Moriae Encomium

Der bestirnte Himmel über mir

2011-09-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

I suppose we all have projects or ambitions we are occasionally able to pursue. I've always wished I knew the names of trees, for instance, or the songs of birds.

Living at seven thousand feet in a dry climate and a smaller city I have found myself, more so than at any other time in my life, aware of the presence of the "starry heavens above." I have always wanted to know something of the stars, not necessarily a deep knowledge, but some sense of which constellations are which (beyond the Big Dipper and Orion), and maybe the names of a few stars and other celestial objects.

This summer has not been a good one for viewing. I don't know why, since we've been in a record-setting drought, but the sky has been cloudy almost all summer. The last two nights things cleared up some, and I spotted, for the first time, the well-known galaxy in Andromeda, and the double cluster in Perseus.

Even the most amateur of amateur sky-watchers will perhaps smile at the modesty of these achievements. No matter. Those who, like myself, have gone through most of their lives oblivious to the celestial hemisphere above may find here some motivation to look up.

I have been much helped by four things. The first two are things you look through, a telescope and a pair of binoculars. The telescope is a cheap one--well, mine, very cheap for me, since I won it in a raffle from a local toy store that was going out of business. It retails for around a hundred dollars, so it's not a terribly good scope. But I've seen Jupiter's Medician moons with it, and, looking at Saturn, I have just barely made out a tiny silver ring running round a tiny silver disc.

The binoculars are much more rewarding. It's hard for me to find things with the telescope--the afore-mentioned Andromeda Galaxy took me almost an hour to find, and it had the same "faint-headlight-in-a-fog" appearance as it had in the binoculars.

The other two aids are things one looks at rather than through. A constant companion has been the "Audubon Guide to the Night Sky," with page after page showing typical monthly night skies, constellations (both drawn and photographed), and narratives keyed to the most interesting sights in each. It's invaluable, but, as I used it more and more, I became increasingly aware of its limitation as a two-dimensional representation of a great overhead hemisphere.

Which brings me to the wonders of the celestial globe, a 12-inch sphere illustrating the positions of the stars, constellations, stellar regions, star clusters, deep sky objects, and the annual path of the sun through the zodiac. Upon receiving it I immediately cut from poster board a narrow ring with a slightly less than 12 inch interior diameter which, placed on the globe, works as a "horizon." By orienting Polaris and the Big Dipper I could thereby at any time of the night have a model of the sky above.

The celestial globe has an initially surprising property, that it appears to be a mirror image of the sky. This is, of course, because one is on the outside looking in, rather than (with the real thing) on the inside looking out. It takes some getting used to, but, by imagining that the surface of the globe is being projected outward, one gets adjusted.

The great utility of the celestial globe lies in being able to handle it, to turn it around the celestial pole to get a tactile sense of what most initially puzzled me about those monthly star maps in the Audubon guide: how exactly the (apparent) movement of the celestial sphere caused just those perrenial and seasonal constellations to appear. It also allowed me to visualize, for the first time, through imagining a tiny solar system in the disk of the great circle formed by the zodiac, how and why the sun and the planets remained within the zodiac.

Life in the Woods

2011-09-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

"Walden" is a book so familiar to my generation that it almost comes as a shock to realize that I've never read it all the way through. I am currently about halfway through remedying that.

The passage about the "different drummer" was ubiquitous in the sixties and early seventies. The great imperative to "Simplify!" has always been present, if ever very incompletely realized. I remember, when moving from a larger city to to smaller town in the mid-eighties, my touchstone wasn't Thoreau, but Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree":

I will arise and go now
And go to Innisfree
And a small cabin build there
Of clay and wattles made.
Nine bean-rows shall I have there,
A hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there....

That's from memory--it may not be quite right, but it's being there, that way, in the memory confirms, I suppose, it's doggedness. And looking back, so much of Walden is there: the lake, the small cabin, even the bean-rows.

