What is Beauty?

I found this Catholic Answers thread entertaining.

My favorite responses:

is the pic on black velvet? that makes a huge difference. only pix of dogs playing poker or Elvis should be on black velvet.

and

This is about thomistic and Aristotlean Asthetics. Maybe Teleology.

and

You might read this article on the philosophical concept of aesthetics.

Pentecost

I got distracted, if pleasantly, by what many would see as minutiae, that is just what exactly the tongues over the apostles' heads at Pentecost were made of. Apparently not fire since the text is clear about “tongues as of fire”, and a biblical commentary made that point as well. I think our man Ronald Knox simply goes ahead and makes it “tongues of fire”, although that could be originally St. Jerome's Vulgate rendering.

“Tongues” for the Jews were basically anything pointy. Perhaps they were pointed lights, very bright. The reference to fire, however, is intentional by the gospel writer since Christ was said to baptize with “fire and the Holy Spirit”. I love the “everybody” aspect of Pentecost, how the tongues rested on everybody and how they could speak all the languages of their listeners. The reading from Sirach yesterday went: “He has poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing according to his bounty.”

I'm kind of surprised Pentecost isn't a bigger deal in the Church. Seems like it should have at least its own week, an octave. The Holy Spirit seems the St. Joseph of the Trinity: overshadowed.

Co-Workers of the Truth Quote

Josef Pieper quotes from a translation of Hesiod by Cardinal Newman in which this thought is expressed with inimitable elegance and accuracy:

“Being wise with someone else’s head … is, to be sure, inferior to being wise oneself, but it is infinitely superior to the sterile pride of one who does not achieve the independence of being wise himself, yet at the same time despises the dependence of one who believes on the word of another.”

The same line of thought can be detected in Newman’s own comment on man’s basic relationship to truth. Men are all too inclined—the great philosopher of religion opines—to wait placidly for proofs of the reality of revelation, to seek them out as if they were in the position of judge, not suppliant.

"They have decided to put the Almighty to the proof—with controlled passion, a total freedom from bias, and a clear head.” But the individual who thus makes himself lord of the truth deceives himself, for truth shuns the arrogant and reveals itself only to those who approach it in an attitude of reverence, of respectful humility.

From: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Auf Christus schauen, pp. 21–23

Quotes from Kingslover's Flight Behavior Novel

Luther was the last shearer standing. Younger men wanted nothing to do with such hard work, preferring to drive some rig or gaze at a screen.

*

Dovey observed to Dellarobia that there was no end to the amount of effort a man would put into saving himself some work.

*

His bewildered sexual gratitude, as near a thing to religious awe as a girl of her station could likely inspire. These boyish things had made him lovable. But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing.

*

Here we go, she thought, into the quicksands of stupid. 

*

everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved.

*

Four wings, with the symmetry of a bow-tied shoelace. Preston had spent all of a recent morning trying to tie a bow, biting his lower lip in concentration, but here was perfection without effort. 

A movement of clouds altered the light, and all across the valley, the butterfly skin of the world transfigured in response, opening all the wings at once to the sun.

*

It did get her out, among people. Whether friend or foe hardly mattered; they ate with their mouths closed and wore shoes without Velcro...being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself. Days and days, hours and hours within them, and days within weeks, at the end of which she might not ever have gotten completely dressed or read any word longer than Chex...Just motherhood, with its routine costs of providing a largesse that outstripped her physical dimensions. She’d seen ewes in the pasture whose sixty-pound twins would run underneath together and bunt the udders to release the milk with sharp upward thrusts, jolting the mother’s hindquarters off the ground. That was the picture, overdrawn. A gut-twisting life of love, consecrated by the roof and walls that contained her and the air she was given to breathe. 

*

An hour in the café, the slake of a tall cup of coffee, and stillness, and wearing shoes, a clean tile floor, time off for good behavior. 

*

She was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord. Unlike all those who called on Jesus daily, rain or shine, to discuss their day and feel the love. Once upon a time she’d had her mother for that. Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend. But if the chemistry wasn’t there, what could you do? 

For a year she’d gone with Cub to Wednesday Bible group and loved the sense of being back in school, but her many questions did not make her the teacher’s pet. Right out of the gate, in Genesis, she identified two completely different versions of how it all got started. The verses could be a listen-and-feel kind of thing, like music, she’d suggested, not like the instruction booklet that comes with a darn appliance. 

*

Pastor Ogle had lured Hester over from a harder line of Baptists, and Dellarobia knew some marital compromise was involved. Bear had stopped attending over there. Here he could sit out the service in Men’s Fellowship, which had checkers and country music pitched low enough you could still hear the sermon on the closed-circuit if you so desired. Bobby had found the key to modern believers: that many preferred their salvation experience to come with a remote. 

*

Dovey liked to text her on Sunday mornings for her own entertainment. There was one waiting now: COME YE FISHERS OF MEN: YOU CATCH, GOD WILL CLEAN. Dovey’s fondness for one-liners-in-Christ was bottomless, she collected them off church marquees. 

Random Thoughts & Quotes

He gave us this eternal Spring
Which here enamels everything.  --Andrew Marvell

Oh May, like Mae West when you're good…you're very good. And today is magical, another pluperfectly minted day fresh off the factory line. I'm in my hammock now, avoiding the “laying versus lying” confusion. Just “in” it. And watching a gold sun still pleasantly high in the sky at 5:45pm.  Bask now I do in this especial moment, gazing at the dewey wax of plants plump with rain. Oh the shimmer-play of light through the back patio pine! How I underestimate this magic spot on the hammock, this rich topography of sun before me while I rest in dappled shade. In the mid-distance I see the fountain and the St. Francis statue, in the foreground the richly landscaped vicinity.

Oh May, fickle May! I've learned by hard experience not to count on any pre-Memorial Day days, but if summer starts June 1st then summer is but three weeks long. For then comes the bittersweet equinox, the Midsummer Night madness, the days shortening. (Oh I must find that wonderful Donald Hall book, Seasons at Eagle Pond. Don't know that I've ever owned a book with content more true to it's form: those handsome thick pages with perfectly chosen font and margin. How that book lingers in memory, particularly the ice stored all summer underground and the madness of an English Midsummer's Night's Eve.)

