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.

The Four Seasons and the Platonic Forms

When does summer begin? I've always thought of summer as May to August, so today is the beginning of summer.

At any rate, we've had summery weather for at least a week already. Blue skies, fluffy clouds, lots of sunshine, and all that.

When I was a kid, I thought (instinctively) of the four seasons as momentous events, that had a being of their own aside from the sequence of time. That a glorious summer's day, or a snowy winter's morning was somehow participating in-- or beckoning towards-- an ideal state of summer or winter, one that was timeless as well as existing in time. That there was a genius temporis as well as a genius loci.

I have to constantly remind myself that there isn't actually such a thing, at least in common reckoning.

(The fact that everything has a timeless as well as a time-bound aspect seems to me to be one of the great sources of poetry in life.)

Is this sensation familiar to anybody else?

(Anything that evokes the seasons is incredibly poetic, in my view. For instance, the very title A Winter's Tale.)

What Does a Turtleneck Mean?

A passing reference to turtleneck sweaters in this blog post by William M. Briggs has me thinking about this sartorial feature.

I've never warn a turtleneck myself, to my recollection. But I've always been intrigued by them. They seem to signify something, but what is it?

(They were generally called polo-necks in my childhood, but turtleneck seems to be the favoured term today.)

Briggs mentions them in the context of the 1970s, with particular reference to Leonard Nimoy in the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also wore them frequently on In Search Of..., an unsolved mystery show he presented. (It's gloriously corny, and available on YouTube.)

Another famous turtleneck-wearer from this time is Carl Sagan, popularizer of science and presenter of the TV series Cosmos, in which he spread the lie that the Great Library of Alexandria had been destroyed by Christians.

Our third fan of the turtleneck is Michel Foucault, superstar of Francophony philosophy and purveyor of various weird and out-there theories, particularly the idea that Everything Boils Down to Power (perennially popular with the left, and some on the right).

We all know about Steve Jobs, although to be honest his turtleneck is kind of minimal.

Then there is John Shaft, that bad mother-- (shut your mouth!), and  the protagonist of one of my favourite films.

Admittedly, I have no ladies in the above gallery. They've become more a male accessory in recent decades, but they were also popular with the ladies in the seventies. (Come to think of it, I have heard many complimentary references to female necks-- white, swan-like, etc.-- but never such a reference to a male neck, which might have a bearing on this.)

Some years ago, I became friends with an elderly gent who habitually wore a turtleneck. He's since passed away, God bless his soul. He was a cantankerous dude, but an entertaining raconteur and self-mythologizer. His turtleneck seemed a part of his persona.

Perhaps it's significant that turtlenecks have never become common, per se. Even at their height they were a minority choice, or so it seems to me.

So, what does a turtleneck signify?

Well, more than anything, I associate it with big and mind-bending ideas. If you have big and mind-bending ideas, you might wear a turtleneck. Why, I don't know. Perhaps because it's unconventional.

What do you think a turtleneck signifies?

Five Star Films

My last post was about the film My Dinner with André, which I've been watching again recently. It's grown so much on me over the years that I've decided to give it my ultimate accolade: five stars out of five on my legendary "Films Seen" Excel sheet. (Legendary to who, you ask? Legendary to me, that's who.) I also decided to bump Inception up to five stars, which seems long overdue.

At the same time, I demoted some other films to four-star status, such as A Hard Day's Night, The American President, and The Chronicles of Riddick. There's only one criterion for a five-star film: that I want to watch it over and over again, that I never get tired of it.

Here is the list as it stands. Out of 1378 films, only twenty-three get five stars!

Shaft
Pulp Fiction
Munich
Kill Bill
The Aviator
Hot Fuzz
The Dukes of Hazzard
Cromwell
Shadowlands
The Way, Way Back
Groundhog Day
This Is Spinal Tap

The Naked Gun
Naked Gun 2-and-a-Half: The Smell of Fear
Naked Gun 33-and-a-Third: The Final Insult
Trading Places
Dead of Night
From Beyond the Grave
Scream
The Wicker Man
The Breakfast Club
My Dinner with André

Inception

My Dinner with André

In my last post, I mentioned the 1981 film My Dinner with André. It's an almost two-hour film which consists of two old friends having a long conversation. It sounds like a gimmick film, and I suppose it is, in a way. But it's also very absorbing and entertaining. I actually wish there was a whole genre of such films.

Additionally, some of the subjects touched on have become even more relevant in the intervening decades, as a thousand clips circulated on social media attest.

You can watch it all on YouTube here, at the time of writing. Actually, the film has been freely available on YouTube for years, which I always take as an indication that the copyright holders don't really mind too much.

It's also the film that introduced me to one of my favourite pieces of music, Erik Satie's Gymnopédie Number One.

What Should We Talk About? What Should We Think About?

This increasingly seems to me like a major and timeless human problem. Human beings need activity-- they need something to do. They need a focus. They also need something to talk about. We require interaction with other human beings, for its own sake as much as for any purpose we might put it too. So what form should those interactions take?

