Essays in Idleness

We have trained several of our jet-setting friends to bring back newspapers & magazines. Not any one journal in particular: rather, whatever they happen to pick up along their way, & find still in their litter upon return to the Greater Parkdale Area. From childhood we have had a fascination for such things; for ephemera of any sort. Often one learns much about some strange place by reading a local paper front to back (or back to front if it is in Urdu), especially the classified advertisements. Alas, the Internet has smooshed the small ads almost everywhere, thinned newspapers generally, & for indirect reasons we’re too bored to explain, is imposing an homogenous glossiness on the magazines, & an asphyxiating sameness on “mainstream” typographical design, all over the world. Typographical error is also in decline, thanks to these infernal spellcheckers; although, by way of compensation, grammatical & syntactical mistakes are trending upwards.

We lunched Thursday with a couple of old friends who kindly supplied us with a recent number of Business India, from their plane ride home.

As the editor of a business magazine ourself, in Asia one-third of a century ago, we don’t expect much from such publications. Most were modelled on the Economist, including the Economist itself (see last post). The problem is fundamental & actually insoluble. Business is a tedious activity, & when you’ve seen one balance sheet you’ve seen them all. Moreover, the decline of the art of banknote engraving has made even the accumulation of large sums of money deeply unsatisfying. It gets harder & harder to trade for real silver & gold. The world is awash in ill-designed silver & gold paper notes, but only a tiny fraction of the denominated amount is actually backed by the substance, & the last time we tried to exchange a gold note for the gold it specified, we were gawped at by the bank manager as if we had stepped from a time warp in ancient Sumerian clothing. There really is no alternative to collecting old coins. But hardly any business magazine contains articles on numismatics. (The one we edited was an exception.)

Notwithstanding, we were able to find one mildly interesting article in the Nov. 11th Business India — just opposite a full-page, full-colour ad headlined, “Let’s talk Sex.” (“Let’s not,” we inwardly responded.) It was a semi-literate review of a new book by one Akash Kapur — son of Dilip, the big name at the high end of the Indian leather handbag trade. The book is entitled, India Becoming. It does not seem to propose an answer to the question, “Becoming what?” — but we’re promised some sort of “microcosm.” The lad has returned from a decade in the West, to find his country changed. The roads are improving, there are more cars, land prices are rising, & more women in the workforce. Hurrah.

“Veenah from Jaipur is a determined young woman, rapidly rising up the corporate career ladder. Divorced, she has a live-in boyfriend, & is open about her sexual needs.” We are already hoping not to meet Veenah. “In many ways she was like a lot of women I had known in New York,” writes Kapur. (We also have them in the GPA.) But wait for it: “Diagnosed with cancer, she realizes her need to have children, do yoga, & write stories instead of emails.” One wants to go into a dark place & scream.

For 599 rupees we can read, apparently, dozens more stories like this about the New India, & the New Indians. And for nothing, we can skip the lot. Mercifully, the review provides the author’s conclusion, thus sparing our time. He has noticed a common thread runs through the personal stories. Almost everyone’s life has been destroyed. “I wasn’t convinced anymore that any amount of money, any increase in salaries or GDP or the number of cars or billionaires was worth the damage.”

We think he may be on to something there.

For a magazine like the Economist, representing in theory & often in practice the classical liberal worldview (“classical” refers to the economists, starting from Adam … Smith), religion exists in a free market like everything else. This is not an animadversion. We have read leaders in the magazine over more than three decades that make this point explicitly; & which benignly argue that the world needs more religion. Therefore, let the product be supplied, & may the best salesman win. The Anglican communion from which we escaped could once be commended for developing their product range, with Low, Broad, & High Church branding to target the market niches. The Romans appeared to be following their strategy in the 1960s, & were duly complimented at the time. Pentecostalism has received some downright sympathetic coverage in recent decades, & the “newspaper” (the Economist has never admitted to being a magazine) was probably more polite to successful Evangelicals & Fundamentalists than any of the American liberal media.

Gentle reader may at first be surprised to see this unusual mainstream item, in which Catholic traditionalists & traditionalism are treated almost reverently. But this accords with the Economist‘s own principles: for as they note, the old Latin Mass is enjoying a surge; while the “new improved” Novus Ordo continues to lose market share. Father John Zuhlsdorf is even quoted comparing the latter to “a school assembly.” London’s Brompton Oratory is described as a “hotspot” & young Traddies are the new avant-garde.

Well, golly; they have numbers & everything. A few tiny points their fact-checkers missed, but in the main their report coincides with our own understanding, & that’s all we ask. They even use the F-word (“fogey”) to deal directly with the liberal conceit that the Tridentine Mass rides on nostalgia. They mention Juventutem, & do the math to calculate there are few people left on the planet who could even remember the old ways. True, one of them sits on the Throne of Saint Peter, but he’s the very man in a position to utter, “Le Vatican II, c’est moi.”

This item, on “Vatican II at 50,” by Robert Royal in the Claremont Review, is the most balanced & reasonable short account we have read of the fallout through the last half century. We are getting to a distance when this can be done; when the generation that lived through the spiritual carnage — both carnagers & carnagees — is no longer with us. We would anyway expect the return to “normal” to accelerate over the next half-century, for the fuel that powered the revolution is spent. But then, in the view over twenty centuries, “normal” for the Catholic Church can be quite exciting. She will need to recover her unity of spirit & intention in face of the persecutions that are coming, almost inevitably. They, in turn, will burn away anything that remains of our glib post-modernism.

As a youff, with a teacher determined to teach us Latin, we became mysteriously attracted to the late 4th-century Roman author, Ausonius. Edward Gibbon, in the Enlightenment, wrote him off (“his fame condemned the taste of his age”), & his habit of writing setpieces on time-worn topics from a provincial location (Bordeaux, once Burdigala) does not immediately commend him to our attention. But there is an atmosphere about him, compounded of nostalgia & a diffuse shading of the Plutarchian wistfulness, that still haunts. Ausonius may not fully know it, but he is writing near The End, of the Roman Empire. He is anyway conveying a Roman spirit that comes very late in the day. (“Decadence” doesn’t do this justice; but nor is it Owl of Minervish.) Perhaps we “feel” his situation today in a way that Gibbon couldn’t; for Gibbon was too smug.