Thoreau is irritating because he asserts that it's all so easy. And it's tempting to respond that not everyone has health, has Ralph Waldo Emerson to let you build on his land and pay your taxes. Even apart from those things, though, why can't we live in nature as in Eden, being content with little, keeping that level of mindfulness high and alert? Part of the answer, I think, is that Thoreau himself couldn't keep it up. He maintained his simple life for two years, and that was that. Paradise was lost again, presumably his own choice.

And then, he did do it alone. When I was young, I was entirely baffled by that "quiet desperation" that Thoreau attributed to the mass of men; now I not only get the concept, I can say right out that I've lived it. And it comes from responsibility, from those connections and concerns that Thoreau simplified out of his life. A great advantage of reading Thoreau is seeing that things like celibacy--though not, I think, by name invoked--are in fact pretty essential for a monastic lifestyle. Something not exactly emphasized in the sixties, but bourne out in a thousand different social experiments.

There is much beauty of observation in Thoreau, much that is instructive (I'm thinking of his conflating the village with a nearby prarie dog colony), in his disdain of the inessential. I hesitiate to criticise an experiment I couldn't have undertaken myself. But my admiration of his project, and my appreciation for so much of what he has gotten right about our aspirations toward the sublimely simple, are tempered by his terrible isolation from deep human ties. Thoreau was no hermit during his two years, and observed very well how easy it is to be lonely when surrounded by others. But his solitude, which, in measure, I, and many people find occasionally necessary, was too complete to compensate for the glorious freedom he enjoyed as perhaps no other. His admirable mastery of his appetites still leaves him sometimes a monsterous egoist. But in this, perhaps, he does come very close to the Natural Man.

The Confessions as "Confessional"

2011-07-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

By "confessional" I mean "sectarian"--specifically, whether its approach to scriptural interpretation is more Protestant than Catholic.

I first formally studied Augustine in a medieval philosophy course where his distinctive theological positions were presented as unmistakably proto-protestant. There was nothing dishonest about this approach, since Augustine was undoubtedly the leading patristic influence on the magisterial Reformation: Luther was, of course, an Augustinian monk, and Calvin's Institutes fairly burst with references and appeals to Augustine.

But the issue came up again recently in a chance conversation with an acquaintance--an acquaintance, I should add, with a long, deep, and learned history with Augustine. She found him essentially Protestant because of the freedom inherent in his biblical interpretation. Those who know the Confessions will remember that only about two-thirds of it is what we could consider properly autobiographical. After his account of the death of his mother Augustine launches into meditations on the marvel of memory, followed by a long disquisition on the nature of time. He ends with a penultimate book entirely taken up with the first phrase in Genesis, and a final book engaged in an allegorical reading of the seven days of creation.

Her view was that Augustine was essentially Protestant because of the freedom with which he handled scripture. And it is, to us, handled freely indeed: "Heaven and earth" point more to Neoplatonic entities that the "sky and ground" as literally read. Light is enlightenment, the firmament the scriptures, the luminaries and creatures in the firmament expositers and exemplars. It does indeed seem quite far from any reading that Ezra or Paul might have given it.

But, given the freedom that is there, it still seems to me a bounded freedom, one that recognizes an imperative to stay within the tradition. This, I think, can be inferred from Augustine's earlier narrative of his disdain of the scriptures, his finding them so essentially childish, until he heard them expounded by St. Ambrose. There he was given a view of them that he had never found by simply reading. Once introduced into the tradition, once reading the scriptures in the lived community of the Church, they not only made sense, but opened themselves to a difficult philosophical interpretation which neither extinguished their sense for the simple, nor unmoored them from the defining limits of the tradition.

I think of Augustine's experience when I come across what seems to be a new journalistic form, the reading of the scriptures by one outside of the tradition with astonishment at the bizarre and outlandish. They read, and expound, like the early Augustine, and, not surprisingly, end with disdain. And very seldom is there time for an Ambrose to explain, to interpret, to place in the greater context. That is one of the frustrations of being a Christian after the demise of Christendom, the belief of so many that they know the Christian faith because of their rote familiarity with a set of random propositions and passages.