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I tend to agree with Wally. We all have moments of pure euphoria or contentment or contemplativeness. But...we can't live like that. We have to do something, to think about something, to talk about something.

(And honestly, for me, those moments have been moments of plenitude rather than moments of pure simplicity.)

No matter how much you believe in the primacy of some particular activity, there's still inevitably lots of time left over. It's impressive and moving to read about great Christian saints who could spend hours on end in prayer. But few of us have that kind of purity, and even those saints seemed to have time and energy left over. Similarly, even the purest aesthete can't really live just for art, even the purest workaholic can't live just for work...

Besides, most art needs to be about something, all work needs to be about something...it has purpose inherent to it. So it can't really be its own purpose, ultimately, although it can to some extent.

And then there's the other problem, the one I started with. What do we talk about? And where can that talk go?

It seems reasonable to me to hold this belief: we should organize society and organize our lives in such a way that there's more rather than less to talk about. We should deliberately avoid simplifying and rationalizing things in such a way that there's less to talk about. Or think about.

(One of my personal bugbears in this regard is the "live and let live" philosophy of life. It's tolerant, yes. But it's very boring. Surely there's a happy medium between the Salem witch trials and all those depressing modern proverbs: "You do you", "Whatever floats your boat", "It's all good"...I don't want to be ruled by bigots. But I'd rather have coffee with a bigot than the sort of person who extends the zero aggression principle to not even criticizing anybody else's choices.)

Ironically enough, I have a great deal more to say about this, but that might be enough for now.

"We're All Adults Here"

This phrase is an interesting one because it's only ever used because people aren't behaving like adults, or because we anticipate that they won't behave like adults.

So how "adult" are adults if the phrase is such a common one?

Sources of the Sublime

This morning, I watched this discussion between Peter Hitchens and a pantheist philosopher. Peter Hitchens has settled firmly into his "grumpy old codger" phase and now regularly turns up to interviews but refuses to defend his beliefs, insisting that he's not trying to convince anybody of anything. It reminds me of Fr. Fredrick Copleston's famous retort to Bertrand Russell, when Russell denied that the universe needed an explanation: "If you refuse to sit at the board you can't be checkmated."

But that's by the by. The part of the inteview that prompted this blog post was where the philosopher claimed that various highly secularized society have been shown to be the happiest, while many religious societies are less happy.

This is the sort of statistic that used to bother me when I was an agnostic seeker. It doesn't really bother me anymore, for several reasons:

1) I'm increasingly sceptical of these findings. Social science is incredibly ideological and I simply don't have faith in its claims. I would have to examine the methodology of every single study to accept them, and even then, how can I know that the results weren't faked? Should the citizens of the Soviet Union have believed the social science produced by their universities?

2) Even if it's true, what is happiness? It's a big question. Hitchens opposes happiness to pleasure in his own answer. That's one criticism. I think there are others.

I like Nietzsche's line: "Man does not seek happiness. Only the Englishman does". (This was  swipe at English utlitarian philosophers.)

Obviously, misery is not desirable and people need a base level of happiness for any kind of human flourishing to be possible. But I think that there are a lot of things which we believe we would be happier without, but whose loss would actually grieve us-- over time.

Which brings me to my actual point-- the sublime. I think that many conservatives (myself included) are motivated by a desire for the sublime-- for themselves and for others.

(The sublime is actually difficult to pursue on your own. The achievement of the sublime is generally collaborative, both in the present and over generations).

I think that many of the things that liberals are now seeking to erode are sources of the sublime:

1) Organized religion, even for non-believers. Liturgy, feasts and fasts, hymns, ceremony, hierarchy, religious taboos, the sense of the sacred, all of that.

2) Masculinity and femininity.

3) National traditions and national identity (as well as ethnic traditions, regional traditions, etc.)

4) Marriage and the family.

5) Childhood innocence.

6) Inconvenience. Society is, in many ways, becoming ever more convenient and the gain in convenience is often outweighed by the loss of the sublime, even if it's a mild form of the sublime. Think of how people get nostalgic about camping and all the discomforts attendant upon that. Or how some streaming services have gone back to releasing TV series through weekly episodes, rather than all at once, to retain the pleasure of a communal experience rather than individualized binge-watching. (Admittedly, it's not really liberals who are pushing for this one, and they are often on Team Tradition in this case.)

7) The reading of poetry, and the enrichment of ordinary language and thought which is brought about by lots of people being familiar with a substantial corpus of poetry. (Again, conservatives are just as much to blame as liberals here.) 

Here's a simple example. In old books one frequently comes across this line from Browning: "But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". It's one of dozens or perhaps hundreds of lines of poetry which it was simply assumed the reader would recognize.

Another example. On a long-ago episode of The Late Late Show, Ireland's oldest TV programme, I remember the host Gay Byrne talking about some old department store and saying: "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod." He could simply assume that a large amount of viewers would recognize this was a quotation from Hopkins. It added a certain elevation to his patter. I can't imagine the current host doing this.

