusing to be euthanized. But she is surrounded by her hollow children, determined to kill her & take her goods.

There are moments when, even as an old European, I think we should blow up the cathedrals, rather than let them fall into enemy hands; just as our ancestors blew up their forts, rather than surrender them to enemy uses. But no, let future generations see their beauty, even in their ruin. Let them know that Europe was not always a dance of death in the pigsty of consumerism; that we once put our wealth & all our art at the feet of our Saviour.

A great majority of Catholics now live outside Europe, & the Rome of the Vatican is once more being transformed into the capital of a different kind of “empire.” The faces of the cardinals streaming out of the conclave were still in their majority white, but this may only be the case for another generation. The churches within Europe, & in Britain, Canada, the States, have been filling with new faces. The “white man’s world” is passing into history, faster within the churches than on the streets. More & more, the Christianity of Europe & America is being imported.

These are things that go beyond the election of Pope Francis, but to which his election now points. He is an old man, with sciatica, on one lung; we cannot expect to have him with us for long. We can, however, believe that God has entrusted him with a mission, upon which he is acting with the energy of a youth. We can expect that some of it will be incomprehensible to us, in a way perhaps as Francis of Assisi was incomprehensible at first to so many of his contemporaries, who saw in him very worrying departures from conventional religious custom, & did not yet see that he was heroically loyal to the Church; that he honoured the Magisterium, & had come not to destroy but to renew.

Christ, I believe, is bored with Europe, bored with our wealth, bored with our sleaziness, bored with our narcissism, sick through the nostrils with our Paris perfume. He will never, however, be bored with our hunger for the Bread of Life. We must rise & be on our way: Europe has died, & Christ liveth.

“We want a Pope for young people,” sez the current top video item on the Beeb, & looking about the media we find that a Pope is wanted for some other things, too. It is time, I read, for a Pope from Africa, from USA, from South America, from Canada. Even when they are not being especially malicious, the media are obtuse. They do not grasp that the papacy is not a representative government, except in the sense that it represents God to man, & man to God.

Yet this is obvious. Why can’t they get it? You don’t have to be Catholic to grasp the principle of the thing. But brains are baffled by the received ideas of any age. We can see this clearly enough when viewing, say, the 10th century through 21st century eyes. It is the beam in our own eye that we cannot see. And yes, there is an explanation for it. (Original sin breeds false consciousness.)

“Lord do not send us the Pope we deserve.”

It is true I have favourites, for instance Angelo Scola, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, former Patriarch of Venice; or Raymond Leo Burke, Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, former Archbishop of St Louis. But I know these men only through other men who have known them, & I have done little more at firsthand than kiss the ring of a couple of others. I have disfavourites, too, but will not be so stupidly invidious as to name them. I am working from the same kind of vague & often wrong & misleading information that is provided through our media of communications to any general electorate, when making their foolish choices among self-seeking politicians. The Pope isn’t elected like that. Perhaps I am better informed than most; but not a fly on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.

That is where one must be to see what is involved in the choice; & some hopeful trust is required that for all their moral, intellectual, & spiritual limitations, the 115 who are locked inside will be listening through prayer for God’s opinion.

Sandro Magister mentions Michelangelo among the electors, in a recent post. For the cardinals have been locked up with his Last Judgement; & with the prophet Jonah, turned to face our common Maker, Who is separating the light from the darkness at the Creation. Jonah, the prophet sent by God to convert the pagans; the prophet who, with his human sense of justice, regrets that God shows mercy to Nineveh; until by a vision of the Creation, some part of the mystery of God’s Love unfolds before him. Christ took upon Himself “the sign of Jonah”; of a justice & a mercy beyond human understanding.

It is an extraordinary place, which through the genius of popes & artists, & by the trumpet of the Gloria, speaks comprehensively of the Keys, which Christ passed to Peter. The frescoes on those walls, the images placed throughout that chapel & in its vaults & recesses, sober & raise the thinking heart. The cardinals are removed not only from the electronic welter of our present world, but more fundamentally from the welter of its glibness.

*

Update. I was in an Italian grocery shop (in the Greater Parkdale Area) when the white smoke appeared from the chimney. The television behind the cashier was set to it. The cashier — also the proprietor I believe; a man of age, girth, & good humour, with a grand white beard — translated a televised remark that the choice was “unexpected.” But of course, the name was not yet announced.

“They must have elected a black,” my grocer surmised.

Another customer in the store, a Jewish lady, asked him if he is Catholic.

“Some days,” he replied.

I was in another store when I heard a radio flash that it was Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, taking the name Francis I. Now curiously, I had been thinking through, to the best of my ability & knowledge, what would be most likely; & had come confidently to the conclusion that it would take the Conclave until tomorrow evening to settle on … Cardinal Scola.

More than I ever knew about the former Cardinal Bergoglio has now been reported through the usual media, or may be found in the standard reference sites. Everything I learn about his career in Argentina persuades me that he will not be a great enthusiast for Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum; but he will not get in the way of it, either. He appears to be humble & without hypocrisy: he takes his Christianity neat, lives it, & has no illusions about right & wrong. Doctrinally, a rock. He is quietly courageous; the opposite of ostentatious. Not the first man I would expect to swing an axe through the Curia, but we’ll see. I am more surprised by the election of a Jesuit than by the election of a Latin American.

According to a well-publicized account, Bergoglio was runner-up in the Conclave of 2005, but clinched the election of Cardinal Ratzinger with an impassioned appeal to his own supporters to “please stop voting for me.” That he will be utterly unlike Benedict XVI seems clear enough. But as they say, the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in cloning. That so many cardinals both then & now thought this man, whose whole life has been devoted to the Church in Argentina alone, a worthy successor to Saint Peter, must speak for itself.

Choi Sung Bong is a name on everyone’s lips, no? The young tenor’s sudden rise from obscurity to fame on the television show, “Korea’s Got Talent,” has been captured for posterity on YouTube, with English subtitles. “Posterity” being defined today as, “forever, or for a couple of years, whichever comes first,” it grows even while it sheds, & the posterior of our culture has become enormous. But fame is still fame, while it lasts. And we do offer enhanced, if belated coverage of Asian Pop on this website (see, “Gangnam Agonistes,” Dec. 21).

By his own account — the main points given succinctly & modestly to the judges in reply to their direct questions when he first went on stage — Choi was dumped in an orphanage by his parents at age three. At age five, tired of beatings, he ran away. The rest of his childhood was spent on the streets of Seoul, sleeping in stairwells & public lavatories. He supported himself as urchin, selling chewing gum & “energy drinks.” There were “bad things” he did not want to talk about, such as being “sold to someone.” By age eight he had tenuously graduated to day-labour jobs, such as delivering milk & newspapers. Twice he was hit by cars, & went untreated; but after a serious fall he finally made it into the Kun Yang hospital, where the cumulative effect of traumatic injuries were diagnosed & given medical attention.

Choi prefers the name “Ji-Sung,” once given him by a kindly lady food vendor, to the name with which he was registered at the orphanage. (He seems to remember every kindness ever done him.) His life-transforming event happened in a nightclub. At age fourteen, selling whatever he was then selling, he heard a performer who sang “so sincerely.” It was classical repertoire. Choi was only vaguely aware that God had endowed him with a magnificent tenor voice. The food vendor told him he must take lessons, must get some schooling. He earned enough on the street to attend some classes in an arts high school. He listened to recordings, especially by Andrea Bocelli, & tried to emulate them. Another kindly lady gave him voice lessons, for free. He remained invisible, until the day almost two years ago when, still looking so desperately young, he came out to sing before the pop judges on television.

His choice of song was “Nella Fantasia” — by Ennio Morricone, the great Italian composer of spaghetti-western soundtracks. But this number comes from a religious film, about the Jesuits in 18th-century Latin America: the only friends the native Indians had against rapacious white men (though the first missionaries sent to them were martyred). I mention all this as a reminder of the many ways in which, I believe, Christ has embedded Himself even in popular culture; & how we must be discerning & not sneer at the “cross-over” genres by reflex — as I am apt to do.

Choi did not project emotion on the stage. Watching the clip, at first I thought, “perhaps he is autistic”; then saw him smile shyly. He answered the judges’ prying questions in a monotone; he did not seem to be playing for sympathy, but to be self-protectively cautious about his past. There was a fluster of anxiety in the hall: “How will this turn out?”

And of course it turned out fabulously. By the end of the first bar, Choi had taken the house down; the judges themselves were near weeping. They waived him right through to the finals. Then after, we see him being mobbed backstage. But again: no emotional response from him, no triumph; & when he can be free of all the well-wishers he walks alone down a corridor, to be by himself.

Now, as hack journalist of long standing, my scepticism was aroused. This story is too perfect; I smell a script. And I flinch at what happens when all the “fact checkers” go to work on what Choi said, because I already love him. But from what I am able to see, after Korean journalists had done their best to find holes in his story, every traceable detail had checked out. Still, they & other writers sprinkle their accounts with qualifiers — “Choi claims this, Choi claims that” — because our world is choking with cheats & frauds & imposters, & no one wants to be caught with his cynicism down.

This last statement is not entirely true. I am every day amazed by media credulity at the imbecile level, typically towards self-serving demagogic politicians. But as I know from first hand, the journalists are seldom so innocent or ill-informed as their reporting might make them appear. They identify with party — usually with the “progressive” side; the side of “secular humanism” — & wish to help it swing elections against what they take to be the “dark side,” of religious believers & the like. (And there will always be darkness enough to go around.) “Truth,” for most journalists, has been “relative” for so long, that they can no longer detect their own lies & hypocrisies. “Good” is whatever serves the agenda, even if it requires the suppression of context to make it sound plausible. The hard simple truth, the big inconvenient fact, will be ignored or scorned. Often, the moral posture becomes the more strident, the more twisted it becomes: & what is beautiful & inspiring is spontaneously derided.

Choi Sung Bong ran off every agenda. His “claim,” though understated, & made only in straightforward reply to factual questions, was staggering. Choi unknowingly broke all the rules, by failing to be a victim of his environment. There had to be something wrong with his story.

Charles Dickens, that wonderful old hack, quite capable of cynicism, was the man to tell dangerously sentimental stories like this. He was the Victorian Solzhenitsyn, in a sense. In a book potentially so mawkish as Little Dorrit, whose central setting was the notorious Marshalsea prison — into which Dickens’s own father had once been thrown, for debt — we find the figure of little Amy Dorrit. She was raised in the Marshalsea, as ward of a father likewise imprisoned. A swill of human evils surrounds the child, & reaches out in the panorama Dickens presents, of moral posturing that extends across England, France, & Italy; by all of which Amy seems untouched. She does what she can for people, out of unthinking loyalties, out of a naïve & unquestioning human decency; she takes her lumps without whining.

Out of a gorgeously colourful background, the “vision” of Dickens is assembled — of this goodness rising from the very mire; a goodness of which Amy becomes allegorical symbol: this angel rising from the squalor. (Dickens is replete with child angels.) From the Marshalsea as from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, it is a vision of salvation. The whole world is a prison camp, & from the bottom of it, “we are rising.” In some details, the novel may seem overwrought; in its overall effect my heart still stops at its splendour, at the breadth & audacity of the thing.

