Films About Mentors

Today I finished watching The Wonder Boys, a film made in the year 2000, which stars Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey Jr. It's a comedy-drama about a professor of creative writing who is also a novelist, one who has been writing his second novel for the past seven years. (People think he has writer's block, but it's quite the opposite; the novel has grown to gargantuan proportions.) It's one of those "one crazy weekend" sort of stories.

It's the first non-horror film I've watched in months, as far as I can remember.

I watched it for two main reasons:

1) It's set in a university, and I'm very drawn to university stories right now.

2) It involves a mentor-student relationship, and I'm especially interested in those right now. In fact, this is why I sought it out (although it had been on my radar for quite a while).

I'm looking for mentor films right now. When I say "student-mentor", I'm not especially talking about formal education. And I'm definitely not talking about the flogged-to-death storyline of an unconventional teacher come to a tough, inner-city school and changing the kids' lives around. To Sir, with Love should have been the last of those. I'm more talking about a mentor relationship between an old master and a young prodigy-- that kind of thing.

I love hearing people talk about their teachers, mentors and inspirations. I find it very inspiring when someone mentions one of their old teacher's sayings, or when they say something like: "I come from the school of such-and-such."

I've always wanted a mentor but I've never had one. I'm forty-nine years old in twelve days so it would be rather ridiculous to have a mentor at my age. But I've always craved a Gandalf or Van Helsing figure look up to.

(Writing this, it occurs to me that I very much did have a mentor in my own father. His influence on me can hardly be overstated and I often quote the things he said. But...a mentor is different from a father.)

I'm even rather envious when I hear people describe their relationship with their spiritual director, their old family doctor, their old teacher, their solicitor, etc. the groundskeeper of their old school or college, etc., when that professional relationship has become a friendship or quasi-friendship. I've never had that.

The Nature of Tradition

I've pretty much stopped commenting on contemporary controversies on this blog. Looking back, I think I probably stopped doing so around the abortion referendum in 2018. It seemed such a definitive defeat that it made engagement with current affairs in Ireland seem rather pointless. (I have kept critiquing political correctness and woke, but that's more socio-politics than current affairs.)

I realize that many of my readers are international, so I don't know how much you've been keeping up with the controversy about the Orange Order and the Garvaghy Road in Northern Ireland. The Protestant (and, let's face it, historically anti-Catholic) Orange Order were given permission to march down a road with a mostly "nationalist" population (whatever that means these days), for the first time in years. In the past, the march had led to huge stand-offs, which once resulted in the utterly horrific murder of three young brothers. This year, once it was announced the parade would go ahead, the nationalists immediately blocked the road, along with many sympathizers. Today the nationalists won the day and the parade was banned again.

As I said, I've stopped commenting on contemporary controversies. I especially avoid doing so in the case of Northern Ireland. As far as I can see, both the "Catholic" and "Protestant", "Irish" and "British" communities are now for the most part secularized and globalized, leaving nothing but a tribal conflict based upon historical grievances. Large-scale immigration is transforming everything anyway, as in the Republic. That's as far as I can see. I might be wrong.

(If there's any exception to the picture I've painted here, it's that the Democratic Unionist Party seems to be the only major party in Ireland with socially conservative positions on anything. How long they will maintain these is another matter. Both of the major nationalist parties have enthusiastically embraced social progressivism, and the Ulster Unionist Party seems to have gone down the same road, albeit with less gusto.)

Regardless of the controversy, and regardless of your stance on the controversy, I think this passage from a tweet posted by Emma Little-Pengelly (the Deputy First Minister, a unionist) is very profound, as regards the point that she is making (the grammar is a bit off, but who cares?): 

All of our traditions come from particular aspects or “sects”. By its very nature, they are “of “something and not “of” something else. They are exclusionary by the very nature of it pertaining to the particular tradition, beliefs or views of some, but it is not exclusionary by experience or engagement. Every religious order or community is exclusionary by doctrine, but not by outreach.

I think is a hugely important point, setting aside its application to the current controversy. Do we want a society with vibrant traditions? If we do, we have to accept that traditions are inherently exclusionary, sectarian and even divisive. Of course, we could have a society without traditions, or where traditions are relegated to private life. But that will be a pretty colourless, rootless, impersonal, atomised sort of society. It seems to me we are travelling in the latter direction.

(I always appreciate comments. But if you're leaving one on this post, please avoid anything inflammatory.)

Everybody Has Some Idea What's Going On

Today I loaned a book about tapestries to a library patron. We had this brief exchange:

Him: My wife is going to see the Bayeux Tapestry so she wants to know a bit more about it.

Me: Oh, is it here?

Him: No, it's on loan to London.

Or words to that effect.

I've been mulling on the exchange since. Think of the assumed shared knowledge it reflects:

1) He assumed I'd heard of the Bayeux Tapestry. (Correct.)

2) He possibly assumed I'd heard that the Bayeux Tapestry was on exhibition in London. (I had actually heard this, but I'd forgotten the details.)

3) I assumed that, when I said "Oh, is it here?", he'd know I didn't mean that it was always here-- in Ireland, or in Dublin.

Everybody has some idea what's going on. The truth of this often strikes me and surprises me.

I mean, there's so much to know. Think of everything that happens in the world in a minute, in an hour, in a day, in a week...all those events piling up, and all the ages of history coming before them. And yet we can have a working assumption that people know what we're talking about when we talk about almost anything.

The Bayeux Tapestry is interesting in this regard. What other tapestry do you know about? I remember, when I was learning about it in school, thinking: "Why are we learning about a tapestry? This is history class." Probably the teacher did explain its importance as a historical source but I just wasn't listening.

Or maybe I'm being too harsh on myself. Maybe I did understand it's importance as a historical source but wondered why we were being taught about the thing itself in such detail.

The depiction of Halley's Comet on the Tapestry has always interested me as well. It seems so unusual and exceptional.