LATER: Oh the perils of the printed book. Amid two thousand volumes I didn't want to spend the lit-hour hunting. But I did find Hall's Unpack the Boxes which shall have to do for now. There's definitely a point at which one can have too many books for finding purposes, unless you are meticulous in your cataloging.

And so now for my State of the Sun address: the state of the sun is strong. It's 6pm and still very warm and bright proving, against recent evidence of chill, that we are actually in May and not late March. On days like these who needs a beach? I have a private backyard glade. 

*

So I ill-spent yesterday evening reading a book harshly critical of the English medieval Church. The superstition depicted is a bit surreal (even allowing for the atheist author's obvious prejudices) and hard to read but it's no wonder the early Protestants reacted so viscerally. The Reformers, or Revolutionists, seemed to throw the baby out with the bathwater by jettisoning the sacraments. Making the sign of the Cross was surprisingly controversial with the controversialists; they certainly were allergic to any action that even could be undertaken without thought, which is also why they didn't like formal, rote prayers. The early Reformers were so allergic to “superstition” that they ended up with the logical endpoint: double predestinationism. If you hate man's attempts to manipulate God, which is a definition of superstition, then you will easily go to the extreme of denying any cooperation of man. Thus men are saved or damned and there's nothing they can do about.

I do have a bit more sympathy for the Reformation leaders after reading this though. What's interesting is how it seems the tables have turned: Catholics seem less superstitious than many evangelicals in as far as expecting health and wealth in this life as a reward for faith.

*

Ran into a hale and hearty former co-worker in the weight-room today. I'd worked with him something like 15 years ago. He looks boyish even at 51, despite three children and four grandchildren. His kids are all growed up, which is amazing. It seems like only yesterday they were knee-high and stole my cowboy boots one time I stayed overnight there. His house and ten acres in Newark still remind me of the agrarian dream, although admittedly I've always been semi-smashed there and alcohol provides rose-tinted glasses. “Good times,” he said.

He's worked three years now from 8pm-4am. Sleeps from 5am-9am, a grand total of four a night. Don't know how he does it.  Drinks Maker's Mark and takes a sleeping pill before going to bed. Knocks him flat he says. I said that I heard you don't get as good sleep on a sleeping pill and he sloughed that off and given his energy on the elliptical trainer it did feel like here was living proof of the falseness of the claim.

Seeing his kids get older drives home the passage of time in a way visible and tangible. Seeing these kids change so radically, from infants to teens to adults, is a way of measuring time that doesn't compute with adults (my wife to me looks pretty much the same to me as she did when we got married.)

*

Aristotle said 2000 years ago: “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.” That dude was wise. None of this, “I'm going to do whatever I want to do for work” nor the other extreme of trying to fit what the market tries to enforce. 

*

No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green,
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress' name:
Little, alas! They know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!  - Andrew Marvell

                                                *

Thus shut out from their neighbours by mountains, the Greeks were naturally attracted to the sea, and became a maritime people. Hence they possessed the love of freedom and the spirit of adventure, which have always characterised, more or less the inhabitants of maritime districts. - A Smaller History of Greece

Ruffled by want of a cigar, I made a special trip to Kroger's for one. It feels earned and I'd been pining for one ever since catching a whiff of Dad's cigar last weekend.

Tried my three all-time favorite beers on brother Doug but he didn't like them - too hoppy - which I can understand. Those sorts of beers can be an acquired taste I suppose. Sometimes I'm convinced of the universality of the palate when, of course, everyone has different tastes. There's a beer slogan that goes, “Life's too short to drink cheap beer” but I think it should read: “Life's too short to drink beer you don't really, really like.” It's worth trying different beers but obviously not worth giving up favorites. 

*

[This paragraph may be safely skipped if squeamish]:  Sperm, for all its potential potency is simultaneously utterly useless in the wrong context, i.e. outside the body of a woman. It shows the complete dependency on two people to produce the new and in that is a metaphor for our interdependence.  It reminds me a bit of the relationship between God and man: without God, man can do nothing. And without man's cooperation, God does not force him to fructify.

Snippets & Thoughts

Poetry anthologist Quiller-Couch:

Writing in 1939, I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful; of scorning at 'Man's unconquerable mind' and hanging up (without benefit of laundry) our common humanity as a rag on a clothes-line. Be it allowed that these present times are dark. Yet what are our poets of use - what are they for - if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?

*

Happened across a Catechism passage and it made me think of anti-Catholic Catholic Garry Wills:

The chosen people was constituted by God as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” But within the people of Israel, God chose one of the twelve tribes, that of Levi, and set it apart for liturgical service.

It's interesting to me that in Wills's systematic attempts to dismantle the Church he began with producing a book he called “papal lies”. In other words, let's look at the words of popes and refute them. But now he goes “one better” by trying to undermine the whole institution of the priesthood. It's as if he first said, “Oh don't listen to those out-of-touch Catholic prelates, especially on birth control!” Then, without achieving noticeable success he decided to say, “And another reason not to listen to them is that the whole schema lacks credibility!” If you can't undermine the popes by their actions then do so by the office itself. It seems childish, like saying, “I don't like cops because they are often in the wrong” and then saying, “I hereby question the whole need and justification for cops.” Methinks he protests too much. It really feels like he's doing Satan's bidding.

*

Pascal observed the problem in seventeenth-century France when he saw the obsession with entertainment as the offspring of the fallen human desire to be distracted from any thought of mortality. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

Sounds similar to Homer Simpson's claim that alcohol is the cause and solution to all life's problems. Quote above is from an article in First Things about how tragic the author finds the lack of tragedy in current church services. Death is the thing we constantly hold at arm's length. Very provocative to say that the problem with church is that it isn't entertaining enough - because there's no addressing the reality of death in current services. He wonders if it didn't start when cemeteries were separated from church grounds. He also makes the dubious claim that Joseph Conrad was a better writer than Charles Dickens because the former dealt in tragedy. He makes the much less dubious claim that Shakespeare's best plays were the tragedies. The author adds:

Today tragedy has, with few exceptions, dropped from popular entertainment. Whether it is the sentimentalism of the Hallmark Channel, the pyrotechnics of action movies, or the banal idiocy of reality TV, the tragic sensibility is all but lost.