Another phenomenon is the re-casting of new traditions, possible anytime from the plasticity of any text. I think a good example, a good contrast with Augustine's penultimate chapter in the Confessions, is Joseph Smith's breathtaking King Follet Discourse, where he, too, interprets the first verse of Genesis, and comes up with: "In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the God; and they came together and concocted a plan to create the world and people it." This is free interpretation indeed, but rather outside of the Catholic tradition as hitherto lived.

E.N.R.A.D., 1921-2011

2011-07-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

Χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ πάντοτε· πάλιν ἐρῶ, χαίρετε. τὸ ἐπιεικὲς ὑμῶν γνωσθήτω πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις. ὁ κύριος ἐγγύς. μηδὲν μεριμνᾶτε, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν παντὶ τῇ προσευχῇ καὶ τῇ δεήσει μετὰ εὐχαριστίας τὰ αἰτήματα ὑμῶν γνωριζέσθω πρὸς τὸν θεόν. καὶ ἡ εἰρήνη τοῦ θεοῦ ἡ ὑπερέχουσα πάντα νοῦν φρουρήσει τὰς καρδίας ὑμῶν καὶ τὰ νοήματα ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.

May God support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last.

Meandering through La Mancha

2011-06-23T12:28:00.001-07:00

Breathless followers of this blog are undoubtely wondering how things are going with the reading of Don Quijote in Spanish. The answer, I suppose, is "deliberately."

There are some things that ought not to be rushed, and if it takes me another ten years to make it through, that's OK. It will give me some comfort in not being an ungraduate trying to finish it in a semester.

And what has been most arresting? The story of the Grisostomo, who died for love of the "cruel Marcela," the beautiful shepherdess who spurned his advance is remarkable, both for its faithful telling of this rather standard kind of pastoral (complete with the late lover's despairing poetry), and for the epilogue in which Marcella is allowed to come on stage and ask, essentially, Where does Grisostomo get off dying for me? I didn't ask him to do it!

"Que si a Grisóstomo mató su impaciencia y arrojado deseo, ¿por qué se ha de culpar mi honesto proceder y recato? Si yo conservo mi limpieza con la compañía de los árboles, ¿por qué ha de querer que la pierda el que quiere que la tenga con los hombres? Yo, como sabéis, tengo riquezas propias y no codicio las ajenas; tengo libre condición y no gusto de sujetarme: ni quiero ni aborrezco a nadie. No engaño a éste ni solicito aquél, ni burlo con uno ni me entretengo con el otro."

"My condition is free, and I am not pleased to be subject to anyone." Some would say that this is "modern." I would be more inclined to say that it is more of Cervantes' contrast of the idyllic and the real. Marcella's protest is just as appropriate in the seventeenth century as today. It was, after all, Chaucer's Wife of Bath who informed us that that what women want is "sovereneyee/As wel over hir housbond as hir love,/And for to been in maistrei him above."

Antecedents of the Confessions

2011-06-23T11:39:00.001-07:00

I have been reading, the last year or so, Augustine's Confessions--the third time through it, for me, but this time in Latin, with much help from the Loeb Classical Library crib. Reading in a language other than English always slows me down a lot, and, in this case, I think that's a very good thing. Augustine is not easy, and often goes where one is not expecting him to go, and where one might have even thought he went, reading rapidly.

It is commonly said that the Confessions is the first autobiography, the first literary expression of this kind of personal history and self-revelation. And I suppose it is so. Nevertheless, I think it important to see here still an assembling of much that went before. I don't think it at all lessens the Confessions' originality to see that it has precursors.

One obvious antecedent--obvious because quoted and paraphrased continually--is the book of Psalms. There the various psalmists give expression to brief but heartfelt cries of internal turmoil, addressed, like the Confessions, not to some future reader, but to God. Of personal history there is little (except of course that addressed in the headings: A psalm of David, when he was fleeing this or that enemy). But they narrate the internal, what is otherwise inobservable. To me Augustine's tone is very like the tone of the psalms: very personal, imploring, and leaving behind a sense of openness, a waiting for the divine response which, if it comes, must be from outside the text.