I can remember, in 1986 (when I was nine years old) being confused as to why people were getting so excited about the comet. Weren't there lots of comets? Now I'm very pleased that a pub in Dublin is named the Comet because it was built that year. (Or so I've heard.)

From the Wikipedia Page on Pope Nicholas the Great

In 866, the Bulgar Khan St Boris the Baptiser wrote to Pope Nicholas asking a wide range of questions, one of which being whether or not it was sinful for Christians to wear pants. In response, Nicholas wrote, "For whether you or your women wear or do not wear pants neither impedes your salvation nor leads to any increase of your virtue." The Pope then proceeded with a discussion on the virtue of wearing the "spiritual pants" of a temperate life while restraining disordered passions.

Personally I think I would support the abolition of trousers for both sexes. Women could wear skirts and dresses and men could wear kilts, or maybe robes. I'd love to go about in a robe.

Ivy Day 2026

Yesterday was the one-hundredth and thirty-fifth Ivy Day commemoration in Glasnevin cemetery. I was present, which made it my fourth Ivy Day commemoration.

The ceremony is held to remember Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish political leader who died in 1891.

I'm not particularly a devotee of Parnell. I'm a devotee of traditions. Ivy Day is the sort of low-key, long-lived tradition I find especially appealing. (It's never been interrupted, even during the Covid lockdowns.)

It's very simple. A small group gathers around the tomb, led by a piper who plays a few tunes. There's an introduction from the President of the Parnell Society, and then a dignitary of some kind lays a wreath on the grave. After that, the dignitary makes a short speech, the piper plays the National Anthem (one of the few occasions when I ever hear it played), and everybody troops out. It lasts less than an hour and I don't think I've ever seen more than fifty people present.

I was amazed when someone recently mentioned Ivy Day in a comment on this blog, apparently independent of my mentions of it in the past. Nobody knows about it. I was only alerted to it by the fact that it features in a James Joyce story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." (As you can imagine, it was a much bigger deal in the decade after Parnell's death. But even in the story, set in 1902, it's a fading tradition. The story reflects Joyce's usual cynicism towards any ideal other than the celebration of his own supposed genius.)

Yesterday, the dignitary was the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Claire Hanna. The speech was the usual boilerplate about pluralism and change, although there were some references to recent events in the North.

Ivy Day itself is tomorrow, being the anniversary of Parnell's death. The commemoration is held on the Sunday nearest to the anniversary.

Every year, on the day before the commemoration, there's a Parnell Symposium in his country house of Avondale. I've been working up the courage to go for the last few years. The speeches are fine but the inevitable tea-breaks are daunting. I might go next year...

My Idea for a New Word

For my entire life, I've had the ambition of inventing a new word and getting it into general usage.

Today, I found myself thinking about a particular class of words: drink (as in alcohol), sale (as in special promotion), product (as in hair gel), view (as in picturesque vista).

All these words are special (but common) senses of a more generic use of the word. Everybody knows what someone means when they say: "I don't drink". 

My suggestion for a rhetorical term to cover this is: "extrageneric". ("Extra" used in the sense of "extragalactic" or "extra-sensory.")

Update: Sadly, and quite surprisingly, there's already a word for this. It's actually autohyponym. Those linguists, you wouldn't be up to them.

Proverbs About Places

Be warned: there's no real point to this blog post except what it says in the title. I like proverbs about places-- I mean, specific places. I've always had a very specific (pleasurable) aesthetic reaction to them.

Why? I think it might be the combination of universality and specificity. A proverb is something that, in a sense, floats free of time and context. It seems to apply to everybody and everywhere. This is a pleasant atmosphere in itself, but the fact that a place-proverb is tethered to a particular place gives it an added relish.

The most famous place-proverbs are to do with Rome. "Rome wasn't built in a day", "All roads lead to Rome", and (my favourite Roman proverb) "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".

I recently learned that this last one had a Christian origin-- it was something St. Ambrose said to St. Augustine and his mother about fasting on a Saturday, as they did in Rome. I was greatly surprised (and pleased) to learn this.

The mention of Rome in proverbs gives them a certain grandeur. Personally I am a confirmed Europhobe, for the very good reason that I've had Europe, Europe, Europe rammed down my throat by progressives my entire life. And yet the very name "Rome" (even for me) conjures up a deliciously vague impression of centuries of history and art and splendour.

I first encountered the proverb "All roads lead to Rome" in a book of proverbs when I was sixteen, and I'm still not sure what it means. It seems to mean different things to everybody. But it has an atmosphere of excitement and of broadening horizons and ever-widening thoroughfares-- very like the line "where many paths and errands meet" from Tolkien's poem "The Road Goes On and Ever On").

Proverbs that allude to Rome are especially potent (by way of contrast) in these drizzly and misty British Isles, which have been blissfully cut off from the mainstream of Yerpan history. They let me momentarily indulge in the glamour of the continent, while reassuring me that we're protected from all that by the silver sea that serves as a moat defensive to a house against the envy of less happier lands.

Of course, not all place-proverbs refer to Rome.

"Sussex won't be druv" is a proverb I've encountered in books, although I've never actually heard anyone say it in real life.

Ireland has "That beats Banagher" or "That bangs Banagher". The full version is "That beats Banagher, and Banagher beats the devil." Banagher is a small town in county Offally, in the east of Ireland. (It's been in the news recently because of a tragic accident, and that's what got me thinking of place-proverbs.)

I know this used to be a fairly popular proverb in Ireland, because I've encountered it used in old books. Today it mostly seems remembered because it's the most famous thing about Banagher. Or perhaps because it's such a memorable phrase. But it does make me wonder...why does this inconsequential place get immortalized in a proverb? Why did this proverb get remembered?

It seems to be the only Irish place-proverb that's survived. This interesting Irish Times article lists quite a few more, but I've never heard of any of them before. Elsewhere, I found a reference to "fighting like Kilkenny cats", which has sort of survived...at least, most Irish people know that the Kilkenny hurling team are nicknamed "the Cats" and many of us vaguely remember the story about two Kilkenny cats that fought each other until only their tails were left.

