As I've mentioned, I've been reading Fanny Burney's diaries. Fanny Burney was a very popular novelist who died in 1840. She kept a diary from the age of fifteen onwards, although she destroyed many of the more sensitive sections. It's the best non-fictional diary I've encountered so far. (Diary of a Nobody and The Diary of Adrian Mole are amongst my favourite novels.)
Diaries fascinate me because I'm fascinated with day-to-day life, and with the very concept of days. I've struggled to put this into words, or even into concepts, because "day-to-day life" seems such a redundant phrase. Isn't all life day-to-day life? Nobody talks about weekly life or hourly life or monthly life.
But, given that we experience life one day at a time, we rarely represent it in this way. Novels and movies and histories skip from day to day, wordlessly. When an episode of a TV series takes a "day in the life" approach, this is exceptional, and seen as exceptional.
Philip Larkin's poem "Days" is one of the few creative works which ponder this subject:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
One of the things that fascinates me about days is that they come in so many "flavours". There are good days, bad days, sick days (not always bad days!), big days (not always good days!), rainy days, busy days, slow days, first days, last days, the lazy hazy crazy days of summer, long winter evenings...and let's not forget nights! How many creative works have titles like Attic Nights or Arabian Nights? There's something very poetic about that formulation.
My father is a big fan of the Restorationist diarist Samuel Pepys. When I was a child, his evocative descriptions of Pepys's diaries made me assume that I would also fall in love with him. Alas, this didn't happen-- I could never get into Pepys, despite several efforts.
It's quite hard to find a good diary, at least for my purposes. I've given up on many diarists because they weren't what I was looking for. Here are, in my view, the requirements of a good diary:
1) It can't be a "special occasion" diary. I have no time for war diaries, election diaries, travel diaries, and so forth. To put it bluntly, they sicken me. The whole point of a diary is that it encompasses the variety of life. Who wants a cake that is all plums, or music that is all crescendo?
2) They can't be too introspective. I'm not interested in reading a diary which resembles a Dostoyevsky novel. (Probably because I'm not interested in reading a Dostoyevsky novel.) A diary which is all about emotions and thoughts is unbearable.
3) Conversely, they can't be too "extrospective". A diary that is simply a chronicle of what happened, and that contains no reflections, is unbearable. A diary entirely focused on public life and not at all on private life is unbearable.
4) The diarist should have an eye for unusual or trivial events, such as random sights on the street.
5) The diarist should tell us, not only about her daily life and her emotional life, but about her intellectual life. One of the best thing about Fanny Burney's diary is her frequent reflections on her reading and theatre-going. She has left us, for instance, detailed descriptions of David Garrick's perfomances and the impact they had on her. (Garrick was a close family friend, so we also meet him "out of make-up", as it were.)
I will keep readers posted on my progress through it!
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query days. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query days. Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Thursday, October 16, 2014
The Mansions of Memory
I've just finished reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It's a book I read in my twenties, and which rather disappointed me, since I was expecting the archetypal university story and it isn't a university story at all. (Whenever anyone refers to an idyllic view of university life they always speak about 'dreaming spires' and Brideshead Revisited.) In more recent times, I felt I should give it another chance, as it is considered one of the great Catholic novels in the English language-- or perhaps the greatest Catholic novel in the English language, since I can't think of another more celebrated example.
Well, I enjoyed it a little more, though I'm still not bowled over. Along with many readers, I'm bothered by Waugh's snobbery-- not for its own sake, but because he seems to give some kind of spiritual significance to good taste and elegance. Nor does the story ring very true to life to me. I know scads of baptized Catholics who don't show the slightest sign of being haunted by the faith from which they've turned away. And having a Catholic upbringing doesn't seem to make all that much difference when it comes to this. I have no doubt that there is a supernatural grace to baptism and confirmation, but I don't think it operates as obviously as it does in Brideshead Revisited. Perhaps Waugh had to exaggerate it in order to dramatize it.
In any case, I think I might be prejudiced against Waugh because he is one of that trio of Catholic fiction writers before whose shrines every thinking Catholic is expected to burn incense-- Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Of them all, Waugh is the only one who has given me any pleasure at all. That might make me a philistine, which doesn't bother me very much. (I should also admit that Graham Greene did give me some pleasure, through the title of his book of film criticism, Mornings in the Dark-- which I haven't read, but may yet.)
That's all by the by. The reason I mentioned Brideshead Revisited is because one particular passage-- in which Waugh is describing a passage on an ocean liner-- got me to thinking about memory, about the flavour of particular passages of time in our lives, and this thought has been haunting me ever since.
We live our lives a day at a time. This is a very pedestrian observation, I know-- but, somehow, when I think about it, it seems very odd. On any given day, we are inhabiting an island of consciousness, surrounded by an ocean of sleep. And each day has a unity of its own-- a unity of mood and atmosphere, as well as of circumstances-- no matter how various the events of that day. (I guess one of the reasons that my favourite film of all time is Groundhog Day is because few films have paid such attention to a single day-- even if it happens to be a day that is being repeated over and over, with variations. How it continues to be the same day is an interesting philosophical question.)
I find it our attitude to days fascinating. Days are the small change of our lives. We spend them heedlessly. Rather than disapproving of this, I find it inspiring. The idea that you should live each day as though it was your last sounds good as a slogan, but seems to miss the whole point (so to speak) of days. The point of days is that there are lots of them. Obviously this is not true of people who are in the last stages of terminal illness, or facing imminent death for some other reason. But most of human life is not spent in such a condition. Even people who die tragically young experience more days than they can remember-- nobody could give a day-by-day account of their lives, even if they started from the dawn of the age of reason. Even very old people have an indefinite number of days before them.
I'm not sure that living each day to its fullest is a good idea-- not if we take 'fullest' to mean 'busiest'. Would a lifetime of busy days really be living life to its fullest? What about lazy days, dreamy days, humdrum days? What about sick days, indeed? Would a person who quite literally never had a day's sickness, who never spent a day 'laid low' in bed, be a lucky person? I think few people would answer 'yes' to that.
A few years ago, in winter-time, a female friend of mine had a very traumatic break-up and told me she was going to ignore Christmas that year. I have always been a devotee of Christmas, and at that stage of my life I was particularly intent upon making every Christmas as Christmassy as it could possibly be-- a determination that can be very stressful. So her declaration shocked me, but even then, I think I felt strangely attracted to the idea of just skipping Christmas-- for once. We have enough Christmasses to afford it, and Christmas will happen with us or without us. We can talk airily about the 'year we didn't bother with Christmas'. I'm not exactly sure why I find this such a pleasing thought, at this juncture in my life, but I do-- even though I remain a fervent lover of Christmas.
We live a day at a time-- and every day has its own unique flavour. (I'm listening to music on 'shuffle' while I read this, and 'Days' by the Kinks has just started playing.) What gives a day its flavour? The weather. The time of year. The news. Work, or school, or its absence. The people we're spending it with. Travel. Physical location. Mood. Drama of one kind or another. Of course, the list could be expanded forever.
There are days, like September 11th 2001, where the entire world (or most of it, anyway) is focused upon one particular public event. I'm glad those days are exceedingly rare, somehow-- and not only because they are usually tragic events that create such a sensation. (The last one I can think of is the day that Robin Williams died-- or, rather, the day after he died.)
I started out writing this post about memory, but I find myself hundreds of words in, and having concentrated entirely upon the idea of days. I suppose it's because that's how we tend to classify our memories. When people are recalling a memory they say I remember the day that or That was the day when or It was a snowy morning. These little scene-setting phrases always give me a thrill. I suppose I am writing this post to analyse and try to understand that thrill-- the same thrill I felt when I was reading Waugh's account of a stormy day on an ocean liner.
I also like the idea of in-betweeny days, and I suppose this is part of why the passage in Brideshead Revisited appealed to me-- since days spent crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner is about as 'in betweeny' as you could get (although, of course, in the novel they are very consequential days indeed). In my experience of life the in-betweeny days are often the best days. 'The morning after the night before' (one of my favourite phrases) is usually invoked as something seedy and depressing, but I've personally found that the mornings after the nights before-- and the days before-- are the most delicious, in the same way that re-heated leftovers are often the most appetizing food.
The first example that occurs to me is one from a whole twenty years ago. I was a keen follower of the Irish national soccer team back then. (As were most of Ireland, since they were experiencing a lot of success.) The day before, Ireland (or the Republic of Ireland, as I should specify) had qualified for the 1994 World Cup in America with a dramatic 1-1 draw against Northern Ireland. The Republic equalized late in the game and, until then, it seemed as though they were going to be eliminated. There was a good deal of ill-feeling; the Republic had beaten Northern Ireland 3-0 in a previous qualifier, and the Republic's fans, rather unsportingly, began to chant "There's only one team in Ireland." So passions were running high. To a teenage boy these things are a very big deal.
Well, the memory that I am recounting is not that, but rather, the very next day. I remember myself, my brother and my cousin sharing a copy of The Irish Press between us-- we unfolded it into its separate pages, and then swapped them about, reading the various reports and analysis of the previous day's match. It may be a strange memory to pick out of almost thirty-eight years of life, but it strikes me as a perfect example of an in-betweeny kind of day. It's a very cosy memory.
Another memory that strikes me is a conversation I had in college, towards the end of my time there. It was in journalism college and at this stage I knew I was not going to be a journalist. (Though I do write for a Catholic newspaper now, so I suppose I did belatedly become a sort of journalist after all, even if it's not my profession.) I was speaking to a class-mate who was, in contrast, already writing front-pages stories for a Dublin daily paper. We were alone in the college's radio studio. He told me that he was so exhausted from all the reporting shifts that he'd been doing that he was looking forward to just switching off and watching television for a day. I found the idea of such an in-betweeny day extraordinarily appealing.
Another memory of an in-betweeny day; discovering the website Snopes, which has articles about urban legends (and which is extraordinarily well-written), one Christmas time, and reading article after article after article, for hours and hours, while drinking Coke. This was soon after I'd begun working in UCD; it was around the time I went to my first library Christmas party. Somehow, the fact that the memory of the Christmas party is stuck to this memory of reading Snopes for hours makes it less anti-social than it might have been otherwise.
Another memory of an in-betweeny day, and again around Christmas-time; it was two or three days before Christmas, and I had gastroenteritis. I wasn't allowed to eat anything for two days, but I cheated by sucking lollipops. I was reading All's Quiet on the Western Front. I was sitting in the living room and the Christmas tree was up and decorated. I had reached that age where we feel ashamed to be childishly excited about Christmas. My cousin (who also featured in the above memory) was in the living room. My father asked him what he was getting for Christmas. "Bills", he said; because he had just entered adulthood. "Maybe you should give them back to Bill", said my father, and I remember thinking even then how better a witticism it would have been if he'd asked what presents he was getting for Christmas. But here I am, remembering it some two decades later.
"All our yesterdays", Macbeth says, "have lighted fools to dusty death". A wonderful line; but we die anyway, whether our lives are mundane and quotidian or not. And part of me thinks that we are most fully alive, not when we are scaling the Himalayas or witnessing history unfold before our eyes, but when we are cutting and pasting pieces of paper into a scrapbook while watching repeats of sit-coms in our pyjamas.
Well, I enjoyed it a little more, though I'm still not bowled over. Along with many readers, I'm bothered by Waugh's snobbery-- not for its own sake, but because he seems to give some kind of spiritual significance to good taste and elegance. Nor does the story ring very true to life to me. I know scads of baptized Catholics who don't show the slightest sign of being haunted by the faith from which they've turned away. And having a Catholic upbringing doesn't seem to make all that much difference when it comes to this. I have no doubt that there is a supernatural grace to baptism and confirmation, but I don't think it operates as obviously as it does in Brideshead Revisited. Perhaps Waugh had to exaggerate it in order to dramatize it.
In any case, I think I might be prejudiced against Waugh because he is one of that trio of Catholic fiction writers before whose shrines every thinking Catholic is expected to burn incense-- Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Of them all, Waugh is the only one who has given me any pleasure at all. That might make me a philistine, which doesn't bother me very much. (I should also admit that Graham Greene did give me some pleasure, through the title of his book of film criticism, Mornings in the Dark-- which I haven't read, but may yet.)
