The Light from Within

I've developed something of a Christmas tradition, on this blog, of quoting one of my favourite passages from G.K. Chesterton. It's a meditation on the nativity scene, and it comes from his great work of Catholic apologetics The Everlasting Man. (What a wonderful title that is, incidentally!)

've had a curious experience regarding this passage. Actually, I've had the same curious experience twice. On two occasions, after reading this passage aloud, somebody has told me either that they literally didn't know what Chesterton was talking about, or that the passage didn't move them at all. On both occasions, it was at a Chesterton-themed event in the Central Catholic Library. (But two different people, obviously.)

Well, everybody has different tastes, and I've often been left cold by various experiences that are supposed to be universally enthralling (like listening to Mozart, sadly for me). But I think this passage will appeal to many people.

Here it is:

No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man.

It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.

Before I say what I love about this passage, here's one thing I don't like, and that takes away from my pleasure in it a little bit: the last few lines. Why mention the Magi and the shepherds leaving? To me, it adds an unpleasant touch of melancholy, since the "classic" assembly has broken up. (Yes, I realize the Magi may not have actually arrived until long after the birth.)

But that's a small detail, compared to what's wonderful about it.

I've long been of the belief that "home" is the most powerful word in the English language. At least, it's the word that I find most powerful; more powerful than "love", "we", "yes", or even "God".

It's a powerful word, but it's not a simple word. We all know that you can live in a place for ten years, or any amount of  years, without it ever becoming "home". Similarly, you can come to a place for the first time and suddenly feel you're home. Like in the John Denver lyric:

He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year

Coming home to a place he'd never been before.

The idea that the Christmas nativity scene is a place where "all men are at home" is a powerful one, and is also explored in Chesterton's great poem "The House of Christmas". It hardly needs any commentary; I think we all feel it instinctively. But it's quite strange and wonderful, to think that this imaginative reconstruction of something that happened long, long ago, in a culture that is totally foreign to us, can have such a sense of homecoming about it.

One phrase that especially delights me in this passage is: "It is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken". It makes think of those evocative words from Scripture: "A bruised weed shall he not break, and a smoking flax shall he not quench". It puts into words an impression I've had all my life: that, although money talks and political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun, the things that ultimately move the world the most are the most airy and insubstantial.

But my favourite part of the passage is this part, which excites me beyond all words: "It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within."

Reader, how can I express how deeply this stirs the depths of my soul? But perhaps I don't have to. Perhaps everybody, or at least many people, feel the same thing. Why else is that moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Lucy gropes her way through the fur coats into another world, so memorable? Or why else has The Secret Garden enthralled the imagination of so many generations?

Personally, I've had literal dreams about finding "an inner room in the very heart of his own house"; although often it's much more than a room. Similarly, every since I was a child, stories of hidden panels, trap doors, secret passages, and things found in the attic have not only thrilled me, but thrilled me in a particular way different from any other. It's the idea that there are horizons to be discovered, not at the other end of the world, but right where you are; or perhaps, even within your own self.

Jacob Rees-Mogg Explains the Immaculate Conception

Watch it here.

I like Jacob Rees-Mogg-- it would be hard not to like him-- but I've long feared he's mostly a Thatcherite merely posing as a social conservative. It seems clear from this video that his Catholicism is indeed important to him, and integrated with his intellectual view of the world.

And here's another good video in honour of the feast, from the excellent Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne.

I wish you a happy and holy Feast-day!

The Coat-Hanger Christmas Tree

Thirteen years ago, I posted this review of The Coat-Hanger Christmas Tree, a Christmas book that greatly appealed to me in my childhood.

I've just discovered you can read it on the Internet Archive. (You need to register, but it's free.)

No need to tell me how much you hate reading books on a screen if that's how you feel. You don't get any points for that.

The Magi by W.B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats's supremacy as a poet seems so clear to me that I'm baffled other people don't agree. Even his third-tier or fourth-tier poems are magnificent. No praise is high enough.

This one came into my head today, since it's Advent, and since I found myself re-reading "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot, which is also brilliant. Yeat's poem predates Eliot's by more than a decade. It's hard to believe it wasn't an influence.

I wouldn't call it one of my favourite poems or even one of my favourite Yeats poems, but it's still brilliant.

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

I think this is an example of a techinique Yeats liked to use; a long, sinuous, contemplative sentence, finishing with a bold, startling statement.

Here is another example, though it has nothing to do with Christmas:

The Living Beauty

I bade, because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood,
My discontented heart to draw content
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but when we have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men:
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

Chesterton on The Vile Assurance of Victory

Because I was rather critical of my idol G.K. Chesterton yesterday, today I want to quote one of my favourite paragraphs from his Autobiography. He is speaking of the public reaction to the Boer War in Britain:

It seemed that all moderate men were on what was called the patriotic side. I knew little of politics then; and to me the unity seemed greater than it was; but it was very great. I saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the street, my own middle-class and most of my family and friends, solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scientific and secure. And I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.

What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law. As the war proceeded, indeed, it began to be dimly felt that it was proceeding and not progressing. When the British had many unexpected failures and the Boers many unexpected successes, there was a change in the public temper, and less of optimism and indeed little but obstinacy. But the note struck from the first was the note of the inevitable; a thing abhorrent to Christians and to lovers of liberty. The blows struck by the Boer nation at bay, the dash and dazzling evasions of De Wet, the capture of a British general at the very end of the campaign, sounded again and again the opposite note of defiance; of those who, as I wrote later in one of my first articles, "disregard the omens and disdain the stars". And all this swelled up within me into vague images of a modern resurrection of Marathon or Thermopylae; and I saw again my recurring dream of the unscalable tower and the besieging citizens; and began to draw out the rude outlines of my little romance of London. But above all, perhaps, what began to repel me about the atmosphere of the adventure was something insincere about the most normal part of the national claim; the suggestion of something like a rescue of our exiled representatives, the commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the Outlanders. As this would have been the most sympathetic plea if it was genuine, it was the more repulsive if it was hypocritical.

Now, I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of the Boer War. That's not the source of my interest in this passage.

It's more that Chesterton puts into very eloquent words my own reaction to the liberal-globalist-secular agenda that has been on the ascendant in the West for many decades: "I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.... I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law."

Although the liberal-secular-globalists have taken a bashing in the last decade or so, and their vile assurance of victory is considerably dented, I still experience a bubbling up of this feeling whenever I come across that horrible phrase, "the right side of history."