Dickens was no politician. The attentive reader will never find in him anything resembling a political agenda. He is clear that the corruption does not stop at any door; that the evils extend not only through the Marshalsea & out of its gates through the streets of every city, but also through the corridors of the Circumlocution Office. He did not imagine any solutions to the “problems of society,” short of that rising. Only when men & women rise — from within their own humble stations — can the good happen. Dickens’s faith was of the simplest evangelical kind; he had no room in his mind for precise theology. His God was of the simplest kind: the Christ child, & not the adult preacher. Yet from that childish angle he could depict a “life force” at work, that cannot be disentangled from Grace, & by which, mysteriously, Love will conquer all.

I have had the good or bad fortune myself, though only in moments, to taste real hunger & life among some of the poorest & most abandoned of mankind, & see how “the bottom of society” looks & feels. These were only little glimpses, by the luck of my travels; & by more luck I have had little glimpses of life “at the top.” I am disinclined to be sentimental about the former; nor too excoriating about the latter. As Dickens showed in Little Dorrit, give the poor enough money & they will soon assume airs. The problems of “society” will be reproduced in every society, & legislation will usually accentuate the worst features, giving new scope to corruption. Salvation comes not through “programmes” but through persons: a teacher, a food vendor, a nightclub singer.

The beauty in Choi’s case is that it proves nothing. Or else, arguably, it proves everything, which is as good as nothing. I wrote above that, by his own account, his life-transforming moment came in that nightclub, when he found his own calling, which was to sing. I cannot know if his “victory” on television was any kind of a good thing; victories in this world being in their nature transitory & illusory. It is entirely possible that it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. But not if he has taken it in his stride.

There is considerable dispute on the date of the end of the world, sometimes even up here in the High Doganate. It is a gentlemanly dispute, however, in which the (aspiring) gentleman who lives here politely considers & then rejects the various alternatives to his own beliefs. I have been doing that all my life. Sometimes I find that I am wrong, but only in retrospect. In prospect my vision is 20/20. Things that haven’t happened yet have never failed to happen. And I have a perfect track record because in every case, as I would be willing to demonstrate, they fail to happen only in the future. Which is to say, elsewhere in the multiverse, not here.

Once again the issue is in the air, for I gather the President of the United States was so foolish as to predict the end of the world, should the “sequester” of funding he proposed himself be allowed to happen on the first of this month. It is wise normally to predict the end of the world for a more remote date; the President was guessing it would happen “tomorrow” on the very eve. Curiously, he had done everything in the power of his office to assure that the end of the world would take place; for like many petty politicians before him, outraged by budget cuts, he made sure they would fall in the most visibly destructive manner on essential government services, leaving mountains of pork & incredible waste untouched. He wants his opponents on their hands & knees, begging him to restore these services & promising to raise more taxes on “the rich” to support them. It is a game so tawdry, & played so many times, that I’m amazed anyone can still be suckered by it; but needless to say the entire liberal media are playing along with his latest “crisis narrative.”

And yet, it is March 3rd already, the sequester has happened, & the world has not ended; just as it did not end at the Winter Solstice, when the ancient Mayan calendar hit 13.0.0.0.0, & nothing followed beyond the usual news & views. There was not even a memorable earthquake in, say, Tierra del Fuego. As we write, south of the border, there is no evidence of a catastrophe yet unfolding. It turns out that even if you remove la crème de la crème of the most necessary functions of the U.S. Government, nothing much happens. The President will have some explaining to do.

Eschatology is not a science we have much pursued (up here in the High Doganate). This may have something to do with our low regard for the statistical methods that are too often employed in calculating the date on which the world will end. They strike us as almost amateurish sometimes. Of the eschatological systems of the great religions, other than my own, I have sometimes taken note from a motive that could be confused with pure self-entertainment. It is not: I think such spiritual insights as each may provide are presented compactly & vividly, in each end-of-world scenario.

Let us consider in passing Frashokereti, the Zoroastrian expectation, which comes to mind whenever I am reading news of anything from “frosh week” in a university to the hydraulic “fracking” of mineral resources. In brief, there are three ages in the world, that of Creation, of Mixture, & of Separation. The first was good, but into the second evil was insinuated. In the third, which is surely coming soon, God, under the name “Ahura Mazda,” effects a winnowing. There is a huge battle between the Yazatas & Daevas (the proponents of good, & evil, respectively). In the course of their exchange, all the dead are raised. Too, the metals of this world melt & flow by tributaries into one great river through which all must pass. No supernatural agent nor force will be able to intervene on behalf of individuals: each man & woman will be tried in the balance of all his thoughts, words, & deeds. The good will find the river as warm milk, the evil will experience it as a consuming fire. The molten stream will itself pour over the ledge of this world, into the depths, where it will find & annihilate “Ahriman” (the very Devil & his Hell). It is an optimistic cosmogony.

Before I receive death threats from aggrieved Zoroastrians, let me acknowledge that this is not from the Avesta, but from interpretive, non-scriptural works. The Avesta itself, or the parts we retain, contain only poetical allusions to this End Time. The most sacred Gathas — hymns attributed to Zoroaster — are in a very old form of Persian indeed (7th century BC?) but the interpretations were written in Book Pahlavi far more than a millennium later (9th century AD). It makes no sense to speak confidently of any Avestan eschatological doctrine; & yet the power in such ancient prophecy can be discerned in resemblances to every other earthly eschatological doctrine; for in all, the worth of men is tested. And on a Zoroastrian view, as from a Christian, it makes no sense to assign specific future dates, or treat prophecy as a prognostic method.

On the other hand, lest gentle reader titter at the introduction of so exotic a body of mythic moral teaching, let me remind him that from Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, & others, we often encounter doctrines as arcane. Each, to my mind, is the product of very sincere “visionaries,” without “conventional” (not to say, “Catholic”) formation, struggling to convey an experience of unknown otherworldly origin in worldly terms; without first subjecting it to the reasoning of the wise. Then seeking followers among the spiritually estranged & hungry.

For some time in childhood I became a kind of connoisseur of the illustrations in publications of the Watch Tower Society — then as now fairly widely disseminated — which showed the lion lying down with the lamb rather literally, & a multicultural assortment of humans smiling as if they had all just won the Irish sweepstakes. These pictures of an imminent heaven on earth struck me as naïve, & contributed to my youthful, smartass atheism. Moreover, as I was distantly aware, the Society & other congregations of “Christian outliers” had been almost trigger-happy in predicting that imminent end, projected from quite worldly political events.

Yet in retrospect, it seems there is something sound woven into their notions. The significance accorded by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to October 1914 — when Christ was held to have resumed the throne of which He had been deprived by the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, & the End Time began to unfold — was well chosen. I myself assign not that event, but something cognate, to a moment a little earlier in that year: to the 28th of June, 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. The summer which followed consisted of an extraordinary matrix of declarations of war, & acts of invasion. By September, Tannenberg & the Marne trench warfare; by October, Ypres.

The Great War was an entirely man-made, planetary disaster, whose vortex was Europe, then fairly plausibly the centre of everything. Its effect was like Constantine, in reverse. Almost everything we now live is fallout from that War: through Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism, to the effects of mass democracy & the construction of Nanny States. In the background, everywhere, the replacement of religion with ideological totalitarianism, & the moral & spiritual blindness which follows from our new loyalties to the available “least evils.” We entered an era that might be called with justice the Age of the Mass Grave; or if you will, the Culture of Death with Wheels On; or with less colour, “post-modernity.” The evils of the Modern Age came home to roost, among all the false hopes of “man’s triumph over nature.”

One might call 1914 the beginning of the end, but let me credit the Jehovah’s Witnesses for also discerning, while I was growing up in the ‘sixties, the impending end of the end in that decade. Though let me quickly add that, in retrospect, John Lukacs (the historian of Chestnut College, not to be confused with György Lukacs, the fatuous Marxist) put the matter more elegantly in his book, A Thread of Years (1998). This book offered a series of vignettes, from commonplace life, cast year by year from the beginning of the 20th century, to 1969, in which the decline & final extinction of “the idea of a gentleman” was knowingly presented. It stands in my mind as the greatest of several dozen of the author’s imaginative yet authoritative historical works.

Though I don’t entirely agree with Lukacs’s world view, which I consider too Anglophile & Churchillian, I think he offers real insights into what has gone down. In particular, his understanding of the emergence of the bourgeoisie in “Renaissance” modernity, & of its development into the Populism of our post-modernity, is essentially correct. He owes this to an astute grasp of 20th century history. As a World War II survivor himself (Budapest son of divorced parents, a Catholic father & a Jewish mother), personally acquainted with forced labour in the penumbra of the Holocaust, he was able to spot a lie at the heart of historical teaching in liberal academia. It was the lie that the German working classes were opposed to Hitler. No: they were his principal support. It was the goad for Lukacs to expose more generally false teaching.

To say that he despises Populism is almost an understatement. I despise it with some warmth, & Lukacs despises it with more than I will ever muster. There is a crucial question we would answer, perhaps, a little differently. I anchor Populism in the self-worship of man, per se. He, to my mind, is a little too indifferent to this philosophical question, & comes closer to despising it for itself. But for practical purposes, the difference comes out in the wash. We have been led, through post-modernity, by men who were truly representative of “the people,” & not by any of the old, & now demonized, men of aristocratic vocation. The carnage may be attributed to the ideal of “democracy” in itself & in its natural ramifications; to the promise of giving the people exactly what they want, without reference to the better angels.

This democratic ideal, though already eloquently expressed through the bloodletting of Paris after 1789, may be said to have matured definitively by the summer of 1914. One might even call it the greatest triumph of democracy — with mass public demonstrations in all the capitals of Europe, from all sides, demanding immediate total war. In cause & effect, we have this history backwards: again, from the lies taught in our schools. It was not old aristocratic politicians cynically manoeuvring “the people” into war against their will, to serve their own mysterious interests. It was “the people” manoeuvring them, into an Armageddon; one which many of the aristocratic, old school, “balance of power” diplomats did actually foresee, & did everything in their power to forestall, fearing it would be the end of their own class.

But it was not a simple process, not some new or sudden thing, for the history of the rise of “popular” national chauvinism & jingoism goes much deeper. We look here only at the point of combustion, through which the politics of the world were radically & unambiguously transformed, from a degree of self-critical civilization, to a high-tech barbarism incapable of self-appraisal. Within this new world order, that emerged from all the blood lust: an oscillation between the “total war” of conscripting national armies, & the “total peace” of conscripting national bureaucracies.

It has been an apocalyptic scenario, to be sure; & it is understandable that we, in consequence, have come to look forward — sometimes religiously, more often superstitiously — to a nuclear incineration, or some equivalent environmental catastrophe. In our gut, we feel that we may have contributed to this as tiny atoms; but at large it is something over which we believe ourselves to have no control, being mere cells in the body politic, hardly to be held to account. From the train of secondary explosions throughout the 20th & into this 21st century, we expect things to end, inevitably with a bang not a whimper.

*

In fact, the world ended on the 10th of August, 1969. This happened to be a Sunday. People look to the future for an event which actually happened in the past; but I am glad to see that Alain de Benoist, the celebrated French pagan of the nouvelle droite, has picked up on this, over at Occidental Observer. He is the compleat crackpot of course, or cinglé as I believe it is called over there, with a long history of viewing everything upside down. That might be his strength, however. Turn him right side up & all becomes coherent. Meanwhile, let me offer encouragement for the first thing he may have got right: in his essay entitled, “Yes, the end of the world has happened.”