That's all by the by. The reason I mentioned Brideshead Revisited is because one particular passage-- in which Waugh is describing a passage on an ocean liner-- got me to thinking about memory, about the flavour of particular passages of time in our lives, and this thought has been haunting me ever since.
We live our lives a day at a time. This is a very pedestrian observation, I know-- but, somehow, when I think about it, it seems very odd. On any given day, we are inhabiting an island of consciousness, surrounded by an ocean of sleep. And each day has a unity of its own-- a unity of mood and atmosphere, as well as of circumstances-- no matter how various the events of that day. (I guess one of the reasons that my favourite film of all time is Groundhog Day is because few films have paid such attention to a single day-- even if it happens to be a day that is being repeated over and over, with variations. How it continues to be the same day is an interesting philosophical question.)
I find it our attitude to days fascinating. Days are the small change of our lives. We spend them heedlessly. Rather than disapproving of this, I find it inspiring. The idea that you should live each day as though it was your last sounds good as a slogan, but seems to miss the whole point (so to speak) of days. The point of days is that there are lots of them. Obviously this is not true of people who are in the last stages of terminal illness, or facing imminent death for some other reason. But most of human life is not spent in such a condition. Even people who die tragically young experience more days than they can remember-- nobody could give a day-by-day account of their lives, even if they started from the dawn of the age of reason. Even very old people have an indefinite number of days before them.
I'm not sure that living each day to its fullest is a good idea-- not if we take 'fullest' to mean 'busiest'. Would a lifetime of busy days really be living life to its fullest? What about lazy days, dreamy days, humdrum days? What about sick days, indeed? Would a person who quite literally never had a day's sickness, who never spent a day 'laid low' in bed, be a lucky person? I think few people would answer 'yes' to that.
A few years ago, in winter-time, a female friend of mine had a very traumatic break-up and told me she was going to ignore Christmas that year. I have always been a devotee of Christmas, and at that stage of my life I was particularly intent upon making every Christmas as Christmassy as it could possibly be-- a determination that can be very stressful. So her declaration shocked me, but even then, I think I felt strangely attracted to the idea of just skipping Christmas-- for once. We have enough Christmasses to afford it, and Christmas will happen with us or without us. We can talk airily about the 'year we didn't bother with Christmas'. I'm not exactly sure why I find this such a pleasing thought, at this juncture in my life, but I do-- even though I remain a fervent lover of Christmas.
We live a day at a time-- and every day has its own unique flavour. (I'm listening to music on 'shuffle' while I read this, and 'Days' by the Kinks has just started playing.) What gives a day its flavour? The weather. The time of year. The news. Work, or school, or its absence. The people we're spending it with. Travel. Physical location. Mood. Drama of one kind or another. Of course, the list could be expanded forever.
There are days, like September 11th 2001, where the entire world (or most of it, anyway) is focused upon one particular public event. I'm glad those days are exceedingly rare, somehow-- and not only because they are usually tragic events that create such a sensation. (The last one I can think of is the day that Robin Williams died-- or, rather, the day after he died.)
I started out writing this post about memory, but I find myself hundreds of words in, and having concentrated entirely upon the idea of days. I suppose it's because that's how we tend to classify our memories. When people are recalling a memory they say I remember the day that or That was the day when or It was a snowy morning. These little scene-setting phrases always give me a thrill. I suppose I am writing this post to analyse and try to understand that thrill-- the same thrill I felt when I was reading Waugh's account of a stormy day on an ocean liner.
I also like the idea of in-betweeny days, and I suppose this is part of why the passage in Brideshead Revisited appealed to me-- since days spent crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner is about as 'in betweeny' as you could get (although, of course, in the novel they are very consequential days indeed). In my experience of life the in-betweeny days are often the best days. 'The morning after the night before' (one of my favourite phrases) is usually invoked as something seedy and depressing, but I've personally found that the mornings after the nights before-- and the days before-- are the most delicious, in the same way that re-heated leftovers are often the most appetizing food.
The first example that occurs to me is one from a whole twenty years ago. I was a keen follower of the Irish national soccer team back then. (As were most of Ireland, since they were experiencing a lot of success.) The day before, Ireland (or the Republic of Ireland, as I should specify) had qualified for the 1994 World Cup in America with a dramatic 1-1 draw against Northern Ireland. The Republic equalized late in the game and, until then, it seemed as though they were going to be eliminated. There was a good deal of ill-feeling; the Republic had beaten Northern Ireland 3-0 in a previous qualifier, and the Republic's fans, rather unsportingly, began to chant "There's only one team in Ireland." So passions were running high. To a teenage boy these things are a very big deal.
Well, the memory that I am recounting is not that, but rather, the very next day. I remember myself, my brother and my cousin sharing a copy of The Irish Press between us-- we unfolded it into its separate pages, and then swapped them about, reading the various reports and analysis of the previous day's match. It may be a strange memory to pick out of almost thirty-eight years of life, but it strikes me as a perfect example of an in-betweeny kind of day. It's a very cosy memory.
Another memory that strikes me is a conversation I had in college, towards the end of my time there. It was in journalism college and at this stage I knew I was not going to be a journalist. (Though I do write for a Catholic newspaper now, so I suppose I did belatedly become a sort of journalist after all, even if it's not my profession.) I was speaking to a class-mate who was, in contrast, already writing front-pages stories for a Dublin daily paper. We were alone in the college's radio studio. He told me that he was so exhausted from all the reporting shifts that he'd been doing that he was looking forward to just switching off and watching television for a day. I found the idea of such an in-betweeny day extraordinarily appealing.
Another memory of an in-betweeny day; discovering the website Snopes, which has articles about urban legends (and which is extraordinarily well-written), one Christmas time, and reading article after article after article, for hours and hours, while drinking Coke. This was soon after I'd begun working in UCD; it was around the time I went to my first library Christmas party. Somehow, the fact that the memory of the Christmas party is stuck to this memory of reading Snopes for hours makes it less anti-social than it might have been otherwise.
Another memory of an in-betweeny day, and again around Christmas-time; it was two or three days before Christmas, and I had gastroenteritis. I wasn't allowed to eat anything for two days, but I cheated by sucking lollipops. I was reading All's Quiet on the Western Front. I was sitting in the living room and the Christmas tree was up and decorated. I had reached that age where we feel ashamed to be childishly excited about Christmas. My cousin (who also featured in the above memory) was in the living room. My father asked him what he was getting for Christmas. "Bills", he said; because he had just entered adulthood. "Maybe you should give them back to Bill", said my father, and I remember thinking even then how better a witticism it would have been if he'd asked what presents he was getting for Christmas. But here I am, remembering it some two decades later.
"All our yesterdays", Macbeth says, "have lighted fools to dusty death". A wonderful line; but we die anyway, whether our lives are mundane and quotidian or not. And part of me thinks that we are most fully alive, not when we are scaling the Himalayas or witnessing history unfold before our eyes, but when we are cutting and pasting pieces of paper into a scrapbook while watching repeats of sit-coms in our pyjamas.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
My Weird Appetites
Today I found myself thinking about
something that I've often thought about in the past, but that recent
circumstances have given me particular cause to ponder. And that is, how
bizarrely specific our appetites and desires and inclinations can be.
When I say "recent circumstances", I mean my own experience, as this has happened to me quite a lot in recent weeks.
The first strange hankering I want to mention concerns the American show The Office. (After Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which I tend to lump together as one show, this is my favourite television programme. I'm not sure I can even yield the supremacy to Star Trek. I like them in different ways.)
There is one excellent episode of The Office called 'Business Trip'. (The scriptwriters of The Office had a difficult time spinning storylines out of such a restrictive set-up, which was simply the life of a paper merchants and its employees. They often stretched the premise too far into wackiness. But 'Business Trip' is pleasingly simple, and it's hard to believe that it took them five seasons to use the storyline of a business trip.)
The story-line of 'Business Trip' involves Michael Scott (the office manager and central character of the show, played by Steve Carrell) and two other characters (Andy, a preppy salesman who is engaged to one of the office accountants) and Oscar (a gay, Mexican accountant) all going on a business trip to Winnipeg in November. Michael is boyishly excited about the trip, but it doesn't turn out to be very exciting.
(David Wallace, their CEO, mentions at one point that: "It's pretty tough to find somebody who wants to go up to Winnipeg mid-November." The lack of glamour in the business trip and its location is a big theme of the episode. This is part of what I find appealing; as I mentioned a few times previously, I like all things provincial. I don't know if Winnipeg is 'provincial', but you know what I mean.)
The scene that excited me particularly was one involving Andy and Oscar. They visit a local bar, one that is portrayed as being not particularly exciting. They get drunk and Oscar starts asking Andy what he can possibly see in his fiancee. Andy mentions that they haven't yet had sex (and in a modern comedy, of course, two engaged people remaining chaste is seen as bizarre-- though Oscar does ask, "Are you guys waiting to be married?" and Andy says: "Honestly, I don't know what we're waiting for!", so at least the concept of premarital chastity is acknowledged). Oscar drunkenly persuades Andy to phone his fiancée and ask her to explain herself, which he does.
It's a reasonably funny scene, and quite a sweet episode. (As Andy says at the end: "I had to go all the way to Canada to get to know a guy who sits twenty feet away from me".) But the point of my story is that, weeks after watching this episode, I suddenly found it coming into my mind over and over again. It was the pub/club/bar atmosphere that excited me. It had been a long time, a record time, since I'd been in any drinking spot.
Then, one evening, on a bus that was passing through the suburb of Phibsborough in Dublin, I looked at a particular pub and thought: "I'd really like to visit a pub, just to be in one." The desire grew and grew, and I hopped off the bus a few stops later, and went looking for a suitable tavern.
But the point is, I couldn't find one. I'd gone too far into the suburbs. There was only one rather sleepy suburban pub, full of regulars-- the kind of pub I would usually prefer. But that scene from The Office had got into my head and I wanted a pub that wasn't sleepy, and that wasn't full of regulars-- something with a bit of animation, just like the pub in the scene, and where there would be a flow of different and new people (not that I intended to talk to any of them).
Eventually, I satisfied my craving by visiting a local hotel lounge. It was on a Saturday morning, but there were lots of people there from the nearby hotel, so it wasn't just regulars.
What I really wanted was to visit a bar in Winnipeg in November, on a business trip.
More recently, I became completely fascinated with the idea of days. Yes, days. It's something I've written about on this blog several times, though I've always struggled to express what I mean exactly. I'm fascinated by the fact that human life is divided into days. I'm fascinated by their texture, their pulse, how they are remembered. I'm always fascinated to hear people talk about particular stretches of their lives ("I spent three days in bed with the curtains closed...I tramped the streets for a week...we spent a month discussing the idea...") The past imperfect thrills me.
So I suddenly wanted to read a good diary. But every diary I contemplated reading seemed to lack what I was looking for. What about the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, the naval secretary who witnessed the Great Fire of London and whose diary is a goldmine of seventeenth century social history, as well as a much-lauded work of art? I'd tried reading it before, and there was a little bit too much bureaucracy and statecraft for my liking. Besides, it was so old-- I wanted something more recent, so that I could relate to it better. The diary of his contemporary John Evelyn was out for the same reason.
Some of the diaries I came across were first-hand accounts of important moments in history; diaries by senior politicians, for instance. But I didn't want anything so specialised, or so dramatic. I didn't want war, or high politics, or expeditions in far off lands. The craving I felt was for the whole rich tapestry of life; dull days, busy days, sick days, red letter days, dark days, holidays, and every other sort of day. I wanted a diary that had as much of the mundane as the picturesque; more of the mundane, for preference.
So how about The Diary of a Country Parson, by James Woodforde, who died in 1803, and who lived a rather uneventful and routine existence? It's had fans since it was published in 1924. However, I found Woodforde's rather plodding account of dinners and expenditures and other daily incidents to be a bit too plain and lacking in reflection or introspection.
