A Great Interview with a New Convert

I was aware of Joe Schmid, who is a bit of a YouTube philosophy wunderkind, when he was an agnostic. Deo Gratias, he has now become a Catholic.

Here is a very interesting interview between him and Trent Horn, the Catholic apologist, in which he talks about his conversion. Interestingly, he was greatly influenced by many compelling Catholic miracles, including those of Padre Pio and the Eucharist. Joe seems like a very likeable guy.

Strange Likings: A Weird Post

Well, not so much strange, but...

I've been reading a book about Liam Cosgrave, a former Taoiseach of Ireland. He was a devout Catholic. He actually voted against his own government's Bill that sought to introduce contraception to Ireland.

One of the more endearing things about him was his love of Rome-- the city itself. He visited it often and he even encouraged journalists accompanying him on a state visit to Italy to see all the sights in Rome, with a child-like excitement.

How many people have a favourite city? Lots of people, I'm sure, but I'm guessing many people don't. Do you have a favourite city? I'm not even particularly attached to Dublin. I can't imagine loving any city, although I like the idea.

I also love this line from Groundhog Day, where Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is telling Rita why vermouth (sweet vermouth on the rocks, actually) is his favourite drink: "It makes me think of Rome, the way the sunlight hits the buildings in the afternoon." True, he's just trying to seduce Rita, but it's still a nice line. I can't imagine ever hearing anybody saying anything like this in real life. I've never known anyone who says things like this.

Still, it's a fact of life that people do love all sorts of things-- and that's what this blog post is about.

Not only that people love different things, but that they love different sorts of things.

Here's an example, that I've probably mentioned before. I have a model of a US Airways plane on my desk. (It's lost various parts and others are blue-tacked on.) I developed an affection for US Airways after several transatlantic flights. I liked their whole aesthetic, both visually and aurally (even coming down to things like announcements).

US Airways merged with another airline in 2013. The thing is, nobody except me seems to be nostalgic about them. People don't really seem to get attached to airlines. Why not? They get attached to other consumer goods and services.

People love different sorts of things.

The Irish statesman Eamon De Valera had such a powerful attachment to his old school, Blackrock College, that there's a whole book about it. I've mentioned this before. How many people have this kind of attachment?

I've mentioned in a previous post that I don't feel drawn to any particular "spirituality", at least in terms of specific religious orders. And yet some Catholics are so drawn to a particular spirituality that they join the tertiary order of the Carmelites, or Franciscans, or Dominicans.

People get attached to historical periods, and particular types of animals, and foods, and diets, and places-- all different sorts of places, from nations to streets-- and particular gadgets, and alcoholic drinks, and activities like survivalism, and...all sorts of things.

A world where most people had different interests, but the same sort of categories of interest, would be a world brimming over with diversity and variety.

But the fact that even the categories are different-- that one person can be passionate about something that the other person would never even think about-- that really gives life its glory of variety.

(I'm inclined to ask if anybody reading has any unusual sorts of interests. But asking seems to be the kiss of death to ever actually getting a response-- at least that has been my experience-- so I won't.)

The Inexplicability of Nostalgia

Today is obviously a "feelings" day, between this post and my last one.

I just had a surge of nostalgia, sparked by a memory from more than thirty years ago.

It was from religion class in secondary school. We were watching some film or TV version of the Gospels around Easter time. Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps, or The Greatest Story Ever Told, or something like that. I remember we watched it in several instalments.

The weird thing is that I wasn't happy in that school, I didn't like religion class (which rarely had anything to do with actual religion), and I've never liked screen versions of the life of our Lord. It's not that I'm opposed to them, I've just never felt they add anything. They seem banal and corny.

I can even remember feeling especially bored while watching that particular one.

Why should I feel a warm current of nostalgia when this memory comes to mind? Not for the first time, either.

I don't know.

Maybe it has something to do with my love of "liminal" experiences. (This isn't unique to me-- I think many or maybe even most people have it.)

Easter was barely a "thing" in my childhood and my youth. It seemed like nobody really knew what to do with it. All of my Easter memories have the strange atmosphere of non-event, which isn't quite the same thing as "not an event".

Added to that, my school wasn't particularly evangelical. The nineties were a very weird time for Catholicism in Ireland, for reasons I hardly have to explain. There was still a lot of cultural and institutional Catholicism but there was an enormous loss of confidence and conviction. In Catholic schools (or at least in mine), this led to a bizarre atmosphere of mixed messaging. We had prayers before every class (which I liked even back then), religious pictures and statues all around us (which I also liked), the very occasional assertion of Catholic teaching (for instance, before a divorce referendum in which some of my class-mates were old enough to vote)....but then, quite frequently, a heavy dose of liberalism on top of it. 

I remember one French teacher telling us (very offhandedly, and incidentally to the lesson) that contraception had emancipated women. This was not a trendy young substitute teacher but a rather old-fashioned middle-aged lady. 

Religion class was mostly "Inspiring" feature films and pop psychology. (Actually I'm quite grateful for some of the inspiring films.) One year we had to buy the gospel of Luke as a schoolbook, but we never once used it. (Unless I missed that day, which is very possible.)

