Favourite Poems: "To a Friend" by Matthew Arnold.

This sonnet is about Sophocles, of whom I know little. Well, it's about Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. The opening is a bit shaky and awkward, although that also gives it a sort of halting dignity. But the sestet, the last six lines, are the kicker. "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" is, in my view, one of the greatest lines in English poetry. "Business could not make dull, nor passion wild" is another wonderful line; the sort of classical antithesis native to the age of Samuel Johnson, here lit by the afterglow of Romanticism. "Mellow glory" is also a wonderful paradox, or at least, a surprising combination of ideas.

It's the sort of poem that makes me regret being so little of a classicist!

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

Poetry and Music is "All or Nothing" For Me

Just a quick observation on my own artistic sensibilities, which may or may not chime with anybody else's.

I've noticed a big cleavage between my own attitude towards poetry and music on the one hand, and pretty much all the other arts on the other.

I'm much more tolerant towards all the other arts. I could watch a film and think: "Yeah, that was OK. It was unoriginal and corny and a bit dull, but it was enjoyable enough to watch-- though I wouldn't watch it again, most likely."

The same applies to books, the visual arts, architecture, and so on. These arts are graded on a continuum.

When it comes to music and poetry, though, I'm looking for something very specific. In those two art-forms, a miss is as good as a mile. It either happens or it doesn't happen.

Now, I don't think this necessarily has anything to do with good taste. In my own mind, I have excellent taste in poetry, but pretty awful taste in music-- for the most part.

The response that I'm looking for, when it comes music and poetry, is something like genuine laughter-- it's an involuntary response. Or it might be compared to a physical shudder, or physical attraction, or (perhaps more than else) the awakening of the sense of wonder.

This is a minimum requirement, of course. It's not to say that every poem, or piece of music, that provokes this response does so to an equal degree-- in the same way that not every laugh is equally intense.

Reading new poetry, and listening to new music, always feels like prospecting to me. Will it happen, or won't it? If it doesn't, all the critical plaudits and hype in the world, all the evident virtuosity at work, mean nothing at all to me.

The Face in the Wallpaper

My aunt and uncle, both of them now gone to their reward, lived on a farm a little bit outside Limerick City. I would visit them every summer and stay in their spare room.

One year they told me that people had seen a face in the wallpaper of that bedroom if they looked at it too long.

On the surface, it sounds like they were just trying to put the wind up me, but I don't think so. Although I can't remember exactly how I was told this, I had the strong impression it was a "true" story-- that is, it at least wasn't made up for my benefit.

I've pondered it ever since, intermittently-- what did it actually mean?

At the time, I assumed it meant the pattern of the wallpaper would somehow "resolve" itself into a face if you looked at it long enough-- like an autostereogram.

Only much later did another interpretation occur to me, one that seems rather more obvious-- that, if you stared at the wallpaper long enough, a ghostly face would superimpose itself over it. 

The funny thing is that, although the first alternative sounds less scary and even naturalistic, it scared me plenty back then.

This is the sort of "chill" I like the most-- a subtle and understated one, with no necessary hint of danger.

I had plenty of scares on that farm, perhaps because it was so far from Dublin and home.

One night I lay awake reading my aunt's magazines, one of which contained an article about the Third Secret of Fatima that suggested it would happen in 1992-- and I was reading it in 1992. I literally lay awake waiting for the bombs to fall. I was my last night in Limerick that summer. Somehow I felt convinced that, if I got back to Dublin, I'd be safe. I think, deep down, I knew it would seem less convincing in Dublin.

In another magazine (she had glossy celebrity magazines as well as religious magazines), I read an account of Michael Jackson filming the "Thriller" video, which hyped up the possibility that he had opened himself up to dark forces.

I can distinctly remember walking out into the sunlight and feeling a sense of "daylight horror"-- that the chill of the story still hung over me despite the summer sun.

I also remember reading a tabloid news story there, which suggested cancer had been mixed with a virus, and this terrified me, for all of ten minutes.

On another occasion, my uncle was telling ghost stories in the "good room", or the parlour, and all the lights went off. That was spooky.

And once I was shown a stone in the vicinity which supposedly had the devil's hoofprints on it. 

I'm very grateful for all these experiences now.

The Life of Brian Debate, Again

I'm rather fascinated by the famous debate on The Life of Brian between John Cleese and Michael Palin (on one side) and Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood on the other.

I know I've written about it before, but I come back to it for several reasons:

1) It's interesting to me that the Monty Python team have completely won in the court of popular opinion, all these years later. You can read the comments on any YouTube upload of this debate and none of them are sympathetic to Muggeridge and Stockwood. Even Christians turn on them. I find this depressing.