Is it possible I'm projecting my own sensibilities onto other people? Yes. But I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite: that everybody really does care about the sublime, and become very nostalgic and regretful when one of its sources are removed.

A Lame Joke

A: Have you heard of the Mandela Effect? It's a phenomenon where people swear they remember something differently to how everybody else remembers it.

B: Wait, isn't that called the Gorbachev Effect? It was yesterday.

Personally, I think the Mandela Effect might explain artificial intelligence "hallucinations". The timeline is being altered too quickly for humans to notice it but computers are quick enough to catch it.

Favourite Poems: "Autobiographical Fragment" by Kingsley Amis

Which is better: a life of ease, or a life of exertion? This is an old theme in poetry (and art and mythology) but it's never been tackled more wittily than in this little-known poem by Kingsley Amis.

It has a remarkable resemblance to the famous poem "Toads" by Philip Larkin, his best friend. Aside from the theme, they both have the same slack metre and loose rhymes, not to mention the same basic structure. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if there's a story behind it.

Autobiographical Fragment by Kingsley Amis

When I lived down in Devonshire
The callers at my cottage
Were Constant Angst, the Art Critic
And old Major Courage.

Angst always brought me something nice
To get in my good graces
A quilt, a role of cotton-wool,
A pair of dark glasses.

He tore up all my unpaid bills
Went and got my slippers.
Took the telephone off the hook
And bolted up the shutters.

We smoked and chatted by the fire
Sometimes just nodding
His charming presence made it right
To sit and do nothing.

But then-- those awful afternoons
I walked out with the Major!
I ran up hills, down streams, through briars
It was sheer blue murder.

Trim in his boots, riding-breeches
And threadbare Norfolk jacket
He watched me, frowning, bawled commands
To work hard and enjoy it.

I asked him once why I was there
Except to get all dirty.
He tugged his grey mustache and snapped:
"Young man, it's your duty".

What duty's served by pointless, mad
Climbing and crawling?
I tell you, I was thankful when
The old bore stopped calling.

If this theme interests you, you might like my previous post "My Fondness for Death, Sickness, Grief, and Melancholy."

A Source of Human Dignity

Very often, I get excited about things that nobody else seems to get excited about, or maybe they just don't talk about them.

Recently I was telling somebody a story about something dramatic I saw on the street that morning. Even though the story was about an event that was unpleasant in itself, I realized that I took tremendous pleasure-- disproportionate pleasure-- in telling the story, and in my listener hearing the story

There's something very magical about stories, even rather mundane stories. One person is recreating, in their imagination, something that another person experienced. They inevitably add details and colouring of their own. And-- is it fair to say they add something else, at least sometimes-- "the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration, and the poet's dream"?

Each time a story is told, this magic is heightened-- so, when we get to a story such as that of Archimedes jumping out of the bath, it has attained the status of legend, the atmosphere of legend.

I found myself pondering why I get so excited about this, and it led me to a thought that has occurred to me many times.

It is, in my view, a great source of human dignity that every person's experience is utterly unique. Everybody sees and hears things that nobody else hears or sees. Obviously, this applies to internal experiences as much as external experiences.

You can learn everything about everything but you will never know what it's like to experience the same things as somebody else. Memory is irreducibly personal.

And the great thing is that this uniqueness applies no matter what you do. It reminds me of the Waterboys song:

I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon.

Somebody who spends their whole life in bed, perhaps an invalid, experiences something that a globe-trotter doesn't.

Does anybody know what I'm getting at here, and do you agree? I must admit that recently I'm getting very self-conscious about the things that excite me and don't seem to excite anybody else. (And no, I'm really not humblebragging that I'm so unique and deep and misunderstood.)

P.S. This fascination with stories, and even stories within stories, has been much on my mind this week because I've been rewatching Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a Canadian-American horror anthology for young teens. The framing device is the Midnight Society, a gang of kids who tell spooky stories around a campfire in the evening-- although they don't seem to meet at midnight.

The series is remembered very affectionately because it didn't lower the bar just because it was aimed at kids. The stories are often very high quality, and even feature twists you might not see coming. And they can be quite scary. You can see it all on YouTube if you want.

Anyway, stories-within-stories have fascinated me all my life. My favourite part of a Sherlock Holmes story has always been the client calling into 221B Baker Street and briefing Holmes and Watson on the details of the case. Similarly, I love horror films such as Dead of Night with the same format.

I've tried reading The Arabian Nights, the Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales is the only one I finished. I found the others fairly tedious, to be honest-- shame on me, no doubt.

And I even found The Canterbury Tales tough going, but I read it a long time ago. I do remember enjoying parts of it.

Anyway, here are two freaky coincidences that happened to me this week.

1) I asked a colleague if he had ever seen Are You Afraid of the Dark? He said: "I was just talking about it two minutes ago with C----", another colleague.