First off, who is to say what the "right side of history" is? "History" is constantly changing its mind.

Biut more importantly...even if the liberal-globalist-secular crowd are entirely right, and they have somehow identified the impersonal, unstoppable laws of history that are sure to prevail, like Isaac Asimov's laws of psychohistory...

Even then, and especially then, I would consider it cowardly and craven to identify with the coming thing, the unstoppable force, simply because it's unstoppable and destined to prevail. If I've stood up for what I truly believe to be right, I don't much care what "history" happens to say on the matter

Protestant Bashing and Catholic Triumphalism

I've come to have a very strong dislike of the phenomena mentioned in the blog post title, which I believe are very prevalent in conservative Catholic circles. (Sometimes, bizarrely enough, they can even be found in liberal Catholic circles.)

In his excellent (though frequently over-egged) essay "Notes on Nationalism", George Orwell has this to say about G.K. Chesterton: "Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad."

Now, I don't think this is at all fair, but Orwell isn't making it up out nothing, either. Chesterton did sometimes become tiresome in his chauvinism towards the Catholic world. The criticism can be taken too far, because he did have valid points to make about the influence of Catholic theology on everyday life. Nor do I like to criticize anyone for idealizing anything; idealization seems like a very endearing fault, if it's a fault at all. It's when we idealize one thing to disparage another that it becomes distasteful, in my view.

An example of Chesterton's attitude is this (admittedly funny) story from his Autobiography:

"In those early days, especially just before and just after I was married, it was my fate to wander over many parts of England, delivering what were politely called lectures. There is a considerable appetite for such bleak entertainments, especially in the north of England, the south of Scotland and among certain active Nonconformist centres even in the suburbs of London. With the mention of bleakness there comes back to me the memory of one particular chapel, lying in the last featureless wastes to the north of London, to which I actually had to make my way through a blinding snow-storm, which I enjoyed very much; because I like snowstorms. In fact, I like practically all kinds of English weather except that particular sort of weather that is called "a glorious day." So none need weep prematurely over my experience, or imagine that I am pitying myself or asking for pity. Still, it is the fact that I was exposed to the elements for nearly two hours either on foot or on top of a forlorn omnibus wandering in a wilderness; and by the time I arrived at the chapel I must have roughly resembled the Snow Man that children make in the garden. I proceeded to lecture, God knows on what, and was about to resume my wintry journey, when the worthy minister of the chapel, robustly rubbing his hands and slapping his chest and beaming at me with the rich hospitality of Father Christmas, said in a deep, hearty, fruity voice, "Come, Mr. Chesterton; it's a bitter cold night! Do let me offer you an oswego biscuit." I assured him gratefully that I felt no such craving; it was very kind of him, for there was no possible reason, in the circumstances for his offering me any refreshment at all. But I confess that the thought of returning through the snow and the freezing blast, for two more hours, with the glow of that one biscuit within me, and the oswego fire running through all my veins, struck me as a little out of proportion. I fear it was with considerable pleasure that I crossed the road and entered a public-house immediately opposite the chapel, under the very eyes of the Nonconformist Conscience."

I'm not going to make heavy weather (no pun intended) of this simple story (although I doubt the "worthy minister" was offering Chesterton nothing but a biscuit-- surely tea or coffee was also on the menu). On its own it would merely be amusing. Possibly the minister was a bit of a prig. But the tone of flippancy (bordering on sarcasm) which Chesterton nearly always assumes when he writes about Protestants, Nonconformists, or the temperance movement does rankle with me.

In Ireland this phenomenon can frequently be found among secular post-Catholics, who like to make ironic jokes about "black Protestants" despite their own contempt for the Church. For instance, the more literary-minded often invoke this famous passage in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

Or the song which Brendan Behan, that pillar of Catholic orthodoxy, sang on a television interview (I've bowdlerised it slightly):

Beware the Protestant minister:
His false reason, false creed, and false faith;
The foundation stones of his temple
Are the gonads of Henry the Eighth.

It's not so much the original occurrence of these quotations that I'm complaining about, as the satisfaction with which so many Catholics, liberal Catholics, and post-Catholics have dwelt upon them. (I can't find quotations now. The problem with an article like this is always that it's  a reaction to a hundred unremembered provocations.)

Please let it be understood that I'm not complaining about this sort of thing because it's "offensive". The last thing I ever want to do is join in the chorus of political correctness. I'm complaining about it because it's so petty, ungenerous, unchivalrous, and redolent of the very nursing of historical grievances which is the underlying atmosphere of liberalism and political correctness.

The Reformation happened a long time ago. I believe that its legacy has been played out for some considerable time. It was probably played out by the time of G.K. Chesterton, but we have less excuse than he did for hanging onto it. I'm sure Protestantism did give birth to secularism, to some extent. But the child doesn't much resemble the father, and the child has long since dumped the father in an old folks' home.

I particularly dislike the concept that Vatican II "Protestantized" the Church or the Mass. We can debate the legacy of Vatican II, and if we did so, I would often be on the same side as the people who make this "Protestantizing" charge. But we should debate the reforms on their own merits, not looking over our shoulders at another religious denomination. That shows a lamentable insecurity-- like the stereotypical woman who's upset because another woman is wearing the same dress. (I'm sure these women exist mostly or entirely in fiction and jokes. It's just an example.)

Constantly defining oneself against someone or something else has obvious perils. One becomes reactionary in the worst sense. Differences become fetishized, and similarities overlooked. As much as I love differences, and generally prefer to celebrate them more than similarities, I think obsessing on differences can lead to a distorted view in this case. Besides, the people who dwell on Protestant-Catholic differences are rarely doing it in a celebratory way.

All Protestant churches are, after all, splintered from the Catholic Church (whether or not they accept this), so they inevitably resemble it to a greater or lesser extent. Nor does it seem unreasonable to assume that schismatic churches sometimes excel the Catholic Church in this or that regard; for instance, Protestants often excel Catholics in Scripture-reading (I mean in frequency and seriousness, rather than interpretation).

(Another example is the King James Bible. In purely literary terms, it's clearly superior to any other Bible in the English language.)

I don't think we should ever refrain, out of excessive sensitivity, from plain talking. Yes, Henry VIII's desire to commit adultery (and pillage the monasteries) was the overriding factor that led to the English Reformation. But it was far from the only one, and there were brave Protestant martyrs as well as Catholic martyrs. Yes, the Church of England today is disintegrating in a puddle of woke. But there have been, and doubtless still are, very holy Anglicans, not to mention untold numbers of sincere Anglicans who were doing their best. The Church of England has made a huge contribution to English culture which is in many ways very admirable. And so on.

