Paideia

The black habit does not save

“Do not be in a hurry to multiply the monks. The black habit does not save. The one who wears a white habit and has the spirit of obedience, humility, and purity, he is a true monk of interiorized monasticism.” -  St. Tikhon of Zadonsk

The recluse is humanity’s delegate to what is important.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 226

Ayn Rand and the Orcs

“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.” – “The Value of Nothing” by Raj Pate

source

The Connection Between Food and Fairies | Front Porch Republic

“[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, from an unpublished letter to Arthur Greeves, June 22, 1930

via www.frontporchrepublic.com

Preservation Institute Blog: Chesterton On Progressives And Conservatives

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types--the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine."

G.K. Chesterton, from a newspaper column of 1924 - and very appropriate in an age when English conservatives were beginning to support capitalism, exactly the innovation that English conservatives had opposed and Whigs had supported a century earlier.

via preservenet.blogspot.com

Whither Walker Percy? | First Things

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Walker Percy’s death. He died at home in Covington, Louisiana on May 10, 1990 following a two-year bout with prostate cancer. He left us six novels and two works of nonfiction, as well as numerous essays, some of which were later collected in the posthumous Signposts in a Strange Land.

Along with Flannery O’Connor, he is often considered one of the leading Catholic writers of the South in the twentieth century. His work—from the National Book Award winning The Moviegoer to the fast-paced The Thanatos Syndrome—captures the malaise and potential absurdity and horror of a post-Christian America with compassionate aplomb. Yet, while interest in O’Connor continues to grow, interest in Percy has plateaued somewhat. There is, of course, the new Walker Percy Center at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, hopefully, the soon to be completed film by Win Riley, but according to these and other measures—works of criticism, biographies, and collected works—the day clearly belongs to O’Connor.

But why?

Percy brooded over the labels “Catholic” and “Southern,” aware of the fact that both, particularly the former, could be used to dismiss his work as another manifestation of what he pejoratively called the “triumphant Christendom of the Sunbelt.” Terrence Rafferty did write a somewhat overheated, though not entirely wrong-headed, review of The Thanatos Syndrome, which he tagged “[e]schatology made simple,” but this rarely happened. While his Roman Catholicism is perhaps more essential to his work than it is to O’Connor’s, it seems unlikely that interest in Percy is less than interest in O’Connor because of this.

Overall, Percy’s Southernness was also an advantage to him—as he himself recognized. The northern writer, Percy once observed, no longer has anything to write about. Having dismissed Christianity and sharing no common culture with his readership, he finds himself writing “dirty,” “not by design, but by default.” The Southern writer, by contrast, still has the remnant of a tradition (or, at least, he did during Percy’s time). He details “the crumbling porticos, the gentry gone to seed, like Faulkner’s Compsons” or is nourished by “the extravagant backwoods Protestant fundamentalism of Georgia.”

No, it seems to me—and it pains me to say this because I am an ardent Percy fan—that interest in O’Connor outstrips interest in Percy because she is simply the better fiction writer. She is a purist and he is a hodgepodge of novelist, essayist, philosopher, and man of science. Or, to put it another way, he is the Samuel Taylor Coleridge to her William Wordsworth. The fact is, when it comes to plot and character—the touchstones of fiction writing—O’Connor excels where Percy sometimes struggles.

While it is easier to structure a short story than a novel, O’Connor’s stories are nevertheless carefully wound for effect and efficiency of movement, even if they are somewhat limited as far as subject matter is concerned. Percy’s plots, however, can sometimes stall and are occasionally tarnished by errors of chronology and coherence, particularly in Thanatos, which is far from his strongest work.

But the biggest difference between the two authors is their characterization. O’Connor’s range and nuance surpasses even that of Faulkner. From the childlike and, at the same time, grotesque brutality of Hulga’s secular atheism in “Good Country People” to the tragic innocence of Bevel in “The River” and the simplistic morality of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s characters shimmer with vitality and complexity.

In his novels, Percy focuses primarily on the protagonist, who often tends to be a version of Percy at the time of the novel’s composition. In The Moviegoer it is the adrift thirty-something, Binx Billing, and in Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome< it is the middle-aged, then older, Tom More. Minor characters are rarely developed, some dropped unexpectedly.

Yet, O’Connor cannot match Percy’s philosophical engagement and his scathing critique of a reductive scientism. It is significant in this respect that one of Percy’s best works after The Moviegoer, at least in my opinion, is Lost in the Cosmos—a hybrid of fictional and nonfictional satire that cuts to the core of American, if not Western, dissatisfaction. Indeed, Percy is at his best when he speaks directly to the reader. In Lost in the Cosmos, for example, Percy proposes to explain: “Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest.” Or:

How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California—or the Cosmos.

His response, of course, is that we do not know who we are because we have rejected our sole point of reference: God.

It is clear from Percy’s gently prodding wit and humor that he had fun writing this book and that the genre suits him. It highlights his great strengths as a writer—his humor, philosophical insights, and prophetic voice. If O'Connor has excelled in the stuff of fiction writing, Percy has done so in the stuff of nonfiction, even if the material is sometimes presented through the medium of fiction.

We will read Percy for many years to come, and rightly so. I, for one, recommend him to anyone I can. Unlike the intellectual impotence found in so many contemporary novelists, Percy takes risks in his work. He asks and answers important questions, which, despite its other flaws, gives his work a sharpness and vigor.

However, like Coleridge with respect to poetry, I think Percy will ultimately be remembered for his ideas rather than for the execution of those ideas in his novels. He will not be remembered for the plots or the characters he gave us, but for his diagnosis of “the modern malaise,” presented in those plots and those characters, and expounded in his works of nonfiction. If O’Connor is the better fiction writer, he is the great thinker, satirist, and apologist, and it is for his unflinching assessment of the essential emptiness of modern secular life that he deserves to be read.

Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana College and author of the forthcoming book, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press).

via www.firstthings.com

Thomas Hardy as Poet

The major goal this summer for me is to imbibe deeply in poetry. I thought I would share someone I did not recognize as a major poet until recently and is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. I stumbled across Thomas Hardy as a poet while reading the excellent (if sometimes dry) biography of Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner. Apparently "Red" Warren encountered this poem and loved it. 

I also ran across a great story in Blotner's biography that exhibits not only the death of a era but also the wisdom of "Red" Warren. While Warren was teaching at Yale at the end of his career the literary world was controlled by the ideology of class, race, marxism, etc. Student strikes and other issues controlled literary exploration and the actual contents of literature were left to the side.

During this time it is said Warren went into the first day of class on poetry and asked what seemed to him a simple request. "Can anyone here recite a poem?" The class looked blankly at him. No one spoke and all stirred uncomfortably in their seats. He than asked, "Can anyone tell me the outline of a short story?" Again uneasy silence. He went around the room asking people individually, hoping someone just didn't have the gumption to step into the spotlight. No one could do it. Warren got up and left the class. It was the last class he was to teach. For someone who could recite the Wasteland by Eliot and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge by heart (among hundreds of other poems) this would just not do.

With sadness I must confess I would have also been the cause of Warren's disappearance. Hopefully this summer will remedy this.

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

Wendell Berry on Surfing

From a friend of a friend, this excerpt from the Plowboy interview with Wendell Berry, from Mother Earth News magazine, sometime back in the late '70s.

PLOWBOY: It's true most educators are jumping on the "relevance" bandwagon. And yet a less didactic approach is certainly appealing to the young person who wants to try new directions in learning.

BERRY: What I'm saying is that the young have had lots of praisers and lots of detractors but few critics which is really a way of saying they've had few friends. A curious phenomenon of the youth culture thing — and it's full of curious phenomena — is these old sycophants who hang about its skirts and try to touch and kiss the hem of its garment. We see white-haired old men stand up at the university and abdicate their responsibility to the young on the grounds that they (the teachers) have not received the word of God.

Charles Reich is one of the best examples I know of a teacher who's copped out completely by becoming a sycophant of his students. I mean I'm completely against this idiocy of his that says surfboarding is an acceptable way of life. That's utterly absurd. The Greening of America is full of false apologies and excuses for people's failure to be responsible. Surfboarding is not a way of life. People are free to think it is because the care and responsibility for society has been broken up and parceled out to the experts. People who make a life of surfboarding are living off other people. They're leeches of the affluent society. They're parasites of a parasite. As long as we have people making some kind of amusement a way of life, you'll find they're getting their support from something destructive, like strip-mining or needless "development" or war-making.

Song for the Luddites - Lord Byron

"Song for the Luddites" Lord Byron
[sent in a letter to Thomas Moore, 24 Dec. 1816]

. . Are you not near the Luddites? By the Lord! If there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers--the breakers of frames--the Lutherans of politics--the reformers?

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
     So we, boys, we
   Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
   We will fling the winding-sheet
   O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
    Yet this is the dew
   Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Q&A with Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is high tech's Captain Buzzkill — the go-to guy for bad news. A former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, he tossed a grenade under big-budget corporate computing with his 2004 polemic Does IT Matter? (Answer: Not really, because all companies have it in spades.) Carr's new book, The Big Switch, targets the emerging "World Wide Computer" — dummy PCs tied to massive server farms way up in the data cloud. We asked Carr why he finds the future of computing so scary.

Wired: IBM founder Thomas J. Watson is quoted — possibly misquoted — as saying the world needs only five computers. Is it true?

Carr: The World Wide Web is becoming one vast, programmable machine. As NYU's Clay Shirky likes to say, Watson was off by four.

Wired: When does the big switch from the desktop to the data cloud happen?

Carr: Most people are already there. Young people in particular spend way more time using so-called cloud apps — MySpace, Flickr, Gmail — than running old-fashioned programs on their hard drives. What's amazing is that this shift from private to public software has happened without us even noticing it.

Wired: What happened to privacy worries?

Carr: People say they're nervous about storing personal info online, but they do it all the time, sacrificing privacy to save time and money. Companies are no different. The two most popular Web-based business applications right now are for managing payroll and customer accounts — some of the most sensitive information companies have.

Wired: What's left for PCs?

Carr: They're turning into network terminals.

Wired: Just like Sun Microsystems' old mantra, "The network is the computer"?

Carr: It's no coincidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut his teeth there. Google is fulfilling the destiny that Sun sketched out.

Wired: But a single global system?

Carr: I used to think we'd end up with something dynamic and heterogeneous — many companies loosely joined. But we're already seeing a great deal of consolidation by companies like Google and Microsoft. We'll probably see some kind of oligopoly, with standards that allow the movement of data among the utilities similar to the way current moves through the electric grid.

Wired: What happened to the Web undermining institutions and empowering individuals?

Carr: Computers are technologies of liberation, but they're also technologies of control. It's great that everyone is empowered to write blogs, upload videos to YouTube, and promote themselves on Facebook. But as systems become more centralized — as personal data becomes more exposed and data-mining software grows in sophistication — the interests of control will gain the upper hand. If you're looking to monitor and manipulate people, you couldn't design a better machine.

Wired: So it's Google über alles?

Carr: Yeah. Welcome to Google Earth. A bunch of bright computer scientists and AI experts in Silicon Valley are not only rewiring our computers — they're dictating the future terms of our culture. It's terrifying.

Wired: Back to the future — HAL lives!

Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.

via www.wired.com