2) I'd already been thinking about giving The Canterbury Tales another go when I went to meet a friend who I meet every week. We always meet at the same spot, a book exchange shelf. As soon as I went to meet him, my eye was struck by The Riverside Chaucer on the exchange shelf. I picked it up. "Yeah, take that", he said. "I just put it there."

(But if I do give The Canterbury Tales another go, it won't be that edition, which is in archaic English. That's how I read it before. I think I'll try a modern English translation this time.)

Any suggestions of other works of fiction (on screen or page) which involve tales-within-tales are most welcome. I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell recently, looking for just this. It was very good, and it is indeed full of tales within tales-- but there's no actual frame narrative. Each tale randomly breaks off and is succeeded by another, and so on, until the second half of the book when each of them are concluded in turn. Interesting in its own way, but not what I was looking for.

(As with all such fictions, the most boring story is the longest. This seems to be an iron law of fiction.)

A Twenty-Year-Old Review of Porterhouse Blue

Here's more from my old blog. I still like Tom Sharpe (now RIP) though I haven't read him in a while. When I say I'm an anglophile, this is the kind of thing I mean-- quite apart from Shakespeare and Constable and all that.

Porterhouse Blue

Tom Sharpe

rating: 5/5

“To Skullion, emerging sleepily from the back room, the sight of the Dean in his dressing-gown holding the knotted end of an inflated contraceptive had about it a nightmare quality that deprived him of his limited amount of speech. He stood staring wildly-eyed at the Dean while on the corner of his vision the contraceptive wobbled obscenely”.

That’s pretty representative of a Tom Sharpe paragraph. Academics, incongruously buttoned-up prose and ludicrous situations are the order of the day. Of course, all farce is about contriving weird scenarios, but Sharpe does it so much more ingeniously than most. His plots are like Fawlty Towers scripts, taking relatively harmless elements and stirring them together to create spectacular explosions.

I made a happy discovery the other day; a load of Tom Sharpe books in The Secret Bookshop (which certainly lives up to its name, since I was only alerted to its existence that week), going at three euro apiece. I’m not going to review them all here, but since Porterhouse Blue is his most famous and the best I’ve read so far, it’s the obvious choice.

The funny thing about this book is, though I’d always loved the title, it made me a imagine a book that was pretty much the yin-yang opposite of Porterhouse Blue. I thought Porterhouse was some kind of alcoholic drink (I was only sixteen) and the title evoked a rich royal blue liquor in a shapely bottle; it had the timeless, tranquil air of a still life. I imagined it was a very staid and contemplative talky book about the human condition, possibly set at the height of the Victorian era, and containing a climactic scene where Penelope Carmichael has a moment of epiphany watching birds eating crumbs in the garden.

Porterhouse is actually a Cambridge college, the nadir of scholarship and the zenith of snobbery, and a Porterhouse Blue is a slang-term for a stroke brought on by the dons’ sybaritic lifestyle. (A blue ribbon, known as a blue for short, is awarded in Oxford and Cambridge for sporting achievement.) A former Porterhouse boy, a left-leaning politician, returns as Master to modernise the college, proposing female students and Fellows, contraceptive dispensers and a self-service canteen rather than the lavish kitchens the Fellows have enjoyed for centuries. There’s also a resident graduate student with a guilty lust for his horribly obese cleaning lady, a servile porter who will stop at nothing to uphold the current regime and a TV presenter who specialises in making documentaries about the passing of the good old days.

Sharpe’s view of human nature is jaundiced in the extreme– virtually everybody in his novels is motivated by some kind of spite, greed or perversion– but his temperament is basically reactionary. He doesn’t romanticise the past (the Fellows of the college and their titled and privileged past students are shown as stupid and callous) but his sting really comes out when he is aiming at the liberal left. Although he seems to hate modernism more for its philistinism and illiteracy than for any more social or political animus. (It’s nice to read Sharpe at one point– I can’t find the passage– describe somebody as being mad only in a figurative sense to mean angry rather than insane.)

His strongest suit is probably the description of his characters’ thought processes. Sharpe’s subject matter, bawdy farce, might lead you to think his books are written in the style of a Sun newspaper article, but nothing could be further from the truth. He is in fact a former academic himself, and not averse to literary name-dropping or giving an occasional flourish of scholarship.

For instance: “The image of Mrs Biggs, a cross between a cherubim in menopause and booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on Fall Out and the Andaman Islands and even Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion by Allard but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity– spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign– and whose third worldiness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism”.

Another reason I like the seventies Pan editions of Sharpe’s books is so trivial I’m almost ashamed to mention it; I love the inky, compact typeface that they’re printed in. There’s something robust and earthy about it. Not enough attention is paid to typefaces. Does the meaning of a sentence subtly change from Times New Roman to Cooper Black? You know, I think it just might.

The Front Room

This week, I sent a friend my poetry collection Suburbs of the Soul. Don't rush to Amazon to buy your own copy. It's not available online. Or in the shops. Or anywhere else. It is, in fact, a PDF document I put together in about an hour, issued by my personal imprint Snowglobe Press (who also "publish" my hand-drawn birthday and Christmas cards).