Next I tried the diaries and letters of John Henry Newman. The university where I work, University College Dublin, is the descendant of the Catholic University that John Henry Newman founded (though he only really got it started, before trouble from the Irish bishops forced him to leave). This fact, and the mere fact that it was the first dedicated Catholic university in Ireland, means that we have a huge amount of Newman material in the library, including a complete run of his collected diaries and letters-- over thirty volumes. (Newman kept everything.) I started on the first volume, knowing in my heart that there was no chance I would read them all, but rather taken with the idea of doing so. (I always love the idea of going off the beaten track.)
I managed to keep it up for almost a whole volume. Newman was certainly more stimulating company than the Rev. Woodforde, and lived life at a higher pitch, both intellectually and spiritually. But...it was a bit too high of a pitch. Newman lived a life of heroic dedication, and it's rather exhausting even to read about.
Besides, he wasn't much of a diarist. He jotted down the events of the day, but he didn't expand upon them. The meat of the volume was much more in the letters than the diary, and these were indeed much more of a chronicle of his reactions, anxieties, hopes, impressions, and all the other things we expect from a diary, than was his diary proper. But even here, the obliqueness of the thing became frustrating. I was always pleased to come across a letter to his mother or one of his sisters, where he tended to pour out his heart, but one might just as easily find oneself wading through a long and dry correspondence with some distant acquaintance.
I gave up on diaries for a few days, reading a book about Shakespeare instead, but the hunger overtook me again. And I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for when I discovered Evelyn Waugh had kept a diary for most of his life. (He destroyed some parts of it, but most of his life is represented.) And even better-- it was much more than just a record of events. He put down his thoughts and ideas and reactions and emotions, too. This seemed like the jackpot. And he was a Catholic, to boot!
But even here, I felt frustrated. It was pretty good as long as he was at public school (for my American readers, this means a private boarding school; they feature heavily in much English writing and many English memoirs of the time, but Waugh was-- as the introduction pointed out-- pretty much the only writer to keep a diary of the experience as it happened.) But then he goes to Oxford-- he destroyed his Oxford diaries, probably because of homosexual experiences recorded in them-- and graduates to a boozy and party-filled young adult life that, despite the presence of many eminent friends, is surprisingly tedious to read about. In fact, the most interesting passages are the ones where he is working as a teacher in a rather obscure school. Too much freedom, I have always noticed, makes everything dull.
I was looking forward to his conversion to Catholicism, which came after his career as a novelist took off, and after the failure of his first marriage (all of these events are missing from the diaries themselves, since he also destroyed this sequence). Unfortunately, when the curtain rises on his successful years, his diary persona becomes blasé and cynical and impersonal (as the volume's editor admits), and the entries are shorter and less heartfelt. I jumped a decade and more, to the end of World War Two; then, when I found him bitterly listing his low opinions of his own children, I gave up on Waugh.
And on diaries, too, at least for the moment. My trawl through them had partly satisfied my hunger, and partly convinced me that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for. Perhaps I had been too influenced by fictional diaries, like The Diary of Adrian Mole (a favourite in my early twenties) and The Diary of a Nobody (a perennial favourite, and my candidate for the funniest novel in the English language). Or perhaps I had learned that the diary of a real somebody is less interesting than the diary of a fictional nobody.
My final strange appetite is the most recent, and the mildest. As I was reading that book about Shakespeare that I mentioned, I found myself (not for the first time) becoming infatuated with the title The Winter's Tale. I think it's one of the most evocative titles ever; and perhaps thinking about it at the height of summer (though it's not very summery in Ireland right now) adds to its charm.
I recently offered readers an "e-book" (i.e., Word file) collection of my poetry entitled While The Wind Howls on a Winter's Night. The title comes from this verse:
In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.
I have to admit I'm pretty proud of that line. I quote it now to try to explain what magic I find in the title The Winter's Tale. (Not that it's needed, I'm sure. I mentioned in a recent post a Youtube video of old Irish ads that I was watching over and over. One is for a sherry called A Winter's Tale, and it seemed to be evoking the same kind of idyll.)
I'd already read through A Winter's Tale not long ago, motivated by the same fascination; I liked it well enough, being a product of Shakespeare's later mellow and dreamy phase. But I like The Tempest better, for the same reason. All the same, I found myself seeking out another edition of The Winter's Tale, purely for the sake of the title. I would, I told myself, read the introduction at least. By the time I had finished the introduction (thoroughly enjoying it), I was already interested in something else....
Yeats once wrote:
Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Should that be my attitude too (though Yeats himself is obviously ambivalent in this poem)? Or should I let these fancies flow freely? One way or the other, I think the mind's tendency to suddenly be attracted to a bizarrely specific idea is quite fascinating.
And more that fascinating; I think that it is very often the seed for works of art and other enterprises. I'm very interested in the creative process, and it's amazing how often a song or a film or a book grows out of one image, one character, or one atmosphere. I also think that a person's philosophy of life very often has such a genesis; something speaks to that person's depths, in such a way that it influences their entire lives, and it can very often be something as madly specific as the things I list here.
When I say "recent circumstances", I mean my own experience, as this has happened to me quite a lot in recent weeks.
The first strange hankering I want to mention concerns the American show The Office. (After Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which I tend to lump together as one show, this is my favourite television programme. I'm not sure I can even yield the supremacy to Star Trek. I like them in different ways.)
There is one excellent episode of The Office called 'Business Trip'. (The scriptwriters of The Office had a difficult time spinning storylines out of such a restrictive set-up, which was simply the life of a paper merchants and its employees. They often stretched the premise too far into wackiness. But 'Business Trip' is pleasingly simple, and it's hard to believe that it took them five seasons to use the storyline of a business trip.)
The story-line of 'Business Trip' involves Michael Scott (the office manager and central character of the show, played by Steve Carrell) and two other characters (Andy, a preppy salesman who is engaged to one of the office accountants) and Oscar (a gay, Mexican accountant) all going on a business trip to Winnipeg in November. Michael is boyishly excited about the trip, but it doesn't turn out to be very exciting.
(David Wallace, their CEO, mentions at one point that: "It's pretty tough to find somebody who wants to go up to Winnipeg mid-November." The lack of glamour in the business trip and its location is a big theme of the episode. This is part of what I find appealing; as I mentioned a few times previously, I like all things provincial. I don't know if Winnipeg is 'provincial', but you know what I mean.)
The scene that excited me particularly was one involving Andy and Oscar. They visit a local bar, one that is portrayed as being not particularly exciting. They get drunk and Oscar starts asking Andy what he can possibly see in his fiancee. Andy mentions that they haven't yet had sex (and in a modern comedy, of course, two engaged people remaining chaste is seen as bizarre-- though Oscar does ask, "Are you guys waiting to be married?" and Andy says: "Honestly, I don't know what we're waiting for!", so at least the concept of premarital chastity is acknowledged). Oscar drunkenly persuades Andy to phone his fiancée and ask her to explain herself, which he does.
It's a reasonably funny scene, and quite a sweet episode. (As Andy says at the end: "I had to go all the way to Canada to get to know a guy who sits twenty feet away from me".) But the point of my story is that, weeks after watching this episode, I suddenly found it coming into my mind over and over again. It was the pub/club/bar atmosphere that excited me. It had been a long time, a record time, since I'd been in any drinking spot.
Then, one evening, on a bus that was passing through the suburb of Phibsborough in Dublin, I looked at a particular pub and thought: "I'd really like to visit a pub, just to be in one." The desire grew and grew, and I hopped off the bus a few stops later, and went looking for a suitable tavern.
But the point is, I couldn't find one. I'd gone too far into the suburbs. There was only one rather sleepy suburban pub, full of regulars-- the kind of pub I would usually prefer. But that scene from The Office had got into my head and I wanted a pub that wasn't sleepy, and that wasn't full of regulars-- something with a bit of animation, just like the pub in the scene, and where there would be a flow of different and new people (not that I intended to talk to any of them).
Eventually, I satisfied my craving by visiting a local hotel lounge. It was on a Saturday morning, but there were lots of people there from the nearby hotel, so it wasn't just regulars.
What I really wanted was to visit a bar in Winnipeg in November, on a business trip.
More recently, I became completely fascinated with the idea of days. Yes, days. It's something I've written about on this blog several times, though I've always struggled to express what I mean exactly. I'm fascinated by the fact that human life is divided into days. I'm fascinated by their texture, their pulse, how they are remembered. I'm always fascinated to hear people talk about particular stretches of their lives ("I spent three days in bed with the curtains closed...I tramped the streets for a week...we spent a month discussing the idea...") The past imperfect thrills me.
So I suddenly wanted to read a good diary. But every diary I contemplated reading seemed to lack what I was looking for. What about the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, the naval secretary who witnessed the Great Fire of London and whose diary is a goldmine of seventeenth century social history, as well as a much-lauded work of art? I'd tried reading it before, and there was a little bit too much bureaucracy and statecraft for my liking. Besides, it was so old-- I wanted something more recent, so that I could relate to it better. The diary of his contemporary John Evelyn was out for the same reason.
Some of the diaries I came across were first-hand accounts of important moments in history; diaries by senior politicians, for instance. But I didn't want anything so specialised, or so dramatic. I didn't want war, or high politics, or expeditions in far off lands. The craving I felt was for the whole rich tapestry of life; dull days, busy days, sick days, red letter days, dark days, holidays, and every other sort of day. I wanted a diary that had as much of the mundane as the picturesque; more of the mundane, for preference.
So how about The Diary of a Country Parson, by James Woodforde, who died in 1803, and who lived a rather uneventful and routine existence? It's had fans since it was published in 1924. However, I found Woodforde's rather plodding account of dinners and expenditures and other daily incidents to be a bit too plain and lacking in reflection or introspection.
Next I tried the diaries and letters of John Henry Newman. The university where I work, University College Dublin, is the descendant of the Catholic University that John Henry Newman founded (though he only really got it started, before trouble from the Irish bishops forced him to leave). This fact, and the mere fact that it was the first dedicated Catholic university in Ireland, means that we have a huge amount of Newman material in the library, including a complete run of his collected diaries and letters-- over thirty volumes. (Newman kept everything.) I started on the first volume, knowing in my heart that there was no chance I would read them all, but rather taken with the idea of doing so. (I always love the idea of going off the beaten track.)
I managed to keep it up for almost a whole volume. Newman was certainly more stimulating company than the Rev. Woodforde, and lived life at a higher pitch, both intellectually and spiritually. But...it was a bit too high of a pitch. Newman lived a life of heroic dedication, and it's rather exhausting even to read about.
Besides, he wasn't much of a diarist. He jotted down the events of the day, but he didn't expand upon them. The meat of the volume was much more in the letters than the diary, and these were indeed much more of a chronicle of his reactions, anxieties, hopes, impressions, and all the other things we expect from a diary, than was his diary proper. But even here, the obliqueness of the thing became frustrating. I was always pleased to come across a letter to his mother or one of his sisters, where he tended to pour out his heart, but one might just as easily find oneself wading through a long and dry correspondence with some distant acquaintance.
I gave up on diaries for a few days, reading a book about Shakespeare instead, but the hunger overtook me again. And I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for when I discovered Evelyn Waugh had kept a diary for most of his life. (He destroyed some parts of it, but most of his life is represented.) And even better-- it was much more than just a record of events. He put down his thoughts and ideas and reactions and emotions, too. This seemed like the jackpot. And he was a Catholic, to boot!
But even here, I felt frustrated. It was pretty good as long as he was at public school (for my American readers, this means a private boarding school; they feature heavily in much English writing and many English memoirs of the time, but Waugh was-- as the introduction pointed out-- pretty much the only writer to keep a diary of the experience as it happened.) But then he goes to Oxford-- he destroyed his Oxford diaries, probably because of homosexual experiences recorded in them-- and graduates to a boozy and party-filled young adult life that, despite the presence of many eminent friends, is surprisingly tedious to read about. In fact, the most interesting passages are the ones where he is working as a teacher in a rather obscure school. Too much freedom, I have always noticed, makes everything dull.