Another possible percursor is suggested by a descendant, an almost contemporary account of faith obtained through struggle and doubt, Newman's Apologia. The very word sends us back to Plato's Apologia Socratous.

There, of course, we are probably not reading Socrates' words about himself; Xenophon's alternative version compels some degree of doubt, unhappily. But the form of the narrative is Socrates telling his own life, justifying the notariety that placed him before the Athenian tribunal. It is not only a "what happened," but "how I internally changed": the encounter with the oracle, the disillusionment that followed on seeking to test the oracle, and the defense of a life, in every sense, examined, and examining. The tone is quite different from Augustine's, but the autobiographical form is there.

But is it really? Can there be any greater opposites than a Confession and an Apology? One seeks to set out and admit, "I was wrong." The other is a defense, an assertion, "Indeed, I am not guilty of what I am accused of; I was right." Certainly in that sense they are quite different.

But of course Augustine's Confessions are, to some extent, an Apology. We are so used to seeing the man as the great stodgy Father of Grace that we tend to forget that, for his contemporaries, he was a bishop with some decided negatives. First, of course, he was for years an adherent of the heresy of the Manichees--he, a man whose upbringing by a devout Christian mother allowed no excuse of ignorance. Second, there was that small matter that, over the years, he had had at least two mistresses, and had a son out of wedlock. These, today, would be weighty clouds hanging over the head of any bishop. In the Church of his day, of course, they would have especial significance because of the Donatist's continuing charge of laxity against the Catholics.

So, in some sense, by combining the imploring and repentant stance of the psalmists with the defensive explanatory history attributed to Socrates, Augustine both confesses himself guilty and seeks vindication for the outcome of a seemingly misspent life. It is a remarkable synthesis of two seemingly incompatible aims.

Par pareille moyen on arrive a divers fins.

2011-06-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

"Something's existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by that thing."

"We do not claim that these things are necessary [i.e. fire not burning, bread not satisfying]. On the contrary, they are possibilities that may or may not occur. But the continuous habit of their occurence repeatedly, on time after another, fixes unshakably in our minds the belief in their occurance according to past habit."

The foregoing is not from David Hume, but from part seventeen of the Tahafut al-falasifa of Abu Hamid Muhammed ibn Muhammed al-Tusi al-Ghazali--the "Incoherence of the Philosophers," from twelfth century Baghdad. It grounds an argument for miracles, much as Hume relied on such observations to declare them inherently incredible. Thus by similar means we arrive at diverse ends.

There is also that strangely illiberal conclusion to the Enquiry: Examine any book in your library, and, if it lacks "abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, " or "experiemental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence," "Commit it then to to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." We can rejoice that Hume's admonition has not been honored in the West, and lament the hand that al-Ghazali, with similar exhortations, had in eventually virtually extinguishing Islamic philosophy.

Tearing the web

2011-05-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

Desocupado lector: Having now left off this thing for a year and a half it's a little daunting to return. "This," one expects to be asked, "is what took eighteen months?"

So, exactly.

Rewriting the Constitution, Introduction

2009-12-01T04:37:00.000-08:00

I take it for granted that our political institutions need reforming, and I think I can summarize the reason for it in one word: plutocracy. None of our most important government offices can be attained without the expenditure of vast amounts of money. If you aspire to office, you either have to have a great deal of it yourself, or you have to go hat-in-hand to those who do.

We see it most blatantly in the non-stop fundraising done by presidents and presidential candidates. This year I was an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Obama, but I was taken aback by the enormous amounts of money he raised, and even more concerned at the apparent correlation between campaign financial strength and standing in the polls. Just as God is said to favor the side with the larger army, the electorate undoubtedly responds to the candidate with the fattest campaign chest. This year I thought the money was on the side of the angels. But what about next year?