Donnybrook (an area in Dublin city) has been immortalized in the term "a donnybrook", meaning a fight-- it seems to bettter-known in America than Ireland. So that's proverbial, but not a proverb. Another Dublin suburb, Sallynoggin, was frequently invoked in my childhood, during neighbourhood kickabouts, when someone or other would shout: "On the Sallynoggin!" or "on the Sally!". As you can probably guess, it referred to heading the ball. But this isn't really a proverb either.

Having said all that about the paucity of Irish place-proverbs, I've just realized that I can't think of very many well-known proverbs about places in Britain, either. There's "Sussex won't be druv", which I've never heard actually used, and there's "Carrying coals to Newcastle", which I certainly have heard used on innumerable occasions. What about "sending [somebody] to Coventry?". I actually used this phrase earlier today, but it seems more of a phrase than a proverb. OK, I'm turning to the internet now..

(Please imagine light orchestral music for a few moments.)

Well, I ran an internet search, and all I really got (aside from carrying coals to Newcastle) were more idioms like "ship-shape and Bristol fashion" or "more front than Brighton". It seems reasonable to insist that a proverb has to be a whole sentence and can't just be a phrase. So maybe Ireland isn't doing so bad after all.

What about America, then? The only one that comes to mind is "Virginia is for lovers", and that's a marketing slogan of very recent provenance. "I'm from Missouri-- show me!" (or its shortened form "I'm from Missouri") possibly qualifies as a proverb. (It's used as a general expression of scepticism--- I first encountered it in the nineties TV miniseries of The Stand.)

And aside from those, I can't think of any others. Even New York, which is presumably the modern Rome, hasn't given birth to a single proverb that I can think of. (Yes, there's "the city that never sleeps", but that's more of a description.) The internet gives me this one: "A bad day in New York is better than a good day anywhere else." Well, all I can say is I've never heard this until now.

Wait! I've just thought of another one. "How will it play in Peoria?" Originally a showbiz proverb that came to be used more generally, asking how something (a show, a policy, etc.) will be received by Middle America. It's all I actually know about Peoria, Illinois. It's generally described as a figure of speech rather than a proverb, but it fits my definition.

And then there's "Don't call it Frisco", which I suppose counts as a proverb.

Really straining my brains, I can come up with "When Boston sneezes, Maine gets a cold". (I had to check to make sure I'd got it right. I hadn't. I thought it was: "When New England sneezes, America gets a cold.")

I've just done a quick internet search for other American place-proverbs, but I didn't find any that I would consider well-known. "As goes Maine, so goes the nation" rings a bell, but only a faint bell.

So much for Rome, Ireland, Britain, and the good old USA. But what about the rest of the world?

The first city that comes to mind is Jerusalem. Surely there should be a proverb that mentions Jerusalem? But I can't think of any-- although I have a vague sense I'm forgetting an obvious one. C.S. Lewis uses the phrase "Every road out of Jerusalem is a road into Jerusalem"-- or it might be the other way round-- but, though this sounds like it should be a proverb, I'm pretty sure it's not.

I can't think of any proverbs that mention Paris. Lots of phrases, lines from movies, and famous titles. But no proverbs.

And, after much racking of my brains, the only other place-proverb I can think of-- from anywhere in the whole wide world-- is: "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." (Which I've always considered a rather stupid proverb.)

So how about it? What am I missing? What place-proverbs do you know and love, or just know?

My Latest Cartoon

 

Poems I Like: To the Rev. F.D. Maurice by Lord Alfred Tennyson

This has never been one of my all-time favourite poems, or even one of my favourite Tennyson poems, but it's always appealed to me since I originally encountered it in my teens. Some of its lines recur to my mind regularly.

I like that it's such a subdued poem. It's very far from ecstasy, rhapsody, tragedy, or any of the blazing moods of human life. It's an invitation to a friend to visit. That in itself gives it a delicious mellowness. (The easy camaraderie between old friends is one of the most beautiful things in the world-- especially, if I dare say it, the friendship between middle-aged or elderly male friends. Tennyson was forty-four when he wrote this. Rev. Maurice was four years older.)

It's one of two memorable "visiting" poems that I can think of. The other is the sonnet "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son" by John Milton, which is remarkably similar.

Tennyson's relationship with Christianity was complex. He famously wrote that there was "more faith in honest doubt" than in "half the creeds". But his Idylls of the King is shot through with Christian imagery, and he apparently died a good Christian death. Anyway, it's no surprise that his clergyman friend was someone whose orthodoxy was apparently questioned, as the poem suggests-- one of the founders of Christian Socialism, it seems. He seems to have been a very good and pious man, according to his lights.

For all the calm tone and lack of intense emotion in this poem, it frequently brings me to tears (even thinking about it)-- especially the verse that ends: "How to gain, as life advances, valour and charity more and more." The line: "Dear to the man that is dear to God" also moves me.

Some of the flashes of nature poetry in the poem are particularly beautiful, for instance: "Hear the magpie gossip, garrulous under a roof of pine." That garrulous...

At the risk of sounding self-pitying, there's a certain pathos attached to this poem for me, since there are few (if any) hearths that welcome my arrival in the manner that Tennyson's hearth awaited the arrival of Reverend Maurice. My own fault, no doubt.

To The Rev F.D. Maurice

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Come, when no graver cares employ,

Godfather, come and see your boy:
Your presence will be sun in winter,
Making the little one leap for joy,

For, being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty thousand college-councils
Thunder 'Anathema,' friend, at you;

Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight.

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless-ordered garden
Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine.

For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And farther on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand;

Where, if below the milky steep
Some ship of battle slowly creep,
And on through zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep,

We might discuss the Northern sin
Which made a selfish war begin;
Dispute the claims, arrange the chances;
Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win:

Or whether war's avenging rod
Shall lash all Europe into blood;
Till you should turn to dearer matters,
Dear to the man that is dear to God;

How best to help the slender store,
How mend the dwellings, of the poor;
How gain in life, as life advances,
Valour and charity more and more.

Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet
Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet;
But when the wreath of March has blossomed,
Crocus, anemone, violet,

Or later, pay one visit here,
For those are few we hold as dear;
Nor pay but one, but come for many,
Many and many a happy year.

An Email I Just Sent

Hello

I have a very unusual query for you. I was in the Den bar last night. It was a very enjoyable evening and all the staff were wonderful. But something is nagging at me. For hours now I've been trying to remember the advertisements on the wall where I was sitting.

We were sitting in a sort of corner snug between the bar and the staff bathrooms/kitchen (I think). I was facing the wall and I spent a lot of time looking at the decorative advertisements on it. There was an ornamental mirror for some whiskey brewed in Tullamore (I can't remember which, not Tullamore Dew), two advertisements for Mick McQuaid's Plug and Cut Plug tobacco, another advertisement for Quaker Oats...and, above the Quaker Oats advertisement, one for a product I can't remember and that's driving me crazy.

I know this is an odd query but it would be possible to take a look at this corner and tell me what the whiskey advertised on the mirror and the product advertised above the Quaker Oats was?

Many thanks

Maolsheachlann

Update: I got a reply. It was a Fry's chocolate advertisement. (The reply didn't mention what whiskey the mirror was advertising, but I was less curious about that anyway.)

A Clerihew

Christina Rossetti
Never showered in confetti.
Whenever a swain made her his target
She said: "Sorry, I'm writing Goblin Market."

The Feast of St. Finbarr

Two saints' day posts in a row!

Today is the feast of St. Finbarr (550-660), who is the patron saint of Cork. He's mentioned in the motto of University College Cork: "Where Finbarr taught, let Munster learn." Which I like because it's both religious and provincial-- literally provincial. (Don't people get tired of everything being about the world, the world, the world, global, global, global, international, international, international?)

Finbarr is also the name I chose for my confirmation name. I chose it entirely because I liked the sound. I didn't know anything about Finbarr. I'm not even confident I knew he was a saint.

 

I had my confirmation (with the rest of my class in school) in Our Lady of Victories church in Glasnevin (a very modern church with a lot of stained glass and which somewhat resembles some alien spaceship). I would have been eleven or twelve. I remember I wore a new cream safari suit, which I had for a considerable time afterwards. I also remember my sponsor (who was my uncle) saying: "A bit of an anti-climax, isn't it?". How edifying!

A confirmation name is a strange thing. You never really use it. I only use mine when I'm using my name and I want to sound pompous (like I have to try, right?), styling myself: "Maolsheachlann Tiernan Finbarr Ó Ceallaigh".

Every now and again I do remember to pray to St. Finbarr, at least in recent years. I'll do so again now. Watch over me, St. Finbarr!

St. Pacificus of San Severino

Today is the feast day of St. Pacificus of San Severino (1653-1721), who was canonised in 1839.

Have you ever heard of him? I haven't.

He went deaf and blind at a relatively young age but still held a position of authority in a monastery and worked miracles.

I suppose his reputation suffers from the fact that there are so many Italian saints.

Anyway, I really like that there are lots of days in the year when the saint of the day is pretty obscure, and there are no special feasts.

Anti-Political Correctness Vows

Today I found myself toying with the idea that there should be anti-political correctness vows in the same way there are baptism vows. I'm always impressed by the solemnity and poetry of the baptism vows, which are renewed at the Easter Vigil:

Do you reject Satan?

I do.

And all his works?

I do.

And all his empty promises?

I do.

Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?

I do.

And so on. There are three more and they are considerably longer.

Vows concentrate the mind. I think anti-PC vows could go something like this:

Do you reject political correctness in all its forms?

I do.

Do you reject all identities based on grievance?

I do.

Do you reject the conflation of trivial and imaginary harms with serious harms?

I do.

Do you reject arbitrary changes in language in the name of sensitivity-- even if you have to go along with them in some circumstances?

I do.

Do you reject the concept that anybody has less right than anybody else to use a particular word or give an opinion on any subject whatsoever?

I do.

Do you reject the attribution of historical guilt to people for injustices that occurred before they were even born?

I do.

Do you reject weaponized false dichotomies, such as victim-oppressor and transformation-stasis?

I do.

Tell me if I missed anything obvious. (By "transformation-stasis", I mean the sort of rhetoric you're surely familiar with: the appeal to gradual and organic evolution in the past to justify complete transformation in the present.)

I Love This Quotation

"Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing."

St. Gregory of Nyssa describing the theological excitement surrounding the First Council of Constantinople.

A Random Thought

I mentioned in a previous post that I was reading a biography of an Irish leftist, one who lived through most of the twentieth century. Reading it, I was struck once again with a thought that has often occurred to me; that all these radical leftists, most of whom had a deep disdain for the Catholic Church and the bourgeois middle classes, somehow managed to stay faithful to their wives and keep their households together. Many of them even raised large or relatively large families.

Actually, the leftist I was reading about did leave his wife for another woman-- but only in his old age, when Irish society had already liberalized around him.

My assumption is that, when lifelong marital fidelity was expected and taken as normal, it wasn't felt as irksome or onerous. Challenges which today are seen as unendurable were simply taken on the chin, par for the course. Nobody thought you were heroic for putting up with another human being for forty or fifty years.

This seems to me typical of the whole movement of Irish society in my lifetime. I watched Irish society secularize all through my lifetime-- the process had already begun before I was born. And it seems to me that the ebbing of Catholicism from Irish life has had all kinds of bad consequences, on a deep level-- that even people who weren't at all religious benefitted from the elevating effect Catholicism had on society.

It comes out in so many things. A sense of the sacred and of awe. A sense of the dignity of the human person. A respect for manhood and womanhood, and indeed childhood. That's just a few off the top of my head.

I've often thought of trying to write a blog post about the ideal of marriage that, it seems to me now, was unspoken but all-pervasive in the Ireland my childhood. It was really quite beautiful. It was anti-romantic and romantic at the same time-- a combination that is, strangely, far from uncommon. The stereotype of the mother and father were both comical, but with an undercurrent of respect and affection. Or so it seems to me.