The news is depressing enough it seems it's no wonder most people don't want to dwell on the tragic even if it is said to be cathartic. Besides, even back in the “golden age” of the '40s and '50s there weren't too many tragic films by my recollection.

*

I need a beer due to stress of the NTSB recommending that a.05 blood level of alcohol being criminal. Which I think is ridiculously over-the-top. The prohibitionists live again. Soon federal highway funds will be linked to the lower limit and all the states will buckle under like they did with the .08 limit.

Thank God for Overreach

Power is said to corrupt and this attribute of power can make it somewhat self-limiting in a democracy.  Given his friendly media Obama had more room to overreach, more of a tendency to self-corrupt (FOX News and talk radio have sadly become ghettoized and de-legitimatized by the rest of the mainstream media).  But eventually he would 'overrun his coverage' and I think we're seeing that now.  The sad thing is that it didn't happen earlier in his presidency and thus limit his ability to damage the country via his policies.

Anyway, Jim Geraghty had the following to say and I have to admit to feeling some serious schadenfreude over the mainstream media's sudden shock at what they have wrought:

You know a scandal is bad when I can point you to the Huffington Post's summary, because it can't collect any more outrage than I can:

Journalists reacted with shock and outrage at the news that the Justice Department had secretly obtained months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

The AP broke the news on Monday about what it called an "unprecedented intrusion" into its operation. It said that the DOJ had obtained detailed phone records from over 20 different lines, potentially monitoring hundreds of different journalists without notifying the organization. The wire service's president, Gary Pruitt, wrote a blistering letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, accusing the DOJ of violating the AP's constitutional rights.

Reporters and commentators outside the AP professed themselves to be equally angered. "The Nixon comparisons write themselves," BuzzFeed's Ben Smith tweeted. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor for the New York Times, called the story "disturbing." Washington Post editor Martin Baron called it "shocking." CNN's John King described it as "very chilling."

Speaking to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, a lawyer for the AP called the DOJ's actions "outrageous," saying they were "a dagger to the heart of AP's newsgathering activity."

BuzzFeed's Kate Nocera was perhaps more pithy, writing simply, "what in the f--k."

With corruption, it's never personal until it's.... personal.

Kentucky Basilica & Book Haunt

On Sunday we and made our way on a sunny but chilly morning to the breathtaking St. Mary Basilica in Covington, KY. We arrived a good half hour before services and I anticipated exploring the near empty cathedral but that was not to be. Surprisingly for a Catholic Church, there were a lot of people there that early and so it was hard to tour while people were trying to pray. The brightness of this gothic cathedral was created by the jillion stained glassed windows. Built around 1895, the Stations of the Cross were huge mosaics. But the most stunning vista for me was a gigantic floor-to-ceiling stained glass window to the left of the altar.

On the web, one commenter said:

One of the few Cathedral Basilica Minors outside of Rome, it has the largest stain glass window in a church in the world. The inside of it is absolutely breathtaking and I find myself staring at the different stain glass windows or mosaics while attending service there.

Another writes:

Cathedral Basilica is home to some of the most beautiful architecture in the tri-state. Located in the heart of Covington, the grand church can be seen from highrises in Cincinnati. Once inside, the view becomes even more breathtaking.

Cathedral Basilica is home to the World's Largest Stained Glass Window, measuring 67 x 24 feet. The facility was erected in 1894 and ended in 1915, unfinished. Near the front door, you can notice some empty pedestals which were meant to house statues. The church ran out of money, and never added them in. The Cathedral is also lacking a steeple because it would be too heavy for the foundation to support.

Some notable architecture:

• 26 gargoyles on the building exterior
• murals by 1903 Covington artist, Frank Duveneck
• two beautiful, stained glass rose windows
• ornate statues of religious figures
• marble flooring, sanctuary, and Baptismal
• two gigantic organs, one dating back to 1859
• 82 stained glass windows made in Munich, Germany
• mosaics of the stations of the cross, made out of 80,000 tiles

Outside, one can find a lush garden, complete with path, benches and fountain. It's an enjoyable piece of serenity for Downtown Covington.

The inside of the church is modeled almost exactly after St. Denis just north of Paris, where the remains of Marie Antoinette reside in the crypts.  St. Denis in Paris was very dark, moody and medieval. It was a gorgeous church, but was in a sad state. It's replica in Covington, KY is more beautiful in my opinion. After a recent renovation, they moved the altar and added some of the most beautiful woodwork I've seen. The stained glass and the rosary are astounding! This is a place not to be missed. 

As if the beauty of the church wasn't enough, the liturgy itself was wonderful, a true high mass featuring the bishop, the successor to the apostles, and all the “smells and bells.” The music was extraordinary as well and I wouldn't have minded owning a recording of their choir's Ave Maria.

Hard gospel truth in John 16: “you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.” Jesus goes on to compare it to a woman giving labor - we'll forget the pain afterward. Lino Rulli brought up the movie Dogma in which one character said something that struck him as so true way back when he first saw in over a decade ago. The character said, “Catholics don't celebrate their faith, they mourn it.” Which is sad and not right but then I thought, “hmmm….In light of today's gospel that's kind of interesting.” Rulli praised evangelicals for being so much happier about the faith but then I recalled the priest at mass today saying how disturbed he was by a big billboard of a smiling “wealth gospel” preacher, dressed to the nines in front of a Lexus. 

*

Later went bookshop explorin' and found a 1940 volume called The Oxford Book of Verse with poetry from 1290 to 1918. Pretty much covers the gaumet.  Editor was a fellow named Quiller-Couch. Also picked up another poetry book by Ashley Shelby called Appalachian Studies. I love Eastern Kentucky stuff, especially in the wake of the History Channel's Hatfields & McCoys as well as the TV series Justified. It was very pleasant thoroughly exploring the local interest section and the leather-bounds. Happened across a history of early New England by Fiske from the late 1800s. There's something about that early Puritan period in the MA area that appeals, or rather interests, me. Would never have wanted to live there in those times.

Via podcast, listened to the great Brian Lamb interview the producer of a film documentary about the decay of Detroit and then one with Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health, star of the genome project, and atheist-turned-Christian. Collins mentioned how he had his DNA tested and found out his risk for Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancers, etc… Makes me want to drop $150 and get the test done as well.