So the memory of watching a film about Jesus over Easter was doubly liminal. That Easter was marked in any way, was most atypical, and that it was used to evangelize us in some way was even more so. It felt strange, and perhaps a bit wonderful-- at least in retrospect.

Does that explain the nostalgia? Possibly, I think. I've come to think that nostalgia is often less about how things were, but how they might have been. At least for me.

The Psychological Need to Be Inside Big Buildings

Does anybody else feel this?

I'm talking about big lobbies in hotels, big shopping malls, airports, big train stations, art galleries, and so forth.

I don't mean being inside an ordinary-sized room of a building that happens to be big. I mean, a big building that has at least one very large space inside of it-- lobbies, atriums, conference halls, that kind of thing.

I've just now found myself hankering for this, and missing a particular big building. It's not a constant need, but if I haven't been in a really big building for a while, I miss it.

It seems to nourish (and satisfy) a sense of awe, and of reflectiveness.

In general, I'm all in favour of "small is beautiful"...but I do have this hunger as well.

(No need for comments about ugly modern architecture. I get it.)

Porterhouse Blue on TV

I'm watching the Channel 4 TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue from 1987. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube. It's very good so far. I was frightened it was going to be a cartoonish version, with lots of mugging and exaggeration and frantic running scenes. But it's not at all.

Porterhouse Blue was Tom Sharpe's breakthrough novel, published in 1974. He's an intriguing novelist. His plots are farcical, bawdy, and full of black humour, while his prose is very literate and full of high culture references.

Recently I've been drawn to fictions with a university setting. Porterhouse Blue is set in the fictional Cambridge college of Porterhouse-- a richly-endowed college with minimal scholarly standards, full of wealthy "hearties" (or jocks). A "Porterhouse blue", the book explains, is a stroke brought on my too much eating and drinking, common among the college's sybaritic staff. (It's a pun on the Oxford and Cambridge term "blue", which means an athletic distinction.)

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, my first encounter with the title Porterhouse Blue is quite amusing in retrospect. To me, at least. I was sixteen years old and reading The Oxford Book of Proverbs, a collection of proverbs that used quotations from various books to illustrate how each proverb was used. Porterhouse Blue was quoted on several occasions.

I really liked the title and imagined the book had to be some dense philosophical novel full of speeches, internal monologues, and dreamy vignettes. It summoned the image of the blue reflection in the glass of a bottle of porter, so I thought it would be both reflective and distilled. (I knew porter was an alcoholic drink but mistakenly assumed it was something like brandy or whiskey.) I really liked the idea of the imaginary book I'd conjured up.

When I eventually read it, I discovered my mistake, but I liked it just as much for what it actually turned out to be.

Here's a review of the book that I wrote twenty years ago.

Given that I'm an Irish nationalist (although I'm increasingly sceptical that Ireland is going to survive globalization, or that its population even really wants it to), people are often surprised that I'm also a fervent anglophile. Well, my anglophilia is rooted in things like Tom Sharpe books. (And Carry On and Hammer films, English poetry, English placenames, English situation comedies, P.G. Wodehouse books, and so on.)

Poems I Like: To Autumn by John Keats

Well, this morning I noticed the fallen leaves crunching under my feet. Summer is definitely over and we're into Autumn. (I like to capitalize the seasons.)

John Keats wrote the definitive poem about Autumn, at least in the English language. I'm sure you know it already, but that's no reason not to revisit it.

I've put this in my "Poems I Like" rather than my "Favourite Poems" series, because it's never quite got into the latter category. The main reason for this is that I've never been a fan of nature poetry. I'm very much an indoors person.

The best thing about this poem (and I'm sure most people would agree) is the opening line. It's undoubtedly one of the greatest opening lines in all of English poetry. (Keats has two immortal opening lines: this one, and "A thing of beauty is a joy forever".)

What is there to say about "Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness?". It's one of those miracles of language where the whole is infinitely more than the parts. The soul of autumn has been captured in six words.

(I often wonder if poets realize they've written a classic line when they've written it.)

I used to post on the Philip Larkin Society Forum many years ago, and there was one rather curmudgeonly contributor who insisted Larkin was the only poet worth bothering with. I plucked this line out of the whole body of non-Larkin poetry and asked him: "Surely you see merit in this?". He said he saw nothing special about it. This astounded me. (He wasn't a troll.)

Aside from the opening line, my other favourite line comes at the very end of the poem: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." It's such a gentle, dreamy end.

Re-reading this poem, it strikes me that, when it comes to Keats's odes, the "Nelson touch" (look it up; I refuse to say "secret sauce") is the shortened eight line in every stanza. It always serves as a pause and an intensification at once. It makes the movement of the verse more stately. For instance, in the third stanza of this poem:

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I also love this couple of lines, which hardly need any comment:

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Out of Keats's four great odes, this is actually my least favourite. "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" are, in my opinion, among the very greatest of English poems. "Ode to Melancholy" has already featured in my favourte poems series.

But "To Autumn" is also sublime, and deservedly beloved by the common reader-- the true judge of poetry, given sufficient time. It's probably just my (lamentable) lack of interest in the natural world that stops me from ranking it higher.

In My Day Being on the Spectrum...

 ...meant you were playing War of the Worlds or Sport of Kings.

(Though I never did. I just watched other people doing it. The Spectrum was a games console of the eighties.)