This problem is so pervasive I don’t think we see it anymore. It’s not bribery in the criminal sense. It’s an accepted way of purchasing access, influence, a friendly ear. We allow it, at worst, as a necessary evil. But is it really necessary? I have wondered whether there may be a way to re-organize our political institutions to prevent their being more or less for sale. This is how I might do it.

Rewriting the Constitution, Part 1: The House of Representatives

2009-12-01T04:29:00.000-08:00

What is a legislature for? To frame laws. Who should have that responsibility? Most of us accept that political sovereignty lies in the people as a whole, and that the people as a whole therefore has the primary right to legislate. How then are we to express our collective will?

There is first, democracy. We citizens sit in a room or assemble in a field and consider questions and vote on them and thereby promulgate laws. There is a practical problem with that. There are about three hundred million of us. We obviously can't fit in a hall or sit down on the side of a hill. Even with our cyber resources an assembly of the whole citizenry would be impracticably unwieldy. So we go next to the representative principle.

How do we choose representatives? Some few with time and influence and resources put themselves forward in one of two stereotyped parties, in oddly-shaped districts, spending most of the enormous amounts of money they must raise on advertising. We don't know them, and learn very little about them. Most of us don't vote. And, once in, our representatives develop a remarkable talent for re-election, based, not skill at framing laws, but in two primary areas: "bringing home the bacon" and constituent service. The first is the counterpart of the role of private money: here federal money is brought back into play in the district, to the benefit of those who invested in the candidate. The second seems innocent enough, helping citizens with the intricacies and occasional stupidities of the bureaucracy--but such help is obviously not equally available to all. And why, after all, should such help be such a major function of a legislator?

How might we set up a representative assembly differently? I would suggest using an ancient device now much neglected (except with jury service): the lottery. Why not simply choose at random our House of Representatives from the people at large? It seems to me that there would be many advantages to such a system.

First, the assembly would be a real demographic picture of the population as a whole, roughly half women and half men, reflecting our ethnic make-up, our social and economic classes, our regional differences and concentrations, our professions and problems.

At first I had thought that, well, of course, there must be conditions. Surely our representatives must understand English. But then I reflected, why should our non-English speaking population be unrepresented? We have translators at the UN; what's the big deal about having then in our House?

Then I thought, OK, but surely there must be some educational minimum, at least literacy. If X% of our population is illiterate, then X% of our assembly will be as well. But again, how better to raise our educational problems, and who better to demand that they be addressed, than a minority of our assembly who suffer the consequences of our neglect?

The assembly, in short, would be representative. It would contain the poor as well as the rich, the foreclosed-on as well as the bankers, the failures as well as the successes, the day-laborers as well as the lawyers

.Nevertheless, if the lottery is truly representative, there will undoubtedly be some incarcerated felons in our House. There we may perhaps make an exception to our demand for pure representation, not as a rule excluding all felons or all the incarcerated (guards can be supplied as well as translators and readers), but as a House committee constituted to determine on a case-by-case whether persons falling in such category should be passed over. Past felony convictions, for example, should not absolutely disquality; our drug laws have ensured that many more people than we imagine have such records, and I don't see why such persons should, for that reason alone, be disqualified--for they too are representative. Of course our population has its share of vicious, pathological souls who should certainly be excluded, and I don't think their being singled out and excluded should be too very controversial.

Once we choose and seat our representative House, there appear some interesting consequences. This House will of course need to be organized, and will, like the present one, elect a Speaker. But there will be no need of majority and minority leaders, as the process of choosing Representatives makes parties superfluous. Our first representatives under this scheme might indeed still think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats, but they will not be expected to adhere to any party line, or be subject to party discipline.

One of the great illusions of our current system is that all political ideas fall on either a "liberal" or "conservative" side, and that one who is "liberal" on, say, foreign policy, will also be liberal on the minimum wage, education, national defense, etc. Our current party platforms define reasonably accurately how one is to think on most issues, if one is to be a loyal Democrat or Republican, and, if our leading politicians seem to accept the stereotyped positions of their parties, it's easy enough to explain: they could not succeed without doing so.