Peggy Noonan on Benghazi

All politics, all the time for this White House.  Doesn't matter if babies die or ambassadors:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed.

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don't if it's an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

Why couldn't the administration tolerate the idea that Benghazi was a planned terrorist event? Because they didn't want this attack dominating the headline with an election coming.

...if the administration was to play down the nature of the attack it would have to play down the response—that is, if you want something to be a nonstory you have to have a nonresponse. So you don't launch a military rescue operation, you don't scramble jets, and you have a rationalization—they're too far away, they'll never make it in time. This was probably true, but why not take the chance when American lives are at stake?

* * *

From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they said it was too far in the past: "Benghazi happened a long time ago." Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, really said that.

Think of that. They can't give answers when the story's fresh because it just happened, they're looking into it. Eight months later they don't have anything to say because it all happened so long ago.

Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.

Will this story ever be completely told? Maybe not. But it's not going to go away, either. It's a prime example of the stupidity of all-politics-all-the-time. You make some bad moves for political reasons. And then you suffer politically because you made bad moves.

Snippets of Williamson's The End is Near and It's Going to be Awesome!

It has long been observed that while historians date the fall of the Roman Empire to A.D. 376, the imperial implosion would have been news to Roman authorities and Roman subjects for a century after that—the empire didn’t know that it had fallen. (Politicians: always the last to know.) A similar dynamic is at work today: The edifice of government looks as imposing as ever, perhaps more so. But something has changed.

*

The Declaration of Independence is a statement of our aspirations, not a description of our reality. Good poetry makes bad politics.

What makes good politics? The question itself is a problem, because to ask the question assumes that good politics is possible. It is not, and the main reason for that is not ethical but technical: Political rhetoric aside, politics as an institution fails first and foremost because it cannot manage the complex processes of modern life, because doing so would require politicians to be able to gather and process amounts of information so vast that they are literally incalculable.

Second, politics fails because people do not cease to be self-interested economic actors once elected to political office or hired by a government agency; the profit-maximizing forces that operate in the marketplace operate in politics, too, whether “profit” is measured in conventional economic terms or in power, prestige, or some other commodity.

*

Big Business isn’t what it used to be. Twenty-first-century corporations are more like temporary associations of people and capital lucky to survive for a few decades, and, if present trends continue, the future corporation will be an even more ad hoc tissue of tenuous short-term relationships...a successful twenty-first-century corporation is really more like an unusually enjoyable dinner party: a happy coincidence that is in part the product of careful forethought and execution, but also the product of the spontaneous interactions among people and events.

*

An important difference between the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century is that businesses have become more specialized and the division of labor radically more precise, so the corporate life cycle runs more quickly. The corporate lifetime is shortening because the pace of social learning is accelerating. More complex economic entities develop adaptive strategies more quickly. We recognize our economic mistakes more quickly and develop alternatives in great number and at high speed. Understood properly, bankruptcy and business failure are pedagogical tools: They are an important part of how individuals, businesses, and industries learn—and the global marketplace is an exercise in collective social learning.

*

We often see only the unpleasant side of such developments: the laid-off workers, the shuttered mills, the declining steel towns. Those are very powerful images because they are discrete and specific. The pain is concentrated, but the benefits are widely dispersed.

*

It is remarkable that we speak and think about commerce as though competitiveness were its most important feature. There is, as noted, a certain Darwinian aspect to economic competition—and of course we humans do in fact compete over scarce resources. But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness...Competition is only one of the ways that we learn how best to cooperate with one another—competition is a means to the higher end of social cooperation.

*

The size and complexity of our brains evolved in parallel to the size and complexity of our social groups. The argument for cooperative human action is not just economics, but biology. Our social institutions are just as much a product of evolutionary processes as our bodies are. And it is through our social institutions, not through our individual brains, that we learn to deal with the problem of complexity.

*

So, how do private companies know what to produce for public use?... How do we learn how to cooperate? As Read noted about his beloved No. 2 pencil, nobody is in charge of the process, which is the result of a spontaneous order. The CEO of the pencil company understands only a small part of how his business works, and the pencil company collectively understands only a small part of the process. The system works because the underlying spontaneous order, even though its vast complexity is beyond our understanding, has a built-in mechanism for getting less wrong over time, mostly through trial and error—which is to say, mostly through failure.

*

The radical advances in quality of life that have characterized human society since the Industrial Revolution are by no means limited to profit-seeking enterprises: There was nothing like Wikipedia even a few years ago, and that extraordinarily valuable collection of knowledge was assembled independent of the profit motive...The people who contribute to Wikipedia have little or no conventional profit-oriented motive for methodically working to improve one another’s work, yet they’ve discovered that the value of cooperating is greater than the cost... similarly banks, car loan companies, and other consumer finance businesses universally share consumer credit information across the industry at considerable cost to themselves, even though each individual bank would be better off simply cutting off its bad-risk borrowers in the hope that they would go down the street to a competitor and cause them losses...Scientists and entrepreneurs may be individually arrogant, but both of their underlying models of operation depend upon openness to discovering that one’s beliefs are wrong and taking action to correct them.

Friday Mysteries

Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present. Help me to find the heft of these days. --Jack Gilbert

My favorite of the rosary mysteries are the sorrowful ones because of the love displayed for us.  I read the passages in Scripture that refer to each of the mysteries and was struck by Jesus quoting Psalm  31 when He said, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.” I hadn't realized that, and it made me hunger for more commentary on the Psalms. It  seems like Scripture rarely stands alone for me, I need to hear what everyone else and their brother has to say about it.

It was the first time I realized  that Jesus not only had a reed stuck in his hand to mock him as king, but they  struck him with it as well. A little detail perhaps, but it seems important to remember exactly when he went through for our salvation. And hopefully to realize his sacrifice was “powerful enough” to take away my sins and, conversely, that my sin was painful to Him. I thought also about how He sweat blood for us. I guess the text doesn't actually say that; it says drops like blood fell. But I always imagine, romantically  perhaps, as Christ wanting so much to free us from our sins that his blood was  already escaping from his body in anticipation of its saving power. Kind of as if his body couldn't contain the blood with which he would seal the new covenant.