I was looking forward to his conversion to Catholicism, which came after his career as a novelist took off, and after the failure of his first marriage (all of these events are missing from the diaries themselves, since he also destroyed this sequence). Unfortunately, when the curtain rises on his successful years, his diary persona becomes blasé and cynical and impersonal (as the volume's editor admits), and the entries are shorter and less heartfelt. I jumped a decade and more, to the end of World War Two; then, when I found him bitterly listing his low opinions of his own children, I gave up on Waugh.
And on diaries, too, at least for the moment. My trawl through them had partly satisfied my hunger, and partly convinced me that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for. Perhaps I had been too influenced by fictional diaries, like The Diary of Adrian Mole (a favourite in my early twenties) and The Diary of a Nobody (a perennial favourite, and my candidate for the funniest novel in the English language). Or perhaps I had learned that the diary of a real somebody is less interesting than the diary of a fictional nobody.
My final strange appetite is the most recent, and the mildest. As I was reading that book about Shakespeare that I mentioned, I found myself (not for the first time) becoming infatuated with the title The Winter's Tale. I think it's one of the most evocative titles ever; and perhaps thinking about it at the height of summer (though it's not very summery in Ireland right now) adds to its charm.
I recently offered readers an "e-book" (i.e., Word file) collection of my poetry entitled While The Wind Howls on a Winter's Night. The title comes from this verse:
In an old, old story spoken
By a low fire’s dying light—
Of promises made and broken
Or old wrongs put to right;
That hushes the room, while the wind howls on a winter’s night.
I have to admit I'm pretty proud of that line. I quote it now to try to explain what magic I find in the title The Winter's Tale. (Not that it's needed, I'm sure. I mentioned in a recent post a Youtube video of old Irish ads that I was watching over and over. One is for a sherry called A Winter's Tale, and it seemed to be evoking the same kind of idyll.)
I'd already read through A Winter's Tale not long ago, motivated by the same fascination; I liked it well enough, being a product of Shakespeare's later mellow and dreamy phase. But I like The Tempest better, for the same reason. All the same, I found myself seeking out another edition of The Winter's Tale, purely for the sake of the title. I would, I told myself, read the introduction at least. By the time I had finished the introduction (thoroughly enjoying it), I was already interested in something else....
Yeats once wrote:
Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Should that be my attitude too (though Yeats himself is obviously ambivalent in this poem)? Or should I let these fancies flow freely? One way or the other, I think the mind's tendency to suddenly be attracted to a bizarrely specific idea is quite fascinating.
And more that fascinating; I think that it is very often the seed for works of art and other enterprises. I'm very interested in the creative process, and it's amazing how often a song or a film or a book grows out of one image, one character, or one atmosphere. I also think that a person's philosophy of life very often has such a genesis; something speaks to that person's depths, in such a way that it influences their entire lives, and it can very often be something as madly specific as the things I list here.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Hurray for Penzu!
This post is going to be a free advertisement, and a fully deserved free advertisement. I come to praise Penzu, the diary software that I have been using every day for considerably over a year.
I wish I still had those diaries. Not only did they describe the routines of my schooling, or some of it, but I remember they contained many reflections which were of lasting importance to me. It would be extremely interesting to read the musings of my sixteen and seventeen year old self. However, it's long gone.
I kept paper diaries in college. I have less nostalgia for these. It was a time of great confusion and aimlessness in my life. I can remember these diaries were full of affectation and self-pity, and I eventually I threw them into the river Tolka in disgust. Although I do regret this, I don't regret it nearly as much as my school diary.
Efforts to keep diaries after that were fitful and unsuccessful. I got it into my head that a diary should be a terse chronicle, rather than a record of thoughts and feelings. This was probably an over-reaction to my college diaries. I have a pocket diary from 2014 that has a few months worths of records, but nothing else.
Then, last year, on the 24th of June, I decided to keep an online diary. A few moments of research were enough to discover that Penzu.com was the market leader. I created an account, and started to keep a diary-- my first entry was entitled 'To Make a Beginning'.
This was the first paragraph:
I decided yesterday-- or was it today?-- that I would start keeping a diary again. Strangely enough, it was the memory of a passage in Brideshead Revisited that did it. There is one section set aboard a liner that filled me with a strange fascination with the notion of days, how our lives are divided into these units. And I remembered, from the computer diary I kept in my teens, how delicious the in-betweeny days seemed to be-- the uneventful, reflective days-- and how each day seemed to have more of an identity when it was preserved in a diary. Even though that diary is long lost, I remember the days I chronicled in it as days, because I chronicled them. Hence-- this.
I think most of us begin most projects, or routines, in the same spirit as we make New Years' resolutions-- hoping they will stick, not really expecting them to. But this one did. I have not missed a day in my Penzu diary since that time. Some days, I have had to make notes on paper and transfer them to the online diary later, but I've not missed chronicling a day.
And, although my life is not particularly eventful, there's already quite a few memorable highlights in the diary. There is an account of my jury service, which was for two weeks on a very dramatic case. There is an account of the wedding of one of my closest friends. There is, sadly, the account of my father-in-law's funeral and internment in New Jersey. There is an account of the strange episode wherein I arranged and catalogued the private library of Judge Ronan Keane, the former President of the Supreme Court. (It was what we call a 'nixer' in Ireland-- a job on the side.) There is an account of a job interview (unsuccessful). There is an account of an operation where I went under general anaesthetic for the first time in my life.
Then there are all the public events, like the general election, or Brexit, or the death of David Bowie. There are all the feasts of the liturgical year, a complete round of which I have made. And all the secular holidays, too-- although the one Christmas recorded in my diary so far was a subdued and rather sad one, for several reasons.
And, of course, there are all the 'in betweeny days' which, to me, are the most delicious part of a diary.
I have also kept a record of my dreams, when I can remember them, and of conversations with friends. These are often the most intereting to re-read. Who remembers most dreams, and most conversations?
I promised some free advertising. I wanted to say that Penzu is a wonderful service. For one thing, I love the name, which seems to be a pun on 'pen' and 'penser' (the French verb for think).
Some people ask me why you even need a diary software. Why not just use a Word document, or a Google Drive document?
Well, of course you can do that, but I find Penzu much more attractive. It's purpose-built for diary writing. It generates a new diary entry every day, for that date, so you don't have to. Secondly, the formatting is aesthetically very pleasant, and you can customize it. Thirdly, its list of entries is very navigable (although it's a shame it doesn't have a facility whereby you can 'skip' back or forward at a day a time-- you have to go into the list of entries each time).
Penzu has a free service, a 'Penzu Pro' service, and a 'Penzu Pro-Plus'. After a few days of using the free service, I upgraded to Pro. It's twenty dollars a year. When the time came, I renewed it. I have shelled out on very few luxuries in the last few years, but this didn't seem expensive for something I use every day, and which gives me such satisfaction.
Penzu Pro allows you to keep multiple diaries in one account, to customize the formatting, and to add tags to your entries. (My tags are things like: "Mass", "Communion", "Confession". "Dreams", "Deep Conversation", "Oddity", "Big Day".) Tags make it easier to search.
You can add photos and pictures-- and video, too, though I've never done that.
I've found it a very efficient service. Sometimes it 'goes down', but very, very rarely, and never for long. It's rarely slow or unresponsive, which is a big deal.
I like the fact that it can be customized. The background image I use as a template for every entry is a photograph of an empty cinema, looking out from the seats to the screen. A cinema screen has always been my favourite metaphor for the mind, for consciousness.
Is keeping a diary a waste of time? I don't think so. I don't think it actually takes time from anything else, in my case. Maybe it's because I write quickly. I update it every few hours, a few minutes at a time. Of course, sometimes I write more reflective entries at greater length.
I like to include little details, little 'grace notes'-- an overheard conversation on a bus, a poster seen in a shopping centre, demonstrations and street evangelists in the city centre, a story that somebody tells me, and so forth. if there is an art to keeping a diary, I think that is part of it.
Who is a diary written for? Primarily, of course, it is written for youself, to re-read in the near and distant future. I do find myself hoping somebody else will be interested in it some day, though-- a child, or a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, or even somebody less directly descended from me. Perhaps even a social historian, or a researcher. (I do find myself explaining references to people and events I haven't mentioned before, as though it is being read by a complete stranger.)
Of course, I have a sneaking hope that one day it will join the exalted ranks of famous diaries such as those of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Virginia Woolf, and Kenneth Williams. Stranger things have happened. Not many, but some.
I've kept diaries on and off throughout my life-- more off than on, though. I remember keeping one when I was about twelve years old. Tim Burton's Batman movie was out at the time, and I remember drawing Batman insignia on the back cover. I don't think this lasted more than a few weeks.
My family got a computer (Microsoft Works) in 1994, when I was sixteen. This was the occasion for me to start writing poetry seriously. It was also the occasion for me to start keeping a diary, and I kept it for a long time; perhaps a year and a half.
 |
| Penzu screenshot-- not mine. |
My family got a computer (Microsoft Works) in 1994, when I was sixteen. This was the occasion for me to start writing poetry seriously. It was also the occasion for me to start keeping a diary, and I kept it for a long time; perhaps a year and a half.
I wish I still had those diaries. Not only did they describe the routines of my schooling, or some of it, but I remember they contained many reflections which were of lasting importance to me. It would be extremely interesting to read the musings of my sixteen and seventeen year old self. However, it's long gone.
I kept paper diaries in college. I have less nostalgia for these. It was a time of great confusion and aimlessness in my life. I can remember these diaries were full of affectation and self-pity, and I eventually I threw them into the river Tolka in disgust. Although I do regret this, I don't regret it nearly as much as my school diary.
 |
| Tolka, final resting place of my college diaries |
Efforts to keep diaries after that were fitful and unsuccessful. I got it into my head that a diary should be a terse chronicle, rather than a record of thoughts and feelings. This was probably an over-reaction to my college diaries. I have a pocket diary from 2014 that has a few months worths of records, but nothing else.
This was the first paragraph:
I decided yesterday-- or was it today?-- that I would start keeping a diary again. Strangely enough, it was the memory of a passage in Brideshead Revisited that did it. There is one section set aboard a liner that filled me with a strange fascination with the notion of days, how our lives are divided into these units. And I remembered, from the computer diary I kept in my teens, how delicious the in-betweeny days seemed to be-- the uneventful, reflective days-- and how each day seemed to have more of an identity when it was preserved in a diary. Even though that diary is long lost, I remember the days I chronicled in it as days, because I chronicled them. Hence-- this.
 |
| Brideshead Revisited |
I think most of us begin most projects, or routines, in the same spirit as we make New Years' resolutions-- hoping they will stick, not really expecting them to. But this one did. I have not missed a day in my Penzu diary since that time. Some days, I have had to make notes on paper and transfer them to the online diary later, but I've not missed chronicling a day.
And, although my life is not particularly eventful, there's already quite a few memorable highlights in the diary. There is an account of my jury service, which was for two weeks on a very dramatic case. There is an account of the wedding of one of my closest friends. There is, sadly, the account of my father-in-law's funeral and internment in New Jersey. There is an account of the strange episode wherein I arranged and catalogued the private library of Judge Ronan Keane, the former President of the Supreme Court. (It was what we call a 'nixer' in Ireland-- a job on the side.) There is an account of a job interview (unsuccessful). There is an account of an operation where I went under general anaesthetic for the first time in my life.
Then there are all the public events, like the general election, or Brexit, or the death of David Bowie. There are all the feasts of the liturgical year, a complete round of which I have made. And all the secular holidays, too-- although the one Christmas recorded in my diary so far was a subdued and rather sad one, for several reasons.
And, of course, there are all the 'in betweeny days' which, to me, are the most delicious part of a diary.
I have also kept a record of my dreams, when I can remember them, and of conversations with friends. These are often the most intereting to re-read. Who remembers most dreams, and most conversations?
I promised some free advertising. I wanted to say that Penzu is a wonderful service. For one thing, I love the name, which seems to be a pun on 'pen' and 'penser' (the French verb for think).