For decades I have held this view against all comers. Indeed, I have held it since the 10th of August, 1969, when I was sixteen. How do I know the date? Because I was there. I remember it perfectly. I was standing at the time in a ruined coastal fortification, from World War II, near New Waterford, Cape Breton. I was up in a concrete tower (once disguised as a church steeple), looking down over a field of blank concrete slabs (once pretending to be a churchyard). It must have happened around two o’clock in the afternoon, Atlantic time; which is to say, about Vespers, GMT.

At the time, I will admit, I was not entirely certain that the world had come to an end that day. But everything I have since read or otherwise learned has tended to confirm my initial observation.

People often ask me what happened that day. “It was the end of the world,” I reply. “You are asking me to mention something bigger? What else could you want? Surely the end of the world will do for a newscast.”

Pressed on the point, of what happened on the day the world ended, I say, “Nothing much.” It ended, after all, not with a bang as everyone had expected, but instead with a whimper, or less. Pressed further, I recall that the LaBianca murders also happened on that day, “But that was sheer coincidence.”

I am even asked what happened to me on that day, as if my own personal fate could have any significance against this world-historical background. “Again, nothing much,” I explain. “The usual adolescent stuff, you know. Unrequited love & all that.”

And nothing much has happened, since; or at least, nothing much good has happened. Forty-three years, & a half, have passed in which people have gone on, not realizing it is over, pretending to themselves that the end of the world has not, in fact, happened. It is obtuse to look to the future for something that has already occurred in the past. I protest against this general obtuseness, & argue earnestly that it must be overcome. We have reached the point of stasis, at the end of the pendulum; we hover there. But I look for some movement, sooner or later, in which the pendulum begins to swing back, the other way.

For Saint David’s Day, our Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield, twitters from space: “A perfect pass coming up on Cardiff.” Were it only not, alas, for the clouds over Wales. I discovered his Twitter page this morning, thanks to BBC. The man is an obsessive space photographer, & some magnificent pictures from high over Scotland were re-splashed through the Beeb. In one, the Isle of Skye is depicted, with the late February snows on her peaks — “mist & mountains, a stirring landscape,” our astronaut observes. The islands Canna, Rum, Eigg, Muck, are below her; the Scottish coast to her right, from Loch Torridon down to Loch Nevis. The relief is crisp, from the acute angle: one could almost use it for a walking map. Well, it brought tears nearly to my eyes.

Some Scotsman tweets back: “I live on the island bottom left, here’s a photo I took of you last week,” showing the light streak of the International Space Station crossing the night sky.

Yesterday, the Pope’s resignation, Commander Hadfield clicked remarkable shots looking down the throat of Mount Etna, which is currently quite active. His finale for the day was the huge cyclone, swirling clockwise off the Australian coast. His captions gleam with geographical precision, & the unquenched boyish delight in his adventure. And, too, with unconcealed Canadian patriotism, as he flags an announcement from our space agency with, “Canadian know-how on its way to see what asteroids are made of.” Or, assures the launchers of the latest package for the space station that his Canadarm is ready-aye-ready to catch it in space. But there are friendly words, too, for a Japanese robot.

My uncle Bob (H. Robert Warren) was something to the Canadian space programme, & on secondment to the British, from their earliest days; his name is written in the annals of our Alouette, & with our teams to Houston. Octogenarian now, enfeebled by age, he was once the dreaming child of a very modest farm cottage in Clarkson, Ontario — inspired by his elder brother who went off to fly Spitfires in the last World War. How he longed to fly, himself. He was just too young to follow. But he never looked down, climbing height to height, from aero to astro. In old photos, still, he is my papa’s earnest & adoring little brother; & through the huge family he begatted in his turn, I have long since taken our space effort personally. Whatever tiny part of my taxes go to support that effort, I pay with uncontained enthusiasm. (It is only about 86 percent of current Dominion expenditures that I find morally abhorent; down a couple of points from the previous administration.)

For astronaut breakfast this morning, in the space station, how perfectly Lenten: “Granola with dried blueberries, dehydrated vegetable quiche, instant pineapple juice, instant black coffee. Suit you too?” (There is nothing so Canadian as a blueberry, even dried.) In a video link with His Excellency, our Governor-General, Cmdr Hadfield shows Canadian schoolchildren how to wash their hands in zero gravity.

There are moments like these when all the stars align, & I feel as if I were at home in our world of high technology. And these are the moments when the technology falls away, & I glimpse the entranced faces of the schoolchildren, & the snow on the ancient mountains, & the serenity of the heavens.

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,” my uncle recited at my father’s funeral, “& danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. …”

           And while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
           The high untrespassed sanctity of space —
           Put out my hand & touched the face of God.

Awoke this morning, a little late from being up very late, with a fine Lenten feeling of desolation. His Holiness chose to resign with effect on a Thursday; the last day of a calendar month. He chose eight o’clock in the evening because this had been the end of his usual working day. From that moment the sedes vacans comes back into view, the empty place between papal reigns & in this case a Lent within Lent. Once again, I do not dispute Pope Benedict’s decision. I accept his authority in principle, but more fundamentally I trust it.

Nor, really, do I resent the malice & ignorance of much of the world’s media, in covering the event as they have done, & as they are likely to do today, & throughout the Conclave, & when they will express their practised surprise & disgust at the “backwardness of the Church” when the new Pope is chosen. They are what they are, & that must also be accepted.

As a “pundit” of some kind, or let us say “Essayist” now for it sounds more distinguished, I often feel like a kid pointing a battery torch to the heavens & declaring, “Let there be Light!” This was especially so on this Friday morning, the last of the pontificate of my greatest living Catholic hero; one who had the curious habit of speaking & writing only on topics he knew something about, & trying never to strike a pose. A man whose actions consistently displayed serenity, whether refusing to retaliate in kind to low attacks, or acting promptly & boldly when circumstances required such courage.

This has been evident even in the last fortnight, through which he has been making administrative decisions that could so easily have been shirked, & left to his successor; while leaving to his successor what will require consecutive action over much longer stretches of time. He has shown the best, the very best, of the German & Bavarian qualities mixed into his Catholic formation. His successor is bound to find that, whatever they contain, the files will be in good & conscientious order. This is a moral virtue, & remains so however it is parodied or satirized: the cultivation of mind & habits capable of making crisp distinctions, & doing what is necessary without sloth, & without pride.

He has been condemned by the world for many petty things, & many imaginary. He has been condemned even for not being someone else; for knowing himself & knowing his limitations, & making them his strengths.

This is something I’ve found again & again when the media have condemned some outrageous thing he is supposed to have said; or quoted with exulting approval something even more outrageous. I go to the text & find that he said no such thing. Nor, upon thinking it through, may I condemn him for failing to anticipate the media reaction. For one may successfully locate & disarm a thousand bombs in a thickly-laid minefield. There is no foreseeing number one thousand & one.

I expect, over time, we will learn much more of the history of his papacy — the actual history as opposed to the “first draught.” If there has been one most exemplary virtue, allied with a profound insight into the management of human affairs, it has been a function of Pope Benedict’s humility. It is the virtue of understanding how much can be achieved when one has no wish to take the credit. So many good things are attempted by politicians, for instance, that go badly wrong because of this moral oversight. They will “do the right thing,” but demand to be seen doing it. And that little demand alone unravels all the good. To serve is to serve, interests beyond one’s own; one cannot serve the “two gods” of conflicting interests. His Holiness has been, to my view, a most exhilarating example of a man without guile, of a man who long ago tamed the natural propensity towards self-service.

Fortunately he has left some books behind him; quite a few, & everywhere in them more than is apparent to a first reading. I returned, in recent weeks, to reading some of his Wednesday “talks” or homilies on the holy men & women of Catholic history. At first I thought them as brief & casual as any scheduled weekly “sermon” he must “do,” as part of a busy & distracting schedule; as “throwaway” by comparison to his major, longer tracts; as learned & dogmatically sound but nevertheless, passing chatter. They are not. Themes have been carried from week to week, & subtle yet very important points recalled successively from many angles. Returning to them, I found something like an “autobiography of the Church” had been taught: one in which the key events are not the outward ones of history. The major historical events are placed for orientation only in the background. It is the inward history that is being told, a most remarkable narrative in which we are looking at events through what I can only describe as “the medium of holiness.” Not, as it were, “through the eyes of the Saints,” as simple hagiography; Benedict is instead trying to trace through them the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit. It is not “intellectualism” he has offered. An extraordinary learning is required for it, but put entirely at the service of an act of meditation.

So he is not really going away, & quite apart from the Gethsemane of prayer into which he enters, & the unearthly Life that follows, we are not finished with him yet. He has taught what he will continue teaching: not, for the most part, through formal encyclicals & proclamations but in a kindly, & slightly aloof manner, from out of the chastity in Love — as Father Ratzinger of the Vatican.

Sardines must of course be originally from the ancient Kingdom of Sardinia. They are little fellows, small herrings, that come in perhaps two dozen choice species, among more than three hundred that swim the open seas. “Sardines” are smaller & “pilchards” are larger; often different stages of exactly the same fish — all from the clupeiod family. Which is to say, herrings: a symbol of Lent. Brislings & sprats are from a more northern sub-family, but not inedible for that. The little sardines & their allies travel the world’s oceans, in their schools; & when they have tired of that, they swim into large nets, & are lifted, high. And then they continue their journeys, now at their ease in little tin boxes. There are kindly people who live by the seashore, & help arrange our little fishy friends, all cosily according to their size. They may fit two, or five, or even fifteen or more of them in each berth.

There is a famous painting by Goya — a real masterpiece, every brush stroke of genius — depicting “The Burial of the Sardine,” El entierro de la sardina. You may have difficulty finding the sardine in the composition, because he is very small. The painting is a mischievous work for, as ever with Goya, he is commenting on the human condition, & we are a mischievous race; especially compared with the innocent sardines. The people are shown masked, & frenzied. From the dark, grinning mascot on the banner they carry, a malign quality infuses the parade. It is a mob, & their intention must be sacrilegious.

My own understanding of the ceremony, however, is different from this. It varies, or varied, in different parts of Spain, attached in some places to the beginning of Lent, & in others to the end.  There is a great procession; the mourners weep & wail. The deceased sardine is carried in his little casket, under a large doll, called the pellele. Inland, he may be buried; but by the sea he is cremated, then carried out by the fishermen in a solemn fleet — his ashes scattered upon the waves. (I love the Spaniards; but of course they are all mad.)

In Aubrey somewhere, there is reference to an English culinary custom: the “herring on horseback,” by which, on Easter Sunday, the fish rides away. Through Europe, many similar Mediaeval customs survived until the other day; festivals often not of the Church, but of the people. Yet by proximity to Lent, they seemed less likely to be “pagan survivals” — as the idiots are constantly explaining to us — than rather imaginative & charming ways to express the idea that one is very sick of fish. I am told that, by the year 1960, when the Quiet Revolution came noisily to the Province of Quebec, the people were so sick of fish that they vowed never to look at another one again, until the end of time. This is given as the reason that per capita fish consumption in that province remains, to this day, lower than in Central Asia.

