Lewis refusing consolation on the death of his wife:
Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.
Quote of the Day.
30-Sep-10Country Churchyard.
28-Sep-10
“Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”
The beginning of this review by Rivka Galchen reads almost like a Borges faux-review short story. Her double-take writing does indeed make me do doubletakes. And much as I love Balzac I certainly never heard that story before.
Slave to Secrecy.
26-Sep-10The older my former students get, the more astonished I am by them – these people I knew as children now lead lives whose richness and complexity equals or exceeds mine, and it occasions strange thoughts in me – a kind of autumn feeling, watching the harvest come in, so fast, it seems.
One story just crossed my inbox today – an article in the Daily Record about Scott Ruesterholz, the young man who held together “my” debate team while my thoughts were elsewhere, who just published a book about freeing himself from secrecy – in this case, his homosexuality. Like me, he started as quite the conservative. We’ll see where he ends up.
In the article the school’s headmaster, Brother Paul Diveny, comes off wonderfully, as does the school as a whole – a Catholic institution committed to loving its students first. That this should be in question at an institution dedicated to taking Christ as its model is, of course, the (in the article unstated) problem.
I can say, from spending many years in all-boys Catholic schools, that to publicly proclaim that you are gay in a school assembly takes astonishing courage – in fact, it may well have been this courage which made all the boys instinctively respect it so much. And those of us who are older respect it even more – we know how hard it is to be yourself in front of even one other person.
Opportunity.
24-Sep-10Krugman does an excellent job giving it to the Republicans. They want to balance the budget by cutting spending, but not spending on seniors and the military, which is the entire problem with the federal budget. Krugman notes that we would have to eliminate the entire federal government, even including Congress, in order to simultaneously 1) keep the Bush tax cuts 2) maintain defense spending and spending on the elderly and 3) balance the budget.
I’ll give the Republicans credit for one thing: they are aware that their core constituencies are old people and servicemembers, and they are putting their constituents first.
But this points out the obvious, which is that deficit reduction is therefore naturally a Democratic issue, because the Democratic Party is the only party available to tackle military spending or government benefits for the wealthy. It’s an excellent issue for Democrats in general and Obama specifically.
The Ferry Terminal.
20-Sep-10An excerpt from the Staten Island book in Brooklyn Rail.
The Staten Island book is (at long last!) nearing its release, which should be in October. I’ve been proofing the galleys over the past few days. The book can be ordered here.
Hiking.
12-Sep-10“Would that I had never been to Wittenberg, never read book.” – Marlowe
Back from a three-day hike, hitting Giant Ledge, Panther Mountain, Wittenberg, Cornell Mountain, and Slide Mountain. The scenery was spectacular. The view from Wittenberg is the best I have seen in the Catskills – not only remarkable distance but a remarkable foreground. And of course, the internet being the internet and the route being a common one, there are plenty of photos online. One of our favorite moments was the historical marker for Catskill writer John Burroughs, which noted that he “hiked extensively on Panther, Wittenberg, Cornell, and Slide mountains.”
I’m on volume six of Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume translation of the Arabian Nights. I intend to write a bit on this topic when I am done with the whole, but as that will be at a far-future date, I wish to set down some of my amazement with this work. The vast scope of the whole, with its richness of images, is alone sufficient to justify its classic status, but it is also amazing to see Burton peering into it as a mirror to the wholeness of his soul. Even the index makes for stunning reading. In the sixth volume, which contains the stories of Sinbad which are suitable for any child, you find these items in the index:
Abd al-Samad = slave of the eternal … 221
Abyssinians (hardly to be called blackamoors)… 63
Amalekites … 264, 265
Anbar (Ambar) = ambergris … 60
Angels (ride piebalds) … 146
Apodosis omitted … 203, 239
Apes (isle of) … 23
(and their lustful propensities) … 54
Asoka’s wife and Kunala … 127
Bab al-Nasr = Gate of Victory (at Cairo) … 234
Bath (suggesting freshness from coition) … 135
(and privy favourite haunts of the Jinns) … 141
(not to be entered by men without drawers) 150
Biunes, bisexuals, and women robed with the sun 168
Bathsheba and Uriah, and their congeners … 129
Batini = a gnostic, a reprobate … 221
Cairene vulgarism … 278
Camel (seen in a dream is an omen of death; why?) 92
Camphor (primitive way of extracting it) … 21
Cannibals and Cannibalism … 36
Ceylon (Ar. Sarandib) … 64, 81
Cocoa-nut (Ar. Jauz al-Hindi) … 55
Colossochelys = colossal tortoise … 33
This just goes on and on. Like Melville and the whale, it seems that Burton saw the entire world in this one thing.
Life Without Principle.
09-Sep-10Two pieces, by Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, on Obama’s policy of torturing human beings for whatever an American president’s ends may be, without limitation. The national malaise continues – how much sadness I see in people’s lives! even people a decade younger than myself are locked in it – and Obama’s practicality (i.e., lack of principle) seems less and less like the thing we need.
In some kind of instant-karma universe – which we do not have – Obama would lose the next election to Sarah Palin, and he and all his lawyers would spend the next decade locked in dark boxes, suffering all the things they have legitimated. But I imagine it will be some far more nameless people who will suffer for this.
In the Catholic wedding service, one of the concluding prayers is that the poor – the nameless ones whose lives are altered by presidential powers far more than ours – deign to receive us in heaven, for the power will be theirs there, and no longer ours. May we pass such a test.
And as far as the world goes, it is good to remember that there is absolutely no guarantee that res politicae will go well, in this country or any other. Infusion of principle is continually necessary, for such is the blood of the body politic.
On the Canon.
28-Sep-10Lindsay Johns has a little piece worth reading on the literary canon, arguing for its universal validity. The most striking passage:
The last sentence formulates almost precisely what I look for in literature.
I have long thought that this is the single greatest thing about being white and male: on so many days, when the world seems overwhelmingly horrible, disgusting in itself as well as utterly repugnant to me and hostile to all my desires, when the basic conditions of existence seem evil in themselves and the end results not worth the effort, when I see all the good I had hoped for not only in my own life but in others’ blighted by malice or folly, when my thoughts swallow all my actions and poison my whole day, when my memory is filled to the brim with evil and I see nothing better in the future, this at least I know: no one imposed this on me but God, or the Universe, or Existence, or whatever you want to call it, and I do not dream that I might have escaped it somehow by an alteration of my race, or my gender, or anything else, but know that there is no alternative but to face it.