An example: Suppose one opposes abortion and the death penalty. The first position would prevent going very far in the Democratic Party (the late Pennsylvania governor is perhaps the exception that proves the rule). Similarly, so far as I know, no ambitious Republican has ever dared breathe a word against capital punishment; it would be the kiss of death in any primary. In other words, on this issue, the "issue alignment" of the parties freezes out anyone holding opinions consistent with what has been called the "seamless garment." And why should that be?In an assembly put together by lot, each issue stands on its own. No representative has a platform to conform to, a "constituancy" to answer to, or a backer to repay. That's not to say that factions won't form--but they will be shorter term than our present parties. And that's not to say that needed, costly projects won't result in "horsetrading." But surely the distribution of federal largess can in this context be addressed more dispassionately than under the present system.

What about the chosen but unwilling? No one, I think, should serve in this capacity involuntarily. So the lottery would need to have alternatives in the wing. In order to encourage those of modest means to serve, there should be a decent, but not excessive salary, and free housing in Washington so that they may keep their current homes or apartments, to return to at the end of their term. Needless to say, there must be no trading on the position, no gifts, no speaking fees, no other income. Perhaps there can be some limited protection of existing jobs, like we do for state militias, to disrupt ordinary people's lives as little as possible.

But is this really possible? Can ordinary people really legislate? It's a fair question. And part of the answer is that some experience can be built in with staggered terms. Suppose each representative chosen served a single three year term. By staggering terms, one third of the House at the beginning of each term would be new to the job, one-third would have a year's experience, and one-third would have two year's experience.

But the larger answer to this question lies in the fact that our legislative branch, the Congress of the United States, consists, not in a single House, but in two. And it is in the Senate, I would suggest, that political experience counterweigh the popular and amateur character of our reconstituted House of Representatives.

Rewriting the Constitution, Part 2: The Senate

2009-12-01T04:25:00.000-08:00

The Senate as now constituted is both redundant and unrepresentative. Insofar as its "districts" are the States, the cost of running makes pursuing a place in the House look almost a bargain. It is, as we should expect, largely a millionaire's club.

How could things be different? We can take our clue from the name given the upper house by the constitution: the senate. In ancient Rome the senate was the assembly of former magistrates, whose constitutional position unhappily remained ambiguous. That uncertainty became a constant source of political mischief, and the Roman senate's alignment with patricians, then optimates, then emperors, kept it always chained to the interest of the few. But its strength, and utility, always lay in its being the permanent repository of political experience in the state.

Despite its dangers, I don't think an "upper house" necessarily dangerous when, as in our Constitution, it is conceived as a partner with the representative assembly, with all legislation requiring the concurrence of both. The ancient Roman senate had too much dominance of affairs as they went before the popular assemblies, and the institution of the tribunate, as a stopgap way of redressing the balance, became a source of serious conflict for centuries.But I think the conception of the upper chamber as balancing the inexperience of the representative assembly has much merit. The trick is to define which former magistrates shall serve in the Senate, and under what conditions.

Our current tradition is to release our former presidents to play golf and increase their personal wealth with lucrative speaking fees to industry groups. We've grown used to the idea that it's somehow beneath the dignity of former presidents to continue to serve their country in lesser capacities. But in fact it's a terrible waste of experience.

So I would populate the Senate with former presidents, former vice-presidents (if we decide to keep that office), former Speakers of the House, former Supreme Court justices. These, I think, could be allowed to serve for life, with the most senior former president presiding. Who else?

I think it would also be a good idea to include former governors. That would allow the Senate to retain its current character as the unique national legislative locus of specifically State concerns. But because there are obviously so many of them, life terms for former governors would swell the Senate's size too greatly. So each governor would serve only until another former governor from his own particular State went out of office. Thus, for example, New Mexico would currently be represented in the Senate by Gary Johnson, who would serve until Bill Richardson gave up the governorship and moved into the Senate.