Up here in the High Doganate, we are well disposed to fish, & would not have them slighted. I rather look forward to Lent, for this reason, & for several like it. For I am, too, genuinely partial to bean dishes, on rice or some other grain — the staple of most of the world’s poor, who cannot afford meat, & are inclined to find luxury even in a little dab of fishpaste. God has blessed these humble with the tropical spices, & with the genius they have used to concoct a million ways to vary this frugal yet perfectly balanced, nutritious cuisine.

But let me not stray from the little fishes. Sardines may even be purchased fresh, from fishmongers in the Greater Parkdale Area. Grilled, they are exquisite; & the fattiest may be deep fried, with batters. But Edouard de Pomiane gave the best ten-minute approach. Run cold water over them, immediately on coming home, to wash away the salt. Pull off the heads, & the intestines will follow. Dry them. Fry, without dipping in flour, in a pan of smoking oil or very hot butter. Do not salt. Serve with curls of butter & a half lemon.

In the spring there were, & still are in many creeks emptying into Lake Ontario, smelt runs that turn the waters silver. Among my happiest childhood moments, in Georgetown, Ont., was helping old Mrs Pattenden gut & jar the harvest her old husband had brought home: great baskets full, by Saint Peter! A beloved old lady, salt of the earth, wearing a baseball cap over her white hair wild; & a thick hand-knitted cardigan, becoming waterproofed by fish oil. She had an errant daughter who once ran away, quite literally with the milkman. And so Mr & Mrs Pattenden did just what gentle reader would expect. They took in their abandoned son-in-law, & his two abandoned hockey-playing boys, to their very small brick cottage. (The boys, my contemporaries, slept in the rafters.) The yard of this cottage was a “victory garden”; its strawberries the finest in the world. They made a paradise on their small town lot, indifferent to the opinions of their middle-class neighbours, & in defiance of all the municipal by-laws. All gone under the asphalt, now.

The Lake Ontario fisheries are still in business, incidentally, under elaborate, multiple layers of regulation. (The need for ever greater regulation being paradoxically “proved” by the consistently catastrophic effects of all past regulation, to the present day.) One may buy their harvest of whitefish, trout, perch, in the Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx. Around here it doesn’t sell, thanks to the success of depraved scaremongering about mercury levels, which started in the 1960s, & has since entered into our provincial folklore. In fact, the mercury levels were not lethally high, & have since been reduced to a tiny fraction of the danger levels for the human metabolism. And so the “environmentally aware” eat freshwater fish from afar, caught or farmed in places where the waters are grievously polluted, & the fish are refrigerated & shipped at huge expenditure in fossil fuels. And meanwhile, the environmental regulation is controlled by the sport fishing interests, whose ability to pose as “friends of the earth” is unsurpassed; while the “First Nations” win court decisions to let them flout all rules. A massive bureaucratic machinery, with enormous investments in hatchery infrastructure, stocks the Great Lakes with Pacific salmon & other exotic species for the sportsmen, carefully monitoring the commercial fishermen, to be sure they don’t touch any of it. This status quo is reinforced by the lobbying efforts of the many vested interests established & enriched by the political process: the charter boat operators, tackle shops, marinas, & shills for the tourist industry. On the plus side, the American bureaucrats have driven their own commercial fisheries into extinction; so that what little remains of the industry is now our proud Canadian monopoly.

But that was just an aside. The real purpose of this Essay is to celebrate the little fish in little tins, from wherever they may hail; the joys of Lent. Why, for dinner just now we opened a tin of the most delicious sardines from Messrs Hyacinthe Parmentier in France, in olive oil with peppers; mixing this with peas into a bowl of white rice. These people know their little fishes. May I further recommend their grilled sardines, delivered “dry” in their beautiful yellow tins. (With sardines, I have found it a general rule, that the prettier & more tastefully typographed the tin, the better the fish inside it.) But that is not to overlook La Quiberonnaise, a brand from Brittany I have tasted but once, & found extraordinary. The French do almost everything better.

And the tinning of sardines was itself a French invention. It was a happy combination of three things: the landing of the exquisite Clupea pilchardus Walbaum by Nantais fishermen; the tradition of preserving them in sealed clay jars called oules, after frying in their fabulous Breton butters, & olive oils imported from Provence; & the introduction of François Appert’s canning process, inspired by Napoleon’s prize to find new methods of food preservation to serve his troops in the field. (The adored Elizabeth David explained all this in an article for the Spectator, half a century ago.)

Joseph Colin, a confectioner of Nantes, brought these three together. The process he developed was by no means simple. Sardines being among the most perishable of fish, the canning must be done immediately ashore, by a series of very quick processes — the sorting by size; the beheading & gutting; the rinsing; the plunging in mild brine; the rinsing again; the drying in warm air; the sudden frying; the draining, & packing, & covering with an olive oil specially married to the qualities of the fish, so they may mature happily together; the sterilizing — each stage timed to the minute or second, adjusted to the size of the fish.

Different but parallel methods have been developed for other species of sardine, in other locations; but anywhere it must be a careful art. The Europeans have understood this, but alas on this side of the Atlantic our canners are not so discerning. Our idea of art is economy of scale. We choose the cheapest available raw materials, & use industrial methods that eliminate the requirement for human skill, or any other scope for the dignity of labour. For quality we substitute a fanatic obsession with hygiene, enforced by our bureaucratic apes. Love & pride in craft is systematically replaced with impudent salesmanship. That is why North American sardines are, today — unless I am blind to some exception — the same rubbish they have always been. (But of course, the big European concerns have copied “American standards,” to compete with our knock-down prices.)

This is why, in turn, it makes no sense to buy a tin of sardines, or almost anything else, from a North American supermarket, which offers myriad interchangeably artificial brands, each “product” reduced to a bulk commodity, & democratically pitched at the lowest common denominator to people themselves considered interchangeable. (Capitalism’s answer to the promise of Communism.) Buy what you need, instead, from the small family & ethnic groceries — or more precisely, from those shopkeepers who know their goods. This will always cost you more, in money & possibly unwanted human contact. But should the prices seem too high, there is a simple remedy. It is to eat less.

The French make the best, & have brands of sardines at stratospheric prices, which I will not mention. These are sardines for the connoisseurs; the truly monied who will pay whatever is asked for the correct or fashionable “vintage.” I am willing to settle for mere excellence.

Beyond France, let me mention the Pinhais company in Portugal, their “Nuri” brand; but look also for the names Idamar, & Gonsalves. From Spain, Ortiz, & Arroyabe, are the grand family fish-tinning firms, knowledgeably working the Cantabrian Sea; but their specialties are more tuna & anchovies. (Ortiz “Ventresca” belly meat of albacore, packed in olive oil, is so delicate & tender, so sublime, that I would avoid it in Lent, except on Sundays. It may be eaten in the Spanish style: which is, straight from the tin, with a good wine beside it; a Corvo, though Sicilian, would be the right idea; perhaps even a dry sherry.) Matiz Gallego are I think the Spanish sardine specialists.

From Italy, Angelo Parodi, & also Bertozzi, I can recommend from direct experience (the latter also for their tinned squid, & octopus in ink). John West, from Scotland, could be mentioned, with hesitation, for brisling. I have heard good things about sardines from Freemantle in Western Australia, but never had the chance to try them. I have tasted quite fabulous iwashi (“sardines” in Japanese), packed in shoyu & teriyaki marinades; & niboshi (sun-dried sardines) in a stock with kelp; but I can no longer recall the best tinned brands of Japan; or Taiwan. Red China I will not mention, except to say I read “Product of China” on any package in the same way I’d read a skull & crossbones.

As a general direction, let me add that sardines packed in tomato & mustard sauces are invariably refuse; they need these strong distractions to conceal the taste of the fish. “Vegetable oil” should also be avoided; it should be olive oil, or water. Marketing claims such as “wild sardines” & “organic” should be treated with contempt. All sardines continue to be harvested wild; & the “organic” can refer only to the sauce ingredients.

On the other hand, try herbed & spiced varieties, which can be marvellous. The flavour combinations depend on prolonged steeping within the tin, & cannot be reproduced by last-minute additions. In the case of chilli partisans (& I am often one) do not look for heat in the tin. The sweeter, milder chillies make the more subtle flavouring agents, & more heat is better added at the end.

*

Now, I was taught in the newspaper business that one does not end a culinary article without supplying some kind of recipe suggestion; so let me mention Stargazey Pie. It is a speciality of my paternal grandmother’s native county of Devon. The heads of the sardines, or better larger pilchards, are left on for this, & the tails, too, but the rest of the fish boned & stripped for eating. A shortcrust pastry is applied, thin to the bottom, thick across the top. The filling will be a mash of boiled potatoes, with any available herring flesh, cream, eggs, chopped onion, perhaps a splash of white wine.

The whole pilchards are stuffed with herbs, samphire, apple. They are inserted so that their tails rise at the centre of the pie, through the top crust, & their heads likewise through the crust, around the edges. Or vice versa: tails at the circumference, heads in the middle. In either case the heads must emerge from the oven, gazing up towards the stars in wonderment.

According to the global village explainers, the reason they were so arranged is that the excess oils, in the heads especially, drip down, adding flavour to the pie. This is nonsense, however. Tests have been conducted to prove it makes no difference at all. The real reason the heads & tails are arranged in that unusual way is something that the post-modern man cannot quite remember. It is for the sheer blooming joy of it.

I was discussing a project for a Philosophical Dictionary with Saint Thomas Aquinas last night (in a dream), & he made a typically acute remark. “It will have to be bilingual, to include Greek words.” Sometimes I have difficulty remembering dreams. In this one, there seemed to be a dispute going, on distinctions between téchne, phrónesis, sophía (Greek words for different kinds of intuitive knowledge). I do wish I could remember how it went. There was a remark made to the effect that one must fully understand the meaning in the terms, before arranging them in some kind of Heideggerian scheme; for having been understood, they will be happy to arrange themselves, in the Aristotelian manner. (Words, as the pagan Greeks knew, are holy.) I was also told, though not I think by the Angelic Doctor, that, “The schematic approach is words first, meanings second. It is the method of Humpty Dumpty.”

That we should have dreams in which we are visited by philosophers, up here in the High Doganate, is not surprising. Since abandoning an accidental career as a newspaper pundit, last July, I have been entering into my “second childhood.” The time spent crawling through places like the Internet, trying to keep up with current events, has gone back into the sort of reading I pursued as a young man, in books. Long ago, I resolved on a course of self-education, that consisted of studying everything that went into, & came out of, Aristotle. (That’s a lot; I didn’t get very far.) I was lucky to win quite a few years of poverty, free of serious material obligations, when I was in my teens & twenties; before I found myself married & it was time to “get real.” Few will understand as poignantly as I do today, why priests, philosophers, judges, lighthouse keepers, poets & artists, should never marry. And why the women who marry them are cursed.

Rather than break the flow of whimsical association, allow me to confront gentle reader with this:

“Believe that man’s happiness lies not in the magnitude of his possessions but in the proper condition of his soul. Even the body is not called blessed because it is magnificently clothed, but because it is healthy & in good condition, even if it lacks this decoration. In the same way only the cultivated soul is to be called happy; & only the man who is such, not the man who is magnificently decorated with external goods, but is himself of no value. We do not call a bad horse valuable because it has a golden bit & costly harness; we reserve our praise for the horse that is in perfect condition.”