Some people ask me why you even need a diary software. Why not just use a Word document, or a Google Drive document?
Well, of course you can do that, but I find Penzu much more attractive. It's purpose-built for diary writing. It generates a new diary entry every day, for that date, so you don't have to. Secondly, the formatting is aesthetically very pleasant, and you can customize it. Thirdly, its list of entries is very navigable (although it's a shame it doesn't have a facility whereby you can 'skip' back or forward at a day a time-- you have to go into the list of entries each time).
Penzu has a free service, a 'Penzu Pro' service, and a 'Penzu Pro-Plus'. After a few days of using the free service, I upgraded to Pro. It's twenty dollars a year. When the time came, I renewed it. I have shelled out on very few luxuries in the last few years, but this didn't seem expensive for something I use every day, and which gives me such satisfaction.
Penzu Pro allows you to keep multiple diaries in one account, to customize the formatting, and to add tags to your entries. (My tags are things like: "Mass", "Communion", "Confession". "Dreams", "Deep Conversation", "Oddity", "Big Day".) Tags make it easier to search.
You can add photos and pictures-- and video, too, though I've never done that.
I've found it a very efficient service. Sometimes it 'goes down', but very, very rarely, and never for long. It's rarely slow or unresponsive, which is a big deal.
I like the fact that it can be customized. The background image I use as a template for every entry is a photograph of an empty cinema, looking out from the seats to the screen. A cinema screen has always been my favourite metaphor for the mind, for consciousness.
Is keeping a diary a waste of time? I don't think so. I don't think it actually takes time from anything else, in my case. Maybe it's because I write quickly. I update it every few hours, a few minutes at a time. Of course, sometimes I write more reflective entries at greater length.
I like to include little details, little 'grace notes'-- an overheard conversation on a bus, a poster seen in a shopping centre, demonstrations and street evangelists in the city centre, a story that somebody tells me, and so forth. if there is an art to keeping a diary, I think that is part of it.
Who is a diary written for? Primarily, of course, it is written for youself, to re-read in the near and distant future. I do find myself hoping somebody else will be interested in it some day, though-- a child, or a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, or even somebody less directly descended from me. Perhaps even a social historian, or a researcher. (I do find myself explaining references to people and events I haven't mentioned before, as though it is being read by a complete stranger.)
Of course, I have a sneaking hope that one day it will join the exalted ranks of famous diaries such as those of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Virginia Woolf, and Kenneth Williams. Stranger things have happened. Not many, but some.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
A Satisfying Day
Today was a good day. Not because anything remarkable happened. No, it was simply one of those "day in the life" days when you suddenly look around and remember that you are alive.
Days are funny things. I think about them a lot. They are like miniature lives. We know that the vast majority of days will be forgotten, and yet each one seems of such overwhelming importance at the time. What a strange system it is, that our existence should be broken up into these units of time! I am fascinated by that question people increasingly ask each other these days, and that I believe is an import from America: "How has your day been?". It seems to presume that we judge experience in 24-hour chunks rather than moment to moment. Nobody ever asks, "How has your hour been?", and but rarely, "How has your week been?". I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask, "How has your month been?".
And yet it's not entirely true to say that we live day to day. When a movie or a book or a work of non-fiction confines itself to a single day, this seems exceptional and notable to us, and like an artificial limitation. Our minds are always flashing backwards and forwards, and we are usually immersed in plans and projects that take us mentally far beyond that single day-- or else we are absorbed by some immediate matter which makes us oblivious of any time-frame beyond that of the moment. And yet we are never entirely unaware of the day we are in, that "You are Here" spot on the map of time.
I often marvel at the giddy profusion of our days. Every adult, and even every teenager, has lived so many days that he or she simply can't keep track of them. We can never take in our whole life's experience at a glance. We can go weeks and months without thinking of a particular period in our life, even if that period was very memorable. I have always felt a thrill when I hear someone say something like, "I spent the entire day going through my album collection", or "I remember the day I spent cycling around the coast", or "We were working flat out the entire day, we got sandwiches in instead of having dinner".
People say that you should live every day like it's your last, that you should make the most of every day. I'm increasingly unsure of the wisdom of this advice. If I really lived each day like it was my last, I would soon be stony broke, spectacularly obese, and probably in prison. Should we live life to the full? Of course. But I think living life to the full would have to include whole days watching old sit-coms while sitting in your pyjamas. In other words, if you don't have dull days, aimless days, routine days, melancholy days, you aren't really living life to the full.
Why is life so various? It didn't have to be, and I have always been haunted by a kind of amazement that it is. I've always felt fascinated by the fact that people expect certain satisfactions out of life, often while posing as complete pessimists. Everybody seems to expect recreation, and a challenge, and responsibility, and time alone, and time socialising, and time spent in "nature", and time to satisfy their creative urges, and time to cut loose now and again, and routine, and a break from routine. Whence come these expectations? Why do people who acknowledge life to be so rich an experience, and who look actually demand such richness, still insist on believing that human life is simply a by-product of impersonal forces of nature? This used to perplex me long before I became a practicing Catholic.
I started today with the morning commute, as usual. I like taking the bus. I walk to the bus-stop throuh the housing estate where I live, when the dogs and the pigeons pretty much have the place to themselves and play out their little dramas.
I was reading The Irish Catholic on the bus this morning, a special issue in tribute of Pope Benedict. However, I couldn't keep my eyes open and was dozing all the way to UCD. I can't rememeber if I dozed as I passed the Liffey, although I usually make a practice to stare into its waters and along its horizon. It is too easy to forget what a remarkable sight a river is.
I had a few minutes for coffee in UCD's Arts Café, which is a treasured moment of the day-- often the very best. In the morning, everything seems newly-minted, even the people. And the Arts Café in UCD is a pleasant environment, with bright colours and long, soft lamps and tables dotted around irregularly. During the day, at least during the term, it is so busy it's difficult to find a table, but in the morning it is always pleasantly half-filled. Of course, being a university café, people are often writing essays on laptops or reading Serious Books, which gives it a certain intellectual air.
Then work. I don't know what I did to deserve the job that I have. Working in a university library is about the most enviable job in the world, short of being a chocolate taster. Just being surrounded by books all day is exciting. (I always especially like the moment when I walk past the stands of current journals, which take in subjects from Methodism in Ireland to accounting, and I am filled with appreciation at just how many things are always going on in the world. You can tell from the headlines on the covers of the magazines that people and debates you've never even heard of are all the rage in the world of archaeology, or analytical philosophy, or business management.) The students are unfailingly polite and friendly and easy-going, although the "mature" students tend to be grumpy and difficult. At lunch-time, being a Friday in Lent, I went to the restaurant and had salmon, chips, carrots, cabbage and Pepsi Cola. I agree it doesn't sound very penitential. I ate it while sitting alone, still reading The Irish Catholic. UCD restaurant has recently been refurbished, but it still has rather a soulless air about it, mostly because the tables are ranged in austere straight lines, giving it a little of an exam hall feeling. But I do savour the hum of voices in the air, which might be my favourite sound in the whole world.
I left work early today, determined to go to confession in St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street. When I started practicing my faith, confession was probably the most difficult hurdle. It was especially difficult because today, in so many parishes, regular confession times are not offered so you have to grab a priest when you can get him-- and approaching people out of the blue is always something I found incredibly difficult. So I was pleased when I found that St. Teresa's offers daily confession, at a convenient time, from 5:15 to 5:30 each day. I also prefer a classic confessional scenario whereby I am speaking to priest through a grille in a confessional box. Until I started going to St. Therese's for confession, pretty much all my confessions were done sitting side-by-side with a priest. It feels more like a chat than a sacrament.
Today I had an old priest who I've confessed to a good few times. I was the first in the queue today. I'm always surprised at the queue for confessions in St. Teresa's. It's not just old women. It's all sorts of people, including many fashionably-dressed professional people.
I said my penitential prayers (which I always find extremely difficult, since my mind keeps wandering) before the beginning of 5:30 Mass. Evening Mass in Clarendon Street is always fairly well attended but this evening there were relatively few people there. The woman beside me used the old responses to the Mass. An African priest celebrated, with all the solemnity that usually entails. During the Eucharistic Prayer, he stopped as he was about to mention "our Pope Benedict", saying "our emeritus Pope Benedict" instead (I forget the exact words). It was a poignant moment.
I don't especially like attending Mass in Clarendon Street. I think it's a rather ugly church, with its walls painted a billious green, its modernist stained glass windows, its gaudy statues, its oddly jarring proportions, its poor accoustics. Nor do I understand why receiving communion at an altar-rail is more reverent than in a queue-- in fact, it always seems rather anarchic and hugger-mugger to me.
But the Mass is the Mass. Some of them are beautiful and satisfy our aesthetic sensibilities. Some don't. But every Mass is Heaven on Earth, quite literally. And even when you don't "enjoy" it on a superficial level, you walk out of it feeling an unfathomable satisfaction and refreshment.
I spent a few minutes after Mass praying before the Blessed Sacrament, as the church emptied around me. I find this kind of quiet, contemplative prayer very difficult-- to be blunt, I get bored. And yet nothing in the whole world seems to me as potent and as impressive as the sight of a monstrance standing on an altar in an almost-deserted church. I can barely find words to express how powerful a sight this seems to me. It is not impressive in the same way that a herd of rampaging buffallo or a massive explosion would be impressive. But, in its quiet and understated way, it seems more powerful. I am an avid reader of Catholic conversion stories, and I find it fascinating that so many life-changing moments seem to occur during chance visits to chapels and churches and cathedrals-- usually at times when "nothing is happening" in the ordinary sense.
I love the words of St. Josemaria Escrivia-- "When you approach the tabernacle, remember he has been waiting for you for twenty centuries". That exactly describes the feeling I'm trying to describe. We feel "This has been waiting here all along. This is what I have always been looking for. This is where all my life has been leading. This is what abides, through all the whirls and eddies of history." It is like the moment in the movie when the protagonist finally opens the locked door, or enters the secret garden, or comes face to face with the woman he has been seeking all over the world.
Though I don't like Clarendon Street very much, I do like the sensation of passing from the hushed space of the church to the busy, lively streets outside.
I had arranged to meet a friend at eight o'clock, so I had some time on my hands-- which is a delicious phrase in itself. I made my way to the Central Hotel in Exchequer Street, in that warren of little streets between Grafton Street and George's Street. The Central Hotel is home to the most perfect little sanctuary in Dublin, the Library Bar.
The Library Bar is so called because the walls are lined with books-- the best sort of books, old musty and gilt-edged and serious-looking books. The Encyclopedia Britannica and bound volumes of the Cornhill Magazine are typical volumes. The whole place has the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century gentleman's club-- heavy, pelmeted curtains, marble fireplaces, deep chairs, subdued lampshades, very tasteful framed paintings and prints of ships, hunting squires, racehorses, and so forth. And-- oh glory be!-- there is no music or television, ever.
The only problem with the Library Bar is that it's difficult to find a place to sit down. This evening, in fact, I was leaving it disappointedly after discovering that the place was full, before doing a Dick Whittington and deciding-- since I had such a yearning to take my ease amongst all that elegance-- that I was just going to hover by the bar until a table was free. And then-- oh joy of joys!-- there was no need, since I saw a table close to the fireplace, gloriously free. I grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down, and sank into the book I'm currently reading-- a biography of G.K. Chesterton by Ian Ker. I had reached perhaps the most compelling part of the whole story-- his eventual conversion, after much soul-searching and struggle and a fair amount of drama, to the Roman Catholic Church.
This is going to sound horribly misanthropic, but I have to admit that I never enjoy having company in a pub or a café as much as I enjoy being there alone, with a book, looking up every now and again to savour the atmosphere, or to ponder my reading while staring out a window or into a decorated pub mirror. Nor can I think of a better way to read a book. The chatter and brightness and conviviality around you seems like a perfect counterpoint to that most intimate and private of activities-- reading. The hour passed all too soon.
And then I was on my way through the busy streets again, to meet my friend-- I will call her B. We were meeting in Whelan's, the live music venue in Wexford Street. Most of the time I've been there, I've been there with B.