It's enough for me that the Catholic Church is (as I firmly believe) the Church founded by Christ; indeed, the one true Church, although I don't see the virtue in throwing that phrase around. Catholicism doesn't have to have the best music, the best artistic heritage, the best customs, or the best anything else. I feel no call to proclaim the virtues of "Catholic culture" or to extol the Middle Ages. I'm mildly interested in the question of whether Shakespeare was a Catholic, and I'll admit that I'd be pleased if it was conclusively proved that he was. But I don't care all that much. I'm uninterested in cathedrals. I don't care for beer. I'm much more drawn to cold, introverted, Protestant cultures than I am to hot, flamboyant Catholic cultures-- fika sounds more appealing than samba! Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh both seem like jerks to me, although I think Brideshead Revisited is a masterpiece.

Conversely, my belief in the truth of Catholicism isn't threatened in acknowledging the virtues and the elements of truth in non-Catholic churches.

(I could pretty much write the same blog post about Irish nationalism and anti-Englishness, by the way.)

Prayer Offer

I'm trying to spend more time in prayer over Advent. If you have any prayer requests you'd like me to include, just leave a comment or email me directly at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com.

Favourite Poems: Sunday Morning by Louis MacNeice

I prefer Advent to Christmas. I prefer the weeks leading up to the holidays, when the workaday world (which I love) is still thrumming along, but there's Christmas lights and Christmas decorations everywhere.

I actually don't like it to end, so every Christmas I find myself contemplating a Christmas tree or an Advent wreath or some such seasonal spectacle, trying to step outside the stream of time and immerse myself in the moment.

It's one of the tragedies of the human condition that we can never fully achieve this. 

C.S. Lewis put it masterfully, in an essay on storytelling: "In real life, as in a story, something must happen. This is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside. Other grand ideas – homecoming, reunion with a beloved – similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so – well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted? If the author’s plot is only a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more?"

In poetry, this thought has been expressed superbly by Louis MacNeice in his poem "Sunday Morning". I've never liked Sundays myself, and I prefer the working week to the weekend, but the idea he's getting at is probably universal. The paradox is that his poem does, to a certain extent, achieve the very thing it claims to be impossible. Perhaps nothing ever achieves it better than art.

Sunday Morning by Louis MacNeice

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Different Meanings of the Word "Tradition"

A quick post, mostly a note to self, about different meanings of the word "tradition". As regular readers will know, I'm all about tradition, so I'm interested in its different and overlapping senses.

(Isn't that interesting in itself, that so many words have different and overlapping senses-- as though meaning is inherently plural and fuzzy?)

So here are some meaning of "tradition" that occur to me:

1) Something like a holiday, or a fair, or a celebration, that happens at regular intervals, and is self-consciously practiced as a tradition.

2) A custom or practice that occurs regularly, although not necessarily at fixed intervals-- it could be many times a day. Shaking hands, for instance.

3) A custom or practice that occurs at intervals, but not at fixed intervals. For instance, the "gun barrel" sequence at the start of a James Bond film. Or eating popcorn at the cinema. Basically, when X happens, Y traditionally also happens.

4) A highly identifiable way of life, with discipline and rules and expectations. For instance, the Carmelite tradition.

5) The traditions of a sub-culture, such as the punk or heavy metal tradition.

6) The traditions of a whole society over time, such as the English tradition or the Irish tradition, or even the Western tradition.

7) Aesthethic traditions, such as the tradition of English poetry. What T.S. Eliot was writing about in "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

8) Aesthetic traditions that are really sub-traditions, often not perceived straight away. For instance, that Harry Potter is in the tradition of Enid Blyton. 

9) Local or family stories passed orally from generation to generation. "There's a local tradition that Shakespeare once stayed at the inn."

10) Intellectual traditions, such as the Marxist tradition or the Jungian tradition.

11) A "tradition" meaning a corpus of law or interpretation; the Common Law tradition, the Westminster parliamentary tradition, the Talmudic tradition.

12) An old-fashioned or customary way of doing something, used as a simple adjective: "She was raised in a very traditional household."

I suppose there are many more. Any obvious ones I'm leaving out?

Advent

And so our Advent journey begins!

I swiped the picture above from a blog called Fr. Julian's blog. Curious to see if it was still updated, I found Fr. Julian had moved to a new blog, and its latest post is this excellent suggestion to counter "Black Friday"  with "White Friday". 

Fr. Julian isn't specific on what this would entail, but I think one good suggestion is to avoid all shopping (except groceries etc.) on that day.

Yes, I love traditions. Almost all traditions. "Black Friday" is one tradition I think we can do without.

What Was on TV in my Home Growing Up (Part One)

Note: As has fairly frequently happened on this blog, I started writing this as a standalone blog post and decided towards the end that it would have to be the first instalment in a series.

I'm a compulsive compiler of lists and records. For instance, I have a spreadsheet of all the films I can remember seeing, which I regularly update. It's probably an unhealthy habit. I don't want anything to go unchronicled.

Recently, it occurred to me to list all the TV shows which were watched in my home, growing up. Obviously this is going to be a "dynamic list", as they say these days-- or an ongoing task, as I'd be more inclined to put it myself.

I've been ashamed of watching television my entire life. I think its influence on society was catastrophic. Still, that horse has long since bolted. And, although the initial and overall effect of TV on society was bad, that's not to say everything about it was or is bad.

The TV in my own home was constantly on. My father was a TV addict. He was also perhaps the most well-read man I've ever known, which is especially impressive given that he left school aged eleven and did manual jobs for most of his working years. He could, and did, recite long passages from Shakespeare, Yeats, and a whole host of other authors. The flat was full of books (hundreds or perhaps even thousands of books) that he'd bought. But he was also a TV addict, and would fall asleep watching television every night. Not only that, but he'd instantly wake up if you switched it off! To be fair, he was also a current affairs addict, so that was a big part of his TV viewing. But he watched pretty much everything else, too.

So TV is the background to all my domestic memories. And I didn't go out much as a child, being quite timid and shy.

