







[There has been] a hunger, on the part of both secularist and believer, for a deeper understanding of mystery, that borderland where reason fails and only faith and imagination can go. These two faculties reach out beyond rigid and divisive ideological categories into paradox and ambiguity. In the end, the mystery of mysteries may be that only in paradox and ambiguity can truth be glimpsed...
Religion and art need each other...When we lack the kind of attention which only the imagination can provide, we make it more difficult to live the life of faith. And art, when it sees no creation to celebrate and no soul in need of saving, loses its respect for truth.
Dear Juan De La Cruz
I gave my class your "dark night" poem to read,
not telling them who wrote it. They were quick
to name adultery as the midnight deed
the female speaker runs to, in a thick
burqa of darkness. And the poor thing gets
her just deserts, being wounded in the neck
by a vampire lover. My best student bets
her husband locks her out. I tried to check
these thoughts by pointing to her night of bliss
under the cypress trees, but they were cold
to ecstasy -- young puritans who kiss
in condoms nowadays. And when I told
them who you were, it didn't change their minds.
They don't know darkness comes in different kinds.
--Gail White
"[The Parable of the Prodigal Son] has been called, and justly so, the Gospel of the Gospels, and it was a wise man who said that even if the Gospels were to be lost, and only the parable of the prodigal son were to remain, that alone would suffice to reveal God's infinite love for man."(Fr. Antonopoulos: Return: Repentance and confession, Return to God and to His Church)
Thank you for the generous donation you made of $30.00 on 02/16/2011.And it made me want to give $1 or .50 to see if, at any point, the word "generous" is lost, even though of course the widow's mite is generous as pointed out in the gospel.
Hosni Mubarak, he left Cairo on the run,
Hosni Mubarak, dominated the news cycle fun,
Zing boom tararrel, Hosni was the US's friend,
But now's the time to roll out ol' Hosni, cause he just will not bend!
As for the novel, the form to which I have devoted some forty years of my life, it was first pronounced dead some eighty years before I was born. Even as I began my writing career the death sentence was intoned regularly, many more times. In this case it was a foolish death sentence: there was never any reason why the novel was likely to die, not unless the middle class, which brought it into being and still sustains it, dies first; and there's mall likelihood of that happening.
THE TRUE RELIGION is not that which has no difficulties. We have to swallow mysteries with it. But we have to swallow the same mysteries without it.
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...a man who wrote and spoke in the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even painfully logical period that the world has ever seen.
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Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.
...the hopeful grandeur of municipal buildings built at a time when the transport of hogs and heifers promised the city a commercial elegance that had expired along with the animals . . . But, somehow, this city has persevered against the unkind seasons and the storms that gather speed over Lake Erie. Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled—the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool—the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth...
This is America, where the morning paper lands on the doorstep at precisely 7:30 A.M.—not the woolly dominion Vladimir once ruled... And what of [his] child? Will he live the way his father once did: foolishly, imperially, ecstatically? . . . No, thinks Vladimir. For he can see the child now. A boy. Growing up adrift in a private world of electronic goblins and quiet sexual urges. Properly insulated from the elements by stucco and storm windows. Serious and a bit dull, but beset by no illness, free of the fear and madness of Vladimir’s Eastern lands.
...because blogs (and dogs) abhor a vacuum.
Global warming this I knowHow I savor those four golden days down at the beach, full of reading! How cool was it to have that time in the sweet spot of the day! I felt sharp as I read Hitchens and wanted to gallop-read his essays even as I was reading his memoir. In many ways he's really "other" to me: atheist, British prep-school educated, and not provincial (far more interested in the happenings around the globe than me).
Because Al Gore tells me so.
Care not what the mercury says,
Shiverin' as I wear my Fez.
Global warming this I knowThe day began on a splendid note: got that early fifteen minutes in the bookroom just post-sleep, coffee sending pleasing electricity to my brain while I imbibed a bit of Chesterton and Acquaintance of the Night. I was especially pleased that that night book looks so promising; it put me in a good mood, which only got better after my 9:30am meeting was over. Mass at lunch after a reading from the lit of the hours: "All of this was made by my hand / and all this is mine. It is the LORD that speaks. But my eyes are drawn to the man of humbled and contrite spirit, who trembles at my word." I thought how elusive it is to feel that way and yet, at the same time, how possible it is. I mean, God's not asking for great strength or sinless perfection but for someone who is contrite and trembles at his word. It gave me hope even though I have need of more contrition and trembling.
Because Al Gore tells me so.