News breaks in on Ausonius in later life, grim events like the seizure of the Empire of the West by Maximus in 383, which involved the slaughter of his patron & old pupil, Gratian. The province of Gaul is increasingly insecure, from incremental surrender to murderous savages. Habits & mores are invisibly breaking down. But in Burdigala all is well. Ausonius recovers from such passing shocks, & life goes on into a well-funded retirement.

His most famous work is the Mosella, which follows the course of that gorgeous tributary of the Rhine. Ausonius became acquainted with that country as a young soldier, beating off the raiding Alemanni tribes. It is a blessed work, which tells us all about the river’s fishes, significant buildings along its banks, the wine-making, the fields & mills — everything one needs to know to “be there,” bouncing along on his happy Latin hexameters. For so it all once was.

A teacher himself, of grammar & rhetoric, who rose by the luck of tutoring a future Emperor to become, first governor of Gaul, then Consul, his place in the heart of Latin tutors may be explained. But there is more, though mostly fragmentary, to make him useful as a kind of picture gallery from the end of a world, & album of its fashions & forms. He is facile, but over a considerable range. We have writers today whom everyone thinks grand, in the way his contemporaries thought Ausonius grand; & he really is, in moments.

In one moment he revives his grief for a long-dead wife; in another unsuccessfully conceals his infatuation with a pretty German slave girl; in another indulges his love of Virgil rather crassly by assembling a cento (patchwork) of Virgilian phrases into a nuptial song that is, quite frankly, obscene. That he could write all three is a bit of a scandal. The little odes on the slave girl are the most lively. She has somehow become the mistress of his villa. She is a strange, somewhat wild, exotic thing: with blue eyes, & blonde hair! He thinks she is virtuous, & can’t get enough of her.

Mrs Jessie Glynn, to remember the name of my last & most beloved Latin teacher, recommended his Ephemeris, however, as a work of the highest pedagogical value. It tells “a day in the life,” of Ausonius himself in retirement, or at least, tells it until towards noon, when the ancient manuscripts desert us; cutting back in later with some bad dreams. This is unfortunate, for by the time we’ve got through his morning the piece has become genuinely amusing, & we are pulled entirely into the diurnal world of Roman town & villa among the elect. From scene to scene, the metre re-arranges. He wakes, calling for his idle slave in plaintive sapphics, switching to breathless iambics as he hunts the wretch down. He washes, gets dressed, dropping satiric dactyls, & then prays in hexameters. (A lukewarm Christian, he has soon “prayed enough.”) And so through the morning, in which he has more slapstick trouble with “the help.” These Romans externalize too much; they don’t make enough fun of themselves. But through it all, one can see how to teach a boy his Latin verse composition.

It is because, perhaps, the Romans went before us, & some other civilizations of which we’re now aware, that our own more educated writers look forward in a way that might never have occurred to Ausonius, who, as it were, “knows without knowing.” Whereas, we are objectively acquainted with the burial mounds of history; in one of which we found him.

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We had intended this post to be about Joseph Roth. From various sources, we gather he has undergone a revival, & that a certain Michael Hofman may be at least partially responsible for this, for he has been doing fine translations. This last fact we cannot yet confirm, for we haven’t read any of them; though we were rather pleased by Hofman’s translation of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. Yet we are also slightly aggrieved, for Joseph Roth was a forgotten literary star, & we thought we had the monopoly on reading him. We specialize, as gentle reader may have noticed, in a certain class of the historically defunct. But suddenly Stefan Zweig, Klaus Mann, & all the other lost luminaries in the German language of the inter-War era, are likewise coming back into vogue. We thought they were all safely dead.

Mark Falcoff writes, in the Weekly Standard, of Hofman’s new translation of Joseph Roth’s letters. (A fine splash of culture in that neoconservative rag.) Roth is presented as “the last cosmopolitan,” a rather dangerous piece of flattery when we recall he was a Catholic-converted Jew. Vividly aware of the rise of Hitler, as it cost him the royalties from his German publishers, he spent his last six years in a morbid spiral, finally perishing in anno 1939, a broken alcoholic old man at age forty-four.

A creature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his most famous novel, Radetzy March, is a kind of “Gone with the Wind” on its passing. For that alone, it was dismissed by the post-War generation. But if one reads it in the original English translation one will find it is rather subtle. The whole plot is built around misperceived corruption; around the consequences to a family, over three generations, of an aristocratic lineage founded in a “harmless lie.” Joseph Roth, almost to the degree of the justly celebrated Robert Musil, sees behind the false fronts of late Viennese pomposity. But he also wanders beyond Vienna. More gently than the very urbane & caustic Musil, he sees the beauty in the sprawling territory that depended upon the preservation of that “absurd” Dual Monarchy — that Empire, weightless as the Holy Roman, in which peoples speaking seventeen official languages freely moved & had their being, enjoying long intervals of security & peace. When the Habsburgs went down, life became considerably worse for every single one of them.

Through another twenty books (only half, we think, ever translated into English) — novels & collections of essays, stories, memoirs — Roth provided a surprisingly clear-eyed view of what was happening around him. He was unpopular with the progressive intellectuals of his day, who looked fondly to the “hope & change” being brought about in Stalin’s Russia. Roth had been to Odessa; he knew what Stalin was. He could not toke on this worldly utopiate, from hard direct experience but also, from the persistent flicker of a faith that was not worldly.

He was proud of the Jewish heritage into which he had been born, & consistently bold in defending it. His Catholicism in no way rejected it; it was instead an even greater positive. In the course of dismissing him, a previous generation also insinuated that he was one of those “converts of convenience,” which entirely mistakes the man. So heavily did fall the curtain of Auschwitz, that today it is almost impossible to escape anachronism, when reading authors before the War. Even affectionate glances towards Jewish contemporaries are now condemned as dark lethal stabs of anti-Semitism (often as not by people who want Israel annihilated tomorrow).