It is a passage from Aristotle that washed up on papyrus, in the last century, from the Egyptian sands. We know it is a passage from Aristotle because a slightly different version survived separately, long enough to be included in a Byzantine anthology. I have myself lifted it from a book by Werner Jaeger, the great modern classical scholar who, for the purpose of showing how Aristotle expounds old saws in his new apodictic, went on to quote:

“Just as a man would be a ridiculous figure if he were intellectually & morally inferior to his slaves, in the same way we must believe a man miserable if his possessions are more valuable than himself. … Satiety begets wantonness, says the proverb. Vulgarity linked with power & possessions brings forth folly.”

Not bad, one might observe, as a description of what we suffer from today. (Count the figure as a politician or manager, & the slaves as his clever flunkeys.) Jaeger held Aristotle up as the one major ancient philosopher who has never enjoyed a modern vogue, except in the confined world of Thomism & Neo-Scholasticism. And yet he has never been forgotten, for all modern philosophy can be read as a desperate & hopeless attempt to uncreate Aristotle, or render him irrelevant.

His works in biology, for instance, are dismissed as laughably dated. With a child’s low-power microscope, we may see where many of his observations & inferences went wrong. But Aristotle did not have a child’s low-power microscope. Which makes what he was able to discern with his unaided human eyes the more astounding.

He “invented” the basic taxonomic order, slightly adjusted by Carl Linnaeus & now further adjusted through comparison of DNA, on which all botany & zoology still rests. And it was not easy: read the De Partibus, where he carefully explains why simple repetitive dichotomizing won’t work, in the construction of this Scala Naturae; why other short cuts will not help in comprehending exact but complex relations between creatures; & why — to put some edge in this — scientists then as now write nonsense unfailingly, when they fail to twig such logic as: “there are no species of that which is not.” (That is, the absence of a trait cannot define, & only positive determinables can be further differentiated.)

He was the first to realize that, for instance, whales & dolphins are mammals (a fact not recovered for nearly 2,000 years). He distinguished the cartilaginous from the bony fishes, with the spectrum of associated physiological contrasts. He began the study of embryonic growth, noticing such things as the little speck of blood that appears on day four in the white of a chicken egg, correctly guessing that it is a tiny beating heart. He explains the four stomachs of ruminant animals. His detailed description of the behaviour of bees remains up-to-date. And so on & on. Read the Historia Animalium, with some knowledge of modern biology & its development, & one will find that Aristotle was not only “ahead of his times,” but ahead of subsequent times, being surpassed in many cases not until the 19th century. And not in one or two points, but in hundreds of points.

Yet his primacy in biological science is more significant than that. He did not merely pioneer the system of classification. At a much deeper level he discerned & imposed something so fundamental as to be hard to describe: the paradigm beneath the paradigms, as it were. To Aristotle we owe our very conception of “organic” development & relations. And he was able to conceive this by means of an unambiguously & shamelessly “teleological” way of thinking, banned from anti-Aristotelian modern science. He looked at every phenomenon with regard to its purpose within larger purposes, & by such means actually created the possibility of extended empirical research.

This point needs stressing. It remains extremely relevant.

Those ignorant of the history of science may not realize that Empedocles was the original proposer of Darwin’s fastidiously non-teleological “theory of natural selection.” He didn’t just anticipate it vaguely; he appears to have had the whole thing down. Nature throws up freaks at random, but only those well-adapted to their environments can survive. Which is how we get “species”: by survival of the fittest. Darwin claims, in 1858 AD, what Empedocles hypothesized twenty-three centuries earlier — unknowingly, for Darwin had not much of a classical education, & sneered at classical learning. (“No one can more truly despise the old stereotyped stupid classical education than I do,” as he wrote his cousin, William Darwin Fox.)

This Empedoclean hypothesis was, very thoroughly, demolished by Aristotle in his Physics (Book II). He does this not from any fluffy, alternative theoretical position, but from his direct & very broad experience of nature (vastly greater than Darwin’s, incidentally). Empedocles does not appreciate the permanence of types in nature, for animals breed true to type; does not grasp the rarity of “monstrous growths,” & how maladaptive they are; does not see the intricacy of design that is required to make a creature functional. By his very failure to apply teleological reasoning, Empedocles has drifted out of science & into an unsustainable fantasy. (There is more: but gentle reader must go to Aristotle.)

*

Sometimes one says something stupid, & on reflection, one wills to take it back. Let me identify with Empedocles in this respect. It often happens while overstating a position. In the hope of clarifying one’s own view, one supplies one’s own reductio ad absurdum. I did this myself just the other day, in replying to a Comment in my own website. I answered a remark I found too aggressively wrong-headed with a remark that made the opposite mistake.

The issue was the place of God in empirical science. By way of striking the decisive rhetorical pose, I said He has “nothing to do with empirical science” — meaning, more modestly, naught to do with it directly. God should be in the hearts & minds of biologists, I suggested, but as toilers in the empirical vineyards they seek only proximate & not final causation; the immediate “how” & not the ultimate “why” of creatures. But I was overlooking the transitional “wherefore.”

What I wrote was correct in a certain narrow sense; but so narrow, as to be misleading. It would have been  more correct to say that biology, as a separate science from theology, does not work from theological doctrines, having doctrines of its own. But even that assertion would get me in a mess.

Modern science more generally omits God as a theological distraction; but this cannot be a problem with God. Might it instead be a problem with modern science? I could perhaps have belaboured the point about “hearts & minds” — for as I have noticed on several planes, the omission of God from just such sciences as biology may very well blind us to empirical fact, then help to corrupt us in technical applications. We do not “avoid metaphysics” by this device, but rather grab the stick from the wrong end, assume a metaphysics that is untenable, then use it to poke out our own eyes.

“Metaphysics” is a dark & scary word, especially to those raised on Hollywood & hamburgers. It was not invented by Aristotle; his treatises entitled Metaphysics were so labelled by an editor in a later century, to distinguish them from those labelled Physics, which came right before. These titles are attributed to Andronicus of Rhodes (floruit 60 BC), who was scholarch (head) of the Peripatetic School, & therefore unlikely to have been dim-witted, or incapable of an intended irony. But it appears to be older, as a term synonymous with what Aristotle himself calls “first philosophy.” From the beginning, I should think, the ambiguity in the term was intended: that this treatise (with or without the notoriously sketchy Book XII, or Λ, “lambda” by the Greek alphabetical counting) does not merely fall after the Physics, in Andronicus’ edition of the collected works, but goes “beyond the Physics” in a fuller sense. There is thus nothing “afterthought” or throwaway about it.

I mention this because our very reading of Aristotle is cluttered by so much modern argle-bargle about texts, imputed authorship, & chronology. The works that have survived were put in good logical order by Andronicus & preceding ancient editors, & transcribed with care. The approach of Thomas Aquinas & other scholastics to them — to read them & make sense of them as they stand, then argue with them “in situ” — was all along the wise & commonsensical strategy. Better that than spend your academic life chasing hypothetical hares. More basically: read Aristotle for what he can teach us, & not for what we can teach him. For the man is dead. There is nothing we can teach him.

(We have the same garbage in Biblical studies: endless coursing after hypothetical hares, to avoid actually reading & coming to terms with what the books say, & will continue to say when all the coursing is done.)

In my modest & frequently embarrassing, but extended attempts to read philosophy, I have often been reduced to abject confusion at the “interface” between ancient & modern terms, & the anachronistic habits of modern scholars, who present ancient philosophers broken out into modern packages; shrink-wrapped, as it were.

Take “epistemology” for instance, one branch of “modern metaphysics,” if not meta-meta, or perhaps even a file folder on its own. We all know (we do all know, don’t we?) that this word denotes the analysis of consciousness & knowledge itself; of how we can know, believe, or justify anything. Though founded on a Greek stem, it is quite certainly not an ancient term, but instead invented by some Victorian Scotsman, a good Tory fellow writing for Blackwood’s magazine, James Frederick Ferrier. In a fine, clear, noble style, he tries to get behind mere psychology, to where the Ouroboros of Reason eats its own tail. And finally fails, as all such Cartesianism.

Whole books — & not a few of them — have been written to examine e.g. “Plato’s epistemology,” including rather a fine one we retain, up here in the High Doganate: a scintillating running commentary on the Theatatus & Sophist by F.M. Cornford entitled, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, from which I long ago learnt much that may or may not be true. But thinking of other such works, which seem to grow glibber & glibber as they multiply in our drive-in universities, it occurs to me our current view of Plato may be skewed in fundamental ways, rather as our view of cattle is skewed when they are ground into burger meat & slabbed on styrofoam, with perhaps a little horsemeat cut in.

To Plato, & ditto to Aristotle & successors in the Western philosophical tradition, before modernity, knowledge is essentially innate. So is sin & ignorance, the Christians may have added, & one is free to disagree with anything, but when it comes to interpreting the older philosophers, & trying to extract an “epistemology” from them, we should ask: “What part of ‘innate’ do you not understand?”

Other parts of e.g. Plato are hived off, into ribs, shanks, briskets, sirloin, & so forth — “Plato’s ethics,” “Plato’s metaphysics,” whatever — which is all very well for the culinary purposes of our post-secondary cafeterias. But the pieces can’t be used to reconstruct the cow which, in the original, lives & moos & has its own being in a certain animate unity. The “parts” are, so to say, interdependent, so that for instance, we cannot grasp what Plato conveys as innate without also grasping some of his cosmology, then wrestling with extremely sophisticated literary devices by which he presents appropriate Greek myths, more as parable than as fact or fiction.

“We murder to dissect,” & let me add that the project of modern empirical science, as modern “humane” scholarship, is a great meat-packing factory. It is arbitrary in the sense that the French cuts are made differently from the British or American cuts (to say nothing of halal dicing), but in no case can the animal survive them. Only (alas?) in plain practical religion is any attempt made to get at animate wholes again, & employ the intuitive together with the analytical reason on things that move.

Now, metaphysics, or “first philosophy,” has itself been sliced & diced, so that what the word might mean depends on which recent philosopher one is consulting. By some it is now rejected tout court, by others reduced to one of its playthings. The notion of a broad enquiry, into what our innate reason can make of an overall picture emerging from the specialized sciences, & what it can give back to them in panoramic view, has rather receded into a pipe dream.

A pity, because sans the attempt at that view, we are left mentally shrunken & atomized: Catholics as much as other people. Our only intellectual nutrition comes from shrivelled dogmas, although they at least contain some hard protein. Add water & the dogmas come gloriously to life; subtract it & our faith in both religion & science becomes as parched as the dried lizards I see, pressed against the bottle glass in the Chinese apothecary.

Which is not to say that Metaphysical Philosophy “mediates” between religion & science. Not quite. The relations are more living & mysterious than that, & the borders, including the frontier between Nature & Supernature, cannot be drawn with surveyor’s precision. Not, at least, by anyone who was ever, or will ever be, born. There are hills in the plains, & plateaux in the mountains.

In my humble & yet earnest view, the old “science” of metaphysics falls out as much into “ethics” & “aesthetics” as onto the ground beneath verifiable “scientific fact.” And as I am hardly the first to observe, the philosophical tradition from, say, Plato through Aristotle through Augustine through Thomas Aquinas through modern attempts to revive philosophia perennis — is flagrantly teleological. That is to say, nothing is examined without interest in its purpose & “fittingness” to its place within a larger view. As well as to its beauty, in itself.