Although I grew up in a housing estate that was euphemistically termed "disadvantaged", we did have one advantage-- at a time when most of Ireland had only the two Irish TV channels, we always had the British channels as well. Then we got satellite TV as soon as it came along. According to Wikipedia, "The Ballymun Flats were the first homes with cable television in Ireland". When I first heard about satellite TV, I genuinely assumed the studios were in a satellite orbiting the earth (although I quickly worked out this wasn't the case and felt silly for thinking it).

For many years, our television was a black and white portable. My father would even watch snooker on it. It had no remote control. In fact, even the dial had come off at one stage. You had to change the channels using a pair of pliers.

Well, enough background. I've broken my list into several categories. The first is...

Shows That Were a Big Deal in my Childhood and Teens

...either because I loved them, or because several members of my family loved them.

The top spot undoubtedly goes to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can hardly exaggerate the influence this show had on me. I wrote a whole blog post about it.

Although I can remember watching the original series, I barely understood what was happening. The only thing I really remember is the closing credits sequence. For me, The Next Generation is the gold standard of Star Trek. In fact, I've come to pretty much hate the original series, rather unfairly, because every time I mention Star Trek that's what people bring up. It's as though people started talking about Sexton Blake every time you mentioned Sherlock Holmes.

I could write reams and reams about TNG-- so I won't. I used to watch it with all three of my brothers, the only show that brought us together like that.

I also watched Deep Space Nine, which I also liked, but not as much. Much later on, in my adulthood, I watched Voyager and really liked it (possibly more than TNG, although it could never have the same impact). I was derided for this at the time but Voyager is now the most streamed Star Trek.

After TNG, Fawlty Towers was probably the biggest show in my childhood. Me, my parents, and one of my brothers would all watch it together. We not only watched it on TV but also rented it from the video shop, and each episode had the sense of an occasion. My father always treated it as the pinaccle of TV comedy, and I think he was right. My mother would often quote lines from "Waldorf Salad" (there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that this was the greatest episode, although "The Germans" was also a contender).

Only Fools and Horses was another big show, although it didn't have the same sense of event as Fawlty Towers, perhaps because it was more long-running. (Still, it might surprise you that there were only sixty-four episodes made altogether.) My father always said that the show declined when it introduced enduring romantic interests for Del and Rodney, but I disagree. I think it actually got a lot better then. It became "dramedy" rather than pure comedy, which I like.

To round off this category, there is The Late Late Show. This was like the fireside of the Irish nation; its host Gay Byrne was known as "Uncle Gaybo". I often fell asleep on Friday evenings watching it, or perhaps just sitting in the room with it on, the weekend stretching ahead of me.

Children's Shows

The Den was more a "strand" than a show. It was children's after-school programming, comprised of various different shows, all presented by a human host. It really hit its stride when the human host was joined by two puppets, aliens called Zig and Zag, who became a phenomenon in Ireland. Later there was a turkey with a broad Dublin accent called Dustin, who was even better. All three puppets were mildly subversive and therefore massively popular.

There were also "strands" of children's programming on British channels, like Fun Factory on the new Sky channel.

I can't remember which "strands" showed which programmes, except that The Den must have shown the few homegrown Irish productions.

There was one famous (or infamous) show called Bosco which centred on a puppet who lived in a box. He had red hair and a squeaky accent. I really hated Bosco but watched it anyway. It was for young children.

There was a pop-culture centred show for teenagers called Jo Maxi, which is Dublin slang for "taxi". I didn't like this much and usually didn't watch it, but it was on anyway.

The most famous Irish children's TV show of all time is Wanderley Wagon, but I only have very vague memories of watching this once or twice.

Much less famous is Anything Goes, a sort of "zany" variety show which I liked as I always aspired to be zany and eccentric. But even as a kid I could see it was pretty poor stuff. 

So much for the Irish productions.

One of my all-time favourite cartoons was Ulysses 31, a Japanese science fiction cartoon which relocated Greek myths to space. It was excellent. Ulysses and his crew were trying to get home (to Earth), and I think "the journey home" is the most powerful narrative of all. It featured a blue-faced alien girl called Yumi, who competes with Diana from V as my first crush of all time. (Another show that exposed me to Greek myth was Odysseus, the Greatest Hero of them All, presented by Tony Robinson, though I only have vague memories of this.)

Shamefully, I really loved a cartoon called Beverly Hills Teens, which was just about a bunch of rich teens in Beverly Hills.

As this blog post is already too long, I'm just going to close it off with a list of children's shows I remember from my childhood, and move onto other categories in a future post.

Cities of Gold. From the people who made Ulysses 31, but on this occasion followed a bunch of kids in pre-Columbian America, at the time of its discovery. Had magical elements.

Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. A very strange science-fiction show which involved motorcycling heroes fighting plant people.

Danger Mouse. Not really my thing, though the London backdrop appealed to my anglophilia.

Batman (Adam West version). I honestly didn't realize this was tongue-in-cheek and got frustrated that the villains escaped from the State Penitentiary every week. What was the point?

You Can't Do That on Television: Mildly subversive Canadian TV show which I enjoyed.

Chockablock: a British educational show for young children, where a presenter drove around a room full of machines in a vehicle like a go-kart. This is so obscure that, until the internet came along, I thought I'd imagined it or misremembered some other show-- even though I had a very accurate memory, as it turned out. But nobody else seemed to remember it!

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I remember He-Man's backstory really bothered me, as it seemed full of contradictions, so I came up with my own alternative version once, in the school playground.

Transformers. I loved the toys and the comics, but the cartoon was never as good, though I wanted to like it.

The Trap Door was a rather witty and self-aware British animated series involving monsters that emerged from the titular trap-door. Loving anything to do with mysterious doors or portals, I gobbled it up.

A list of kids' shows which I watched, but I don't really have much to say about: Thundercats, Top Cat, Alvin and the Chipmunks (I hated it, but still watched it), Count Duckula, Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds, The Flintstones, the Jetsons, MASK, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Dungeons and Dragons, Fraggle Rock, The Amazing Adventures of Morph (which disturbed me), Bananaman, Rainbow, Sports Billy, Button Moon, Wacky Races.

Wow, compiling that list makes me realize I watched a lot of trash. And there's probably many more titles to add. The only thing that consoles me is that, going through a list of 1980's children's programmes on Wikipedia, there are many more that I never saw.