The "collection" is twenty-eight pages long (with photographs I copied and pasted), containing some of the poems I wrote over thirty years.

Re-reading them, I honestly think some of the poems I wrote in my teens and twenties (and afterwards) were pretty good. So much work went into them. And so much thought!

Here is one I don't think I've ever published on the blog, but which I think is fairly good. It was inspired by an actual photograph of an actual "sweet girl graduate" (to quote a different poem on a similar subject), clutching her script and wearing her mortarboard, in an actual front room. I wrote it in 2003.

The Front Room

Whoever took a photograph that was not sad?

A million mantlepieces bear their tender gloom

Of seasons all gone sour, and dreams gone to the bad,

And summer sunlight chilly with the touch of doom.

Those fragile smiles, those background faces’ vacant stares!

(The dust motes flicker in the front room’s morning sun.)

What camera caught these troubled glances, unawares?

Whose sombre face is this, so failing to have fun?

But sadder than all of these, the "happiest moment" snaps;

The beaming bride, the rose-cheeked girl in mortarboard.

Surely joy lingers here? Perhaps. And yet perhaps

These pictures capture all the joy our lives afford.

Look deep, and see the wistfulness their bright eyes hide.

(The lonely front room tingles with the old clock’s chime.)

What shade lies on this graduate? What ails this bride?

What sadness tinctured in the darkroom of sly Time?

The Best Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Episodes

My favourite podcast of all time is Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. Jimmy Akin is a Catholic apologist and a polymath. In this series, he talks about various "mysteries" with Dom Bettinnelli, his genial co-host.

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is very much in the tradition of TV shows such as Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of.. (although it's considerably less sensationalized than that one), as well as the Ripley's Believe It Or Not franchise. I've loved that sort of thing all my life. (My favourite example was a kid's book called The Giant Book of Fantastic Facts.)

The show is from a Catholic perspective, and some of the topics are of special interest to Catholics (like Marian apparitions), but mostly they are of general interest. In each episode, Jimmy examines the mystery "from the twin perspectives of faith and reason".

I'm usually a latecomer to TV shows and podcasts, but this one is an exception. I've followed it from the very first episode, having already been a fan of Jimmy Akin.

One of the things I like about the podcast is how comparatively seriously they take it all. There are plenty of jokes and moments of light relief, and some of the episodes are humorous in nature, but for the most part the tone is endearingly earnest, rather than hilarious or tongue-in-cheek. Each mystery is unfolded in a methodical and even somewhat academic manner.

I haven't listened to every episode, or even anything close to it. I generally skip the UFO episodes, of which there are many. (I find UFO stories boring and corny, and don't believe any of them.) I'm not keen on the parapsychology episodes, either.

My favourite episodes are those which introduce me to a mystery I'd never even heard about before, or which analyze a mystery which is somehow one of a kind. 

So, without further ado (I love that phrase, here are my favourites:

https://sqpn.com/2019/05/fatima/

Well-trodden ground for most Catholics, but it's so interesting and astonishing, it never ceases to be of interest. And it's fun to hear a well-known mystery get the Mysterious World treatment.

 https://sqpn.com/2019/06/the-voynich-manuscript/

A strange manuscript, which came to light in modern times but whose vellum been carbon-dated to the fourteen century. Written in a language (or code) that nobody has been able to decipher. Truly a unique mystery.

https://sqpn.com/2019/07/joseph-smith-mormon-prophet/

I've been fascinated with Mormonism from my twenties. Jimmy and Dom are always kind and respectful, but Mormonism's founder doesn't come out well from this examination.

https://sqpn.com/2019/08/the-betz-sphere/

A small steel sphere which came to public knowledge in the seventies, and supposedly had many strange properties. I'm very sceptical about this one, but I'd never heard about it, and it's interesting. 

https://sqpn.com/2019/10/numbers-stations/

Mysterious radio stations where numbers are read about at repeated intervals. Sometimes includes a call signal. There's not much mystery about these. They undoubtedly exist, and everybody knows their purpose: to transmit coded messages to intelligence agents. But they're still extremely creepy and fascinating. A new one has been started recently, broadcasting to Iran.  

https://sqpn.com/2020/04/david-koresh-waco-siege-branch-davidians-texas-apocalypse/

I knew next to nothing about David Koresh, even though I remember the story being in the news all those years back. And I find cults interesting. The sequel episode, in which the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidian complex is described, is also interesting.

https://sqpn.com/2020/08/ruby-ridge/

Not really a "mystery", per se, but a compelling story about another disastrous raid. I'd never heard about it before.

https://sqpn.com/2021/08/the-exodus-did-it-happen/

I'm a fairly sceptical guy. I've always found the story of the Exodus kind of hard to swallow and wondered if it's to be taken as literal truth. This episode provides some surprising evidence in its favour.

https://sqpn.com/2021/11/d-b-cooper-the-hijacker-who-got-away/

Ah, D.B. Cooper. Who doesn't love this one? The hijacker of a commercial flight who managed to parachute away from the plane with a lot of money, although he probably didn't survive the jump. But nobody knows for sure!