Shades of Meaning

Here are a list of words. Tell me what associations or nuances they have for you. Perceptive readers will notice a pattern to them.

Guy.

Fellah. (It was hearing someone use this word on a bus that started this train of thought.)

Bloke.

Dude.

Chap.

Lad.

Gent.

Geezer.

The Brahma by Ralph Waldo Emerson and All-Embracing Conspiracy Theories

Here are the first three verses of "The Brahma", by Ralph Waldo Emerson. There's a fourth verse but it's not relevant here.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

This is the poem I always think of when I encounter the people who see everything as a vast conspiracy, all opposition as controlled opposition, every apparent coincidence as news management, all politics as a puppet show, psy-ops are as common as cabbages, and so on.

It's like all those dystopian novels where the hero realizes at the climax that the underground resistance to the dystopian government was actually planted by the dystopian government and he's been a pawn all along. There's a certain pleasurable frisson in this moment of despair, that can't be denied.

What is there to say about such theories, except that they seem unlikely on the face of it? History has no example of such a thing. Yes, the KGB had spies and informers and double agents everywhere. Yes, there was omnipresent propaganda. But there was also a genuine resistance and ordinary people had a pretty good fix on what was actually going on. We also know from the history of totalitarian regimes that, far from resistance being futile or fabricated, resistance is greatly feared and obsessively monitored.

Also the theory is unfalsifiable because any evidence presented against it can be discounted by the same theory. Chesterton famously wrote about this in the first chapters of Orthodoxy, although he was using the principle of criticize philosophical materialism instead of conspiracy theories.

I think the kind of fatalism that is spread by such theories is lamentable. Indeed, if there was such a panoptic, omnipresent regime in power, spreading such fatalism might be exactly what they would do. What if the controlled opposition is inside your head?

Hypnotic Moments

I don't know what better title to give to this post, which is going to be a quick one, even though I've been thinking about it a long time.

It's one of those very personal and idiosyncratic posts. I really wanted to talk about the enormous fascination particular moments have for me-- moments I hear about, read about, and so forth.

One that has recurred to me a lot recently is the scene at the beginning of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, which another blogger has kindly transcribed:

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a jocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakespearian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and as if performing a rite, cast some substance—apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper—on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind. As the dark fumes floated above the houses, snow began to fall gently from a dull sky, each flake giving a small hiss as it reached the bucket. The flames died down again; and the men, as if required observances were for the moment at an end, all turned away from the fire, lowering themselves laboriously into the pit, or withdrawing to the shadows of their tarpaulin shelter. The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.

For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world—legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea—scattered, uncoordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

I never finished the whole series of novels-- I think I got about half of the way in--  but this particular image delights me. I might say "this particular passage", except-- to be honest-- I didn't remember the passage itself.

In recent weeks, whenever I've found myself looking at steam or smoke-- for instance, when I'm heating up food in a saucepan-- I find myself thinking about this passage. Perhaps because it seems to me as though these moments of sudden contemplation are the very best thing life has to offer.

Another "hypnotic moment" that constantly comes to my mind is the story of Blessed Solanus Casey's first night in a Capuchin monastery, on Christmas Eve, as he was discerning his vocation. Here's an account from Catherine Odell, one of his biographers:

In the midst of a blinding snowstorm, he left Superior on December 20 and headed southwest for St. Paul on the 11:00 p.m. train. From St. Paul, his train then headed east, pulling along slowly through drifting snow to Milwaukee. After a brief stayover there, during which Barney [his birth name] stayed with Capuchins for the first time, he boarded a train again. Down through Chicago and over through Michigan, his train headed for his goal-- Detroit.

On Christmas Eve, the train pulled into the station in Detroit at last. Barney located a streetcar and headed for Mt. Elliott Avenue. There, at 1740 Mt. Eillott, the young man finally arrived, well after dusk. Exhausted, he refused the offer of dinner. He was too tired. Upstairs, on the second floor, he was shown to his room; a simple, stark little space with a wooden door latch. The sight of it immediately renewed his fears of this Capuchin austerity. But, spent with the strain of travel, he pulled off his shoes and heavy coat, still wet with snow, pulled a blanket up over himself, and soon fell into a heavy sleep.

Just before midnight, he awoke to the sound of hand chimes and the voices of men singing. They were singing Christmas carols in German. It was Christmas Eve! As the voices grew louder, Barney could hear other men getting out of bed and coming down the corridor to join their voices with the little group of carolers. Barney joined them, and his heart was lifted. The gloom over his decision to follow Our Lady's orders and "go to Detroit" left him.

Down and around, through the darkened corridors, the carollers moved. Carrying candles, they roused the other Capuchins who then followed down into the chapel for Christmas Midnight Mass. It was a moving, joy-filled occasion and initiated a week or more of festivities.

I really can't put my love of that story into words-- even though nothing really happens. It's barely a story, actually.

Here's a third story, that I'll mention briefly. I was listening to an interview with an Irish politician of recent decades. He was talking about some parliamentary drama in which he had been taken a major role, but that he was absent from on the particular day under discussion-- because was "in bed with a dicky tummy" (upset stomach). Somehow I found this idea deliciously cosy and pleasing.

So what's the big deal, you ask? There are moments that catch our fancy. Everyone has that. I suppose it's just the sheer importance of such moments, in my own mind, that makes me ponder. I come back to them again and again. I wonder if other people are like this at all.

Poems I Like: A Ballade of Ephemeral Controversy by G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton wrote a lot of mediocre poetry, as well as a good few absolutely first class poems. But here's a poem I wouldn't place in either category. It's completely obscure, but it expresses thoughts and aspirations which are very familiar to me. I don't understand the "Hists" reference.

I don't think it is a great poem, but I do think it has one truly great line. Can you guess which one I mean?