One peculiar footnote: for someone who was to become such a reactionary, I had absolutely no interest in the vintage black-and-white TV shows that were shown as part of kid's programming. I mean shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or Get Smart or (bizarrely) Mrs Muir and the Ghost. I can remember the title credits, but never watched more than a few minutes of any of them. There was one show called Comedy Capers, which was a compilation of supposedly funny scenes from old black-and-white slapstick films. I felt complete and utter withering contempt for this. I regarded it as the bottom of the bottom of the barrel, and wondered if anybody actually watched it!

Favourite Poems: The Man from God Knows Where by Florence Wilson

The Irish nationalist tradition has given rise to a great wealth of poetry and ballad-- untold thousands of ballads and poems. Many (perhaps most) are indifferent, or even doggerel. Of the rest, their literary value is on a continuum-- many have the charming crudity appropriate to ballads, many have flashes of brilliance in this or that line or verse, and some of them are gems.

Here is a gem: "The Man from God Knows Where" by Florence Wilson, first published in 1918.

This poem featured in an anthology entitled Rich and Rare, which I read again and again in my teens. Yes, it's a long poem, and it's in dialect (though easily understood dialect), but I think it's worth reading. It's astonishingly accomplished, subtle, and even polished (despite the homespun register it's written in). One thing that lifts it above most patriotic poetry is the repeated shift in mood and atmosphere which occurs throughout the poem. This also makes the last, rousing verse all the more powerful.

Another thing that lifts this poem above most patriotic poetry is the rhyme pattern-- not the usual ABAB or AABB. Judge for yourself, but I think it gives the last line of every stanza a note of anticipation, which works very well given the subject matter.

It's about Thomas Russell, a leader of the 1798 rebellion.

Calling this one of my "favourite poems" is a bit of a stretch, but it's one that I greatly admire, so I include it in the series. It fuifils one of the criteria for poems I really love: that lines from it often come into my head unbidden. For instance, when some project or plan is foiled, I often find myself thinking of these lines:

But no French ships sailed in Cloughey bay
And we heard the black news on a harvest day

That the Cause was lost again

Although, to be honest, I always remembered the first line of that quotation as "But no ships sailed into Botany bay". Apparently Botany Bay is in Australia. I didn't know that. It might as well have been in Ireland for all I knew. My ignorance of geography is colossal, despite many efforts to Improve it.

I know nothing about Florence Wilsdon except that she wrote at least one magnificent poem. (And it's not at all what one might think of as a "girly" poem, which is neither a bad nor a good thing in itself-- but it's impressive for a poem written so convinciningly from such a masculine perspective to be written by a woman.)

The Man from God Knows Where by Florence Wilsdon

Into our townlan' on a night of snow

Rode a man from God knows where;

None of us bade him stay or go,

nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe,

But we stabled his big roan mare;

For in our townlan' we're decent folk,

And if he didn't speak, why none of us spoke,

And we sat till the fire burned low.

We're a civil sort in our wee place

So we made the circle wide

Round Andy Lemon's cheerful blaze,

And wished the man his length of days

And a good end to his ride.

He smiled in under his slouchy hat,

Says he: 'There's a bit of a joke in that,

fFor we ride different ways.'

The whiles we smoked we watched him stare

From his seat fornenst the glow.

I nudged Joe Moore: 'You wouldn't dare

To ask him who he's for meeting there,

And how far he has got to go?'

And Joe wouldn't dare, nor Wully Scott,

And he took no drink - neither cold nor hot,

This man from God knows where.

It was closing time, and late forbye,

When us ones braved the air.

I never saw worse (may I live or die)

Than the sleet that night, an' I says, says I:

'You'll find he's for stopping there.'

But at screek o'day, through the gable pane

I watched him spur in the peltin' rain,

An' I juked from his rovin' eye.

Two winters more, then the Trouble year,

When the best that a man could feel

Was the pike that he kept in hidin's near,

Till the blood o' hate an' the blood o' fear

Would be redder nor rust on the steel.

Us ones quet from mindin' the farms

Let them take what we gave wi' the weight o' our arms

From Saintfield to Kilkeel.

In the time o' the Hurry, we had no lead

We all of us fought with the rest

An' if e'er a one shook like a tremblin' reed,

None of us gave neither hint nor heed,

Nor ever even'd we'd guessed.

We men of the North had a word to say,

An'we said it then, in our own dour way,

An' we spoke as we thought was best.

All Ulster over, the weemin cried

For the stan'in' crops on the lan'.

Many's the sweetheart and many's the bride

Would liefer ha' gone to where he died,

aAd ha' mourned her lone by her man.

But us ones weathered the thick of it

And we used to dander along and sit

In Andy's, side by side.

What with discourse goin' to and fro,

the night would be wearin' thin,

yet never so late when we rose to go

but someone would say: 'do ye min' thon' snow,

an 'the man who came wanderin'in?'

and we be to fall to the talk again,

if by any chance he was one o' them

The man who went like the win'.

Well 'twas gettin' on past the heat o' the year

When I rode to Newtown fair;

I sold as I could (the dealers were near

Only three pounds eight for the Innish steer,

An' nothin' at all for the mare!)

I met M'Kee in the throng o' the street,

Says he: 'The grass has grown under our feet

Since they hanged young Warwick here.',

And he told me that Boney had promised help

To a man in Dublin town.

Says he: 'If you've laid the pike on the shelf,

You'd better go home hot-fut by yourself,

An' once more take it down.'

So by Comber road I trotted the grey

And never cut corn until Killyleagh

Stood plain on the risin' groun'.

For a wheen o' days we sat waitin' the word

To rise and go at it like men,

But no French ships sailed into Cloughey Bay

And we heard the black news on a harvest day

That the cause was lost again;

And Joey and me, and Wully Boy Scott,

We agreed to ourselves we'd as lief as not

Ha' been found in the thick o' the slain.

By Downpatrick goal I was bound to fare

On a day I'll remember, feth;

For when I came to the prison square

The people were waitin' in hundreds there

An' you wouldn't hear stir nor breath!

For the sodgers were standing, grim an' tall,

Round a scaffold built there foment the wall,

An' a man stepped out for death!

I was brave an' near to the edge of the throng,

Yet I knowed the face again,

An' I knowed the set, an' I knowed the walk

An' the sound of his strange up-country talk,

For he spoke out right an' plain.

Then he bowed his head to the swinging rope,

Whiles I said 'Please God' to his dying hope

And 'Amen' to his dying prayer

That the wrong would cease and the right prevail,

For the man that they hanged at Downpatrick gaol

Was the Man from God knows where!