During the fourth mystery I looked at a picture of that particular mystery on  my iPhone app as many times before. I always tend to mistake Jesus in the  picture as the strong man carrying the cross (actually Simeon) rather than the figure bent below it. How challenging not to overlook Christ in the poor or weak!  My eyes naturally gravitate towards strength and vigor when Christ, like Paul  later, would find his greatest power in weakness.

Seven or So Short Friday Thingies

As my favorite Dispatch columnist John Switzer, the important herald of the obvious who reports on the changing of the guard season-wise, wrote: “We're suddenly in May, the fat part of spring. A very good time of year.” Indeed. One of spring's charisms is that it's the only habitable season of the year without mosquitoes, ticks & flies, and that's a rather nice outdoor feature. A check of the 'net reveals that the skeeters could be here any day. When the temperature consistently stays above 50 the buggers come out. I hear that southwest Florida is due for a swarm of giant mosquitoes the size of quarters this year! Everything's bigger and stranger in Florida.

I look out over the refreshing vista of our trees in full green, our patio chairs standing like knights awaiting our arrival at the property edge. The air temp was a splendiferous 80 at one point today but now, at 8:20pm, has cooled down considerably. The sky is a benign shade of robin egg blue with harmless white clouds intermixed. Just a hint of pink; the sun will be setting shortlivedly. The cumulative effect of the cumulus clouds is atmospheric.

Oh what can surpass the beauty of a warm, spring day? Life comes back - I spy a struggling worm on our stone patio and I wish him well, hope he means to be there. Life is precious; yesterday my commute was longer than normal due to an accident. Little did I know that behind me two people would lose their lives when a huge semi wasn't ready for the sudden braking action the accident caused. In other words the second accident happened because of the first. The poor lady who died had her dog with her; it escaped unharmed and was lost for a day until found on the road that goes past my house. It all is gift and the body can be taken as away in an instant. If I'd left the house later, or the truck driver came through earlier, it could've been me.

How quiet and peaceful it is tonight! No mowers of lawn, no insisters of clipping, hedging, gnawing, ringing or blowing. And I can see the lighter-colored grass beyond ours gleaming in the distance. Natural beauty is democratic, isn't it? Every place, left to its own devices, can be beautiful, be it desert, mountain, valley, plain, forest, or sea. Even some of the glaciers of the Arctic consist of gem-like shades of blue. God knows what He's doing is what I'm thinking.

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Oh myyyy but how aliiiive I felt running down those picturesque Short North streets! It's stimulating to the senses: the beautiful spring weather, the  handsome old brick buildings (some probably dating to the 1800s),  the wall-less coffee joints abutting the street, art in  the gallery windows,  the pretty gals, the big black arches over High Street harking back to when  Columbus was known as “Arch City”….Feels downright SoHo-ian. It's such a joy to  do a strong run in this urban setting, especially since I run north-south and  the cross streets rarely have green lights so I can run without stopping. It's  funny that I spent many years avoiding High Street and ducking towards the sylvan parkland of Goodale. (Though, on second thought, for most of those years  the Short North was an ugly stepchild of its present version.) I guess I see  enough of my own park-like backyard such that I don't want to see trees and  grass nor pond but the big city glitter.
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Am concerned about our diocese website being down. I've never seen that happen before. I go there on Thursdays sometimes to read the newly hatched diocesan newspaper. But tonight no go and I wonder if perhaps it got hacked by haters. The National Catholic Register recently had an article on Bishop Campbell's  rather surprisingly firm stand. I'm sure he's aware of how Catholic schools too easily devolve into CINO schools.

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Kind of interesting to see the school board sold property to the school's arch-nemesis (developers) and now are taking heat for being hypocritical. It's kind of interesting call to see whether the district should've taken the money or stand on principle and refuse the developer's money. It's kind of symbolic, and symbols seem to inspire stupidity or nobility depending on the circumstance. Of course one man's nobility may be another's stupidity, witness St. Thomas More. (Not to compare, in any way, something as trivial as a school district decision with the great Thomas More's.)

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Started reading Kevin Williamson's fascinating The End is Near. He writes for National Review and yet he disavows the simplistic notion that “the market will solve everything.” No it won't, and he recognizes this. Anyway his heart seems in the right place. He writes of jobs as a “means to an end” not an end in itself. But a means to what end?  I suppose that we not starve. He points out that we could easily achieve full employment by drafting the entire population into the army but then we'd all starve to death.

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I love a parade (of books) / A waterfall of books, a meme of surprising looks, a verbal babel of brooks / For I love a parade….of books!

So difficult to choose but Daria Sockey's Everyday Catholic's Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours seems indispensable. (C.S. Lewis said of the praise that by “commanding us to glorify him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.”) Then too there's NR's Kevin Williamson's new book on the future of American government (it's bright, because it'll be broke!).

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Voted in the Repub primary Tuesday.  Something like 7% voting rate, sad. Five candidates seeking four positions for  city council. I only voted for two lest I unduly encourage the bastards. I don't  have confidence in any of them really, but was okay with voting for the one the  Republican Central Committee didn't like.

Not sure how I feel about party institutions. Next time the Republican Nat'l  Committee calls I may say, “I'm not a Republican, I'm a conservative.” I don't  trust the party apparatus all that much although admittedly in many elections  the RNC was right. For example, that awful Christine O'Donnell candidacy, and  the less-than-stellar Sharron Angle nomination. There have been others who've  practiced political malpractice, such as Todd Akin – he who managed to think it was  a good idea to opine on the rape and pregnancy. Even junior high school  candidates are politically smarter than that guy. So perhaps the RNC isn't that  bad after all….

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Interesting to read about how much Tim of the Catholic Bible blog loves the Knox. He argues, convincingly, that the NRSV, NAB and RSV are pretty much the same in terms of being on the literalist and less dynamic scale while the Knox and Jerusalem are freshly rendered. Says he can understand why many like the New Jerusalem. The only downside to the Knox, he says, is the distraction of archaic renderings - but the New Testament reads really well.

MJ of Logos Forum Fame

Occasionally I'll wander to the Logos Bible Forum and look for posts by the inimitable MJ Smith, she who stands amid the forum contents like a colossus of catholic civility. 