Friendship is something that seems both strange and marvellous to me, since I had no friends until I was in my twenties. This is quite literally true, and not hyperbole. I was cripplingly shy and withdrawn, and B was one of my very first friends. I met her in the library where I work, though she has moved on to other things now. She was a confidante in the directionless, depressed days of my early and mid-twenties. I was so mired in negativity that it was a rather thankless role for her. We are pretty close to mirror opposites-- she's bubbly and outgoing, while I'm shy and fogeyish. We have had our tensions, but she never stopped being my friend. We are both mad about movies, and that helps.
I always felt out of place going to clubs and gigs, and now I feel more out of place than ever. I feel too old for that kind of thing. In fact, I can't help feeling that everybody there is too old for that kind of thing. Looking around, and seeing men and women in their late thirties and early forties and beyond, still wearing t-shirts proclaiming their admiration of various rock bands, still exchanging the kind of would-be witty banter that is appropriate to those kind of places, still determined to rock on, makes me wince more than a little. Nor do I feel the slightest sense of loss or regret at being past it, any more than I am nostalgic for my teenage acne.
Still, I tried to enjoy the atmosphere, if only as an outsider looking in. B's brother, who is an extremely talented songwriter, was opening for another act. I gave him several standing ovations, which were fully deserved.
When the main band came out, B and myself adjourned to the smoking area and spoke for the rest of the night. It was one of those deep heart-to-heart conversations that-- for men, anyway-- only seem to happen with female friends. B was reminding me how far I had come since I had first met her, back when I never went out, had never been outside Ireland, and had never even been to a party of any kind. Myself and B used to have these kind of deep conversations a lot. But it had been a long time since we did, and it left me glowing with gratitude for the gift of friendship.
I set out to catch (to use a phrase I find deeply evocative) the last bus home. I like to read a little bit of the Bible every day, so while I was waiting at the bus stop I got on my phone and accessed the "app" I have downloaded, which includes an e-version of the Douay-Rheims Bible. I read some verses of the first letter of the James, which contains the strange and haunting passage:
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if a man be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was.
"For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was." I don't know exactly what the Apostle meant by those words. But, as the bus took me home, it made me think of that memorable passage in Chesterton's masterpiece, Orthodoxy:
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Oh, Lord, let me remember! Let me never forget! And let me never cease to give thanks and praise!
Days are funny things. I think about them a lot. They are like miniature lives. We know that the vast majority of days will be forgotten, and yet each one seems of such overwhelming importance at the time. What a strange system it is, that our existence should be broken up into these units of time! I am fascinated by that question people increasingly ask each other these days, and that I believe is an import from America: "How has your day been?". It seems to presume that we judge experience in 24-hour chunks rather than moment to moment. Nobody ever asks, "How has your hour been?", and but rarely, "How has your week been?". I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask, "How has your month been?".
And yet it's not entirely true to say that we live day to day. When a movie or a book or a work of non-fiction confines itself to a single day, this seems exceptional and notable to us, and like an artificial limitation. Our minds are always flashing backwards and forwards, and we are usually immersed in plans and projects that take us mentally far beyond that single day-- or else we are absorbed by some immediate matter which makes us oblivious of any time-frame beyond that of the moment. And yet we are never entirely unaware of the day we are in, that "You are Here" spot on the map of time.
I often marvel at the giddy profusion of our days. Every adult, and even every teenager, has lived so many days that he or she simply can't keep track of them. We can never take in our whole life's experience at a glance. We can go weeks and months without thinking of a particular period in our life, even if that period was very memorable. I have always felt a thrill when I hear someone say something like, "I spent the entire day going through my album collection", or "I remember the day I spent cycling around the coast", or "We were working flat out the entire day, we got sandwiches in instead of having dinner".
People say that you should live every day like it's your last, that you should make the most of every day. I'm increasingly unsure of the wisdom of this advice. If I really lived each day like it was my last, I would soon be stony broke, spectacularly obese, and probably in prison. Should we live life to the full? Of course. But I think living life to the full would have to include whole days watching old sit-coms while sitting in your pyjamas. In other words, if you don't have dull days, aimless days, routine days, melancholy days, you aren't really living life to the full.
Why is life so various? It didn't have to be, and I have always been haunted by a kind of amazement that it is. I've always felt fascinated by the fact that people expect certain satisfactions out of life, often while posing as complete pessimists. Everybody seems to expect recreation, and a challenge, and responsibility, and time alone, and time socialising, and time spent in "nature", and time to satisfy their creative urges, and time to cut loose now and again, and routine, and a break from routine. Whence come these expectations? Why do people who acknowledge life to be so rich an experience, and who look actually demand such richness, still insist on believing that human life is simply a by-product of impersonal forces of nature? This used to perplex me long before I became a practicing Catholic.
I started today with the morning commute, as usual. I like taking the bus. I walk to the bus-stop throuh the housing estate where I live, when the dogs and the pigeons pretty much have the place to themselves and play out their little dramas.
I was reading The Irish Catholic on the bus this morning, a special issue in tribute of Pope Benedict. However, I couldn't keep my eyes open and was dozing all the way to UCD. I can't rememeber if I dozed as I passed the Liffey, although I usually make a practice to stare into its waters and along its horizon. It is too easy to forget what a remarkable sight a river is.
I had a few minutes for coffee in UCD's Arts Café, which is a treasured moment of the day-- often the very best. In the morning, everything seems newly-minted, even the people. And the Arts Café in UCD is a pleasant environment, with bright colours and long, soft lamps and tables dotted around irregularly. During the day, at least during the term, it is so busy it's difficult to find a table, but in the morning it is always pleasantly half-filled. Of course, being a university café, people are often writing essays on laptops or reading Serious Books, which gives it a certain intellectual air.
Then work. I don't know what I did to deserve the job that I have. Working in a university library is about the most enviable job in the world, short of being a chocolate taster. Just being surrounded by books all day is exciting. (I always especially like the moment when I walk past the stands of current journals, which take in subjects from Methodism in Ireland to accounting, and I am filled with appreciation at just how many things are always going on in the world. You can tell from the headlines on the covers of the magazines that people and debates you've never even heard of are all the rage in the world of archaeology, or analytical philosophy, or business management.) The students are unfailingly polite and friendly and easy-going, although the "mature" students tend to be grumpy and difficult. At lunch-time, being a Friday in Lent, I went to the restaurant and had salmon, chips, carrots, cabbage and Pepsi Cola. I agree it doesn't sound very penitential. I ate it while sitting alone, still reading The Irish Catholic. UCD restaurant has recently been refurbished, but it still has rather a soulless air about it, mostly because the tables are ranged in austere straight lines, giving it a little of an exam hall feeling. But I do savour the hum of voices in the air, which might be my favourite sound in the whole world.
I left work early today, determined to go to confession in St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street. When I started practicing my faith, confession was probably the most difficult hurdle. It was especially difficult because today, in so many parishes, regular confession times are not offered so you have to grab a priest when you can get him-- and approaching people out of the blue is always something I found incredibly difficult. So I was pleased when I found that St. Teresa's offers daily confession, at a convenient time, from 5:15 to 5:30 each day. I also prefer a classic confessional scenario whereby I am speaking to priest through a grille in a confessional box. Until I started going to St. Therese's for confession, pretty much all my confessions were done sitting side-by-side with a priest. It feels more like a chat than a sacrament.
Today I had an old priest who I've confessed to a good few times. I was the first in the queue today. I'm always surprised at the queue for confessions in St. Teresa's. It's not just old women. It's all sorts of people, including many fashionably-dressed professional people.
I said my penitential prayers (which I always find extremely difficult, since my mind keeps wandering) before the beginning of 5:30 Mass. Evening Mass in Clarendon Street is always fairly well attended but this evening there were relatively few people there. The woman beside me used the old responses to the Mass. An African priest celebrated, with all the solemnity that usually entails. During the Eucharistic Prayer, he stopped as he was about to mention "our Pope Benedict", saying "our emeritus Pope Benedict" instead (I forget the exact words). It was a poignant moment.
I don't especially like attending Mass in Clarendon Street. I think it's a rather ugly church, with its walls painted a billious green, its modernist stained glass windows, its gaudy statues, its oddly jarring proportions, its poor accoustics. Nor do I understand why receiving communion at an altar-rail is more reverent than in a queue-- in fact, it always seems rather anarchic and hugger-mugger to me.
But the Mass is the Mass. Some of them are beautiful and satisfy our aesthetic sensibilities. Some don't. But every Mass is Heaven on Earth, quite literally. And even when you don't "enjoy" it on a superficial level, you walk out of it feeling an unfathomable satisfaction and refreshment.
I spent a few minutes after Mass praying before the Blessed Sacrament, as the church emptied around me. I find this kind of quiet, contemplative prayer very difficult-- to be blunt, I get bored. And yet nothing in the whole world seems to me as potent and as impressive as the sight of a monstrance standing on an altar in an almost-deserted church. I can barely find words to express how powerful a sight this seems to me. It is not impressive in the same way that a herd of rampaging buffallo or a massive explosion would be impressive. But, in its quiet and understated way, it seems more powerful. I am an avid reader of Catholic conversion stories, and I find it fascinating that so many life-changing moments seem to occur during chance visits to chapels and churches and cathedrals-- usually at times when "nothing is happening" in the ordinary sense.
I love the words of St. Josemaria Escrivia-- "When you approach the tabernacle, remember he has been waiting for you for twenty centuries". That exactly describes the feeling I'm trying to describe. We feel "This has been waiting here all along. This is what I have always been looking for. This is where all my life has been leading. This is what abides, through all the whirls and eddies of history." It is like the moment in the movie when the protagonist finally opens the locked door, or enters the secret garden, or comes face to face with the woman he has been seeking all over the world.
Though I don't like Clarendon Street very much, I do like the sensation of passing from the hushed space of the church to the busy, lively streets outside.
I had arranged to meet a friend at eight o'clock, so I had some time on my hands-- which is a delicious phrase in itself. I made my way to the Central Hotel in Exchequer Street, in that warren of little streets between Grafton Street and George's Street. The Central Hotel is home to the most perfect little sanctuary in Dublin, the Library Bar.
The Library Bar is so called because the walls are lined with books-- the best sort of books, old musty and gilt-edged and serious-looking books. The Encyclopedia Britannica and bound volumes of the Cornhill Magazine are typical volumes. The whole place has the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century gentleman's club-- heavy, pelmeted curtains, marble fireplaces, deep chairs, subdued lampshades, very tasteful framed paintings and prints of ships, hunting squires, racehorses, and so forth. And-- oh glory be!-- there is no music or television, ever.
The only problem with the Library Bar is that it's difficult to find a place to sit down. This evening, in fact, I was leaving it disappointedly after discovering that the place was full, before doing a Dick Whittington and deciding-- since I had such a yearning to take my ease amongst all that elegance-- that I was just going to hover by the bar until a table was free. And then-- oh joy of joys!-- there was no need, since I saw a table close to the fireplace, gloriously free. I grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down, and sank into the book I'm currently reading-- a biography of G.K. Chesterton by Ian Ker. I had reached perhaps the most compelling part of the whole story-- his eventual conversion, after much soul-searching and struggle and a fair amount of drama, to the Roman Catholic Church.
This is going to sound horribly misanthropic, but I have to admit that I never enjoy having company in a pub or a café as much as I enjoy being there alone, with a book, looking up every now and again to savour the atmosphere, or to ponder my reading while staring out a window or into a decorated pub mirror. Nor can I think of a better way to read a book. The chatter and brightness and conviviality around you seems like a perfect counterpoint to that most intimate and private of activities-- reading. The hour passed all too soon.
And then I was on my way through the busy streets again, to meet my friend-- I will call her B. We were meeting in Whelan's, the live music venue in Wexford Street. Most of the time I've been there, I've been there with B.