Brave New World Dystopianism and 1984 Dystopianism

I'm reading a dystopian novel right now, and it's got me thinking of two different sorts of dystopianism; Brave New World dystopianism and 1984 dystopianism. 

Both novels are masterpieces, of course. I read Brave New World when I was very young (maybe even pre-teen). Although I've never re-read it, many aspects of it have stuck with me. I didn't read 1984 until my twenties, but I've read it several times since. In purely literary terms, I think it's a much better work-- perhaps even the novel of the century after Lord of the Rings, in my view. And I've seen the Peter Cushing film version (also a classic) at least twice.

1984 is, of course, a self-conscious response to Brave New World, and they could be contrasted in many ways. But right now I'm thinking of a particular contrast: the contrast between a dystopia that works all too well, and is horrifying for that reason, and a dsytopia that doesn't work at all, and is horrifying for that reason.

My contrast could be argued with. You could say, rightly enough, that the dsytopia in 1984 does indeed work; that it works perfectly in the way the Party intends it. I concede that. But still, the Party is lying to its people, while the World State of Brave New World doesn't lie to its people (as far as I can remember). It delivers a degrading happiness and a techno-utopia, while the society of 1984 is decaying in every way, including scientifically.

In other words, it's a society that's gone horribly right, and a society that's gone horribly wrong-- to borrow terms from the website TV Tropes.

Although I prefer 1984 to Brave New World, I've always been braced for a Brave New World dystopia rather than an Orwellian one.

For instance, opponents of the European Union often say that the project is doomed to failure because you can't yoke so many different cultures and economies together. But my fear is that the EU will work, that it will go horribly right; that the free movement of peoples and all the other homogenizing tendencies within the EU will indeed erode the languages, cultures, and customs of the individual nations.

Similarly, my fear with artificial intelligence is that it will achieve all the things its champions predict it will. (Although my fear of this has rather diminished recently, since there seems to be widespread acceptance that it's already plateaud-- for now. My fear of the this long predated the current surge of AI, when I read an article by Alan Turing insisting that machines could become intelligent. He should know, I thought.)

I realize this is a difference of temperament rather than an intellectual one.

As a bit of a postcript, Brave New World was actually my very first encounter with the magic of Shakespeare's language. A few Shakespearean quotations used in it captivated me. I've wondered since whether this is because of their inherent beauty of because they came with Shakespeare's prestige, or both.

The first and most powerful is from King Lear: "The wheel has come full circle; I am here". The drama of that still fires my imagination. (Except I remembered it as "the wheel has turned full circle", and I actually prefer that.)

And then there are these lines, quoted from The Tempest: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will play about my ears, and sometimes voices."

And of course, the line from The Tempest which gives it its title: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in't!".

I've always said The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, although I feel a bit pretentious saying it, since I've never even seen a film version, and I've only read it a few times. It's the atmosphere as much as anything else-- and the idea that has grown up that Prospero is Shakespeare achieving a serenity in his final years, as evoked by Louis MacNeice:

When hardly bothering
To be a dramatist, the Master turned away

From his taut plots and complex characters
To tapestried romances, conjuring
With rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray
And from then turned out happy ever-afters.

Another Bad Joke

Who was the most popular comedian in Anglo-Saxon England?

Woady Allen!

An Entry from Tony Benn's Diary

Monday, 21st February 2005

"Got up at 6:45 because I wanted to be the first man in the Notting Hill supermarket in Notting Hill Gate. There was nobody hanging about, but I put myself in front of the door, and when the door was unlocked, I got in first. There were a lot of managers all clapping. They had these cup-a-soups, which I love. They also had ice cream. They had little pizzas. They had vegetarian burgers. I was really pleased."

Even radical leftists have their endearing side.

A Real Groaner For You

Which soccer team do zombies support?

Moan United!

Another Tradition Blog Out There

Regular readers will know of my other blog, Traditions Traditions Traditions! I'm saying they'll know about it, not that they'll care about it. It's clear that nobody cares about it so far, except for me and my monkey. And I'm not even sure about my monkey, to be honest.

Anyway, I was checking to see if it would show up on a google search (it didn't). But I did find this other traditions blog, In Search of Traditional Customs and Ceremonies, which looks absolutely delightful.

I haven't had a good look at it yet, but it seems to be focused mostly on quaint local English traditions.

It's not exactly soothing on the eye, but it's been going since 2012, and still seems to be regularly updated. I look forward to many hours of browsing it!

From the Dictionary of Irish Biography Entry on Patrick Duigenan

Patric Duigenan (1735-1816) was a convert to the Church of Ireland, a vehement opponent of the Catholicism he had been born into, a lawyer, a politician, and a secretary of the Orange Order. I love this paragraph from his entry in the indispensable DIB:

Duigenan's character was a mass of contradictions; he could swing alarmingly, and inconsistently, from one position to another. He was rude and overbearing in public, always feuding with someone, yet in private was renowned for his kindness and good humour. Involved in at least two duels, each time he acquitted himself strangely; on one occasion he refused to fire, a second time he brought a blunderbuss on to the field. The extremism of his writings was not helped by his style: he wrote rapidly and never checked what he had written, believing that this would only lead him to delete the most offensive sections.

Read the whole thing here, if you're so inclined.

An Updated Version of My Lesser-Known Irish Words and Phrases List

Whenever it comes to a discussion of Irish slang and idioms, it's always the same handful that come to mind; eejit, craic, bold, etc. But there's loads of others that are used all the time but that never really make it into such lists, since we're barely conscious of using them.

So every time I find myself using a lesser-known Irishism, or hear one, I add it to the list.

Today I found myself using the word "loola", meaning "lunatic", and added it to the list. I decided I might as well post the list with all the latest additions. I've put expressions in bold which occur pretty much on a daily basis. I'm confident in saying that the expressions in bold would be used thousands of times every day in Ireland.

Others are less common; most Irish people to whom I mentioned the expression "sent from Billy to Jack" had never heard it. Nevertheless, it is indeed used and it's only used in Ireland. Do an internet search if you don't believe me.

So here we go:

Youu’re some flower (You’re quite a character).

The biggest (or greatest) such-and-such that ever walked out (e.g., “The greatest liar that ever walked out”). Never used as a compliment.

Sent from Billy to Jack (Being sent from one person, department etc. to another). Quite rare.

You’re a star (Thank you).

Tell me this and tell me no more (Asked for emphasis before asking a question).

Get out of that garden (Stop messing about). Usually jocular.