https://sqpn.com/2022/02/our-lady-of-kibeho-marian-apparition

I'm fascinated by Marian apparitions and I knew very little about this one.

https://sqpn.com/2022/04/the-green-children-of-woolpit/

This is about as singular and one-off as it gets. A medieval English legend about literal green-skinned children who appeared out of nowhere. So many incidental details about the story give it a certain plausibility.

https://sqpn.com/2023/03/joshua-abraham-norton-first-american-emperor-emperor-norton/

This is one of the "funny" episodes, and it is absolutely charming. About an eccentric who proclaimed himself an Emperor and was indulged by many people.

https://sqpn.com/2023/05/the-amazing-story-of-iron-mike-malloy-michael-malloy-mike-the-durable-murder-trust/

Another funny episode, about a syndicate who decided to kill a drinking buddy (and Irishman) for insurance money. However, he seemed impossible to kill. Not really that funny, I suppose, since they did kill him and went to the hot chair.

https://sqpn.com/2023/11/our-lady-of-zeitoun-egyptian-apparition-coptic-church/

Jimmy Akin has named this the most persuasive of Marian apparitions and it's hard to argue with that. It was filmed!

https://sqpn.com/2024/09/the-zodiac-killer-crimes/

The show tries to avoid too many true crime episodes, which is laudable. I'd never really paid much attention to the Zodiac Killer until I listened to this episode, then I was fascinated by the subject for a while. It also got me to watch the 2007 movie Zodiac, which can hardly be praised too highly.

https://sqpn.com/2024/11/investigating-medjugorje/

I've never paid that much attention to Medjugorje. I've always been a sceptic. Jimmy and Dom devote three episodes to the subject, and....well, I came away more sceptical than ever. But interesting stuff, for sure.

https://sqpn.com/2024/12/the-man-from-taured/

An absolutely fascinating story of a man from an apparently non-existent state, who was detained by Japanese police in 1960. I'd never heard of this before.

https://sqpn.com/2025/04/jack-the-ripper/

I've never been particularly interested in Saucy Jack, but this is a good distillation of the head-spinning number of theories that have proliferated down the decades. They did several episodes on this one.

https://sqpn.com/2025/10/the-tennessee-prophet-john-hendrix/

A man who seems to have prophesied the building of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project. Absolutely captivating.

https://sqpn.com/2025/12/the-amazing-sea-monkeys/

Unless it's false memory syndrome, I'm pretty sure I can remember encountering advertisements for these critters, which were first marketed in 1962. One of my colleagues was actually given some as a gift, when he was a kid. He thought they were lame, although apparently they have their own fandom.

The guy who came up with the idea is interesting for other reasons, which are quite shocking.

So what are you waiting for? Go and listen to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World!

Polybius

Have you ever heard the urban legend of Polybius? Here is a perfectly adequate summary from Wikipedia:

Polybius is an urban legend about a mysterious arcade video game. According to the legend, the game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981. The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.

Polybius is probably my favourite spooky urban legend-- despite the fact that it's a manufactured urban legend. That is, it seems to have been started by an online article in 1998. (Although, tantalizingly, it does draw on various rumours about video arcades back in the eighties.)

Here are some the reasons I find the story so spooky:

1) The strangeness of the name Polybius. It's not the sort of name you'd associate with a nineties video arcade game. (Admittedly, I don't know much about nineties video games.) It's the name of an ancient Roman historian. I seem to recall that the choice of name might have been a nod to something Polybius wrote about mass hysteria, though I can't remember where I read that. I find this oddly sinister.

2) The fact that the game's "cabinet" was said to be a plain black cabinet, and that the game itself was "abstract and geometric". I also find this oddly sinister.

3) The understatement of the story. Although the above summary mentions players of the game dying and going mad, most of the accounts I read-- or perhaps this is just the version I preferred to remember-- didn't go so far. Instead they mentioned that the game was addictive, and that it gave people nightmares, hallucinations, and insomnia. This is somehow much creepier, in my view.

4) The fact that the scary element in this story is the opposite of everything that is traditionally scary. Video arcades are public, busy, modern, and high-tech (for the time). Spooky legends tend more towards deserted, abandoned, dark places. Why this should make the story scarier, and not just more original-- I'm not quite so sure of that. (The obvious answer is to say: because it suggests that dark forces can strike us anywhere, even in mundane and modern settings. But I don't think that's it, somehow.)

5) The lack of any final climax, pay-off, or "reveal".

So, do you find the story scary?

I think I'll have much more to say on the subject of why I find particular stories scary, and why I seek out particular stories. It's one of those topics where I want to write about it to form my own thoughts, as well as to communicate them. 

An Incidental Query

Would a world full of idealists be a better world, or a worse one?

It's not a rhetorical question. I'm interested in what people think.