Roth could indeed be presented as “the last cosmopolitan,” but to understand this is to see that it was more than the old ease of crossing borders. In central & near-eastern Europe, men crossed the borders the more easily, in themselves. The very way in which Roth carried his ancestral Judaism & acquired Catholicism, is indicative of this; he did it almost unselfconsciously. This could not be done today, when everywhere we turn to face either/ors.

In the Austro-Hungarian realms we had, until only a century ago, a survival of that much older conception of “personhood,” an inward pluralism from which a man’s identity could not be reduced. He could have one citizenship, & another nationality, yet be of an ancestry different again, speaking a language foreign to all three. He could practice his religion in another language still; adding layers of identity through family connexions, professional associations, cultural avocations, & artefacts of class. Nor did this make him “multicultural” in our current sense, where one must choose a single adjective & stick with it to receive benefits from the state. The multiculturalism was carried instead within each person, & was by its nature beyond the state’s purview.

The Roman society, which Ausonius depicts, was mixed & stratified in different ways, owing to the high value placed on Roman citizenship. Yet in its own way it also permitted dimensions of personhood. Ausonius himself is citizen, par excellence, & a Roman whether speaking in Latin or Greek; but he reveals himself, too, as the product of a region that is never so simple as that. The identity he evokes, along with that “nostalgia,” is a complex thing, which begins & ends in a sense of specific personal location.

Joseph Roth’s fidelity to the Habsburgs outlived their reign; rather as the fidelity of Ausonius outlived Gratian. But Roth belonged to a world that had already been crushed, better in every way than the world that had crushed it. Alas he drank his way down the memory hole. (Not to be recommended.) Though he loved Paris, he was an exile there, & often a pauper into the bargain, robbed, like so many others, of all he owned, from his country to his cash. His works wonderfully describe that quality of exile — exile even from oneself — that only moderns know. A passing revival of his literary reputation is therefore a hopeful thing. He can help us to look back. He can even remind us that barbarism, too, has a past, & a very uncertain future.

We may not have the time this week to blather as we have done the last few days, giving a certain “Mildred” an opportunity to catch us up, for she complains we write faster than she can read. But we would not have another day pass without acknowledging the retirement of Father James V. Schall from Georgetown University in the District of Columbia, to a Jesuit community in Los Gatos, California.

He is eighty-four, & perhaps entitled to retirement, but gentle reader must know what we think of “entitlements.” A certain Joseph Ratzinger was looking forward to a serene retirement — to catching up on his bedside reading, & humming Mozart in the garden, & not having to listen to delegations of crackerjack Yankee theologians any more — when the nasties in the College of Cardinals suddenly elected him Pope. We harbour the same secret wish for Father Schall: that Our Lord will immediately disturb his retirement plans, with some task suited to a much younger man. It is not for us to demand alterations in the Divine Plan, but we were thinking he would make a good President of the United States, & a considerable improvement on the incumbent. (We leave the “how” to others.)

Er, seriously, Father Schall & Father Ratzinger (as he then was) were, prior to our own entry into the Catholic Church, at the top of the list of (biologically) living Catholics we most admired, & read. The full list was longer, but these were by-lines that made our heart skip & our wallet come out, every time. Since we are discussing the former, in limited time, let us say the quality we found most glorious & exceptional in Schall, after taking his towering intellect for granted, was his manliness. He was not merely unafraid of the vast wretchedness of our post-modernity, or of the pinhead legions expounding the latest progressive doctrines. In his writings he embodied, & has since embodied, a very masculine head into the prevailing breeze; a wonderful freedom from soppiness & crappola. He was ex-Army when he entered the Jesuits, & it shows. He leaves the impression of the true Christian soldier, marching as to war; of the Crusader in the finest sense, which incidentally encompasses a casual drollness, a delight in paradox & the shocking understatement. With a gentle smile, he loads a slingshot against Goliath.

Read this brief squib, “On the Mind that is Catholic,” directed to the “popular” reader, in which faith & reason are presented whole. And here is a characteristically manly phrase: “The very idea that we can actually love someone without willing his good is simply contradictory.” To which we could add only, “Bang!” — for he has just shot the Zeitgeist in the head.

That appeared in a collection of philosophical & political essays recently published. (He has been, in fact, a “professor of government.”) The man has been on a roll, these last few years, his books & collections appearing almost annually. His titles through the years give some flavour: … Redeeming the Time … Human Dignity & Human Numbers … Christianity & Politics … Christianity & Life … The Praise of “Sons of Bitches” … Idylls & Rambles … Does Catholicism Still Exist? … Unexpected Meditations … What is God Like? … And then: On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, the best, most Platonic, recent presentation of homo ludens, of man who “plays,” not as a break from more serious activities, but as his sustaining & essential activity. For even soldiering is play.

Let the reader unfamiliar with Schall do his own homework. His Georgetown University website is still here. His column in today’s Catholic Thing is another point of departure. And here is a little call to arms, to get things moving.

We are saddened to learn of the death of Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, author, cricketer, chess master, golf pro, musical composer, xylophone soloist, ballet choreographer, comic actor, anti-immigrant campaigner, & all-round great guy. (Not to be confused with Patrick Moore, the partially reformed Greenpeace psycho.)

They are going down ninepins, these oldies: the men & women of our parents’ generation whom we remember in their prime. This item, from the BBC memory bank, in which Moore was interviewing the late (& also beloved) Neil Armstrong about standing on the Moon, gives the flavour of that era when, for all its flaws, adult life & intelligent conversation were still quite common. Alas, from every side the moral & intellectual sinkhole of hippiedom was encroaching, as Moore was explaining even at the time.

He was all of one remarkable piece from the beginning — even the monocle he wore from age sixteen, when he lied about his age to join the RAF at the outset of World War II. Though he longed for a wife & children, he never married. This was because his fiancée, a nurse, was killed by a German bomb in London. Through seventy years he stayed true to her memory. In everything else he remained, though sometimes eccentric, almost inhumanly constant.