A Ballade of Ephemeral Controversy by GK Chesterton

I am not as that Poet that arrives,
Nor shall I pluck the laurel that persists
Through all perverted ages and revives:
Enough for me, that if with feet and fists
I fought these pharisaic atheists,
I need not crawl and seek when all is done
My motley pennon trampled in the lists
It will not matter when the fight is won.

If scratch of mine amid a war of knives
Has caused one moment's pain to pessimists,
Poisoned one hour in Social Workers' lives,
I count such comfort more than amethysts
But less than claret, and at after trysts
We'll meet and drink such claret by the tun
Till you and I and all of us (What? Hists!).
It will not matter when the fight is won.

When men again want women for their wives,
And even woman owns that she exists,
When people ask for houses and not hives
When we have climbed the tortured ivy's twists
To where like statues stand above the mists
The strong incredible sanities of the sun,
This dazed and overdriven bard desists.
It will not matter when the fight is won.

Envoi

Prince, let me place these handcuffs on your wrists
While common Christian people get some fun,
Then go and join your damned Theosophists.
It will not matter when the fight is won.

Why Does the Left Oppose "Imperialism"?

I'm reading a book about a left-wing activist (A long-dead, pre-woke left-wing activist.)

The book, however, has been written recently so it uses contemporary leftist rhetoric. It repeatedly uses the word "imperialist".

I always find myself wondering why the (contemporary) left would oppose imperialism.

Is it because they think power should be devolved, that everyone should be governed by rulers who live close to them rather than rulers who live far away? Is it a sort of localism?

That sounds plausible...except the left is overwhelmingly in favour of supranational institutions like the EU, the WHO, the UN, etc. etc. Just look at the meltdown they had about Brexit.

So do the left oppose imperialism because they think people should be self-governing and not ruled by an alien government?

But what could this possibly mean according to the leftist worldview? The whole idea of an allegiance that is based on anything particularistic-- religion, language, ethnicity, folkways-- is anathema to the left. According to the left, the only permissible bond, on a societal level, is common humanity. (Even while they push identity-based grievances, this remains true.)

So how can the left possibly oppose imperialism? On what grounds? I don't get it.

Two Definitions

A Marxist: Someone who is infinitely cynical about existing institutions and infinitely credulous about future institutions.

Nationality: Something that you can't find when you go looking for it, but that rugby-tackles you when you're not looking for it.

Painted Rocks and Re-Enchantment

A few years ago, when I still lived in a house with a garden, I discovered a rock painted as a ladybird hidden under the grass. It was one of several painted rocks hidden there.

I didn't realize at the time (although I was quickly told) that this is part of a trend.

My own belief is that the path to societal re-enchantment lies in Christianity.

But I think delightful little actions like this are re-enchanting in themselves-- guerilla warfare of re-enchantment, so to speak. (Painted electricity boxes are another example.)

Why Isn't the Universe Boring?

I mentioned YouTuber Joe Schmid recent conversion (or reversion) to Catholicism, and the epic seven-hour video he made on the cumulative case for God. (One of only three videos explaining his conversion, which total twenty-five hours.)

I'm working my way through it bit by bit, but I was particularly struck by this section, in which he asks why the universe, if it's "just there", isn't a lot more boring. I've often wondered this myself.

Whenever I've found myself pondering this, I've imagined the universe as an endless block of steel extending in every directions

Here are some of Schmid's suggestions of how the universe might have been (I've modified things I don't understand):

No concrete objects exist.

Only one particle exists.

One particle moves in a straight line forever (or a circle, etc.)

One particle periodically enters into an excited state.

Exactly two particles exist and orbit their common centre.

And he then says: "I could do this forever". Indeed.

Atheists put so much weight on evolution that it doesn't seem to occur to them that even for evolution to occur, the universe had to be a dynamic, rule-governed, complex reality.

To which the atheist might reply: "Well, it just is."

Which reminds me of Fr. Frederick Copleston's reply to Bertrand Russell, in a radio debate on the existence of God, when Russell was sticking to the "arms folded and sitting back" position: "If one refuses to even sit down at the chessboard and make a move, one cannot be checkmated."

My Hipster Cartoon

 

Yes

 I completely agree with this Daily Wire article. The death of the monoculture is a good thing.

I can vividly remember how monolithic pop culture was in my childhood. It was a bad thing. It was a homogenizing, standardizing, deadening force.

Folk culture was dissipating, high culture was almost a memory, but everybody talked about the same TV shows and films and music and toys.

In a small country like Ireland, this could be quite cosy, insofar as it was Irish pop culture that was uniting people. But it mostly wasn't.

Also, people were generally led into same sociopolitical talking points. 

There's lots to decry about the internet, but the shattering of the pop culture straitjacket is not one of them.

A Theory of Nostalgia

The sort of nostalgia to which I am most inclined is a nostalgia for particular moments. They might be forty years ago or they might be four months ago. (It usually takes a few months for them to settle into my memory.)

The strange thing is that these moments of nostalgia often have no obvious explanation. I may have been doing something completely mundane when they occur. They might even come at a very stressful time or in the midst of dejection.

Here is my theory: at every moment, we are experiencing and assessing the world according to a multitude of criteria, most of which are dark to our own vision-- that is, we don't even realize we are applying them.

For instance, if we walk into a room, and the colour combination is pleasing to us, we might not even register this consciously. Or perhaps the sound of traffic outside the building is calming at that moment.

Those are only the intrinsic factors, the ones you could list off from examining the particular setting you're in. But there are any number of others. There are psychological factors-- something triggers a memory, an association, a comparison that is somehow pleasing. Or perhaps you were anxious about something which has recently been settled. Or perhaps something in the news that day has pleased you somehow-- it might not even be a good news story, but perhaps a bad news story that you find somehow bracing.

In any case, my theory is that all these factors come together in a given moment, or at least enough of them to cause a flood of wellbeing or excitement or delight. Like a fruit machine with a hundred windows all showing the same fruit at once. (I've never actually used a fruit machine.)