Let me go so far as to assert — rather boldly since I could myself be reduced to mincemeat by the rotating blades of our modern industrial logic-choppers — that without the (perfectly innate) teleological habits of a “first philosophy,” we are right up a tree; not only with respect to religion & philosophy, but also to empirical science. I would describe the contemporary, self-styled “secular humanist” man as up it with a false metaphysics, rather as Alasdair MacIntyre does, & a host of other trending-Catholic philosophers who, typically, began swimming the Tiber when they realized there is only desert on the other side.

This false metaphysics (which might alternatively be described, falsely, as “no metaphysics at all”), by fanatically excluding the teleological, blinds or skews our understanding of phenomena at the most basic level, where they do in fact display anticipation in the obvious ways: as the acorn anticipates the oak; as inward genetic change anticipates outward adaptive change. It is, as Aristotle knew from his own grand conception of non-contradiction, bad news when our “theory” must ignore our “observations.”

Nature herself is taken for blind, when she is foreseeing; taken for mundane when she is miraculous by disposition; taken for drab, & thus insufficiently loved. By false reasoning, we dismiss as “theoretically impossible” what is happening constantly before our eyes, in an unambiguously testable & thus empirical way; so obvious that we are constantly sneaking the teleology back in, unconsciously or under the table, through our use of normal language. We forget ourselves, & start using words not as the cuckold’s jargon, but for what they actually mean. For no one can “do science” without constantly asking, What does this thing do? What is it for? What other purposes might it have? How does it coordinate with these other things? Et cetera.

That is in fact the foundation of Western science. The very assumption that things will make sense, if we persist in our inquiries, is at its root teleological. Yet the modern scientist, or scienticist, shrugs all this off, to repeat with smug assurance: “There is no such thing as Purpose in Nature.” He is lying, to himself if not to me. Animate nature is ridden with purpose throughout. And the cosmic joke gets bigger & bigger: for in the domain of necessity, in physics & chemistry, nature also turns out to be purposeful, & as is increasingly evident, downright anthropic in an extremely uncool, Aristotelian way.

“Nature does nothing in vain, nothing superfluous.” … “Nature like a good householder throws nothing away that could be made useful.” … “Nature behaves as if it foresaw the future.”

These aphorisms, taken respectively from De Caelo, from De Generatione Animalium, & from De Partibus Animalium, are in themselves the little doctrinal suggestions that dwell in the foundations of all Western science; & as may be seen, each is flagrantly teleological.

Curiously, it is the Aristotelian theology (within the Metaphysics) that is most out of date. In that strange Book XII — the “Lambda of God,” as I like to call it — the Master of Those Who Know is himself put to chasing his own tail in astronomical speculations, none of which remain useful once we have disposed of the old geocentric cosmology. It is only in passing, there & elsewhere in his works, that Aristotle uses “God” in a more colloquial sense — as something casually acknowledged because self-evident — & presents the Prime Mover or Original Cause as an inevitable Thought, not dependent upon any subsidiary scheme of celestial mechanics. (The notion of an “unmoved mover” of the outermost heaven is much older than Aristotle, incidentally. Homer attributes it to Zeus early in Book VIII of the Iliad.) And the funny thing is, when he speaks of God in this intuitive & unqualified way, Aristotle stays right on the money.

I think there is something to be said from this. To leave God out of biology is to be wrong, about biology. Ditto all other empirical sciences. But to make God a mechanical force is to be wrong, about God.

A woman named Wong Shuk Yee was struck by a car on Wednesday, somewhere in the northwest suburbs of Calgary. The driver of this car did not stop. The woman’s body became an obstacle to traffic, & two more cars had to swerve to avoid her. Neither stopped. A fourth car struck her again, dragging her (still living) body a short distance before it became detached; & that driver, too, sped on.

Another woman, named Tonja Beach — mother of four — was drinking her morning coffee at a kitchen table by a window to this scene. She heard the thumps, then looked out. She, alone, ran to the stricken woman’s aid. She found Wong Shuk Yee still alive, & conscious, but with ghastly injuries that could not be survived. She held the woman’s hand to comfort her, as she lay dying.

While she was doing so, innumerable other cars passed, without stopping, including several turning into a nearby daycare to drop off kids. At the transit loop across the street, the driver of a waiting bus remained in her seat. Those waiting at the loop continued waiting. Someone must have called 9-1-1, for the police arrived, & the agencies of the state then began standard procedures, to eliminate this road anomaly. A media reporter was duly assigned to ask Tonja Beach how she felt, & to explain to the woman that psychologists refer to such events — which are now quite common — as “bystander syndrome.” (This is one of the “fun facts” you pick up in a place like journalism school.)

The term describes our modern, non-participatory democracy quite well. Everyone is equal, & everyone has rights. We might call them “the rights of the bystander.” One might say that the most fundamental of these rights, on which all others can now be constructed, is the right to assume that “someone else is taking care of it.”

In this case, all but one of the bystanders did nothing. In the case of the Vancouver hockey riot, all the bystanders joined it, but one — one kid who stood up to the crowd to declare “this is wrong” & was then physically attacked by the rioters he had tried to address. We forget that the evil we witness so often in passive form, may also take active forms.

I do not drive a car, I walk wherever I can, though sometimes I am reduced to public transport. As a pedestrian, over the last decade, I have been twice hit by a car, both times while crossing a street with a green light. In only one of these cases was I knocked flat to the asphalt. It was a glancing blow, & I do not think the driver (her attention focused on making an illegal left turn) ever noticed me.

In the other I remained standing. It was dusk, & the driver must not at first have seen me, coming as she did around a slight curve in the road. Had she not hit the brakes hard, I would have been killed. In the event, nothing more than my handprints were left on the shiny front hood of her exquisite luxury sedan. I did not at first realize that one leg had been twisted in such a way that I would be limping for the next two years. I was too angry to notice. I continued to stand in the way of the now stopped car, glaring at the driver. She — a person I took to be a “professional woman” from her dress, the car, & the expression on her face — shouted obscenities to the effect that I’d intentionally stepped into her way. I pointed to the stoplight, as Zeus with thunderbolt, as she rolled up her windows. It had not yet changed from green in my direction, red in hers. Her face changed from self-righteous indignation to that slightly frightened, “victim” look. (“Men are so violent!”) Then, finding me no longer in her way, she suddenly tore off, now round the corner, accelerating up a fairly empty University Avenue. In the euphoria of my anger, I neglected to take her licence number.

This, incidentally, was a moral error on my part. As Socrates explains, rather warmly to the smart Callicles, in the Gorgias, it is better to suffer wrong than to perpetrate wrong. But having done wrong, it is better to be punished than to escape punishment. And this is universally true. By failing to record the licence number (though I had a notebook & pencil on my person) I had let this woman escape punishment. By doing so, I had wronged her. It was my moral duty to see that this woman received the punishment she deserved, for her own sake, & for my own sake as a just man. “Forgiveness,” in the heart, is quite another thing; & injustice is an impediment to that forgiveness.

I have also been twice hit by a bicycle on the sidewalk; knocked over once, & the other time, gently but intentionally nudged by the wheel from behind by the impatient bicyclist — helmeted, visored, & spandexed — after I ignored his cute vocalized “Beep beep!” instruction to get out of his way. That changed immediately to, “Sorry man! Sorry man!” after I spread him out on the sidewalk, & hovered over his prone person shouting, “Quick, give me a reason not to kill you.” Then walked away contented, for justice had been served.

In three of these cases there were plenty of bystanders. In none did any of them intervene. In the two where I ended sprawled on the pavement, & the one where the bicyclist did, I was aware however vaguely of the crowds of people — my fellow pedestrians — simply standing out of the way, then moving along. Given the neighbourhoods, I would guess they all had important shopping to do.

I have extended these anecdotes to make a point. It would be easy to moralize against the effect of cars — these big metal boxes that insulate the people inside from unwanted human contact. And I would be happy to moralize in that way. But the cars, in this matter, are a red herring. The “issue” here is not technological but civilizational. Too, the glib psychologizing about “bystander syndrome,” & the fake empathy in the prying, “How did you feel?” — are themselves symptomatic.

There is one more excuse I should like to kick away. Tonja Beach made it, on behalf of all the parents delivering their kids to daycare, still on her mind many hours later. “You’d think that everyone taking their kids to daycare,” she told the news reporter, “that any one of them would have stopped. I can understand maybe they didn’t want their kids to see that.” (Two guesses on whether this woman is a Christian believer.)

I daresay their kids did “see that.” It is a myth that all children are born blind, deaf, & incapable of thinking. They saw a woman gravely injured, lying helpless in the road, & they saw their parents drive by, & no doubt heard them try to change the subject. For such parents are on a schedule; they cannot let an incident like this, or childish questions about it, slow them down. They may have “clients” waiting. They have colleagues who notice when they are late. They have big salary on the line. Money talks, after all; & they need that money to pay for stuff like daycare, & “a good home.”

Each of these little children has been taught, in a fairly traumatic way, a very important lesson about their parents, who dump them in daycare to get on with their busy lives, as professional people with “priorities.” And I daresay it is a lesson that will have consequences in each of their little lives, however their experience is assimilated. And there will be further consequences when the sensitive child begins reacting to the evil with which he has been contaminated, as at some point he may. His parents will perhaps seek psychological counselling for their “problem child,” & get him dosed with pacifying drugs. That will teach him the final lesson about what his parents are.

But then, let us be charitable. Perhaps the parents in their turn had been raised by similar, morally worthless parents, in this post-Christian society that has come to consider morality itself to be a form of “oppression.”

It is a myth that people have no conscience. Our Maker implanted that in each of us. We all know that voice perfectly well, even those who deny it. It is the voice to which we reply: “There was nothing I could do.” And we still hear the voice, & we reply, more impatiently, more self-righteously: “The woman was a goner. There was nothing I could do for her. I’m not a doctor, I don’t have a medical degree. And besides, if I got involved, I’d be exposing myself to legal consequences. I might get called as a witness. I might get sued for touching her. People are crazy these days, you don’t need to take risks like that.”

This has been the basic “liberal” act, through all ages: as much among the Pharisees as among our modern adepts of “secular humanism.” It is to refute the True, with the Plausible. It is to answer the hard moral argument with the soft tendentious argument; with mild heckling; with pseudo-moral posturing; with a display of insolence if it comes to that; & finally, with “statistics.” It is to be glib, by reflex, persisting into habit. And yet all these responses are founded in an uncompromising & absolutely necessary act of faith: that there is no God who will come in Judgement.

Czeslaw Milosz called this “the true opium of the people.” He defined it as, “a belief in nothingness after death; the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

It is very difficult to discuss intellectual history, & therefore ideas, owing to a sublimated version of the idea of progress. While superfically even the crassest enthusiasts for progress as “an inevitable & irresistible perpetual improvement of the human condition” — or shall we say, naïve optimists — have surrendered or died, their ghosts continue to hold tenure in all our universities. These ghosts cannot think, therefore cannot teach, anything on its own merits. They only know how to teach “this leads to that.”