Friendship is something that seems both strange and marvellous to me, since I had no friends until I was in my twenties. This is quite literally true, and not hyperbole. I was cripplingly shy and withdrawn, and B was one of my very first friends. I met her in the library where I work, though she has moved on to other things now. She was a confidante in the directionless, depressed days of my early and mid-twenties. I was so mired in negativity that it was a rather thankless role for her. We are pretty close to mirror opposites-- she's bubbly and outgoing, while I'm shy and fogeyish. We have had our tensions, but she never stopped being my friend. We are both mad about movies, and that helps.
I always felt out of place going to clubs and gigs, and now I feel more out of place than ever. I feel too old for that kind of thing. In fact, I can't help feeling that everybody there is too old for that kind of thing. Looking around, and seeing men and women in their late thirties and early forties and beyond, still wearing t-shirts proclaiming their admiration of various rock bands, still exchanging the kind of would-be witty banter that is appropriate to those kind of places, still determined to rock on, makes me wince more than a little. Nor do I feel the slightest sense of loss or regret at being past it, any more than I am nostalgic for my teenage acne.
Still, I tried to enjoy the atmosphere, if only as an outsider looking in. B's brother, who is an extremely talented songwriter, was opening for another act. I gave him several standing ovations, which were fully deserved.
When the main band came out, B and myself adjourned to the smoking area and spoke for the rest of the night. It was one of those deep heart-to-heart conversations that-- for men, anyway-- only seem to happen with female friends. B was reminding me how far I had come since I had first met her, back when I never went out, had never been outside Ireland, and had never even been to a party of any kind. Myself and B used to have these kind of deep conversations a lot. But it had been a long time since we did, and it left me glowing with gratitude for the gift of friendship.
I set out to catch (to use a phrase I find deeply evocative) the last bus home. I like to read a little bit of the Bible every day, so while I was waiting at the bus stop I got on my phone and accessed the "app" I have downloaded, which includes an e-version of the Douay-Rheims Bible. I read some verses of the first letter of the James, which contains the strange and haunting passage:
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if a man be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was.
"For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was." I don't know exactly what the Apostle meant by those words. But, as the bus took me home, it made me think of that memorable passage in Chesterton's masterpiece, Orthodoxy:
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Oh, Lord, let me remember! Let me never forget! And let me never cease to give thanks and praise!
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Days of Boredom
Long-term readers of their blog (may their sufferings be rewarded in Heaven!) will know that I often write about days-- those units of time into which the week is divided, those islands of wakefulness between sleep and sleep.
My fascination with days manifests itself in many ways. One is the writing of a daily diary which has continued unbroken since June 24th (the Feast of St. John the Baptist, and the date on which I proposed to my future wife) 2015. I've been writing it in Gaelic for a considerable time now. Bad Gaelic, but Gaelic nonetheless.
My favourite film of all time is Groundhog Day, partly because of this fascination with days. I did intend to watch it on Groundhog Day itself (which was last Sunday), but my DVD player is broken and none of the TV channels I can get were showing it (strangely enough).
Another way in which my fascination with days manifests itself, more recently, is subscribing to an "On This Day" email, from this website.
The most interesting thing about today's email is how little actually happened on February the Fifth, the Feast of St. Agatha, through all the long ages of the world.
Here are the top events the compilers of the website found for today:
1576 Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France) abjures Catholicism at Tours
1885 News of the fall of Khartoum reaches London
1885 King Leopold II of Belgium establishes the Congo as a personal colonial possession
1969 US population reaches 200 million
No insult to Henry of Navarre, or to enthusiasts of the demographic history of the USA, but this seems slim pickings indeed in terms of world history and culture. This date has come around every year since the beginning of recorded history. Really, nothing more notable happened in all those years?
Reader, do you think I'm complaining about this? On the contrary, it delights me. It's yet another example of the spaciousness of life.
I was inspired to do an internet search for "the most boring day in history". I didn't find that, but I did find (arguably) the most boring day of the twentieth century: April 11th, 1954. A general election in Belgium was, apparently, the most newsworthy event. (It's amusing it should be Belgium. Peter Hitchens has disputed Belgium's reputation as a boring country, but the reputation certainly exists.)
For the same reason, the phrase (and the concept) of a "slow news day" has always delighted me.
For the same reason, this account of a visit to Shipea Hill (at that time the least busy train station in Britain) is one of my favourite blog posts of all time.
What would life be if it was thrills all the way? But even to say that is to suggest that slow news days, sleepy train stations, and so forth, are simply recuperative, or a kind of necessary contrast to all the good stuff. And I won't have that. They have their own unique poetry, in themselves.
This is one of the reasons I fear (and resist, as best I can) a globalized world, and a twenty-four hour society, and a pure meritocracy; because I believe mediocrity, boredom, and obscurity add vastly to the richness of life.
My fascination with days manifests itself in many ways. One is the writing of a daily diary which has continued unbroken since June 24th (the Feast of St. John the Baptist, and the date on which I proposed to my future wife) 2015. I've been writing it in Gaelic for a considerable time now. Bad Gaelic, but Gaelic nonetheless.
My favourite film of all time is Groundhog Day, partly because of this fascination with days. I did intend to watch it on Groundhog Day itself (which was last Sunday), but my DVD player is broken and none of the TV channels I can get were showing it (strangely enough).
Another way in which my fascination with days manifests itself, more recently, is subscribing to an "On This Day" email, from this website.
The most interesting thing about today's email is how little actually happened on February the Fifth, the Feast of St. Agatha, through all the long ages of the world.
Here are the top events the compilers of the website found for today:
1576 Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France) abjures Catholicism at Tours
1885 News of the fall of Khartoum reaches London
1885 King Leopold II of Belgium establishes the Congo as a personal colonial possession
1969 US population reaches 200 million
 |
| Henry of Navarre |
Reader, do you think I'm complaining about this? On the contrary, it delights me. It's yet another example of the spaciousness of life.
I was inspired to do an internet search for "the most boring day in history". I didn't find that, but I did find (arguably) the most boring day of the twentieth century: April 11th, 1954. A general election in Belgium was, apparently, the most newsworthy event. (It's amusing it should be Belgium. Peter Hitchens has disputed Belgium's reputation as a boring country, but the reputation certainly exists.)
For the same reason, the phrase (and the concept) of a "slow news day" has always delighted me.
For the same reason, this account of a visit to Shipea Hill (at that time the least busy train station in Britain) is one of my favourite blog posts of all time.
 |
| Shipea Hill railway station |
This is one of the reasons I fear (and resist, as best I can) a globalized world, and a twenty-four hour society, and a pure meritocracy; because I believe mediocrity, boredom, and obscurity add vastly to the richness of life.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Commonality Value
We all understand the concept of "rarity value". It's often occurred to me that its opposite also exists-- I suppose it should be called "commonality value".
The appeal of many things is that they are so common. The awareness that they are so common, that there are innumerable other instances of them, is a big part of their appeal.
This theme occurred to me (though far from the first time) when I was going to Mass today. As readers will know, I'm not a Traditionalist. I'm not anti-Traditionalist, in fact I've found myself leaning in that direction quite a lot recently. But something keeps me in the Ordinary Form, and partly it's the desire to join in the same liturgy that innumerable Catholics participate in all around Ireland (and all around the world) every single day.
This same feeling often strikes me in regard to other things, though. It struck me on Friday evening, when I went to see the movie It in the cinema. Like most Stephen King films, it's set in Anytown, USA. Well, actually, it's set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, and the town is anything but ordinary under the surface. But, on the surface, it's the ordinary American small town with white picket fences, low skyline, box-like buildings, and doubtless plenty of Mom and Pop stores. This environment, so common in horror and science fiction, seems so endearing precisely because it's so ordinary.
The same is true of love stories. The world will never grow tired of love stories. Sir Paul McCartney addressed this very theme in "Silly Love Songs": "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see it isn't so..." The fact that men and women have been falling in love (etc. etc. etc.) since the species began doesn't make love stories any less interesting to us. It makes them more interesting.
The themes of Christian art are another example. How often can the Crucifixion be pictured? Or the Nativity? Or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? When do these themes get played out? They never get played out. In fact, the artistic tradition enriches each new treatment of them.
This feeling also occurs to me when I'm listening to homilies. I take great pleasure in the knowledge that the Bible passage the priest is enlarging upon has been discussed innumerable times, millions of times, in the history of Christianity-- that it's a "living word".
Holiday customs are another example. A Christmas tree is beautiful in itself, but it's more beautiful because there are Christmas trees in almost every home, office, shop and square throughout the Christian world. The same is true for Halloween bonfires, New Year's fireworks, St. Patrick's Day parades, Thanksgiving parades, and so on.
Another example: popular songs, stories, plays, and other works of art. When does a work of art become a "classic" or a "staple"? And doesn't it seem to become more than it was at first, when it attains this status, as though there is now a kind of aura around it?
Another example is days. Days are beautiful (in my view) because there are so many of them. Nobody could hope to remember all the days that make up their lives...I keep a diary and one of the pleasures of reading it is remembering days that I'd forgotten. This is even more true of history, whether it's the history of the world, the history of a nation, the history of a soccer club, or the history of some institution. Individual days blur into that delicious shimmering timescape, the past imperfect...
One instance of "commonality" value which gives me special pleasure to think on is country roads. I take tremendous pleasure in daydreaming about the thousands of miles of country road, many of them deserted or almost deserted, which must stretch all over Ireland. The same is true of cinemas and pubs. And yes, I wrote about this fascination in this blog post, where I made an effort at prose poetry. I tried to evoke a similar atmosphere here.
I suppose you either feel this or you don't. Personally, it's something that I think about very often, that I've always thought about, that moves me profoundly on almost on a daily basis. I wish I could find words to do it justice. Perhaps that would require poetry, rather than prose.
The appeal of many things is that they are so common. The awareness that they are so common, that there are innumerable other instances of them, is a big part of their appeal.
This theme occurred to me (though far from the first time) when I was going to Mass today. As readers will know, I'm not a Traditionalist. I'm not anti-Traditionalist, in fact I've found myself leaning in that direction quite a lot recently. But something keeps me in the Ordinary Form, and partly it's the desire to join in the same liturgy that innumerable Catholics participate in all around Ireland (and all around the world) every single day.
This same feeling often strikes me in regard to other things, though. It struck me on Friday evening, when I went to see the movie It in the cinema. Like most Stephen King films, it's set in Anytown, USA. Well, actually, it's set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, and the town is anything but ordinary under the surface. But, on the surface, it's the ordinary American small town with white picket fences, low skyline, box-like buildings, and doubtless plenty of Mom and Pop stores. This environment, so common in horror and science fiction, seems so endearing precisely because it's so ordinary.
The same is true of love stories. The world will never grow tired of love stories. Sir Paul McCartney addressed this very theme in "Silly Love Songs": "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see it isn't so..." The fact that men and women have been falling in love (etc. etc. etc.) since the species began doesn't make love stories any less interesting to us. It makes them more interesting.
The themes of Christian art are another example. How often can the Crucifixion be pictured? Or the Nativity? Or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? When do these themes get played out? They never get played out. In fact, the artistic tradition enriches each new treatment of them.
This feeling also occurs to me when I'm listening to homilies. I take great pleasure in the knowledge that the Bible passage the priest is enlarging upon has been discussed innumerable times, millions of times, in the history of Christianity-- that it's a "living word".
Holiday customs are another example. A Christmas tree is beautiful in itself, but it's more beautiful because there are Christmas trees in almost every home, office, shop and square throughout the Christian world. The same is true for Halloween bonfires, New Year's fireworks, St. Patrick's Day parades, Thanksgiving parades, and so on.
Another example: popular songs, stories, plays, and other works of art. When does a work of art become a "classic" or a "staple"? And doesn't it seem to become more than it was at first, when it attains this status, as though there is now a kind of aura around it?
Another example is days. Days are beautiful (in my view) because there are so many of them. Nobody could hope to remember all the days that make up their lives...I keep a diary and one of the pleasures of reading it is remembering days that I'd forgotten. This is even more true of history, whether it's the history of the world, the history of a nation, the history of a soccer club, or the history of some institution. Individual days blur into that delicious shimmering timescape, the past imperfect...