Moore was “basically a solar system man,” & a leading amateur Moon mapper — the inspiration for one of our childhood hobbies, which was looking through a cheap cardboard-tube telescope then trying to draw lunar landscapes in pencil. It began under a Christmas tree. Our papa had noticed a certain obsession with extraterrestrial objects, & found us a copy of Guide to the Moon (often revised & today entitled,  Patrick Moore on the Moon). Little things start a child up, & in this case it was a passing remark that photographs of lunar & other surfaces convey little information, when they are not actually misleading: one must draw, sharply, what one has seen. (Drawing is also the best way, by far, to trick the eyes into observing. Today, schoolchildren are not taught to draw, & graduates of art colleges can’t draw unless self-taught, for the ability to do anything with competence is held to endanger “creativity.”)

We accumulated, over time, a lot of reasons to admire this man, whose interests & attitudes often crossed over our own (at greater altitude). Take cricket, for instance: we were both spin bowlers, a craft in which it seems to us only wily reactionaries flourish, & in which no physical athletic type has an intrinsic advantage. He was big & wide, we were wiry, & like Moore a useless batsman, almost invariably out for a duck (zero runs), & usually a golden duck (out on first ball). Also, a useless fielder. But when leg spin is called for, especially unorthodox leg spin, “I’m your man.”

The essence of the spinner’s task is to read his opponent’s mind, & bowl to the blank from which it has wandered, in hypnotizing slow motion, making use of physics in the thirteen fundamental ways a hard, variously spinning, centre-seam ball may rise from contact with the ground — multiplied by combinations & the changing conditions of ball, ground, humidity, temperature, & lighting — then decorated by sleight of hand to prevent the batsman from guessing what comes next. (A googlie or a chinaman?) North Americans are unfortunately impoverished by the experience of baseball, where the pitcher is limited to the “full toss,” i.e. the ball isn’t bounced off the ground, & so the range of possibility is severely reduced. It is a game wherein the pitcher would be hit out of the stadium ball after ball if his opponent had an intelligently-designed bat to swing with.

And yes, we have never met a spin bowler without a lively interest in astronomy. The Greeks called this “syndrome” (concurrence of symptoms), & we’ve often thought a man’s whole outlook on life may be deduced from what his attention is naturally drawn to. A leftwing spin bowler is, for instance, a contradiction of terms. (We met one once, but after watching him surrender three sixes & a four in a single over, realized he was no exception.)

Moore, for instance, wrote (under the pseudonym R.T. Fishall) a very serviceable book entitled, Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them, full of useful tips such as spreading a thin layer of candle grease across parts of a form marked “official use only,” to prevent the bureaucrat from writing in the space & thus drive him out of his little wee mind. Innumerable other suggestions, while dated to technological conditions a generation ago, may be easily adapted to the present for, as Moore noted, the bureaucratic mind has not developed in any way over the course of history, & is the closest thing we find in nature to a dead loss. We once forwarded to Moore from our commonplace book some quotes from e.g. the Rajataramgini of Kalhana (the 12th-century Kashmiri historian) which exactly describe the breed. Example: “The crab kills its father & the white ant its mother, but the unspeakable Kayastha [member of the bureaucrat caste] destroys everything he touches.” We received a kindly note in response.

Patrick Moore’s ebullience, his extraordinary learning & extreme precision with fact (the Apollo mission used his lunar maps), his indifference to criticism, & devastating wit when confronted, made the usual progressive trolls in England leave him mostly alone. They could not even mock him, for he excelled at self-mockery, too. He even survived in the BBC, setting the record as presenter for a single programme, The Sky at Night, which began in 1957. Its following was so large & enthusiastic that the devils couldn’t dare take it off the air. They had to be satisfied with merely shifting it repeatedly through obscure slots in their late-night schedule — even when Moore founded the United Country Party, “to keep England English.” It is, to our knowledge, the only TV show after which a Main Belt asteroid has been named (Caelumnoctu, the show’s title in Latin; another asteroid had already been named for Moore himself). His last appearance on television was last week: he missed only one episode over more than half a century (after a near-death experience from eating a poisoned goose egg). The show was broadcast live, by long tradition; & the BBC finally honoured him by losing the tapes of many hundred episodes & other inventories of important records.

His political career was at no point successful, but consistently entertaining. United Country went farther, to argue that neither Germans nor Frenchmen could ever be trusted (a point Moore was happy to make in fluent German or French). On the other hand, he admired Liechtenstein as Europe’s last absolute monarchy, & had a soft spot for Catholic Irishmen. He also campaigned for the Monster Raving Loony Party, under Screaming Lord Such, & was at his death a patron of Ukip. He refused to be interviewed on air my females, argued that they’d ruined everything, & coined, we believe, the phrase, “Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve,” along with other philosophical maxims such as, “The catless life is not worth living.” He joined the Flat Earth Society because, while he disagreed with their views, he admired their spirit.

In an iron pan, in butter, lightly braise beefsteak shavings (from raw, of course). Pour over a green peppercorn sauce — made from beef stock with wine & shallots, thickened with cream. Toss in some sliced mushroom, & garden peas, then simmer patiently. On a deep plate of frites (“freedom fries”) spread a layer of cheddar cheese curds. Then pour the molten content of the pan over top of this. We have decided to name our collation of the evening, “Poutine High Doganate.”

The wine for this, both for sauce & table, is a masculine, plummy, Alentejano from Portugal. It is called “Lóios,” in honour of the monks who once dominated the local economy; & should be drunk down at one sitting, for it gets a little inky once the cork is out. Very cheap at the Ontario Licker Control Board, currently, or would be if they took off all the taxes.

(Give us a choice between domination by bibulous monks, or Kafkaesque provincial control boards, & we’ll take the monks, thank you.)

The preceding post was perhaps more appropriate to the season of Ashes than to the season of Advent, yet in both we consider a world without Christ. Advent waits hopefully upon His arrival, & so the character of the fast is different; Lent faces down the Crucifixion. (Happyface Christians skip that part.) But what of a world in which we are not waiting hopefully; of our New World, our America, our new found land, in which the toll from Operation Meetinghouse is reprised semi-annually, in the form of smoothly performed abortions? In Canada since the Omnibus Bill, & in the United States since Roe v. Wade, we have achieved about ten times the number who perished in the Nazi death camps.