Progress may not make everything better any more; indeed the spokesmen for progress can become quite jaded. They say something closer to, “It makes some things better & some things worse; live with it!” But whether for better or worse, one thing leads inexorably to another, & we remain bits in some sort of Hegel Machine. Should it turn out that we have anything resembling free will (& the possibility is frankly doubted), we must orient all our actions as bit-players to the elimination of all the bad, “regressive” tendencies from the past; & to their replacement with good “progressive” tendencies — the words in quotes having taken on a fanatically moral connotation.

In other words, we are back where we started, with the idea of progress in its most fatuous form, as something irresistible. Except, this time, the progressives will make it irresistible, & make those who wander off the progressive script very very sorry that they did so.

I was about to mention the name, Johann Georg Hamann. In order to inoculate myself against the charge of being stale-dated, I did a quick Internet sweep, for recent “books about” him — with no intention whatever of reading them, only to see what is there, & get the gist from publishers’ blurbs & excerpts.

What I found was precisely what I expected: Hamann, considered as leading to this, & leading to that. This is the Hamann that “everybody knows” — though I should think most readers had never heard of him, including 99 percent of the post-graduates in North America’s drive-in universities. Never you mind. For even had he been your best buddy, you wouldn’t recognize him in an honours course. He is made into a donkey on which any number of tails may be pinned: romanticism, pluralism, diversity, identity politics, deconstructionism, terrorism, totalitarianism, &c. None of which have anything fondly to do with him.

While the reader’s familiarity is casually assumed, it is equally assumed that Hamann could have nothing to say to the present, directly. (He died in 1788 after all.) All this secondary literature on where he was coming from, & where he led. Shelves of it. The only thing you will not easily find, even in a big university library, is the works of J.G. Hamann. Or any which set out to explicate them, directly. Perhaps I am exaggerating.

He was a friend of Herder & Kant, & almost every other figure of the German Enlightenment, but — & this is an important “but” — he was opposed to them in every conceivable way. He is therefore presented as an opponent of “Reason,” & proponent of what Isaiah Berlin liked to call the “Counter-Enlightenment” — with all Berlin’s charm, & bag-load of donkey tails. (I wasted a lot of time once, reading Berlin when I could have been reading his sources.)

Hamann is presented as “leading to Kierkegaard” — & thus to Existentialism & all that — but it would be sufficient to say that Kierkegaard read him with great attention, & it shows. The rest is all bosh. Given a small coracle, a long journey, & a choice between these two oarsmen, you may bet I would choose Hamann. (I’d go nuts with Kierkegaard, in a small coracle.)

Perhaps even my gentle reader has never heard of J.G. Hamann. I wouldn’t blame him in the least. He is taken to be less important, thus more forgettable than, say, Herder or Kant, because he is pointed in the wrong direction, & is against what every emancipated progressive person is supposed to be for. The later German Romanticism with which he is associated has long been in rather poor taste (largely for what it is taken to have led to). But having declined to punish Marx for the Marxists, Darwin for the Darwinoids, or even Freud for all the frauds, I will not saddle Hamann with the Sturm und Drang. He is anyway totally innocent of that sensibility.

He is mystically Christian — albeit in a mildly Lutherish, pietistic way — “born again” through an unconcealed encounter with Jesus Christ, in London of all places. (Even at the time, good children were expected to be born only once, at most, & Hamann’s conversion cost him a fiancée, for starters.)

Books have been filled with what we mean by “mystical,” & most of them remain to be written, but for the purposes of this present writing let me define it as the conversation at the heart of prayer, & what emerges from that into life. Or, as it were: the essence of creativity, stripped of consciously imposed effects. In the contemporary popular mind, there is something quite vague about mysticism. In reality, however, it is quite the opposite, & genuine mystics are among the clearest writers.

Hamann is witty & pointed & crisp of speech, even when speaking in riddles. And he is usually speaking in riddles. Kant, who would never have consciously spoken in riddles, is almost incomprehensible in the service of “pure reason,” & much more attractive to the professorial mind, in which the primordial cliché is constantly emerging from the primordial mudswamp. By contrast, as my quote for the day, let me supply what is perhaps Hamann’s most famous saying:

“I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter.”

I know very little of Hamann myself, but just enough to love him. And that is saying a lot, for the man was a Prussian, just like Frederick II; & from Königsberg, just like Kant; & if I haven’t stated my prejudice against Prussianism thus far in this website, trust me, I’ll get around to it.

But truth to tell, one needs German, & my bootgrip on German peaked around age sixteen (there was a German girl I was trying to impress …) & has since been sliding. I can’t even read a German newspaper any more without lexicographical crutches, & yet I have come to appreciate the failure of translation. For few translators have minds on par with the authors they are translating, & more is lost than wordplay & a few allusions. The tensions themselves are lost: the hard fibre of sanity itself.

Now, Hamann is a very elegant writer, whose Aesthetica in Nuce (“Aesthetics in a Nutshell”) has a lot to say in a couple of dozen pages. And if gentle reader were to think he could get more from it at a single pass, than a strong flavour, then I’m sorry to say, gentle reader must be one of those naïve optimists. But ditto if he is hoping for another deadly Teutonic pedagogue. If anyone ever thought Germans can’t do irony, they should read Hamann. He does it symphonically. Yet every sentence parses easily, & we don’t have any Kantian oilspill of subsidiary clauses.

He also does voices & accents, like a pro. When he takes up an argument against an opponent, he takes up the opponent’s style & substance in rich & often comic layers of parody & mimesis. He breathes life, or at least the danse macabre, into the most desiccated academic skeletons. And let us say he “anticipated” the Internet, too, for he signs off his essays with a little galaxy of pseudonyms — Aristobolus, Adelgunde, The Sybil, &c — each one pregnant with some particular intent. Hegel, in one of his lighter moments, quoted the French when they say “the style is the man himself” — then made an exception for Hamann, in whose case, “the man is style itself.”

He (Hamann, not Hegel; O Lord, not Hegel) certainly anticipated the linguistic philosophy of the 20th century, & remains well ahead of it. I think he may actually have invented Wittgenstein, which I admit shows a kind of influence — a “this,” in a sense, leading to a “that.” But again, in the round, he never “led to” anything. Rather, he understood that the origin of language is both human & divine, something Wittgenstein only suspected.

He was an oracular writer — there are very few of those. But for our weakness he at least kept his writings mercifully short. This was not so simple a thing as compression, however: the oracular style conveys matter that by its nature neither is, nor can be, compressed. But it is not simply poetic, either, for although rhythmic & allusive, the intention is philosophical. Hamann, a master lutenist, condemned his good friend Herder for being “poetic.” When Hamann wanted to be poetic, he played upon his lute.

Moreover, prophecy requires prophets. Hamann is “prosopopoeic” to the core: a nice long word that means, he personifies. The very ideas he presents are clothed, & walk across the stage playing parts in the pageant, as allegories in Mediaeval morality plays. (Once the reader gets this, he’ll find Hamann easier to follow.) Thanks perhaps to his influence, nay inspiration, Kant almost acquired this habit, while writing his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. (See James Creed Meredith’s translation & notes from 1911, which explain everything. The argument develops dramatically, like a play; though it accelerates more like a train. The ideas inside it are presented like players, with their exits & their entrances; though unfortunately for them, while the train is moving. The whole book seems to be aspiring to dialogue.)

One of Hamann’s collections was Biblische Betrachtungen (“Bible Reflections”), & in these it seems to me that he expounds oracular expressions in Scripture by means of oracular expressions of his own that pair with them, in the way a second eye gives us depth perception. It might be taken as a demonstration of what he called not just the “reconciliation” but, the “union” of opposites. (And quite the opposite of Manichaeism.) One might wrongly think he takes his Bible lightly when in fact he is taking it more seriously, on its own terms, than any “Bible thumper” could take it through earnest literalism. In his response to nuance in the Old Testament, he is Mishnah & Hasid all rolled up in one: the reason, I suppose, Martin Buber loved him.

Was he a philosopher or a theologian or a man of letters? It doesn’t matter.

Towards the end of his life Hamann produced, in response to Kant, what he called a “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason,” in which he suggested language without imagery is meaningless & sterile, & that on the contrary to being “pure,” the a priori reason is merely untenable. For from the moment God is dismissed from the dialogue, we hear the monologue of one lonely human soul. If not the shrieking of a madman.

But that is not to say that Hamann dismissed Reason. To say that would be taking him at his word, in the moment when he is being most ironical. He was instead a sybil of the Impure Reason — of a kind of thinking which embraced intuition, rather than sending it into exile. Perfect (in the sense of, “complete”) Reason requires the full tripod of the transcendentals (the Platonic goodness, beauty, & truth) short any leg of which it will fall over — as flat as Enlightenment Reason. It was because of this that Goethe called Hamann the brightest light of his age — that very Goethe who may be taken himself as the protean exponent of “holism.”

Can this stuff be Catholicized? I would think so. All that is good, beautiful, & true, can be Catholicized. Saint Paul explains this. (Philippians 4:8, et seq.)

Professor Immanuel Kant, who like the rest of us had to earn money sometimes (his dayjob at the Albertus-Universität didn’t pay well), once wangled a commission to write a physics textbook for children. He offered Hamann the co-authorship, knowing him to be a savant in this realm. Hamann promptly declined, but kindly supplied some hints to his friend on how to go about it:

“To win oneself praise out of the mouths of babes & sucklings! … One must begin by divesting oneself of all superiority in age & wisdom of one’s own free will, & renouncing all vanity. A philosophical book for children must therefore appear as simple, foolish, & unrefined as a book written by God for men. … The method for teaching children consists in condescending to their weakness. However, no one can understand this principle, nor put it into practice unless, to use a vulgar expression, he is crazy about children & loves them without really knowing why.”

I smile as I imagine this profound theological observation passing, with a nice clean whistle, right over Kant’s head; indeed right over Königsberg, & then impacting somewhere in the Urals with the power of a mighty meteorite.

In the past — do you remember when we were “living in the past,” gentle reader? neither do I — in the past, & with our old technology, time delays in publishing & correspondence were not so much an imposition as part of the rhythm of life. A physical letter took at least some time in transit, & the time elapsed contributed to the recipient’s leisure in responding. The physical letter, when from a person loved or esteemed or even silently detested, was an artefact, an object of some value. It could be kept & returned to, over time. There are bales of such keepsakes up here in the High Doganate, to remind me that I was once living in the past, without realizing. They remind me, too, that I must now be living in the past. Handwriting provided a physical presence, & even those who used typewriters became familiar through their fonts, & peculiarities as slight as the way they indented paragraphs. The reply might be “dashed off,” or it might be carefully composed, draughted then copied nicely. In both cases, some degree of “linear thinking” was required.

From the age before “reply all,” I recall the thrill of receiving an envelope addressed in a certain handwriting, in ink of a certain purplish shade, with stamps from a certain country. The world indeed keeps shrinking & shrinking, but I have noticed it is still the same distance to walk; so that it is not the distance that is the primary illusion. It is instead the proximity. Though, distance is of course also an illusion, according to the old Buddhist quatrain that Japanese travellers once carried in their breasts:

          Really there is no East, no West;
          Where then is the North & the South?
          Illusion makes the world close in.
          Enlightenment opens it on every side.