Loves and Hates From Twenty Years Ago

Going through my twenty-year old blog, I was interested to find this list of loves and hates. I've changed my mind on many of them, while with others I feel exactly the same today.

First, I listed the hate. Comments from Present Me in italics.

1) Travel bores. No change.

2) Travel-writers/writing. No change.

3) People who dilly-dally in queues. No change.

4) People who walk slowly in front of you in a narrow passage-way. No change.

5) Sideways (movie). I was too hard on this. It wasn't a bad movie, I just found its cult irritating.

6) Shrek (movie). I can't even remember why I put this on the list.

7) People using “oh” when they mean “zero” or “nought”. No change.

8) Bob Dylan. I'm not sure why I put Bob Dylan down. Probably, again, because of his cult. I don't know a lot of his songs even today, but the ones I know, I like. And he seems like a good guy.

9) Republicans/Unionists. I've completely changed my mind about this. If republican means "res publica" (the common good), I consider myself a republican, and even an Irish republican-- despite my fondness for monarchy. As for the unionists, I've come to greatly admire them for their loyalty to their heritage. Basically, in our socially atomised and banalised society, I tend to admire anyone who cares about heritage or national loyalty.

10) Robert de Niro. I don't have strong feelings about him now and wonder why I put him on the list.

11) Jack Nicholson. I've come to like him a lot.

12) Sneering, mean-spirited humour, no matter how funny. Prime example: The Simpsons. I still hold by the principle, although I would no longer accuse the Simpsons of this.

13) Anti-semitism posing as liberalism. I still hate anti-semitism, but I've also become wary of accusing anyone of prejudice-- it's such an easy charge to make, and such promiscuous accusations are the bread and butter of political correctness/woke.

14) Most of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. I no longer feel so strongly about this, and I wonder why I ever felt strongly enough to put it on the list.

15) Parents who let their children run in the supermarket. I've changed my mind about this. I still find it irritating, but childhood obesity has become such a problem that I can't find it in my heart to complain about children running.

16) Anti-Englishness. I've become a lot more tolerant of this. i'm an anglophile all the way through, but national prejudices make the world more interesting-- if they don't got too far.

17) Church-bashing. Well, I still hate this, though I might be indulgent in particular cases. This was written when I was an agnostic.

18) People who exaggerate their Dublin accents to sound more street-wise/tough/working-class. I've become more tolerant of this. Insofar as it adds to local distinctiveness, it's good.

19) People who pull you up for saying “tomorrow” when, for example, you refer to Wednesday afternoon as tomorrow at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. I would find this to be an amusing quirk today.

20) Confrontational people. I still feel this way-- mostly-- but sometimes confrontation is admirable.

21) Studied bohemianism. Again, I would find this more endearing than annoying today-- anything that adds to the colour of life.

22) Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, New Historicism etc. I've come to think that postmodernism has something going for and is, to some extent, a genuine description of a cultural and social phenomenon. The rest is all nonsense. Mostly endearing nonsense, but post-colonialism feeds into the "sacred victim" and "oppressor-oppressed" menatality that has wreacked havoic in our world.

23) Lotteries. I still feel the same way.

25) Cars. I've completely changed my mind on this one, and I've come to see the romance of cars.

26) The servility of dogs, in contrast to the dignity of cats. Honestly, this baffles me. I like both dogs and cats, and loyalty is probably the virtue I admire the most. This must have been a temporary hang-up.

I followed this up with a list of things I loved. Again, I add comments in italics.

1) Poetry of W.B. Yeats. No change.

2) Poetry of Philip Larkin. No change.

3) Quentin Tarantino movies. No change, although I didn't like Django Unchained, and I haven't loved his later works as much as I did everything up to Kill Bill.

4) The cinema in general. No change.

5) Snow. No change.

6) Horror movies/books. No change.

7) The students in UCD. No change.

8) Spaghetti Bolognese. No change, although it's been overtaken by steak and chips as my favourite meal.

9) Winter and Autumn, esp. October. No change.

10) Train stations. No change.

11) The English language. No change.

12) Englishness in general. No change.

13) Jewish culture in general. No change, although I'm less confident I have any real knowledge of it.

14) Led Zeppelin. No change.

15) The Victorian Era. No change.

16) The King James Bible. No change.

17) The sea. Who doesn't love the sea? But I admit I sometimes find it dispiriting, in certain circumstances. I've lived five minutes from the sea for the last few years.

18) Evocative phrases like “The cold light of day”, “All human life is there”, “Softly-falling snow” and many, many others. No change. Although I've come to realize that getting overly excited about this doesn't get a good reaction in some social situations.

19) Darkness. No change.

20) Billboards, especially glowing billboards on a lonely night. No change.

21) Tea. No change, although to be honest I drink coffee more.

22) Puns, especially excruciatingly bad ones. No change. 

23) Silence and quiet. I'm surprised to see this here. Who doesn't love a bit of silence and quiet now and then? But personally, I much prefer a good bit of noise and activity around me.