The facts, when reduced to numbers, leave us cold. In the course of checking a few little facts last night, we saw a photo from that Tokyo holocaust of the remains of a young woman, charred black & brittle (one limb still lifted, like a burnt stick). We had to examine it for a moment to see what she had been before the incendiaries descended: a young mother carrying a baby in a pouch on her back. The two charcoal forms had become separated, but could be fit back together in the forensic imagination. Of course, one of the difficulties in counting the dead, supposing some attempt to count honestly, was that the great majority of corpses had burnt beyond this state; were for all practical purposes vaporized.

One of the progressive innovations feminist activists now pursue is to stop the abortion count: to remove the requirement for hospitals & clinics to report the numbers. This way the unborn child, already transformed by ideology into a “foetus,” & then by a “procedure” into medical waste, will lose his status even as a number.

There are many ways to achieve the same result in politics, & through the 20th century, & into our 21st, the human race has proved quite innovative in finding ways to make people disappear. With “deep ecology” our philosophy is catching up with our empirical science. For now the need to make humans disappear actually becomes the first principle of ideology: de-population as an end in itself.

Which takes us back to those Ten Commandments. Not any ten, randomly selected, but the specific set dictated to Moses, which the civil libertarians want stripped from court walls & any other place where they might be visible, as an affront not only to Atheists, but to moral relativists of any kind. “Thou shalt not have strange gods before me” has admittedly the authoritarian ring; but “thou shalt not kill” might be even more inhibiting of the great progressive project. And where would “democracy” be, to say nothing of the real estate markets, if we did not covet our neighbour’s house, glom his wife, eye his car & appliances, or envy his disposable after-tax income? Call him a member of the “one per cent,” & it will be seen that he is himself disposable.

The Plan, so far as we are able to follow, is to replace the superannuated Ten Commandments, from a law-giver anyway deposed, with new commandments of our own choosing. From that “primitive” beginning we have already progressed, & will continue to progress. From innumerable hints in this morning’s news we could clearly discern the direction of this progress, but from none of them a reference to the destination. Democrats all, aboard our great Ship of State, we decide where we’re going as we’re going along, voting as we sail on which obstacles to our progress we will recognize, & which ignore.

The quaint Mediaeval mind, with its delight in allegory, had already envisaged what we call the progress of democracy, though not our technological accomplishments (except in their most horrified nightmares). They called it the Ship of Fools: passengered & crewed by the frivolous & oblivious, & liberated from the ministrations of a pilot. They understood its destination, too, which they called the Fool’s Paradise, & in the same frankly reactionary view, believed that the ship would soon get there.

Years ago, living briefly in Tokyo, & wandering through the Nakano campus of “Todai,” hungry in mid-afternoon, we discovered an immense cafeteria. It consisted of long, very narrow benches — hundreds of them. Not one had a person sitting at it. The cafeteria line was open, however, & the myriad serving stations staffed. By our customary barbarous method of pointing & grunting, we selected a meal, & took a seat half way down this rink of benches, over by a wall where a juke box had started playing — by a kind of spontaneous combustion — Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” This was followed by the rest of the Time Out album.

A young lady, spied in the distance, became the cafeteria’s second customer. We were chuffed to see her approaching our section, given the choice of so many others; then startled when she set down her tray brazenly opposite our own.

“Do you like hot jazz, or cold?” she asked.

We had already discovered, in bookstores, how forward Japanese girls could be. This, anyway, after several years on the Asian mainland, where no respectable woman, married or unmarried, would be caught dead alone in the company of a “European” male. But Japan was rich, like Europe. This seems to do things to people. And a Japanese girl who wants to practise her English, knows no shame.

This was precisely what the young lady intended. Having answered her question with a question of our own (“What do you mean?”), we found that her English did perhaps need some practice; but her knowledge of jazz was encyclopaedic. Too, that her preference was for “cold jazz,” of just the kind that was playing.

A very pretty girl, as we recall. … And, since gentle reader may be wondering: “Warm jazz plays red notes, cool jazz plays blue notes, & cold jazz plays purple notes with white edges.” Brubeck, we were given to understand, plays all the notes; but yes, purple, edging sharply to a very pale blue.

*

We knew then, as we know today, nothing about music. But let us add, we know what we like. For as long as we can remember we have been attracted to Brubeck (our papa had his records), through all his phases to his latest choral odes (“Christmas Hymn” & “The Peace of Wild Things”). For he was one of those glorious artists who go on working to the end, in Brubeck’s case composing into his nineties & no doubt up to the moment when “his number was called” — in 9/8 signature, if we know anything about God.

That was yesterday morning. David Warren Brubeck, to give his full name, was not nearly finished as a composer. His later work, “progressively” (hate that word) more orchestral & choral & explicitly religious, seems as all his previous work to be leading somewhere, to something even better. As the later Bach, he is as much exploring as composing. He has discovered some sublime things no one ever heard before, because they are not of this world.

For reasons of pure sentiment we are playing “Brandenburg Gate Revisited” just now, past midnight up here in the High Doganate. It is the version he scored for the full London Symphony; a live recording from a decade ago, led by Brubeck himself on piano, with a couple of his six talented sons also in the foreground (Matthew on cello & Dan on percussion we think; no album notes). Curiously, it is rather warm. There are pink notes in it, & violet, & some yellow-orange at the end. There is a passage on this track, where string replies exquisitely to keyboard, that required the whole preceding nine minutes to set up. And it is utterly timeless, beyond era or style. Brubeck is full of moments like that, in the course of something between storytelling & a lively sermon, expressed in pure musical phrase; & presented entirely without presumption.

The man was, rather as other jazz greats yet more so, free of posturing. That is, he was not full of himself; he was only full of music. There is the modest serenity of a man about his job. In Brubeck, in Duke Ellington, in the voice of Ella Fitzgerald or the fingers of Art Tatum, we have to our mind audible “glimpses” of what our civilization might have been: of a music that is at once in thick with tradition, & shock new; of high classical precision, yet accessible to all.