Here are a few of her recent thoughts/replies:

I have a basic preference for believing we constantly overestimate the quality of our [biblical] scholarship just as our predecessors did. Of course, my measure of language competency is that you don't know a language until it becomes bathroom reading. More seriously, as long as we use dual language dictionaries, I am uncomfortable saying we know a language. And, to the best of my knowledge, Logos is short of completely Hebrew (or Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, Ugaritic, Coptic ...) dictionaries. There is a big difference between reading a foreign language to translate it into your native tongue and reading a foreign language and understanding it in that language ... what we nicknamed the dream test.

I don't disagree that multiple translations serve as pointers towards the original language meaning as each translation gives us additional clues of the constraints on the original text. Another thread offered a link to a journal article that I find apropos - BaxterBiblicalWords.pdf

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My translation pet peeve is people having a pet peeve rather than recognizing translators have to make compromises in order to best meet the need of their ideal intended audience which I not me. I much prefer to have my pet translations such as Psalm 4 in the Jerusalem Bible ... I measure all other translations against it even though i know the grammatical argument against the translation.

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David A: Textual Criticism ASSUMES that all versions have the same chances of being found.

MJ Smith: Really? That is odd because it is so unlikely to be true. It could only be a simplifying assumption to make the data manageable. How many ancient manuscripts do we have from the Mar Thoma church in India? [Trick question - use of banana leaves as a writing surface has seriously limited the number of old manuscripts in a bug infested environment.]

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Dean053: ...with the moral brigade always trying to shut down legitimate questions or concerns about the product.
MJ Smith: While I have seen this accusation made frequently, I have seen the shutting down of legitimate questions only occasionally. As in a face-to-face community, there are particular people who by reasons of upbringing, culture, age or mental health need to be given a broader leeway than others.


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There are also many excellent graphics for the liturgical year. My (very simple) favorite also captures the sense of a spiral i.e. movement towards the end of time:

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I'd set two rules for myself when I offered to create the [following] list - non-Catholic Logos resources. As you can see, I ignored the Logos part when I tried to tailor the list to what L.S. seemed to need - enjoyable, non-confrontational reading that raises the important issues. Getting people to ask the question is more important than giving an answer to a question not asked.

• Prayer by Richard Foster - a good introduction to liturgical prayer
• Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster - a good introduction to spiritual disciplines
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - a good introduction to logic and what words mean
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - a study in social ethics
• The Way of the Pilgrim by Olga Savin and Father Thomas Hopko - a study in Christian growth
• The Psalms through Three Thousand Years by William Holliday - use of psalms in worship, Jewish and Christian
• To Pray As A Jew: A Guide To The Prayer Book by Hayim H. Donin - liturgy as way of life
• Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture and Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan- church history made enjoyable
• Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality by Alan W. Jones - not really introductory but presents a very catholic spirituality in a contemporary way

and cheating to add one Catholic convert book:

• The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth by Scott Hahn to explore the heavenly liturgy as described in Revelation

Spotted on tumblr

Various & Sundry

Read a fascinating piece in New York magazine about how Hasidic Jews took over the local school board and cut the public schools' money way back (all the Jews go to private schools). Didn't paint the Hasidics in a very flattering light but very interesting, the politics of it. Lots of inbreeding led to many kids in need of special education which the Jews couldn't afford so they took over the school board partly in order to allow their handicapped kids to get state funding for help which the previous school board was hesitant to do. (Apparently for understandable reasons since now the Hasidics are getting in trouble for drawing too much.) We see lots of unintended consequences: the old school board awoke the “sleeping giant” by not catering to the emergency majority (i.e. the Jews). The Hasidics then exacted their pound of flesh when they came to power. It makes me wonder if that's what life will be like when minorities (Hispanics) come to dominate our politics. Will it be payback time for Republicans not catering to minority demands of European-style socialism?



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The Dispatch mentioned how a petition to rehire a fired gay teacher at Columbus catholic high school has gotten 100,000 signatures. It mentioned that a new petition supporting the diocese has only 500, but I added mine just now. The paper says the story has gone international. Wow have times changed. This would not even be a story at all twenty years ago. The thing I never really got when I was in my teens and twenties and even into my thirties was just how fast-moving cultural norms and mores are. How much more dramatic the change must feel to those of my parent's generation, who witnessed even greater change.

I don't think our bishop knew what hit him given the backlash. It feels par for the course given the Church's painful record with public relations. Cardinal Dolan recognizes this which is why he hired Lino Rulli has his communication consultant. Bishop Campbell didn't even offer a statement until like three weeks after the firing which is a lifetime in the current communication environ. God bless him though. One thing it brings home is that you can't pick your fights. The gay rights controversy is surely not what the Church would like to be talking about. And he probably should've been prepared just given the circumstances, how the lady put her significant other on her mother's obituary. It paints the stereotype of the church being out of touch as well as cruel and secularists love that.

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Book by Kenneth Clark on nudes arrived yesterday and there's a lot to digest even in the first few pages. The author emphasizes how rare this form of art is in the history of art, how it is limited to just a few periods, and how it was invented by the Greeks in the 5th century B.C.. Clark says that it falls out of favor for various and sundry reasons, including a penchant for asceticism. He says that the form is most congenial to those countries on the Mediterranean and is almost completely opaque to the Chinese and Japanese mind. Which is really a startling statement. It seems as though Greek influence is the key. What is it about Greeks, as opposed to the Chinese, that went the full monty in depicting the nude human body? Is it a mere accident of history?

He says this is partially because painting nudes is different from any other natural subject. He aim to perfect, to idealize, not simply draw. Imperfections in trees or animals are not seen as unpleasing, but in a naked human it's different. It's kind of interesting in that we see the same thing on a moral plain; we are critical of moral flaws in humans that we aren't in animals. It's almost like inborn within us there's this drive not only towards physical perfection but moral (my gloss, not Clark's).

Clark also admits forthrightly that it's simply impossible to eliminate the erotic element given we have a biological drive to perpetuate ourselves. Thus he disdains a famous and oft-quoted art professor who said that any nude painting that incites base desires is not art.