An old lady of my acquaintance — one of those who is not my mother — was found smoking in the Parkdale snows the other day. She was clutching a letter, which she wanted to show me; not have me read, just look at it as an “objective thing.” It was the first letter she ever received from the man who became her husband, himself long gone. It was the proof to her that she had not imagined all the past. It was as tattered as an old prayer book. I think it served a similar function, for her, bringing the proximity & distance together until they met at the point of reality. And when she dies someone will throw it out. That won’t matter; it has served in its time. And everything that ever was is immutable in the Eye of God.

Today we require an act of will to appreciate these distances. Time in transit once spared us what I find today an almost excruciating effort — to appreciate distance — compounded by the demand for instantaneous response, & the electronic sense that one is writing on water. “The Internet never forgets,” one correspondent wrote, but I don’t believe this. I’ve seen all my old links go dead after a few years, & the bookmarks themselves lost with old laptops. Our technology becomes faster & faster, & with that, increasingly defective.

A fine lady in Venice has been writing to me, & sending wonderful photographs, which I had better find a way to print out. What enchants her most about that city is a quality she calls the “fittingness” of all things, including the people who have been “conditioned” by their environment. We might say that Venice is a very beautiful city (the part built long ago), but I would go farther & suggest that this Venice was built in the light of the Gloria.

It was built, incrementally, with the kind of time delays we once had by analogy to the transit of mail. An “aesthetic” point is made in the elaboration of one building, & the next after responds to it; not in antagonism, but as a new voice rising in the choir. There is leisure to consider the rhythm of this response, & for the reconciliation of apparent contradictions: the use of dissonant notes in the construction of larger harmonies. There is an etiquette which has grown up organically in statement & response, & over centuries of time what was once successive has become simultaneous: a foreshadowing of life beyond time. Nothing was built, nor removed, casually; though as we can know, things were often built & removed, in the development of this extraordinary choir — in stone, on water.

In the hope that this lady writing from the Cannaregio will forgive me for quoting what she has perfectly observed:

“Why build three huge gorgeous churches on one corner, & fill them with sculpture & painting? Certainly there were not enough people to fill them, so it seems they were built to fill the world with glory.”

Speed & efficiency, both of them narrowly & nastily defined, have been erasing a whole dimension of Reason among us, at a terrible cost. We do not have time, in our “economy,” to consider & reconsider; we must act quickly & decisively. The penalty for dawdling over the “fittingness” of our actions has been growing, till we are reduced to quick mental checklists which focus entirely on the immediate cause & effect. I think of an old architect, in a very old Spain, who in his enthusiasm for his project wrote to his patron, “We will build such & so great a Cathedral that those who look upon it in the future will think that we were mad!” (Cannot find the reference, alas, for I cannot find my old copy of John Harvey’s Cathedrals of Spain.)

We have been erasing, as it were, a dimension of Reason itself, in the name of Reason. For the madness of this architect was a form of reason. He had an image in his mind which could only be conveyed by “rational” drawings, & finally in the Nueva Catedral itself — which would come into its full being a couple of centuries after his death, & after many later modifications to improve the “fittingness” of each part to the whole, & the whole to the landscape of its city. Consider, if thou wilt, the sublime patience of this madman.

As I was just writing to this fine lady: “Now, one of the ‘problems’ as I have come to see it is that, when Reason excludes that form of contemplation in which we discover what is fitting, what is rhythmic, what is beautiful, it starts turning against itself. We have these battles to the death between exponents of Reason from different camps. There is nothing left to elide their differences. The gnit-pickers triumph in blood & gore.”

We have always had this problem. We have always had men who will stop at nothing, & would not dream of stopping to think through the prudential implications of what they are doing; & even centuries ago there were men who would tear all of Holy Church apart for the sake of simplifying fine points of doctrine, excluding one or another of the transcendentals to reduce Truth to a slogan. (And they were not all Protestants, far from it; & to be fair, it was not they who tore the Church apart — for on the larger scale, it was men with their eyes fixed beadily upon worldly power, using theological controversy for their excuse to seize both the property & authority which belonged to that Church — again, French Catholics as English Protestants.) We have always had men in a hurry, & will always have, regardless of technology. The sin in this case is quite “original”; & no machine can be original like that.

What we have not always had, however, is the modern & now post-modern condition of constant acceleration of pace. Reason is not extinguished by this, it is only narrowed: made more & more svelte to keep up with the race. We pitch sanity to keep the frame lighter.

That, in case gentle reader has wondered, will account for the peculiar eccentricities of this blog, & why I am trying to make it & keep it a kind of “anti-blog,” devoted to that spirit of Idleness in which we try, so far as God will assist, to restore the Gloria, & the beauty in things that the world has no time for.

Some general “Hints to the Commentariat” were previously offered. As I mentioned then, I’d intended the tone & style of comments to be that of the old-fashioned “letter to the editor,” as to the Times (of London) in some other century. In January I briefly considered cutting off comments entirely, being distressed by a tone that was growing ugly. After Thursday’s thread, I was tempted to do this again; but have resolved on a course slightly less drastic.

“Trolls” & “foodfights” are among the terms of art, used to describe the soi-disant battle of ideas along Internet comment threads. It seems to be given to almost every partisan, to recognize trollish behaviour in an adversary. It is given to few to recognize this in an ally, or in oneself. It becomes the harder to see when the conversation is on topics apparently exalted, where the partisans imagine themselves to be defending the highest principles, & just as they are sliding into the worst kind of sectarian darkness — the kind which has left many bloody swathes through Western, & world history. At such moments, religion is transformed into a very worldly ideology, wherein the end justifies the means.

It is embarrassing (or rather, worse than embarrassing), to me as a Catholic, to look through the long history of events in which Catholicism was defended by unCatholic means. And I do not mean by physical violence in unnecessary wars, only; I mean also by intellectual & spiritual violence in many kinds, which leave a legacy of hatred whether or not directly accompanied by bloodshed. It is acutely painful, to see one’s own allies attributing to God a malice that could not come from Him, in the service of certainties that are all too human.

No word in that last paragraph speaks against genuine Catholic doctrine, teased out by reason from Revelation over two thousand years. Nor am I disowning a history, in which good & evil are necessarily entwined. The good comes from God & men divinely inspired; the evil from wilful men taking their shortcuts to what they imagine will be the good result. Least of all am I suggesting that Catholics are especially guilty, in the sectarian clashes that litter history; nor suggesting that some of the worst behaviour did not begin in reasonably justified self-defence.

Men are men, as all Christians should know, to say nothing of others; & therefore we are never to be entirely trusted. The condition of Sanctity is real, but it is also very rare, & never to be tritely assumed. The Church herself has always been sceptical of claims to Sainthood, as to claims of Miracles. She accepts & recognizes them only when they survive the most exacting investigations. She learnt to do this from both divine instruction & worldly experience: she knows that men get carried away. And her task, when her men & women have been equal to her task through the ages, has been necessarily (as T.S. Eliot put it) to be hard when people would be soft, soft when people would be hard.

My function as Author of this little website — as a kind of hack journalist set free from the constraints of contemporary media — is to write about men, events, & ideas, to the best of my ability in truth. By that I mean, truths plural in the light of the Truth singular, which I sincerely believe to hinge on Jesus Christ. My function as Moderator towards “comments” is not to censor divergent views, but to assure myself that they are compatible in tone & intention with my own exercise. I will not have this as yet another forum for “trolls” & “foodfights” — even highly intelligent trolls, intending very sophisticated foodfights.

Since Michaelmas last year, I have been proceeding with a general idea through trial & error. There are actually many attractions & even virtues in amusing pseudonyms, & wanderings off the point. They may reflect “idleness” in the best sense, where it is quite the opposite of “acedia.” Leisure is required for the free play of reason when it seeks the good, the beautiful, & the true. Reason is not a mule to be hitched to a cart, & whipped towards a precise destination. It should be, far more often than it is allowed to be today, a means of exploration. But against this, I must consider in the balance the vices that are encouraged by the use of costume identities & the indulgence of hobby horses.

It might even be that squabbles among the Commentariat attract readers to the website, & hold the reader’s attention even when he is appalled, so that I ought to encourage them for the sake of “success” — usually measured in number of comments, & number of visitors to the website, & the trendline. But with such success comes, not always but almost inevitably, the corruption of the original intention. I’d rather stick by that intention, & should the number of comments sharply decline, & the number of readers with them, then so be it.

And let me add that I have no other websites. This one is entirely devoted to my own writing & thinking, for all its flaws. And while commenters are welcome to point to my errors or their disagreements, it does not exist for the purpose of letting them argue among themselves on topics of their own choosing. There are many, many, many places in the Internet where they may do that.

I am, incidentally, myself among the guilty of the sins I have defined. For I have myself been joining in the cat herd on topics unrelated to my own posts. My motive has been sometimes to correct what appear to be egregious errors, & sometimes, to lighten the tone where it seems to be growing dark. But sometimes I just take a gleeful kick, in the smartass manner. Therefore I have decided to ban myself from making comments: for my purposes will be better served in Comments by just shutting up. If I have something to say on another topic, or in response to an especially thoughtful comment from a reader in Comments or email or conversation, I will make it into another post, & thereby open the field to comments on that topic.

No one else is banned from Comments, but I leave them free to withdraw themselves, should they rebel against either of these two New Rules, which I hereby proclaim, with the infallible authority of the High Doganate:

The first rule is, all comments to appear under real names. Those who feel uneasy posting comments under their own identities should either take heart, or take flight. I have become convinced that the use of pseudonyms on the Internet, here as everywhere, encourages unpleasant habits, & the worst of them the most subtly. Those in possession of titles may use them parenthetically, but recall that, by custom, even members of the British House of Lords use their own untitled names as their by-lines in the public prints. (Those who use their titles for that purpose are considered to be jack-asses.)

The second rule is, all remarks to be addressed in the correct Parliamentary manner, “to the chair.” That is: one is speaking before all members, & all readers, at all times; & never in private dialogue, banter or cross-talk with another member. The fact that I, in my capacity as “Speaker of the House,” have recognized a commenter, may be deduced from the fact that his comment has appeared. If it never appears, the commenter may rightly assume that his remark was ruled out of order. He may well benefit from trying to guess why. (No Speaker has the time to justify every small decision, & none can possibly avoid making the occasional mistake.)

I hope these two rules, which I intend to enforce fairly strictly, will assist in maintaining the highest standards of civility. It should go without saying that unparliamentary language (lively yes; vicious no) will be deleted, even from posts allowed otherwise to stand. And it should be assumed, as an implication of these two strict rules, that no single commenter will be allowed to dominate a long thread. On any given thread, each additional item he submits will be less likely than the one before to be recognized by the Speaker. Therefore, make your first comment count.

The Speaker in this House is a jolly fellow, happy to tipple outside Lent, & will allow some wandering if he finds it genuinely entertaining. He generally allows members to ramble on a bit, if they can complete their points without becoming tedious. But he will not permit persistent wandering from the point, & will try hard to spot & scotch gratuitous efforts to change the subject by the introduction of red herrings & other poisoned fish.

For clarity, let me mention that, on sound Parliamentary principle, I am not enforcing these rules retroactively. They come into force only with this post, & from this moment.

Finally, it follows from the above that this post opens a thread to those who disagree with my New Rules, to explain why they are wrong. But note, gentle commenter should expect only one chance to state his case (or hers, should it come to that), & must sign his own name to it.