2) I feel a strange sort of love for Malcolm Muggeridge. He was well-known in his time, a national figure, and now he's completely forgotten. But he was astonishingly right about many things, including the evils of activism and the prophetic wisdom of Humane Vitae. And there's just something endearing about him, right down to the way he pronounces graffiti "GRA-fitti", with a stressed first syllable. 

(I've noticed that this is a marked phenomenon among crotchety old men-- they choose a particular word, or several words, to pronounce in an idiosyncratic way. I knew an old man who always pronounced "immediate" so the second syllable rhymed with "head". My own father insisted Latvia was pronounced Lat-ria.)

3) The most moving part of the programme is this contribution from Muggeridge, where he reproves the Pythons for cheapening the story of Christ: "Remember that story of the Incarnation was what our whole civilization began with...remember that it has inspired every great artist, every great writer, every great builder, every great architect, to celebrate that marvellous thing.."

(At this point John Cleese makes the cheap shot that it also inspired the Thirty Years War and the Inquisition, and gets a round of applause from the audience, who are clearly on the side of the Pythons.) 

Muggeridge resumes: "But nothing can alter the fact that if you were to make a list of all the greatest works of art in all fields, and all the greatest contributors to those works of art, you will find that this scene of the Incarnation, the story of the Incarnation, has played the largest part. Now, in our twentieth century, this film produces a sort of graffiti version of it, and I don't think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place..."

On that last point, Muggeridge has been proven wrong, at least so far. But there is something inexpressibly beautiful and graceful about the way he makes his point. He speaks slowly and sadly, pointing his finger (presumably at a screen where clips from it were played), with all the gravity of an eyewitness to much of the twentieth century's insanity.

I'm particularly impressed that Muggeridge bypasses any of the tiresome arguments about artistic or intellectual freedom, or respect for religious sensibilities. I very much doubt he would have been in favour of censoring the film. He is, in fact, saying: "Shame on you. Shame on you for trampling something beautiful and lofty." An argument that conservatives have more or less stopped making. We are too frightened of ridicule.

4) This debate is interesting to me, also, because of its relevance to current debates about political correctness and woke and freedom of speech and all the rest of it. Both John Cleese and Michael Palin have become outspoken critics of political correctness. I admire them for that.

I'm sure they would say-- and doubtless they have said-- "We were opposed to the moral guardians when they were Christian conservatives, and now we're opposed to them when they're woke leftists." The idea is that Mary Whitehouse morphed into Owen Jones.

I'm not at all convinced of this. In fact, I don't believe it for a moment. I think political correctness is part of the same wave as Life of Brian. I don't have time to make this argument right now, and I'll admit it's more an intuition than anything else. 

5) I do think both the bishop and Malcolm Muggeridge were at fault for attacking the film as "tenth-rate". It is indeed a funny and accomplished film. What's wrong with saying that something is both funny and tawdry?

An Excellent Debate on the Resurrection

Yesterday and this morning, I watched this excellent debate on whether the Resurrection occurred, between Trent Horn and Alex O'Connor.

Alex O'Connor is the best example of a new breed of post-New Atheism atheists who are interested in having serious, respectful conversations with believers, and who mostly avoid cheap point-scoring in the Dawkins-Hitchens tradition. (I say "mostly" because one or two of his arguments in this video do fall into that category, or at least incline that way.)

Along with his Catholic Answers colleague Jimmy Akin, Trent Horn is my favourite Catholic apologist. He also avoids cheap point-scoring and concentrates on the essence of each question.

Until I listened to this video, I'd never heard about the supposed transfiguration of Brigham Young, despite having an interest in Mormonism that goes back to my early twenties. It's fascinating.

E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition by Karl White: A Review

E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition by Karl White. Bloomsbury, 2025

Before I read this book, I knew nothing about E.M. Cioran. I still haven't read anything by Cioran, except the (plentiful) excerpts that I've encountered in this book. It served as an excellent introduction to a thinker who is certainly intriguing and is relatively uknown in this part of the world. (I've had a lifelong layman's interest in philosophy, and especially in conservative thought, but I'd never even heard of him.)

Cioran was a pessimist, which presents a certain challenge to me. As I've mentioned before, I have a melancholic temperament but my allegiance, as it were, is with the cosmic optimists. G.K. Chesterton is my great literary and philosophical hero, and his view of existence was not only optimistic but even ecstatic: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Given my affirmation of this credo, what interest could there be for me-- or for anyone of a Chestertonian mindest-- in a pessimistic thinker?

Well, plenty, I think. Pessimism is a permanent and necessary part of the human condition. We live in a physical universe governed by entropy and every life ends in death. The Bible gives ample voice to pessimism, from Job (Chesterton's favourite book of the Bible) and Ecclesiastes (a particular favourite of my own), to Christ's harrowing cry from the Cross.