It might also be wise to allow certain former cabinet secretaries limited terms after their service--State, Treasury and Defense, for example.None of these magistrates could be compelled to serve. They would certainly be allowed to play golf and rake in the speaking fees if they so chose. But that choice would be irrevocable--if, after leaving a qualifying office, they refused service in the Senate, they would thereafter be ineligible to serve. And I think, given this structure in place, it would eventually become a firm social expectation that those to whom authority has been given should continue to serve in this capacity. As currently, all new legislation would therefore have to pass in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We might have a legitimate concern that the ordinary citizens of the lower house might be a little overawed by the "names" in the upper. But as a co-equal partner in the framing of laws one would hope that their representative character would give them the courage to bring their distinctive perspective to the legislative process, tempered by the senators' experience of actually governing.

The Senate would also retain its current "advise and consent" function for ambassadors, cabinet officers, federal judges, and treaties. One would hope that this membership for the Senate might make it less likely to be overawed by the sitting executive, and perhaps less deferential.

And so on now to the selection of the chief magistrate of the nation.....

Rewriting the Constitution, Part 3: The Chief Executive

2009-12-01T04:20:00.000-08:00

Our manner of picking a president suffers from all the problems associated with any elective office when the electorate is so enormous: the cost of being heard is incalculable, and only those who are extremely rich, or who can raise funds in the tens of millions of dollars, have any chance of even being considered. During campaigns there is as much fundraising as campaigning. And if the candidate is elected to office, it sometimes seems as if the officeholder spends as much time fundraising as governing. And the strange thing about all this is that we accept it as normal, that our candidates and presidents, who themselves are invariably wealthy, are nevertheless continually begging for money, and incurring the occult obligations that go with that.

So I would propose a radical reform to eliminate at least some of that. It is, I know, a new approach. But I even came up with a name for the body that would choose the president. I call it "the electoral college."

OK, I know, that's who now elects the president, and who is invariably the subject, every four years, of cries that the electoral college must be abolished, insofar as it can thwart the general will, as it did most recently in 2000. But over the years--actually, almost from the beginning--the electoral college has become (with a few exceptions) simply a conduit for tallying winner-take-all elections, state by state.

It is instructive to contrast this with what the Founders thought they were doing in setting up the electoral college in the first place:

"It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.

"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations."

This is Hamilton, from Federalist No. 68. The idea is that the people choose a body for the special purpose of choosing a president. That the electoral college never became a deliberative body is a consequence of the constitution's prohibition of its actually meeting; the electors now meet in their states, separately, and now only pass on, imperfectly, the results of the popular vote.

It seems to me that there is much to say about picking a president with a special elective assembly. For starters, the electors would not be constrained to pick only those who are running for office. Arguably, on only one occasion, did the electoral college function as intended by the founders: when it picked the reluctant George Washington for president.The electors would themselves be chosen in local elections. They themselves would be ineligible for the office. Once chosen they would be free to consider, not only the obvious candidates, those who put themselves forward, but other men and women of achievement, in government, business, education, the military, law, medicine--wherever--who might show promise. They could interview them, investigate them, hold hearings--in short, do whatever anyone else would do in considering anyone for an important position. And added advantage would be the consequence for party affiliation: it would become irrelevant.

Since the leadership of the Senate is in the hands of a former president, the question comes to mind of whether a vice-president is really needed. On reflection I think the office is a useful one--given the president's importance, it would be good to have someone in the wings in the event of a death, resignation, or removal. But the vice-president would be chosen in the same manner as the president, by the free selection of the electoral college. He would in no sense be a "running mate." Furthermore, he would not necessarily complete any unexpired term. On his taking office the first act of the vice-president should be to call for the election of a new electoral college, to choose a new president; he or she would merely be a caretaker until a new president was chosen. The electoral college could, of course, choose the vice-president for president. But it would be unconstrained in that choice.

One of the weaknesses of our current system is that there is no provision for removal of a president for incompetence or for political reasons. Currently only "high crimes and misdemeanors" will do it. But, as recent experience has surely suggested, there is a need in the American government for some equivalent of the "vote of no confidence" in the Congress. I would recommend that if two-thirds of each house votes for the removal of the president, removal should follow, and a new electoral college be chosen to pick a new president.