In Brubeck particularly, we hear a mind consciously returning upon that euphonic order, in which large, even prophetic things can be said — whether by the cantor of a single melodic line, or polyphonically, & even polyrhythmically. And not for passive entertainment, for as the Psalmist we must dance. Not “easy listening” but the full reply. (The Mass was never confined to words & music, incidentally; being in its nature, too, a solemn dance at the meeting of worlds.)

He was born on a California ranch, of an English mother herself a concert pianist, so that he started piano before he was born. He followed his elder brothers into music, & his sons followed him. In this broad world he was assimilating influences all his life, & through his travels everywhere; but assimilating always to some ineffaceable core. His sound is never mistakable, & like Bach’s, unified beginning to end. (He was often in conversation with Bach.)

Raised as a “nothing” in denominational terms, in 1980 he walked into a Catholic church and simply “signed up.” He denied having converted, for he hadn’t converted from anything. Decades before he had been assembling oratorios & cantatas on frankly Biblical themes, & when he tried to explain his religious position it was too simple for anyone to understand. He’d been in the war — World War II — & he’d seen things there that were “against the Ten Commandments.” You can’t get simpler than that. He didn’t judge people, & so hung out with a wild variety; surely bringing out the best in each.

And he was so American. One wants to weep sometimes at how great Americans can be.

We were delighted to learn, from the most official sources, that Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge (“Kate” to the tabloids) is carrying an heir to the heir to the heir to our throne. Twins, according to some press speculation, bringing to mind the old vulgar but practical adage, “an heir & a spare,” while generating some foreboding. For we must consider the propensity of low-life, such as British prime ministers, to toy with the law of succession (which was plain enough to start, & fixed in the constitutions of many Commonwealth countries).

There was a time, unhappily now passed, when in these British realms the press would become quite excited by such news, while yet trying to reflect the dignity of a public occasion. We have, or rather had some old newspapers around the High Doganate, giving examples of how such “joyous news” was once presented, kept for the purpose of explaining it to our younger colleagues. With the decline of monarchy, seemingly everywhere, “royals” are now treated instead as glitterati, stalked & paparazzied just the same, then described with that gutter familiarity we once associated with the criminal class.

But then, “Hollywood royalty” has been, for its part, also brought down, from the days when even the biggest stars signed contracts with their studios, committing themselves to dress well & behave respectably in public, so not to bring scandal to their trade. Our art director at the Idler magazine held a stock of old magazine photos to illustrate this point. Look at the pictures of twenty-something starlets from the 1950s & before. They appear to be adults. Then look at even forty-something starlets today, who appear to be cheap tarts. Notice not only the (often ghoulish) attempts at pornographic display, but the childish immaturity in the faces: “role models” for people who will never grow up.

It was not the business of the common people, in days gone by, to gape lewdly into the private lives of the high-born. Conversely, it was not the business of the latter to slum. Yet all participated, according to station, in that pageantry by which noble aspirations were vindicated through public art. Deep, deep, in immutable human nature, is the need for that pageantry, that beauty in motion — that parade in which there are no pure spectators, because every soul has taken his place. The production of an heir was indeed of interest to every subject; the continuation of a dynasty being after all a guarantee of peace & good order & the freedom that allows. But it was also a reflection of Advent: an earthly mimesis of heaven to come.

Under present conceptions of “democracy” the opposite principles are now maintained, & increasingly enforced by the egalitarian gestapo. We become outsiders now, all spectators purely, including the starlets who spend their lives leering at themselves.

Human nature continues to require leadership, & therefore something to look up to, tier by tier towards God. We instinctively require not merely order, but a dignified order, sanctioned by time. We still crave the continuities, by which we & our ancestors had been able to converse; by which our descendants would converse with us; by which we could build without constantly losing what our forebears had built. Inwardly we long for a country where the cathedrals & palaces might still stand, together with our own little castles. At least, not all of us long for a government of the depraved, by the depraved, for the depraved.

We are accordingly disturbed, disoriented, demented, by an environment in which nothing is fixed, in which our landmarks are scoured daily to make way for the latest commercial latrines; where no tradition commands respect or, as it were, “nothing is holy.”

Yet we must live with this new “democratic” totalitarianism, in which the slightest assertion of nobility will be spontaneously confronted with crass gestures. Our new aristocracy is itself “democratic.” It consists of those starlets & runway models, nominally male or female or transvestite; of “people like us if we won the lottery.”

Contemporary royalty must negotiate with this; they have no choice. And given the collapse of social standards (including those which were assiduously maintained even in republics), the argument is made that we should now abandon monarchy entirely. Canadians, it could be argued even from the monarchical perspective, no longer deserve to have a Queen.

To us, this earthly Majesty is a symbol of more than legitimate nationhood, of public order & the continuity of Christian law. In one sense it is more than a symbol of the hierarchy that connects by degrees the smallest to the largest, the lowest to the highest, in one continuous organic progression — the lynchpin of unity in all of our variety. For in our contemporary circumstances, the Queen becomes, more, a symbol of Resistance: an inspiring reminder that everything is not yet lost. For on our throne still sits a very fine woman, an embodiment & exemplar of righteous duty, who has herself diligently resisted the collapse into squalor.

All trends are reversible, & while we cannot reasonably hope for the recovery of dignity in our public life, through the foreseeable future, or perhaps for centuries to come, there is joy to be had in every reminder that our world was not always a cesspool; that throughout Christendom, we were once lifted out; that every surviving particle of it still labours to lift us out of this mire.