Not only that, but I personally have a taste for the bleakest pessimism as a kind of ice bath. For instance, these lines from Yeats (drawn from Sophocles):

Never to have lived is best, ancient sages say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

This is a quotation that is highly relevant to Cioran, who wrote a book titled The Trouble With Being Born. In the second paragraph of E.M. Cioran and the Human Condition, White addresses the centrality of birth to Cioran's philosophy: "If there is one linking theme or overall message to Cioran's work it is, I believe, the following: being born is a kind of disaster, and all of the efforts we make to alleviate and ameliorate the human condition are due to partial and often total failure."

What room for manouvre does such a radical stance leave to a thinker? If the picture is pitch black, what is the point of detail, or how is it even possible? This is what I've always wondered about writers and thinkers commonly described as "nihilistic".

And yet (as this book makes clear), it's not quite accurate to call Cioran a nihilist. He did seem to believe that there was at least better and worse in many regards-- for instance, he valued the role of the Catholic Church in civilisation, and regretted its comprise with modernity (as he saw it). He was also an admirer of Luther, as if to prove what a contradictory creature he was.

The most obvious comparison for Cioran is Friedrich Nietzsche. Both thinkers held a gloomy view of modern civilization, both embraced the use of the aphorism, and both-- although I'm less sure of Cioran than Nietzsche here-- had an essentially aesthetic view of life. The biggest difference seems to be that Nietzsche, while holding a tragic view of human existence, saw its tragedy as something to be overcome, sublimated, or even gloried in. Cioran, it seems, looked towards no such apotheosis.

Indeed, one can find close matches between many of Cioran's aphorisms and those of Nietzsche:

"Thought which liberates itself from all prejudice disintegrates, imitating the scattered incoherence of the very things it would apprehend." (Cioran.)
"Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion." (Nietzsche.)

"What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts." (Cioran.)

"That for which we find words is something that is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." (Nietzsche.)

"Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man". (Cioran.)

"Man is something to be surpassed". (Nietzsche.)

"I have no system; and as for a method, I have only one: the trial by agony". (Cioran.)
"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is lack of integrity." (Nietzsche.)

"Determined to be happy, [man] has become so. And his happiness, exempt from plenitude, from risk, from any tragic suggestion, has become that enveloping mediocrity in which he will be content forever." (Cioran.)

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest."(Nietzsche.)

Cioran's attitude to religion is interesting, and typical of many (perhaps an increasing number) of thinkers on the right. It's fascinating that, while many people believe in God but repudiate organized religion, Cioran seems to have been quite the opposite: he wasn't at all sure about God, but he was nostalgic for Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church. Indeed, he resented the liberalization of Catholicism, despite not being a believer.

As White puts it: "Although he personally lacks faith, Cioran discusses God with an urgency of a man with a serious investment in belief, or at least the need to believe. God is an object of thought that is interrogated relentlessly, with a mixture of wonder, horror, reverence, disdain, and respect."

Cioran also seems to have had a conflicted view of the "end of history", at one time looking forward to a post-historical state where (as White puts it) "books and knowledge are banned...The perennial present shall be enforced as a mode of being and a form of ethical perfection." He quotes Cioran's own words: "Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so".

However, Cioran was also pulled towards the idea of history beginning again, even if it meant catastrophe: "Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror".

In his Conclusion, White writes: "Cioran is more than merely another nihilistic continental philosopher who trades in pity but ephemeral aphorisms... His value is as a philosophical gadfly, one who operates on the margins of thought with a license to roam and criticize as he sees fit, unfettered from normal philosophical or institutional obligations... He is more a therapist than a sage." (One is tempted to quip: "The kind of therapist who talks his patient onto the window-ledge"...except that Cioran did not advocate suicide, seeing it as pointless!) The book ends with an especially interesting survey of the secondary literature on Cioran.

This is a fascinating book, especially recommended for those interested in straying from the well-worn paths of twentieth century philosophy, and in the history of right-wing thought.

My Breakfast This Morning

 

Including my new mug which says "Cad é an scéal?", meaning "What's the story?" in Gaelic.

Irish language mugs, mats, tea-towels etc. have become very popular recently. It might be a reaction to a sense of cultural homogenization. I have an American friend who has lived in Ireland since 2004 and he says that, in his perception, the Irish language is much more of a presence now than when he arrived. I was very surprised to hear this, but he has no skin in the game, so he might be right. (Incidentally, the same American friend was devastated when Ireland failed to qualify for the soccer World Cup recently.)

Of course, this is all purely ceremonial Irish, but that's a lot better than nothing in my view. Anything that gives a flavour.