Favourite Movie Scenes #6: Neo Meets the Architect from "The Matrix Reloaded"

I'm not going to say much about this one. I liked The Matrix Reloaded a lot more than most other people did. However, I enjoy this scene as a sort of stand-alone short movie.

The reason I like it is because it feels archetypal. Perhaps it's my imagination projecting backwards, but I think I've harboured a lifelong scenario of meeting an immensely wise old man, who is not God and not necessarily benevolent, in some kind of normally inaccessible place, a place that seems unreal or hyperreal or something like that.

I think this archetype is also evoked by other scenes in movies, books, and television. For instance, the last scene in the first series of Squid Game, when the protagonist meets the evil genius behind it all. (I regret watching Squid Game, which I find sickening in retrospect. I only watched one season.) And then there are the final scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monolith might serve the role of the wise old man. And then there's the premise of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, where the protagonist's whole purpose is to reach the top of the Dark Tower which is the nexus of the universe. However, I never got to the end of that series.

(I've never cared much about acting. But, insofar as I care about acting, it's to strongly dislike over-acting. So Keanu Reeves is my kind of actor, and I wish all actors and actresses were similarly "wooden".)

Favourite Poems: "A Portrait in the Guards" by Laurence Whistler

Laurence Whistler is hardly a household name. He's not even primarily remembered as a poet, but a glass engraver. And yet he wrote two of my favourite poems: this, and "A Form of Epitaph".

I encountered this poem in my teens and have never forgotten it. Although the whole thing is good, it's the fourth and penultimate verse that, in my view, lifts it to the level of the sublime.

In my teens and twenties, I had the idea that great poetry expressed something that was on the verge of being inexpressible. I still think this is an important form of poetic greatness, though not the only one. "Snow" by Louis MacNeice is another example of this.

Note that Whistler uses "very" twice within the same two lines. The idea that one should always avoid such repetition (in verse or prose) seems quite misguided to me.

Aside from that incomparable verse, though, I think the poem captures something very real about drawing and painting: that you only really see something when you draw it. The hush of a drawing session in the Art class-room is a unique atmosphere, a unique state of mind.

A Portrait in the Guards

So these two faced each other there,
The artist and his model. Both
In uniform. Years back. In training.
Not combatant yet. But both aware
Of what the word meant. Not complaining,
But, inwardly, how loth.

They talked of this, perhaps. Each knew
The other, or himself, might be
Unlucky. But each knew this true
Of anyone at all. And so
There was no thrill in it. A knee
Jigged to the hit-tune of some show.

Each scrutinized the other frankly,
As only painter and sitter do:
Objectively and at leisure. Face
That must not, please, relax too blankly
Into repose. And face that threw
Glances, the brush being poised in space.

So both, it may be, had the sense
Of seeing suddenly very plain
A very obvious thing: the immense
Thereness of someone else: a man
Once only, since the world began.
Never before, and never again.

It could be, while a cigarette
Hung grey, each recognized the other
As valid utterly and brother.
It should be so. Because, of all
Who in that mess-tent shortly met,
These would be first to fall.

Why I Dislike Anti-Capitalism

During my self-imposed Lenten blog moratorium, I've had a lot of thoughts. This is one of them: I really dislike the whole concept of "anti-capitalism."

It's not because I'm especially a cheerleader for capitalism. But what is capitalism, anyway? I think a lot of the problem is that nobody really agrees what "capitalism" is. 

But it's more than that. I think it's a very bad thing that so many people blame all social ills on something called capitalism. The implication is that those problems can only really be solved when capitalism is abolished. And, until then...

Of course, capitalism is never going to be abolished, and the only developed societies in modern history that seriously tried to abolish capitalism were notoriously awful.

But even aside from that...

I've noticed that, whenever I argue with Irish people from a conservative perspective, they might acknowledge that the conservative has identified real problems, but they tend to put those down to "capitalism".

For instance, the housing crisis in Ireland is caused by capitalism, rather than the more obvious cause that their secular religion, or fear of social censure, won't allow them to blame.

But it can be anything else. If you complain about the loss of innocence in childhood, for instance, this will be put down to advertising and commodification and so on. There is literally nothing that you couldn't blame on capitalism with a bit of imagination.

Similarly, when I point out to progressive Irish people that they are now the establishment-- that they completely agree with the government, media, entertainment industry, and corporate elite on all the hot-button social topics-- they'll almost invariably say: "How can I be pro-establishment? I'm anti-capitalist!"

As though the establishment cares about that, or as though anybody cares about that.

There is nothing at all radical about being anti-capitalist, because everybody at heart knows that it's purely theatrical. Capitalism isn't going to be abolished and nobody really expects it to be.

It was the acknowledgement of this fundamental truth that led the left-wing to concentrate on identity politics from the sixties or seventies onwards.

Is this to say that there can be no economic reforms? Of course not. There can be and there have been.

But the basic model of all prosperous societies is going to remain capitalism in some form or other, and pretending otherwise seems like pure self-indulgence to me. And worse, since it prevents concentrating on real problems and real possibilities.