We had intended to assault gentle reader with expostulations of Scotch chauvinism on the occasion of Saint Andrew’s Day, then our “DOS Devil” took the site down again. (From Glasgow, perhaps?) But as Lord Jowls insists, we cannot let the occasion pass without some Caledonian gesture. Let us therefore belatedly resort to YouTube, recommending this old Capercaillie chestnut, “Canan nan gaidheal,” which laments the loss of the Gaelic language in the Scottish uplands:

          It wasn’t the snow from the North
          It wasn’t the chill from the East,
          It wasn’t the gale from the West,
          But the disease that blanched from the South
          The blossom the foliage the stem & the root
          Of my language, my race, & my people. …

As we were given to understand, while rising & falling on the knee of Annie Graham, our beloved Cape Breton grandmother, Gaelic is unlike English. It is spoken & sung with the full mouth & throat. (“There can be no Gaelic ventriloquists.”) This would seem to be how they can cluster or “dipthong” consonants together — four or five of them into a single sound. Notice how the adored Karen Matheson’s lips curl as she is forming the words, first left then right, as if she were Jean Chrétien on both sides. That cannot be an affectation, for our grandma did it, too. Mrs Matheson was evidently born into the language, & the near impossibility of mastering the physical means to Gaelic, for those not acculturated from birth, helps explain why so much Celtic fringe music sounds shallow & inauthentic. Or so we opine: that God is in such details. The band are prob’ly all commies & nationalist hooligans, of course, but who bloody cares so long as they are singing?

It is in this version by our fellow Torontonian, John McDermott, that we are inclined to present the Scots’ anthem. The alternative lyrics are priceless, for they start with gratuitous insults to foreigners, then descend through degrees of glowering aggression to what we might call the full Scottish “psychopathos,” steeped in gore:

           Let Italy boast of her gay gilded waters,
           Her vines & her bowers & her soft sunny skies;
           Her sons drinking love from the eyes of her daughters,
           Where freedom expires amid softness & sighs. …

Big truths are more important than small truths & yet, the multiplication of little lies may have a huge compounding effect. Such is the case in the annals of commerce & advertising, when goods are purposefully misrepresented — called one thing when they are quite another. This is not unusual in contemporary trade, thanks to the collapse of guild principles. Nor has it been for decades now; centuries in some jurisdictions. Indeed, the lies have been bureaucratically standardized.

Consider, gentle reader, the wiener, sometimes more fondly called the frankfurter, when it is neither. It has become a commodity on North American supermarket shelves, spreading worldwide with a “simplified” form of the English language. It is made from pork, cheap fillers as available, industrial chemicals & nitrite preservatives, mashed down to a paste then very thoroughly cooked. There is no case for it. Quite literally: the ersatz casing in which it is gathered by machines is stripped off at a later stage in the manufacturing process, leaving a product as softly generic in texture as in taste: a kind of congealed pabulum, for baby’s first adventure in solid food. One might almost call it “democratic.”

Thanks to the proliferation of small ethnic butchers (in Parkdale, we estimate their average height to be 5-foot-6) we are able to obtain the real wiener. This is a cooked minced pork sausage, to be sure, without the unnecessary ingredients, but with subtle spicing. It is longer than an industrial wiener, thinner, & somewhat curved from the effect of natural physical tensions. Crucially, it comes strung in a highly edible casing, made from the intestines of sheep. This gives it the snap when it is bitten into. Texture can be as important as taste, as cooks know from France to Japan. But only the foodies in North America seem to have clued in, & they only half-consciously. There is also a taste component in this muttonish ring. Finally, these sausages are smoked in their casing, which accounts for their richly irregular golden colour, contributes much to their taste, & even a little to their feel, when handling. Note that this “smoking” is an art. It thus excludes the squirting of a vile liquid artificial flavouring into the antecedent machine mash.

Cooked meats do not need to be cooked, incidentally; unless the intention is to ruin them. To the fastidiously hygienic, puritanized American mind (a term in which we subsume all British North Americans), nothing must be eaten until sterilized. This is why the food exporters of the world send their very lowest grade of products to North America; for by the time we are finished sterilizing everything, there’s no taste anyway. The poorest of the poor in Third World slums demand more flavour. Whereas, our poorest eat something they call “vienna sausage,” which is industrial wieners cooked yet again, stuffed in small cylindrical tins, & eaten often directly out of them in the belief that if the tin isn’t blistered, the contents will be safe.

Verily, wieners may be heated through for a few minutes in not-quite-boiling water, but are good cold. With a fine bread, with a potato salad, with condiments such as horseradish, a mustard, or our adored Moroccan harissa, they are sublime. They are exquisite for picnics, & joy to the workman in his packed lunch.

Now, the wiener is associated with a Frankfurt butcher in Vienna in the early 19th century; a certain Johann Georg Lahner. From the German Wicked Paedia we find that he was actually Franconian Swiss. But the sausage of his fame was rightly associated with Frankfurt am Main, and has a traceable pedigree, to the 13th century. (Everything of value in our culture is of Classical or Mediaeval origin, unless of Oriental. All we have added is machines.)

Note that in Frankfurt the “frankfurters,” which they themselves now call “wieners,” were by tradition packed in boxes when shipped, the layers separated by parchment. This was the cause of their subsequent shape: for they would come out somewhat squared in section. And here we encounter another lie, for our manufacturers often imitate this shape, carried to America no doubt by German immigrants. It was like putting the yellow food-dye in the margarine, to conceal what would be in its nature a repulsive light grey.

Let us not live even by little lies. Let us demand real wieners & frankfurters, just as we demand the real Latin Mass!

We learn that a young Hollywood TV star (of whom we’d never heard) has called the show in which he appears “filth,” & told his fans not to watch it. We suspect this was a poor career move, & are suitably impressed. The lad comes from the usual broken home, found drugs when his parents divorced, & has now found the Seventh Day Adventists, via televangelism. The trendline is looking up, & yet we fear for him, for he has chosen an heroic path for which he had no formation. And while the promises of Christ are true, always, the promises of televangelists are not so reliable. May God ready those who are not ready.

We live by lies, but we don’t have to. This item forwarded by an American reader, contains a further link to Solzhenitsyn’s immortal essay, spelling out what every Christian must do: Passively resist. This, as Solzhenitsyn said, is heroic enough. “The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.”