You’re very good (Thank you).

You're some tulip (You’re quite a character). Rare.

At all at all (Used for emphasis).

Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye (Ending phonecalls).

He's a total looper (He’s crazy).

You're some boy (You’re quite a character).

In the ha’penny place (Not as good as someone else).

No bother to you! (You could easily do that).

What is this I was going to say? (Said when you lose your train of thought. I've never heard any non-Irish people say this.)

In the name and honour of all that’s good and holy (For emphasis). Rare these days, or jocular.

Fussing and foostering (Fidgeting and behaving restlessly). I get the impression this one is quite archaic, although when I mentioned it to other Irish people, they'd heard it. I've only ever heard it from my mother, who died in 2001.

Moidered (Exhausted, harassed, pestered).

Hurler on the ditch (Someone who gives advice about something they don’t do themselves).

Pass remarkable (said of someone who makes snide comments, or just intrusive comments. "He's a very pass remarkable kind of guy"-- he's the kind of person who passes remarks.)

Mílemurder (pronounced meela-murder, a combination of Irish "míle", meaning thousand, and murder. Basically means 'blue murder', a hubbub, a commotion. One of my favourites.)

The Irish Gaelic phrase "rí-rá agus rúla-bula", pronounced ree-raw ogus roola-boola, and meaning uproar and commotion, is fairly often used in Hiberno-English. I think the constituent elements are used on their own more often, to mean the same thing. Indeed, I've never actually heard the whole phrase used, to my knowledge. Always used jocularly.

Loola (mad).

I will in my eye. (I absolutely will not. "I will in my eye pay to use the bathroom". Can also be used to express scepticism about something that somebody else supposedly did: "She did in her eye get up at six in the morning".)

An Attempt at an Aphorism

Humility smells great, but tastes terrible.

Footnote, which is going to be several times longer that the post: I'm personally not at all keen on artificial intelligence, so I was partly pleased and partly disconcerted at the AI-generated explanation which came up (unsolicited) when I googled this aphorism, to see if anyone else had said it before me. I was pleased because my aphorism obviously conveys what it's supposed to convey if AI understands it in a jiffy. Disconcerted because the advance of AI scares me, even though I realize it's not actually thinking. Anyway, this is what it said:

The phrase "humility smells great but tastes terrible" is a metaphor for a difficult truth or virtue that is admired but unpleasant to experience. Humility is seen as a great quality that makes one admirable, but the act of being truly humble can feel demeaning, especially when it involves acknowledging one's own limitations or being perceived as "too" humble, which can be harmful. The phrase uses a play on the senses to express this complex idea: while humility is a virtue that smells "good" (is a positive thing to have), putting that virtue into practice can have a negative "taste" (be an unpleasant experience).

Smells great: Humility is often described as a virtue, a positive quality that is respected and admired. It makes people seem better, more relatable, and easier to work with.

Tastes terrible: The experience of being humble can be difficult. It might involve acknowledging that you don't know everything, admitting you're wrong, or putting someone else's needs before your own. These actions can be uncomfortable and feel like a sacrifice, even if they are ultimately for the best.

The metaphor: The phrase draws a parallel between the abstract concept of humility and the physical experience of taste and smell. The smell (how others perceive it) is positive, but the taste (the internal, personal experience of it) is negative. This highlights the difference between an admired virtue and the personal cost of practicing it.

Habemus Cathedral!

Dublin has an official cathedral for the first time since the Reformation!

I wrote this about the (formerly) Pro-Cathedral in a fairly recent post, "The Atmosphere of Dublin":

Another strange one-- the Pro-Cathedral seems quintessentially Dublin to me. I hated it as a child. My father used to take my brother and me into it to light a candle every now and again (probably not more than five times in all). It seemed dark, musty, reminiscent of death and mortality, haphazardly laid-out, and ramshackle. Now, of course, all these things appeal to me.

Presumably people will still call it "the Pro-Cathedral". I'll be disappointed if they don't!

Bliss

I've been contemplating this post for a good while. But I've put off writing it, both because it's about something that's very important to me and because it's something that's very hard to put into words.

For many years, I've been aware of a contradiction in my own personality. Temperamentally I'm a pessimist, but philosophically (for want of a better word) I'm an optimist.

When it comes to my own life and experiences, I nearly always expect to be disappointed. I nearly always anticipate that things won't work. This extends to very mundane things. If I make a joke and somebody laughs, I'm both delighted and amazed. (People who have heard my jokes will probably say this is entirely justified.)

But it extends to bigger things, as well. Don't ask me who's going to win the next big election or referendum that we all care about. My answer is always: "The side that I'd like to see lose."

Similarly, the current indications of a revival of Christianity flabbergast me. I didn't expect to see this in my lifetime.

So I'm a pessimist by nature. And yet I've never been attracted to philosophical (or artistic) pessimism.

I've generally been drawn to optimistic art and entertainment. For instance, Star Trek, which is not only optimistic but downright utopian. Or Groundhog Day, which is all about a cynical jerk learning to appreciate the beauty of everyday and ordinary. Or the US version of The Office, which is deeply sentimental and upbeat under its upper layer of cringe comedy. Or the "Fanfare for the Makers" section from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

(Not that I never like pessimistic entertainment. But I like it as an astringent cordial.)

The last day of the twentieth century was a big day for me, because I won a millennium poetry competition organized by ITV Teletext. My poem drew on Lord Alfred Tennyson's famous "New Year's bells" section from In Memoriam-- "Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring out the thousand years of peace"-- and contrasted it with the horrors of the twentieth century. But it ended on a defiantly hopeful note:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky--
Though every hope may be disproved
May none see through such jaundiced eye
As to regard this night unmoved--

Although so many a New Year peal
Brought forth so many a hope untrue
Still whisper with unvanquished zeal
Ring out the old, ring in the new;

Ring in the new, ring out the old;
For who can say that hopes are vain?
And if they fail a thousandfold
May others hope them all again.

So I'm a pessimist by nature but an optimist by choice.

In some ways, being a thoroughgoing pessimist leads to an optimistic view of the world-- or, at least, a relatively approving view of the world. Things are never quite as bad as a pessimist expects (most of the time). If you are not currently living through war, famine, plague, or anarchy-- well, things could be much worse.

(There's an amusing illustration of this in a Tom Sharpe novel-- one of the WIlt novels, though I forget which one. Wilt describes Lord of the Flies as a sickeningly sentimental novel, since the author actually seems surprised and outraged that an island of schoolboys would descend to barbarity!)

