The Ever-Interesting Barzun...
By way of preface, Barzun describes the myth of the American Indian as the "noble savage" and then relates it to how Roman historian Tactitus portrayed the Germanic tribes of the first century in such a way to shame the people of Rome...

The fine barbarians in Tacitus were used as models in Luther's Germany to stimulate resentment against the foreign authority of Rome, and these two attitudes, favoring the Indian and the German, combined to change the western peoples' notion of their origins. For a thousand years they had been the sons and daughters of the ancient Romans. Now the idea of different "races" replaced that of a single, common lineage. The bearing of this shift is clear: it parallels the end of empire and the rise of nations. Race unites and separates; We and They. Thus the English in the 16th century began to nurse the fetish of Anglo-Saxonism, which unites them with the Germanic and separates them from the Roman past. We shall see how a similar notion influenced politics in France up to and beyond the 1789 Revolution...

The conviction moreover grew that the character of a people is inborn and unchangeable. If their traits appear odd or hateful, the theory of race justifies perpetual enmity. We thus arrive at some of the familiar prejudices and hostilities of our time. "Race" added the secular idea of inborn difference to the theological one of infidel and Christian. -Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

Poetry Wednesday
Farewell, green fields and happy groves,
Where flocks have took delight;
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves
The feet of angels bright;    - William Blake

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
      With meditation.

Thus let me live, unheard, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
     Tell where I lye.   - Alexander Pope

He ate and drank the precious Words --
His Spirit grew robust --
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust --

He danced along the dingy Days
And this Bequest of Wings
Was but a Book -- What Liberty
A loosened spirit brings --     --Emily Dickinson via Tenebrae

Been pondering the unseemly CIA killing, the one in Yemen where a vehicle containing six suspected terrorists was blown up. Our Dominican priest was upset by it, and said so in a sermon, intimating that this was no different from assassination. The problem is that it is police work, but what if the country in question does not welcome you with open arms and doesn't provide the opportunity of arresting them?

Terrorists play by a different set of rules and we are left either playing by their or...or what? WWII saw the targeting of civilian populations - certainly something way outside the "gentleman" rules of war. And now again with respect to armies doing "police work". I have no answers, but I say this by way of a preface to another transition, as told in Barzun's Dawn to Decadence. In 1525, Charles V defeated Francis I in a great battle at Pavia, in Italy, and by accident Francis was taken prisoner. The fuedal notion was war as a tournament, a contest between two knights. It was expected that a ransom be paid for Francis, so that his honor lay intact:

But Francis, as his behavior soon showed, seems to have had inklings of a more modern, more national conception of war...

Francis, although he had given his word to stay put, decided to escape... He was caught, Charles was shocked, unbelieving. How could a Christian gentleman who had given his word act like a varlet? The transition from princely conduct to raison d'eetat, from knight to head of state, from medieval to modern was painful. - Barzun

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.--William Butler Yeats

Sweeps?
Perhaps it is a ratings week and I missed the news, but Flos Carmeli has a post on one of my favorite subjects. Sex. In lieu of having it, I'll read about it.

Seriously, he was reacting to an article by a Jesuit and his essay is well-written and convincing. My initial reaction was to take issue with a comment such as, "Victorian society for all its renowned repression, was in fact every bit as sexually charged as modern day society". One difference is that we have the birth control pill and an accompanying lack of shame, both of which contribute to a new sort of sexual license. But then I read on and Mr. Riddle brought up the valid point that Islamic societies have gone to ridiculous measures to stem the impulse. Besides which, Jesus said to lust in your heart is to commit adultery, which, of course, is not affected by a pill.

Here is Shawn McInerny's review of Paul VI's biography. Am looking forward to Amy's take on the John XXIII books she's reading.

I'm currently reading Barzun's wonderful Dawn to Decadence. He has a wonderfully idiosyncratic style. Also want to continue with Flannery O'Connor's letters - Habit of Being. Preversely, I tend to hoard my best books in the sense of not wanting to read them because a) they may not be as good as I anticipate and b) the very act of consuming them diminishes them in the sense that they'll be over that much sooner!

Still excavating remains from the journal. 500+ pages - remember what you paid...

   Twas 1844 and I was a simple Irishman with children taught the landowner's language at the "hedge school", so-named because education was forbidden and they had to hie thee to the hedges. I learned some too, and with my youngest Bridget’s help, with whose help I do write this now. My wife Bridget has been gone most of a decade, lost giving birth to the one who took her name.
   I was born two miles from the Irish Sea, where oft I would go to catch perch and clams. We’d smoke aged seawood in leeward winds and run-sail in our grand papa's crude dingys. I’d stare at the agate sea until my mind was blank and the waves became as music. We would go to Mass at the church built in stones ten centuries old and dream of the Hill of Tara and hero Patrick’s burning the Druid altars. Sometimes the Sheridan girl would come with us, named like every other Eirean girl for the Blessed Mother. So fair she was that the Blessed Mother herself might be jealous, such be the beauty of this blackhaired Iberian.
   In the daily toil we found the work man was meant to do – we free’d our mind from mental hardships and strife by dint of sheer effort. Work all day with your body and your mind is oddly satisfied, like a child’s by a mother’s lullaby.

Et macula non est in te -Cant. 4:7 via Old Oligarch

I was with eight thousand Christian music fans at the Michael W. Smith concert, singing in Latin.

Well, okay, a line from Angels We Have Heard on High:

Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

...a moment of nostalgia
Jennifer Juniper vit sur la colline
Jennifer Juniper assise tres tranquile
Dort-elle? Je ne crois pas
Respire t'elle? Oui mais tout bas
Qu'est ce que tu fais, Jenny mon amour   -Donovan

My seventh grade science (!?) teacher played this many times for us in lieu of examining slides under a microscope.

skeins of snow litter the dark field
ruts and mounds of muldering leaves
a moonscape landscape
the sky a cryptic shade
imprinted with doubt.

scourged trees sway in penitential bows
silverbacks coated with silver
croak, groan in the bending wind.

cold that demands Normandy invasion planning
gloves, ski-masks
smooth-soled shoes a mistake;
errant lurches from a pent-up dog
close-calls on ice
unpleasantness squared.

windy & nineteen degrees
thirty-seven in Galway.

On taking the dog for a walk
Obi trips the land fantastic
knows not fear of dark or cold
skitters from post to post
bladder at the ready
firing urine at the usual suspects:
small trees, wayward leaves, and urban landmarks.

To Journal or Not To Journal* - John Adams on Keeping a Diary
"Have you kept a regular journal?" John wrote John Quincy in 1783. "...We think, and improve our judgments, by committing our thoughts to paper." "Without a minute diary, " John wrote his grandsons in 1815, "your travels will be no better than the flight of birds through the air; they will have no time behind them."

The family project [of keeping journals] continued into the fourth generation, although by then the family grew sick of it. Charles Francis, Jr., thought introspection had been 'morbidly developed by the journalizing habit.' When he reread his own youthful diary, he was embarrassed by "its conceit, its weakness and its cant". He burned it all...
-Richard Brookhiser's America's First Dynasty

* - gag. I succumbed to making a noun a verb.