Week in Review
The joy-inducing rituals are music, reading, prayerful prayer, a donut & coffee at my desk, spilt sun in the morn through a McDonald’s window, ingesting the serrated edge’d print of a good novel or tasting the other-scent of a good history book. I always think that I’ll sometime add “my wife’s work party” to the list but in practice it never happens that way. So small battles were won and lost without any sense that ground was gained, smelling of Vietnam.
I think part of the “trick” of suburban life is to use leisure time well. You have to read deeply and experience profound art in order to make the dullness of cocktail parties appealing. You are so deep into the novel that you welcome the banal. I think this is the general theory behind horror movies - you're just so damn glad to be alive afterwards.
Sometimes, though, I have my suspicions about art and architecture in the Christian world. I don’t like to have to lean on something that doesn’t necessary HAVE to be there, or could be taken away. Even the sacraments are optional in the sense that they are dependent on having a priest near or living in a country that doesn’t persecute the Faith. Of course, to deny yourself the goods and helps of art is to tempt God, and though He works outside the sacraments that is not a reason to devalue them.
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Reading "Albion's Seed", about the Puritans, and how they often listened to five or six hours of sermons on Sundays, two or more hours in the morning, again in the afternoon and sometimes at night. The amazing thing about it is that they were in no way bored - to the contrary, they were on the edge of their seats. And Fischer says that this is because they were always on the edge salvation-wise, they were hungry to know "what must I do to be saved?".
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SO what else? Just that Tom Wolfe says that novel-writing is glorified reporting. And he is so right. He said what most writers do is cannibalize their first 25 years of life and then their 2nd novel is about a writer who cannibalized his first 25 years of life and has nothing left to say.
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