I've noticed that such moments of nostalgia often take years for me to "decipher", and even then they only seem partially deciphered. So perhaps other people are like me in this regard.

Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although it's an obscure feast it dates back to at least 1684.

Interestingly, it was removed from the liturgical calendar after Vatican II, but re-introduced by my guy, St. John Paul II-- along with the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

I find the "name" feasts very interesting, along with the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus (which occurs on Shrove Tuesday). I like how anti-rationalistic they are, although that's a negative way to put it. Maybe I could better say they are particularistic.

I do believe that the name of Jesus has a special power. I don't know how to elaborate on that theologically, but it seems an observable fact that just invoking the name of Jesus changes the atmosphere in a room. Of course, that could be explained non-supernaturally. Supernatural or non-supernatural, I'm all for it.

I personally prefer to use the name "Jesus" than "Our Lord", for this very reason. And don't get me started on "BVM", a usage I can't stand, even if it's been used by saints and bishops (as it might well have been, for all I know). I also dislike the abbreviation of Mary Immaculate College in Limerick to "Mary I." (Every year I fight back against "Paddy's Day", despite being a defender of "paddywhackery" more generally.)

I struggle with Marian devotion. It's never come naturally to me. But I keep praying to be cured of this.

Back when I was an agnostic, I wrote a poem about the name of Jesus, though I took it from a rather negative perspective. I wrote this in 2005:

Jesus

Even the name is difficult to say,
Except as a curse.
Now even the dying hardly think to pray
And even prayers get by without the name
Since we found all gods to be more or less the same.
But the echo of that sound won’t go away–
The roll of the tombstone filled the universe.
And the words that the Bible-printers put in red
Live on in daily breath, carelessly spoken.
Some try, like a girl whose heart's been broken
To speak that name in an even voice.
But all our sleepless nights down centuries,
The weight of Tartarus and Paradise,
Won’t vanish. Something sturdier than faith
Lurks under all our jokes, our ironies.
And the atheist and the old man on his knees
Still share a world watched over by a wraith.

This Office Life

I've just finished watching This Office LIfe, a TV comedy that aired on the BBC in 1984. Someone has uploaded it onto YouTube.

It was written by Keith Waterhouse, who also wrote the novel from which it was based. I read the novel many years ago. I think I was in my early twenties when I read it. It was one of Waterhouse's better novels, though not a patch on his masterpiece Billy Liar.

Both the novel and TV adaptation feature something of an everyman character (or perhaps someone slightly dimmer than an everyman) who goes to work in a company called British Albion, a labyrinthine and bureaucratic company typical of the time. (Or perhaps somewhat more typical of the seventies, when the novel was published.) But the odd thing about British Albion is that nobody seems to know what they actually do.

My memory of the book is that it was a rather light satire on corporate bureaucracy for about half of its length, after which it became an equally light Kafkaesque mystery. I preferred the mystery to the satire. Satirizing office life is shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, how many people are now nostalgic for that "stultifying" corporate environment of the past?

Whether or not my memory of the novel is accurate, the TV version leans much more towards the Kafkaesque mystery. The mild surrealism kicks in very early. One effective visual has a man in a gorilla suit banging on the glass doors of the company's reception area, as a sort of incidental background event. He turns out to be a novelty act for an office birthday party. In a later scene, "Administration Services" is directly across the corridor from "Services Administration", and is staffed by the same guy.

A central plot point involves The Albion Players, the company's own amateur dramatic troupe. I'm guessing that, when the show was broadcast, this was something that might actually exist. I love the idea and I'm sad that this kind of thing became obsolete.

The story itself is absorbing and suspenseful enough to keep you watching, with a few reasonable twists, and an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

The only review of any length that I can find is on the Curious British Telly Substack. Not a single person has reviewed it on IMDB.

I never know whether anyone takes up my suggestions when it comes to these "recommended viewing" posts. So if you do watch it, let me know.

The Liturgical Calendar and Mystical Experiences

Here is an interesting passage from a Catholic Exchange article about Therese Neumann, a supposed stigmatist and visionary from Germany who died in 1962. (I use the word "supposed" not to convey scepticism, but only because she has not yet had any official recognition from Church auhorities.)

Therese’s sufferings and visions conformed exactly to the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.  Just as she received the wounds of the Crucifixion on Good Friday, so also were her visions and ecstasies aligned to the liturgical calendar.  For example, when she initially received the sacred stigmata, it was during the liturgical season of Lent.  Although Therese had the wounds of the Passion for the rest of her life, she only experienced the ecstasies of the Passion on Fridays, and only on Fridays during Lent and Advent, and on some of the sorrowful octaves.  Thus, her experience of the Passion was connected only to the relevant liturgical days, and never during joyful seasons, such as Christmas or Easter.  On the Fridays when she did not endure the Passion ecstasy, she would have a vision of the death or martyrdom of the saint whose feast day it happened to be, in recognition of the liturgical calendar.  On All Saints Day, November 1st, she would have a 24-hour ecstasy and see souls of saints from Heaven, and similarly on All Soul’s Day, November 2nd, she saw saints from Purgatory.  Based on the timing of the mystical experiences of Therese Neumann, it seems heaven honors with great respect the liturgical calendar; perhaps we should pay close attention to this as well.

This alignment of mystical experience with the liturgical calendar isn't unique to her case, either.

Full article here.

When Can The British Be Patriotic Again?

 I'm not talking about patriotism based on "shared values" or any of that lark.

I've just started watching the miniseries This Office Life, taken from a Keith Waterhouse novel written in 1978. (I read it a long time ago. It was pretty good.)

The company it's about is called "British Albion Limited."

This seemed pretty common at this time. For instance, there's the Britannia Hospital in the roughly contemporary film of the same name. Both fictional, but realistic.

Why can't British companies call themselves after Albion or Britannia or the Lion and the Unicorn or any of those regal, splendid names?

When is this sort of naive patriotism going to come back?

My Latest Cartoon

I especially like "guy in bed" cartoons and I'm going to do more of them. 