Frostbite, schmostbite - oh fu fa
Just wait till next year oh la la.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;Chesterton to Dorothy Collins in 1927:
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.
Children we were - our forts of sand were even weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Here you watch the Bard's Career,From "Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark" by Christopher Dewdney:
Month by month and year by year,
Writing, writing, writing verse,
Worse and worse and worse and worse.
I love night, some of my earliest memories are of magical summer evenings, the excitement I felt at night's arrival, its dark splendor. Later, when I was eleven, there were hot summer nights, especially if the moon was bright, when I felt irresistibly drawn outside...After quietly shutting the bad door behind me, I was free, deliciously alone in the warm night air. A bolt of pure electric joy would rush through me as I stepped into the bright stillness of the moonlit yard.
We lived at the edge of a forest, so I'd hop the rail fence and blend into the trees. Even without moonlight my night vision was good enough to avoid stepping on twigs and dry leaves. Imagining I was a puma or a leopard, I'd walk silently through the forest, a creature free in the North American night. Although I didn't know it at the time, by exercising my night vision I was proving Victor Hugo's maxim "Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only nigh."
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...while Australian poet Frank S. Williamson, in a sort of reverse personification, described his lover as if she were the night:She comes as comes the summer night,
Violet, perfumed, clad with stars,
To heal the eyes hurt by the light
Flung by Day's brandish'd scimitars.
I'm a minor civil servant. My partner in this book madness is my wife [MaggieO] (who has a major library of her own); and we have three kids. Our house is now officially Full of books.
(People who visit us are at first staggered by the number of books. Then they usually manage to remark politely, "Welll...errm...I guess you can't HAVE too many books." Uh, no, sorry: we are living proof that you CAN in fact have too many books....)
About my library: No, I have NOT read everything here. (I've read more of it than you might think, though.) I custom-built a couple hundred feet of bookshelves for our family room. Yes, we have now officially run out of shelves (we've been forced to resort to the barbarity of double-shelving (*Gasp!* The horror!), and - until the kids leave the nest - we've just about run out of wallspace to put bookshelves. Consequently, some of the older/rattier/less-referred-to stuff has Gone to Storage.)
We are gradually coming around to the strategy of building a library put forth by Samuel Pepys: "For every book that comes into the house, a book will have to leave the house."
The Seven Deadly Sins according to St. John Vianney...
...and a quote from C.S. Lewis: "Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues."
Audi Escape from "old luxury" prison 60 1 6.93 CarMax Kid in a candy store, other good feelings 30 2 6.16 Bridgestone Mistaken "reply all" leads to panic 30 1 7.39 Budweiser Bud gives Old West Elton John feeling 60 2 7.21 Bud Light Kitchen redone with Bud Light 30 1 7.28
THE OBJECT OF a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.From Christopher Hitchens memoir:
He once soberingly told me, concerning the American presence in Afghanistan: “We’re blondes out there, man. Dumb and innocent as the day is long”).
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[Alcohol] is the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)
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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
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Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy.
The liberal project began to fail when it began to lie. That was the mid sixties when a range of social science appeared - Think Coleman (i.e. the 1966 report by James Coleman on the equality of education] - which said it was going to be a bitch. The response was that said social scientists and their craven lackeys were objective right wing deviationists.On our over-spending, from way back in 1981:
We have been eating our seed corn. You cannot do that for long... [this] was reinforced by the maturing of the industrial economy. By this I mean nothing more complicated than that railroads and the steel mills and the assembly lines finally all got built. Until then saving - the forgoing of consumption - was absolutely necessary in order to make those investments. Now, the investments have been made, they could only return a profit if people commenced to consume their products. The advertising business began in earnest. Someone invented the installment plan. The Federal government began to guarantee home mortgages. The logic of our economy, as of our reigning economies, also decreed: overspend...
I have a weird theory. Maybe one of the reasons -- aside from the illiteracy, shame culture, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, etc. -- that Arabs are both so conspiratorial and so complex in their political machinations is the lack of alcohol in their cultures. Maybe there's so much intrigue and duplicity in the Middle East because that's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a society where men sit around all night consuming stimulants like nicotine and caffeine. In, say, Russia -- another hotbed of paranoia -- people stay up late into the night, but they get drunker and more simplistic the later it gets. In hookah bars, you stay up later and later, totally sober and increasingly wired, like a college sophomore on a sleep-deprivation vision quest who, at 3:00 in the morning, suddenly realizes he should write his term paper on how Kierkegaard predicted Jersey Shore. Of course, this could be entirely wrong.