As a child, of “post-Christian” parents, we nevertheless benefited from a fine example. For our papa persistently lost good jobs, & we came sometimes very close to desperate poverty. But he lost them because he was an honest man. He absolutely refused to tell lies, to participate in lies, or by his lights to live any lie. He took the consequences & of course, so did we. Our mama sometimes wondered about her husband’s good judgement, why he couldn’t just make a “little” compromise sometimes, but her loyalty to him was unshakeable. She had after all married him, having declined to marry some “better prospects” (she was a red-haired beauty; she had lots of choice). She had done so because she had decided, in an inspired & “irresponsible” moment, “You live only once, & I will marry a good man.” She married him indeed in the chapel of a sanatorium, when his recovery from tuberculosis was uncertain, & his career prospects were nil. Christian or not, we came from a good family.

We mention this because the argument is constantly made, by perfectly conservative people, that a man’s first duty is to feed his children. Yes, but not by bread alone. Papa did what was necessary to keep us in food, in clothes, & under a roof, even when it involved personal humiliation. But he would not lie.

A rich Polish Jew we know, who survived the death camp as a child with his mother, by jumping off a train, told us the worst thing to leave your kids is money. Money comes & goes, he said with authority, for he had watched lots of it come & go. “You leave them an example or you’ve left them nothing.”

It is not true that we are powerless. It is not true that politics are the answer. It is not true that we can do nothing because we have failed. These are among the lies for our rejection. It is not even true that we need friends to persist, though friends are very helpful; for there are moments when the truth may cost you every friend, & perhaps even your family. (“Do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the world. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”)

This seems a hard way forward, but as Solzhenitsyn said, hard on the body. For the soul, he said, it is the only way forward, the only path clear. (“My way is easy, & my burden is light.”)

On the subject of daring offence, raised in our last post, we had occasion to be discussing Gettysburg recently with a certain gentleman in Texas. Our great hero from that American Civil War (the Third American Civil War, by a Canadian reckoning) was Robert E. Lee. As a schoolboy we first read of his exploits, presented to us in simplified form through a reader used at Saint Anthony’s School in Lahore, then West Pakistan. He was presented alongside Nelson, & Wellington, & Florence Nightingale & Grace Darling, as a figure larger than life.

It will be recalled that the British, & British North Americans, mostly cheered for the South during that war; though the descendants of the progressive types who had dressed ostentatiously as “American Patriots,” in London after 1776, naturally cheered for Lincoln. But in the main, especially up here in the Canadas, we were “in the bag” for the South; so much that Southern statesmen would come up here, to raise money.

Slavery wasn’t the issue for us, from either side. The Royal Navy had eliminated the slave trade on the open seas, & Governor Simcoe had made it illegal in Upper Canada from the first day. We did not hesitate to receive escaped slaves; for how many escaped slaves had fought bravely beside us as United Empire Loyalists during the First American Civil War; & for God, King, & Country during the Second Civil War, after the Invasion of 1812. Indeed, slavery was, by 1861, illegal throughout the British Empire. The attitude was, “Of course we’re against slavery, everyone is against slavery”; & “everyone” knew it would soon disappear from the U.S. republic. It was unsustainable in a Christian realm. (It had always been illegal in the Papal States, & been condemned by Catholic priests throughout the Western Hemisphere.)

As General Lee himself stated, emphatically, “This war is not about slavery.” One might enter into controversy on what it was actually about: in hindsight, the imposition of a more thoroughgoing “democracy” on an unwilling South, & of central governance on the naive defenders of “States’ Rights” under the U.S. Constitution. Lincoln & company were creating — unknowingly, to be fair — the basic condition for a Nanny State. It is homogenous rule over a vast area, from a single central location, by an agnostic power. (Lincoln himself was only dubiously a Christian.)

In France, as we have argued elsewhere, & will argue again, the major achievement of the Revolution was the transformation of local government. The French nation was changed, overnight in historical terms, from a polity of 60,000 parishes, each under its own unique & long-established customary form of self-government; to one of 36,000 “communes” governed absolutely identically, & answerable directly to an ever-increasing volume of decrees from Paris. Totalitarianism requires no less.

The South had remained agrarian, & varied, & in some respects almost feudal. The North was growing industrial, & urban, & attracting immigrants for its new “working class.” In effect, new forms of “wage slavery” were being invented for new methods of machine production, to replace superannuated forms of plantation labour. There was a clash of cultures deeper than any specific point of public policy, such that “slavery” became the political football. It could be used in the conventional political way: to demonize an opponent & thus avoid having to argue with him on questions that might be subtle.

Or so we were taught by Irish Patrician brothers in a backward school, modelled on British “public” (i.e. private) pedagogic traditions, in what had until recently been British India. And incidentally, this was taught to eight-year-old schoolboys. In retrospect, we feel ever more indebted to those seemingly demented green-sashed Catholics for their acuity. (Our post-Protestant father had sent us to them only because their academic standards were so high.)

As military tactician, General Lee stands accused of commanding Pickett’s Charge, uphill at Gettysburg to the centre of the Union’s forces. For it didn’t work. Our grandfather’s general, Arthur Currie, could equally be condemned for commanding the Canadian charge, up Vimy Ridge to the centre of the German forces. Except, that did work; & grandpa was rather proud of how it worked all the rest of his days, even though his horse was among the casualties. It is indeed surprising how often in history the uphill charge has worked, with the benefit of surprise. Unfortunately, at Gettysburg, General Meade was expecting it.

But we have wandered from our intention, which was simply to provide the following little packet of sayings, from Robert E. Lee. We found them on the Internet, but they made our hair stand, not only because they expound the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, but because each was first encountered half a century ago, whenas we were a schoolboy at Saint Anthony’s, & first took Lee aboard as one of our biggest heroes.

Item, “Duty is the most sublime word in our language.”

Item, “Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character.”

Item, “Get correct views of life, & learn to see the world in its true light. It will enable you to live pleasantly, to do good, & when summoned away, to leave without regret.”

Item, “In all my perplexities & distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light & strength.”

Item, “Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one.”

Item, “It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.”

Item, “I have been up to see the Congress & they do not seem to be able to do anything except eat peanuts & chew tobacco, while my army is starving.”

Item, “We failed, but in the good providence of God apparent failure often proves a blessing.”