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Read a Thomas Friedman column in which he said that he feels an unease over this world where you can't just show up for work anymore:

I find a lot of this scary. We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.

That last sentence is kind of humorous on the face of it: “let's think about how we can help every citizen be aspirational and motivated” (dream on, lib Friedman). I'm thinking he means: “let's think about how everyone can be in the top twenty percent in terms of contribution” - a mathematical impossibility of course.
But his column rings true, and he mentions how much skills matter and how much we need networking and mentors. In other words, you need the constant refresh of “hard” skills as well as the “soft” skill of networking. Makes me glad I'm toward the end of my career. But what's interesting about this hyper-measuring is that if it's true that 20% of the people do 80% of the work, I'm not sure how being able to measure the 80 versus the 20 is going to change things that much (other than remuneration potentially). It seems there's safety in numbers inasmuch as they can't fire 80% of the employees (although they could, of course, outsource everything to India so it's not as though we're only competing against our fellow workers).

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The bright shine of May, days long with light, I hie to a town historical walk where I learned that  the trains came through on Tuesdays and they didn't do the laundry then because the clothes would get smoky. There was a really good lumber mill and a Masonic lodge as well as one for the Oddfellows, another male fraternity. Apparently they were Really Big on fraternities back then.  They used to have a town “character”, a guy like Otis Campbell but not a drunk, a homeless guy with one tooth. Was a hard worker - used to clean the streets for free. Eventually the town fathers thought it was wrong that ol' Johnny was homeless, so they set him up in an Airstream-like trailer on some vacant ground. And they bought him meals at the one restaurant in town.


We toured the Lodge, bought by the Masons soon after WW I, and built as a “consolidated school” back in 1870.

It's nice that our guide had such a sense of “place” and seen the radical change such that it's almost unrecognizable. How much can history influence the current zeitgeist of a town when the town ballooned from a few hundred to 30,000 in a very short time? Can the Methodist influence, for example, be felt at all still? Regardless, it helps put a soul in the soulless suburb to see these fine folks trying to provide history where so little exists.

It reminds me of how my employer is now emphasizing it's roots by displaying the original office of the long-dead founder, and by hiring a company historian. I like this sudden interest in history by previously ahistorical institutions. Back in the 90s, there was no interest in anything that happened before last Tuesday and my suburb was likewise an amnesiac. I wonder what has happened that has made it suddenly fashionable to seek roots. It can't be a coincidence.

The Masonic lodge was alluringly creepy. Old posters with the famous "eye atop a pyramid" staring at you. Chairs arranged all along the sides; up front a stage with a throne chair with two smaller side chairs. A big “G” hanging down for reasons unknown (I asked the Mason guy what the “G” signified and he said he didn't know. Which seems fishy.) In the center of the room a strange-looking monument apropos of nothing. Upon entering I'd said to the Mason, “Into the secret room!” and he smilingly said, “no, the room where there are secrets.” He was then quick to add that no alcohol was permitted in the lodge, which seemed a bit of a non-sequitor.

Joe K. later said he was surprised I didn't turn into smoke, a Catholic going into a Masonic lodge like that.

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Read a bit of a book called Manufactured Depression, the latter about the rise of depression from part of the human condition to a disease. The author says that his post-divorce depression was perhaps “my initiation into the reality of how hard life really was.” He says: “I just figured I'd had a disaster in my life and my unhappiness was the consequence of it, as surely as whacking my thumb with a hammer would have left me injured and in pain and really mad at myself.”

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Was thinking today about Taylor Swift's astonishing popularity and I think it can at least partially be ascribed to her authenticity, or what appears to be at least. Watching her perform a song live in Canada, there's never a false note. Her face and body language are completely convey the ingredients of a performer: energy and enthusiasm. Her face radiates joy or pathos such that you could never tell that this was a job for her (and I find it hard to believe that she feels emotion 100% of the time on stage).

The Letterman generation grew up on irony as the mark of the authentic (Letterman had a sort of meta-awareness of the schlock of show business), but Swift seems to have found a way to be authentic in a wholesome, non-ironic way. Regardless whether authenticity is of the Letterman or the Swift sort, it's clear that it's what this generation longs for. Which, of course, makes it even more crucial for Christians to be authentically Christian and why this pope perhaps has a chance to get through to this some of the young (even though John Paul II was authentic in the way kids define authenticity – Benedict being too cerebral for their tastes – but without too much impact).

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Curious about Argentina, I looked up the country in the CIA World Fact Book and learned that although the country is “90% nominally Catholic, only 20% are practicing.” (So now the CIA is determining whether someone is a CINO? Hmmm….). But if the figures are close to be correct it's a bit discouraging that our pope wasn't able to turn the situation in Argentina around. That's surely an unfair burden to put on him, especially since conversion is a work of God and of man's free will. Perhaps the lesson of Pope Francis, like Mother Teresa, is that success is not the measurement but fidelity instead, and both Cardinal Bergoglio and Mother Teresa were nothing if not faithful. The “little way” of convented St. Theresa seems now the way even of popes and missionaries! No wonder she's considered such an important saint of the modern age.

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The gospel the other day had one of the most amazing statements in all of Scripture in it: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” Unfortunately it's not left to stand on its own but is caveated/fine-printed with “…if you keep my commandments.” But then it ever has to be in order to ward off the twins of presumption and despair. The gospel is for everybody and every possible fall.

But glorious is “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” I immediately thought about something that had nagged me in the past, the Father's affirmation at the Baptism of Jesus: “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well-pleased.”

I read the meditation from Word Among Us:

When I think of how the Father looks at you, Jesus, I am speechless. I can try to imagine the Father gazing on you with deep pleasure and joy, but words fail me. And then to think that you, Jesus, look at me with the same love, seeing the goodness I was created to have in your image, seeing your approval of every step I take toward you—I can only bask in this love, filled with wonder and awe.

Yes, the Word Among Us seems the right tonic for pessimists like me!

Quotes Heard 'Round the World (or close enough)

Francis: Pope of a New World by Andrea Tornielli 

She told me: “Father [Bergoglio], I can’t believe it, you make me feel important. . . .” I replied, “But Señora, where do I come in? Jesus is the one who makes you important.”