But this route to optimism from pessimism isn't just a reaction to circumstances, at least in my case. It's a reaction to the underlying conditions of existence. For instance, I've often found myself feeling grateful for the fact that most of us, most of the time, confidently expect to live another day and another year. I can imagine a world where this wasn't the case, not just in times of war or sickness but in times of peace and health. What if all human life was literally as precarious as a war-zone?

The poetry of Louis MacNeice nourished (and expressed) this sense of pessimistic optimism, or pessimistic gratitude. But don't worry, I'm not going to divert into MacNeice just now.

As you can imagine, the discovery of G.K. Chesterton in my late twenties was an epoch in my life. Principally because Chesterton carried me over the finish line of faith in Christianity, but also because he vindicated and amplified this innate sense of gratitude and wonder, under all my pessimism.

Out of dozens of possible Chesterton passages I could quote, the "abyss of light" passage from Chaucer might be the best: "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."

Al of this, however, is a sort of prologue to what I really wanted to write.

I really wanted to write about bliss-- an underlying sense of bliss which has accompanied me all my life, as far as I can remember. Even in the shadow of my general pessimism and melancholy.

More than anything else, this bliss resembles a faint music which can just about be heard, or which comes in and out of hearing, and which underlies everything.

When I look back at my infancy and childhood, I remember a lot of boredom and frustration and other negative emotions-- but all the time, shot through with the sense of bliss underlying everything.

This sense of bliss seems like both an underlying reality and an anticipation, an anticipation of something unspeakably wonderful which throws every other joy and happiness into the shade.

I'm sure this is a common human feeling, even among atheists and secularists-- hence the many social philosophies that beckon us towards a heaven on earth, or which "immanentize the eschaton". Of course, for religious believers, it's a premonition of Heaven, or the Beatific Vision, or some equivalent. In the words of Tennyson, it's:

That far-off, divine event

To which the whole creation moves.

I'm sure that almost all of my readers are thinking of C.S. Lewis and "Joy" right now-- as well they might. There's an obvious resemblance between the "bliss" I'm describing here and the Joy that Lewis has described so well. If there's a difference, it might be that Joy seemed to be a fairly rare experience for Lewis, while the "bliss" I'm describing is more habitual. (I might be wrong about that.) I'll come back to Lewis and Joy later.

Where Lewis had his Joy, Wordsworth had his "spots of time". I'm not saying all these experiences are the same, they certainly resemble each other.

(Honest to God, I didn't use the term "bliss" to differentiate it from Lewis's "Joy". I wasn't even thinking of the Lewis comparison when I started writing this post!)

If this sense of bliss was all anticipation, it might be seen as a curse-- a sort of evolutionary carrot on a string to keep us soldering on through the hardships of life.

But it's not just that. It's as much a bliss in things as they are as it is looking forward to some future happiness. In fact, both seem linked to me: every moment of bliss seems like a beacon towards some ultimate bliss.

C.S. Lewis, in a famous passage that is always worth quoting, lists a few triggers (if I dare use that word?) of Joy: "the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves."

I have my own list of triggers when it comes to bliss:

The titles of various films, books, albums, etc. For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier or Mornings in the Dark or "There is a Light That Never Goes Out".

Particular words and phrases. ("The dead of night", "The middle of nowhere", "The old, old story..")

The hum of voices on the air, especially in a place in which a current of life is always passing through: a hotel lobby, an airport concourse, etc.. Or the hum of voices in the air at a special event such as an election count centre, a conference, a convention, an open day, or so forth.

Anything to do with the iconography, symbolism, and associations of the cinema; the stylized image of a reel of celluloid, an old-fashioned cinema marquee, a TV presenter addressing the camera in an empty cinema, studio logos, and so on.

Every stylized symbol that is used to evoke a whole atmosphere; such as a lit cityscape at night for the Big City, or a cartoon palm tree for reggae music, or a glitterball for the seventies.

The sounds that water-pipes make; tapping, the whistling of wind, gurgling, and so forth. Along with many other sounds.

Anything that evokes "the drunkenness of things being various", as Louis MacNeice so memorably put it. For instance, the Trivial Pursuit board.

Anything that evokes a tradition; a Halloween bonfire, a Chrismas tree, an Advent wreath, a menorah, etc.

Various idents, such as this one, and this one, (The Carlton one brings back happy memories of my peak cinema-going days, in my early twenties.)

I could go on and on. Indeed, I doubt I'll resist the temptation of adding to this list in the future.

But you get the picture, and I may as well end it there. I hope I have explained, to some extent at least, how I can regard myself as a melancholy pessimist who still exults in the gift of life, the magic of existence itself.

Strangely Unexploited Story Ideas

Another quick post. (I'm working on something else, and, as ever, my mind is popping all over the place.)

I was a keen reader of the UK comic Eagle in the nineties. The most famous serial in Eagle was "Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future". But by the time I came to it, the comic had absorbed any number of other comics, as was the custom in the British comic industry. (When one comic went out of business, its more successful serials migrated to another comic.) So Eagle was a curious mixture of science-fiction, horror, war, and humour.

One less-celebrated serial in Eagle was "Toys of Doom", about a rather unlikeable boy who had an army of mechanical toys who followed his commands. He operated them by remote control. He'd inherited them from a relative, I think. The story itself was a spin-off from a previous serial, as I've learned recently (but didn't know at the time).

I remember I loved "Toys of Doom". I appreciated that its central character was a not particularly sympathetic kid, which is how I felt myself to be at the time (and I was largely right). But I also liked it because it had a premise so full of potential. I can't remember any plot details, but I remember turning to it with pleasure and anticipation every week. 

Here's the thing: it's a great premise for a story. And yet, I can't remember ever encountering a similar story, despite the number of other plot-lines that are regurgitated!

Interesting Survey of Priorities from American Priests

A very quick post..

The 2025 National Survey of Catholic Priests (in the USA) was recently released, based on answers from 1,165 priests. It can be read here.

The graph displaying these priests' pastoral priorities, on page fifteen, makes for very interesting reading.

The top three priorities (in order, and out of fifteen) are: youth and young adult ministry, family formation/marriage preparation, and evangelization.

The bottom three (again in order) are: synodality, LGBTQ community, and access to the Traditional Mass.

If it's reliable, it's a snapshot that complicates both liberal and conservative narratives.