One instance of "commonality" value which gives me special pleasure to think on is country roads. I take tremendous pleasure in daydreaming about the thousands of miles of country road, many of them deserted or almost deserted, which must stretch all over Ireland. The same is true of cinemas and pubs. And yes, I wrote about this fascination in this blog post, where I made an effort at prose poetry. I tried to evoke a similar atmosphere here.
I suppose you either feel this or you don't. Personally, it's something that I think about very often, that I've always thought about, that moves me profoundly on almost on a daily basis. I wish I could find words to do it justice. Perhaps that would require poetry, rather than prose.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Three Years of Keeping my Diary
Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. It also marks three years of me keeping my Penzu diary. (Penzu is a diary website. Yes, it's online, but it's private. In fact, "write in private" is their excellent slogan. You can also export a PDF to keep, which I do every month.)
As it has a wordcount feature, I can tell you exactly how long it is: 1,067,605 words long! I've never missed a day. (It's actually quite easy to keep, five or ten minutes here and there at a computer.)
I've chronicled jury service, surgery, funerals, weddings, the abortion referendum, pro-life marches, major storms, Brexit, Donald Trump's election, a visit to a radio studio, several visits to television studios, and lots of other stuff.
I have a complete record of writing my book, from the moment of inspiration (when I was praying the rosary on my morning bus) to the moment I held it in my hand for the first time.
I know pretty much everything I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last three years!
I record my dreams, when I remember them. I record interesting conversations. I record amusing or memorable incidents I witness on the street or bus or elsewhere. I take notes of the homilies I hear at church. Sometimes I even record little things like a change of shelf layout in the supermarket.
Will anyone ever read it? Well, I will read it, if nobody else does.
It's also a diary of my inner life, as well as my outer life. I record my dreams (when I remember them), my ideas, my fascinations, my internal debates, my reactions to whatever I'm reading. These are especially interesting to re-read. My diary flows into my other writing.
This was the first paragraph I wrote, this day three years ago. (The teen diary mentioned covered less than a year.)
I decided yesterday-- or was it today?-- that I would start keeping a diary again. Strangely enough, it was the memory of a passage in Brideshead Revisited that did it. There is one section set aboard a liner that filled me with a strange fascination with the notion of days, of how our lives are divided into these units. And I remembered, from the computer diary I kept in my teens, how delicious the in-betweeny days seemed to be-- the uneventful, reflective days-- and how each day seemed to have more of an identity when it was preserved in a diary. Even though that diary is long lost, I remember the days I chronicled in it as days because I chronicled them. Hence-- this.
As it has a wordcount feature, I can tell you exactly how long it is: 1,067,605 words long! I've never missed a day. (It's actually quite easy to keep, five or ten minutes here and there at a computer.)
I've chronicled jury service, surgery, funerals, weddings, the abortion referendum, pro-life marches, major storms, Brexit, Donald Trump's election, a visit to a radio studio, several visits to television studios, and lots of other stuff.
I have a complete record of writing my book, from the moment of inspiration (when I was praying the rosary on my morning bus) to the moment I held it in my hand for the first time.
I know pretty much everything I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last three years!
I record my dreams, when I remember them. I record interesting conversations. I record amusing or memorable incidents I witness on the street or bus or elsewhere. I take notes of the homilies I hear at church. Sometimes I even record little things like a change of shelf layout in the supermarket.
Will anyone ever read it? Well, I will read it, if nobody else does.
It's also a diary of my inner life, as well as my outer life. I record my dreams (when I remember them), my ideas, my fascinations, my internal debates, my reactions to whatever I'm reading. These are especially interesting to re-read. My diary flows into my other writing.
This was the first paragraph I wrote, this day three years ago. (The teen diary mentioned covered less than a year.)
I decided yesterday-- or was it today?-- that I would start keeping a diary again. Strangely enough, it was the memory of a passage in Brideshead Revisited that did it. There is one section set aboard a liner that filled me with a strange fascination with the notion of days, of how our lives are divided into these units. And I remembered, from the computer diary I kept in my teens, how delicious the in-betweeny days seemed to be-- the uneventful, reflective days-- and how each day seemed to have more of an identity when it was preserved in a diary. Even though that diary is long lost, I remember the days I chronicled in it as days because I chronicled them. Hence-- this.
Keep a diary! You'll be glad you did!
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
Commonality Value: A Blog Post from 2017
Looking through my blog posts from 2017, to find one to represent the year as I count down to the ten-year anniversary of this blog, I was struck by this blog on "commonality value". One of the reasons is the mention of country roads, and of meditating on country roads. I've been doing that a lot recently, as I try to improve my knowledge of Irish geography. It's hard for me to really believe that there are places outside of Dublin! I half-think they disappear when I come back to the capital. I actually wrote about this very subject on Facebook last night!
We all understand the concept of "rarity value". It's often occurred to me that its opposite also exists-- I suppose it should be called "commonality value".
The appeal of many things is that they are so common. The awareness that they are so common, that there are innumerable other instances of them, is a big part of their appeal.
This theme occurred to me (though far from the first time) when I was going to Mass today. As readers will know, I'm not a Traditionalist. I'm not anti-Traditionalist, in fact I've found myself leaning in that direction quite a lot recently. But something keeps me in the Ordinary Form, and partly it's the desire to join in the same liturgy that innumerable Catholics participate in all around Ireland (and all around the world) every single day.
This same feeling often strikes me in regard to other things, though. It struck me on Friday evening, when I went to see the movie It in the cinema. Like most Stephen King films, it's set in Anytown, USA. Well, actually, it's set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, and the town is anything but ordinary under the surface. But, on the surface, it's the ordinary American small town with white picket fences, low skyline, box-like buildings, and doubtless plenty of Mom and Pop stores. This environment, so common in horror and science fiction, seems so endearing precisely because it's so ordinary.
The same is true of love stories. The world will never grow tired of love stories. Sir Paul McCartney addressed this very theme in "Silly Love Songs": "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but I look around me and I see it isn't so..." The fact that men and women have been falling in love (etc. etc. etc.) since the species began doesn't make love stories any less interesting to us. It makes them more interesting.
The themes of Christian art are another example. How often can the Crucifixion be pictured? Or the Nativity? Or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? When do these themes get played out? They never get played out. In fact, the artistic tradition enriches each new treatment of them.
This feeling also occurs to me when I'm listening to homilies. I take great pleasure in the knowledge that the Bible passage the priest is enlarging upon has been discussed innumerable times, millions of times, in the history of Christianity-- that it's a "living word".
Holiday customs are another example. A Christmas tree is beautiful in itself, but it's more beautiful because there are Christmas trees in almost every home, office, shop and square throughout the Christian world. The same is true for Halloween bonfires, New Year's fireworks, St. Patrick's Day parades, Thanksgiving parades, and so on.
Another example: popular songs, stories, plays, and other works of art. When does a work of art become a "classic" or a "staple"? And doesn't it seem to become more than it was at first, when it attains this status, as though there is now a kind of aura around it?
Another example is days. Days are beautiful (in my view) because there are so many of them. Nobody could hope to remember all the days that make up their lives...I keep a diary and one of the pleasures of reading it is remembering days that I'd forgotten. This is even more true of history, whether it's the history of the world, the history of a nation, the history of a soccer club, or the history of some institution. Individual days blur into that delicious shimmering timescape, the past imperfect...
One instance of "commonality" value which gives me special pleasure to think on is country roads. I take tremendous pleasure in daydreaming about the thousands of miles of country road, many of them deserted or almost deserted, which must stretch all over Ireland. The same is true of cinemas and pubs. And yes, I wrote about this fascination in this blog post, where I made an effort at prose poetry. I tried to evoke a similar atmosphere here.
I suppose you either feel this or you don't. Personally, it's something that I think about very often, that I've always thought about, that moves me profoundly on almost on a daily basis. I wish I could find words to do it justice. Perhaps that would require poetry, rather than prose.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Puerile, Point-Scoring Letter in Today's Irish Times
From a John A Kehoe, of Castleknock:
Sir, – It is surely ironic that the release on December 10th of the further audits by the National Board for Safeguarding Children established by the Catholic Church (Home News, December 11th) should coincide with World Human Rights Day. While the Vatican in 1990 with great alacrity signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, being the fourth chronologically to do so of the 193 signatory states, it was merely symbolically, but not altogether successfully, trying to bolt the door well after the horse had gone. – Yours, etc,
JOHN A KEHOE,
LLM (Human Rights),
Roselawn Road,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15
This is the kind of letter that, to me, seems no better than chanting, "Nya, nya, nya, the abuse scandals." Mr. Kehoe thinks it is ironic that the release of the audits should coincide with World Human Rights Day. I don't think this is so very extraordinary. You couldn't stick a pin in a calendar these days without hitting the International Day of Something or Other. It rather devalues the whole idea of World Days. (Which don't greatly appeal to me anyway. I would happy to fill every week of the year with holidays and festivals, but World Days and International Days are the most dreary things imaginable.)
Also, the letter doesn't really say anything new. It says that the Vatican signed the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child while the whole child sex abuse scandals were beginning to emerge. I've never heard a Catholic deny the seriousness and the awfulness of these scandals. The Church has apologized for them time out of mind. It doesn't undo the damage, but surely there has to be a point where a religion that has existed for two thousand years and which comprises hundreds of millions of members ceases to be defined by the misdeeds of a few, at one moment in its history. The audits to which Mr. Kehoe refers acknowledge that the Church is now taking the question of child protection very seriously.
Nor do I see why it's ironic that the Church should sign the Convention of the Rights of the Child. It has been a staunch defender of the child's right to life-- its most fundamental right-- and it has given practical reality to the rights of millions of children to education and healthcare.
But this is just point-scoring, too. What good is point-scoring? Where does it get anybody? It could go on forever, like a table-tennis game between a pair of robots.
It's almost impossible to have a serious and mature discussion about Catholicism in this country. People who are measured, thoughtful and fair when it comes to most subjects become petty and spiteful and irrational when it comes to the Catholicism. It's weird.
Sir, – It is surely ironic that the release on December 10th of the further audits by the National Board for Safeguarding Children established by the Catholic Church (Home News, December 11th) should coincide with World Human Rights Day. While the Vatican in 1990 with great alacrity signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, being the fourth chronologically to do so of the 193 signatory states, it was merely symbolically, but not altogether successfully, trying to bolt the door well after the horse had gone. – Yours, etc,
JOHN A KEHOE,
LLM (Human Rights),
Roselawn Road,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15
This is the kind of letter that, to me, seems no better than chanting, "Nya, nya, nya, the abuse scandals." Mr. Kehoe thinks it is ironic that the release of the audits should coincide with World Human Rights Day. I don't think this is so very extraordinary. You couldn't stick a pin in a calendar these days without hitting the International Day of Something or Other. It rather devalues the whole idea of World Days. (Which don't greatly appeal to me anyway. I would happy to fill every week of the year with holidays and festivals, but World Days and International Days are the most dreary things imaginable.)
Also, the letter doesn't really say anything new. It says that the Vatican signed the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child while the whole child sex abuse scandals were beginning to emerge. I've never heard a Catholic deny the seriousness and the awfulness of these scandals. The Church has apologized for them time out of mind. It doesn't undo the damage, but surely there has to be a point where a religion that has existed for two thousand years and which comprises hundreds of millions of members ceases to be defined by the misdeeds of a few, at one moment in its history. The audits to which Mr. Kehoe refers acknowledge that the Church is now taking the question of child protection very seriously.
Nor do I see why it's ironic that the Church should sign the Convention of the Rights of the Child. It has been a staunch defender of the child's right to life-- its most fundamental right-- and it has given practical reality to the rights of millions of children to education and healthcare.
But this is just point-scoring, too. What good is point-scoring? Where does it get anybody? It could go on forever, like a table-tennis game between a pair of robots.
It's almost impossible to have a serious and mature discussion about Catholicism in this country. People who are measured, thoughtful and fair when it comes to most subjects become petty and spiteful and irrational when it comes to the Catholicism. It's weird.
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