("Guy" because I'm not good at drawing women. Or, if you prefer, I'm even worse at drawing women than at drawing men!)

Poems I Like: Father O'Flynn

This one isn't really a poem, but rather the words to a song. But it can be read as a poem.

I'm not claiming this is great poetry, but I've found myself thinking of it lately. Lines from it have come into my mind unbidden.

I've always liked it. It's gentle, sentimental, and good-natured. It's well-written, too-- there's nothing awkward or crude about it. And it's a reminder of a time when priests in Ireland were admired for being priests-- not for being social crusaders who happened to wear dog collars. I very much like the fact that Father O'Flynn is lauded in the poem for being something of a disciplinarian.

As for the Irishisms:: "Sláinte" is the Irish version of "Cheers" or "To your health!" (you probably knew that), "Father avick" means (rather nonsensically) "Father, my son", and there are two renderings of Irish dialect that might throw you: "onaisy" just means "uneasy", and "Is it lave gaiety all to the laity?" means "Should we leave gaiety all to the laity?".

"Dad and the devil and all" seems to mean "everybody". I've never heard "Dad" used in that way but that's what the context suggests. It's probably a contraction of "Bedad", which is a dated Irish exclamation.

My favourite verse is the one that begins: "Oh, Father O'Flynn, you've the wonderful way with you..."

This poem was written by Alfred Perceval Graves. I never knew, until I looked him up just now, that he was Robert Graves's father. Robert Graves is a poet I've never admired at all, although I can see he had talent. I've never read I, Claudius and I'm never going to. Historical novels are not to my taste.

Father O'Flynn by Alfred Perceval Graves

Of priests we can offer a charmin' variety,
Far renowned for larnin' and piety;
Still, I'd advance ye, widout impropriety,
Father O'Flynn as the flower of them all.

Here's a health to you, Father O'Flynn,
Slainté, and slainté, and slainté agin;
Powerfulest preacher, and
Tenderest teacher, and
Kindliest creature in ould Donegal.

Don't talk of your Provost and Fellows of Trinity,
Famous for ever at Greek and Latinity,
Dad and the divels and all at Divinity,
Father O'Flynn'd make hares of them all!
Come, I venture to give you my word,
Never the likes of his logic was heard,
Down from Mythology
Into Thayology,
Troth! and Conchology if he'd the call.

Och! Father O'Flynn, you've the wonderful way wid you,
All the ould sinners are wishful to pray wid you,
All the young childer are wild for to play wid you,
You've such a way wid you, Father avick!
Still for all you've so gentle a soul,
Gad, you've your flock in the grandest control;
Checking the crazy ones,
Coaxin' onaisy ones,
Liftin' the lazy ones on wid the stick.

And though quite avoidin' all foolish frivolity,
Still at all seasons of innocent jollity,
Where was the playboy could claim an equality
At comicality, Father, wid you?
Once the Bishop looked grave at your jest,
Till this remark set him off wid the rest:
"Is it lave gaiety
All to the laity?
Cannot the clargy be Irishmen too?"

How Can I, Personally, Right Now, Mitigate the Banality of Modern Life?

This question haunts me constantly. I think, instinctively, that it should haunt everybody.

And I think this despite the fact that it's hard to make a moral case for this. Banality isn't evil in itself. (Which is, I suppose, why the phrase "the banality of evil" exists. They wouldn't have to be paired if they weren't distinct. Besides, we all know that evil is often cool and stylish-- superficially, at least.)

Life is becoming more homogenized, standardized, rationalized, disenchanted, etc. etc. I'm convinced of this, though it's a hard thing to quantify.

What can we do about it? What can I do about it? I'm not talking about a grand strategy for a transformation of society. What can we do about it in our immediate environment, right now, with our way of life?

What element of eccentricity, colour, romance, contrarianism, visual poetry, and so forth...can we personally inject into our world? How can we re-enchant our immediate environment?

I haven't even found an answer to this myself, but I'm always asking it.

I'm inspired by people such as the Poe Toaster and Ferdinand Cheval. It would be hard to reach the heights of the latter in particular. But we could try!

Of course, you could all be doing this already.

My Cartoon of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

I have a growing urge to draw cartoons so you can expect to see more of them here...whether you want to or not!

I'm a huge fan of both both of these men so this meant entirely affectionately.

Loving America For What It Is

I get very tired of people professing to love the "other" America.

Usually the America of Howard Zinn and the Beat poets and Ledbelly and labour activists and Bob Dylan and college towns and Mother Jones and Allen Ginsberg...you know the drill.

Usually it's that. But choose your own "other" America. It can be Russell Kirk's America just as easily.

I love the America of Mom's apple pie and Fourth of July fireworks and "sir" and "ma'am" and Bibles in hotel rooms and the white picket fence and Norman Rockwell and cheerleaders and  shiny-suited televangelists and the Stars and Stripes on the porch and get-up-and-go. (I don't have much of the latter quality myself, so I admire it.)

You might say this is all a dream, an ideal, an idyll.

Well, you could say the same about the "other America"-- except that's more of a sour-faced ideal laced with resentment. (I'm not having a pop at labour activists, by the way, or even Bob Dylan. You know what I mean. I'm talking about the ensemble.)

Humans are such aspirational beings that it's really impossible to separate the ideal from the reality, because the reality is always striving towards an ideal.

Give me the Norman Rockwell, Happy Days ideal over the one any old day. (Yes, I know Norman Rockwell was a Democrat. Democrats used to be sane!)

I touched on this subject in this blog post ten years ago. I haven't changed my mind.

That's it. God bless America. The vulgar, dime store America.

(You can point out I have never lived in America. I can point to the millions of real Americans who are happier to chant "USA, USA" than to cheer along with "American Idiot" by Green Day.)

A Great Interview with a New Convert

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

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

Strange Likings: A Weird Post

Well, not so much strange, but...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People love different sorts of things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inexplicability of Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Psychological Need to Be Inside Big Buildings

Does anybody else feel this?

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

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

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

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

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

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