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux 

Why don’t you take the plane? the Georgian had asked me. Because—I thought when I was in the corner seat of my railway compartment—airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked..

The predictable regularity of humdrum domesticity is perfect for writing: monotony is the writer’s friend. People said to me, “You’re always away!” But it wasn’t true. I loved being home, waking in my own bed beside my wife, watching the news on TV, spending half the day writing, and then cooking, reading, swimming, riding my bike, seeing friends. Home is bliss. 

Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move towards an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, inventing the trip, 

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk 

One of the biggest bones of contention, so to speak, about hunter-gatherers versus agriculturalists is that the latter work too hard, in terms of both the time spent on subsistence and the intensity of the labor required, or at least they work harder than people who do not farm. Wells puts it this way: “As hunter-gatherers, we were a species that lived in much the same way as any other, relying on the whims of nature to provide us with our food and water.”14 And the whims of nature are presumably easier to cajole than the rocky soil or recalcitrant cattle of the farm. Agriculture, then, is sometimes seen as bad because it is just plain too difficult. It is true that at least some hunter-gatherers spend less of their day “working,” defined as engaging in activities necessary for subsistence, than do many farmers. Richard Lee’s classic 1960s studies of the Kalahari desert people found that they needed two and a half days per week to collect enough food;

the apes, spend even less time foraging? Should we be yearning for the days before tool use? And how do we balance time against effort? Is it better to mindlessly munch grass, which requires little effort but takes a lot of time to down, one determined mouthful after another, or to spend less of the day fashioning a complex fish trap that may yield no catch? Choosing agriculture as the point at which we all started to go downhill because we began to work too hard is simply not defensible.

one of the clearly undesirable effects of agriculture is the proliferation of new diseases, both infectious and noninfectious. Here, then, we can point to an unmitigated downside to settling down and farming: infectious diseases,

Regardless of whether the people existing after agriculture were happier, healthier, or neither, it is undeniable that there were more of them.

more people means more kinds of diseases, particularly when those people are sedentary. When those groups of people can also store food for long periods, the opportunity arises for sequestering that food, creating in turn a society with haves and have-nots.

neither the benefits of human population growth, such as the flowering of genetic potential or cultural complexity, nor the more dismal consequences of agriculture, were directed. Spencer Wells looks at the advent of farming as akin to humanity diving off a cliff. Humans, he says, “divorced themselves—and us—from millions of years of evolutionary history, charting a new course into the future without a map to guide them through the pitfalls that would appear over the subsequent ten millennia.”27 He rues the “unintended consequences” of the establishment of agriculture. The problem is, all of evolution’s consequences are unintended, and there are never any maps. Arguably, apes, by moving from trees to plains, made their world spin just as out of control as we did when we began to grow crops. Either way, no one was aiming anywhere.

Evolution is continuous, but it is not goal-oriented. It is not as if we were on a predestined path toward enlightenment when agriculture suddenly threw a plow into the works and made us deviate into obesity and disease.

Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski

Your brain is used to having a dialogue, if you will, with the typographer and page layout artist of the book you’re reading. That’s why the occasional use of a new font or a drop-cap—or heck, even an italicized word—helps you stay focused. It keeps your brain from yawning and switching to something else. With e-readers, though, this dialogue often stutters. The digital page is often bereft of nuance, of any anchor besides a list of monotonously formatted words, like plain black beads on an invisible string. When you talk to neuroscientists about how the brain works, they’ll tell you that a book is meaningless if you don’t actively engage with it. That’s why poets use unexpected word combinations, or why Friedrich Nietzsche used irony, or why David Foster Wallace used footnotes. These touches disorient you as you read, forcing you to put 10.5 watts of energy into the reading process to actually focus on what you’re reading. Why did I say 10.5 watts?

It’s so much easier to tweet a passage in an ebook we read than to call someone up and talk about it. Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction.

NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith  

 

Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh’s dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping.

Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock.

Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan?

A hundred and one ways to take cover: the complete black tent, the facial grid, back of the head, Louis Vuitton–stamped, Gucci-stamped, yellow lace, attached to sunglasses, hardly on at all, striped, candy pink; paired with tracksuits, skin-tight jeans, summer dresses, blouses, vests, gypsy skirts, flares. Bearing no relation to the debates in the papers, in parliament. Everybody loves sandals. Everybody. Birdsong! Lowdown dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle.

Leah mounts a mild defense, thinking of the smell of the censer, the voluptuous putti babies, the gold sunburst, cold marble floor, dark wood carved and plaited, women kneeling whispering lighting candles InterRailing nineteen ninety-three.

Harvard Square: A Novel by André Aciman 

I wanted to share with him and bring back all of my old postcard moments: the day I crossed the bridge in the snow while friends ran across the frozen Charles and I thought how reckless; the first time I entered my beloved Houghton Library and sat waiting for the librarian to hand over my very first rare book written by Mademoiselle de Gournay, Montaigne’s adopted stepdaughter; the aging face of my long-gone Robert Fitzgerald who taught me so much in so very few words; my last drink at the Harvest bar; down to the stifling reluctance to head out to class on a cold November afternoon when all I’d rather do was curl up with a book somewhere and let my mind wander. I wanted to walk the cobbled lanes leading up to the river with him and, in a spellbound instant, seize the beauty of this sheltered world that had promised me so much and in the end delivered much more. The buildings, the feel of early fall, the sound of students thronging to class every morning—I couldn’t wait for him to heed their call and their promise.

For now, it was the magical after love I wished to convey. It had stayed with me all those years and yanked me back to days I missed a great deal but knew I would never for a minute wish to relive again.

How to explain this to a seventeen-year-old without destroying the carousel of images I’d shared with him since his preschool days? Cambridge on quiet Sunday evenings; Cambridge on rainy afternoons with friends, or in a blizzard when things went on as usual and the days seemed shorter and festive and all you wanted to imagine was tethered horses waiting to take you to Ethan Frome places; the Square abuzz on Friday nights; Harvard during reading period in mid-January—coffee, more coffee, and the perpetual patter of typewriters everywhere; or Lowell House on the last days of reading period in the spring, when students lounged about for hours on the grass, speaking softly, their voices muffled by the sounds of early summer.

Still a Lot of the U.S. of A. I Haven't Seen