A president so removed would still have the right to serve in the Senate (as opposed to one convicted of crimes under the current impeachment procedure, which should continue in effect, unchanged). The current four years terms, with a possibility of one re-election, seem to strike a good balance between the need to have sufficient time to enact a president's plans and the need to limit the exercise of power by a single individual.

On a minor note, I would also get rid of that provision barring the foreign-born from the presidency. I am no great fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I don't see why his foreign birth should disqualify him for office. Surely a reasonable terms of citizenship beforehand--twenty years, perhaps--should suffice. I wonder if our current provision had something to do with lingering resentment over the accession of the Hanoverians to the English monarchy.

Rewriting the Constitution, Part 4: The Supreme Court

2009-12-01T04:14:00.000-08:00

With the judicial branch I honestly have must less to suggest. The Court is an appellate tribunal; even with those few matters falling within its original jurisdiction, such as suits between states, it really acts as an appellate court reviewing the conclusions of a Special Master.

I would retain the present method of appointing justices, though I would hope that the Senate as reconstituted would perhaps more aggressively exercise its prerogative of advice and consent.

The great issue with the justices is keeping the judicial function to the judicial function. Constitutional and statutory review necessarily implicate policy choices. All justices, in one way or another, eschew the notion that they are engaged as a sort of super-legislator. But all, at one time or another, give in to the temptation--even if we can't always agree when they have.I know of no way to solve that problem (not, I would hasten to add, a problem on the scale of money-talking that got me started, but, while I'm solving the nation's problem, why not?). But one approach is to give the justices a legislative future, i.e. limit their terms to, say, ten years, and then have them rotate into the Senate, like other magistrates.

This would not of course guarantee that they wouldn't stray into the legislative function. But it might give them a sharper sense of the distinction, in a personal way. And they would have a distinctive experience to bring to the Senate, both in crafting legislation with judicial review in mind, and in passing on presidential nominees.

One other point, perhaps not so minor. I would have at least a third of the Court positions filled by non-lawyers.I know, we typically no longer allow non-lawyers to preside over even municipal courts. But there is a narrowness to the legal profession (I'm a lawyer myself) that could use some tempering in the highest tribunal. It's a difficult point to make, exactly, but it's based on a recognition that if, as observed above, there is invariably a non-technical, political aspect to judging, then there is a place on the bench--in the minority, importantly--for judges guided by something else than professional expertise and the received traditions of the bar. It's not that they would be expected to ignore the law, but rather that their very amateurism might prompt fresh questions and novel approaches outside of the tunnel vision sometimes characteristic of certain types of professional experience and training.

Can non-lawyers make good judges? Of course they can. For about six years I practiced as a member of the Navajo Nation Bar Association. In the Navajo court system some, but not all, of the judges had law degrees. I could never really tell which did and which didn't. We argued to them, and briefed issues, as if they were lawyers, and the remarkable thing is, if a brief is done well, and clearly, it will be as intelligible to a layman as a lawyer. We are not dealing in matters arcane, like, say, quantum mechanics, but the everyday stuff of human interaction--the known and assumed rules of conduct, local custom, fairness, the need to restore harmony after certain balances are thrown off. Of course non-lawyers can make such judgments, and would give precedents and authorities the weight they deserve as a matter of fairness and respect for community standards. But they would also see things through their "lay eyes" that we with a particular type of training might miss. So, I would say, put 'em on (but no more than a third).

There is one other consideration. Maybe it's not so important that it goes in a re-written constitution, but there is something a little unseemly about Supreme Court judges hobnobbing with other high government officials whose actions they will undoubtedly have occasion to review. I don't think I'd cloister them, but I think it makes sense to to limit those kind of contacts, as we now forbid ex parte communications. The judges, after all, once were clerics, and a little more propriety, a little more independence, a few fewer duck hunting expeditions, would in all likelihood increase the respect for opinions rendered.

Conclusion: Dude, Where’s My Vote?

Yes, it is largely gone, because the lottery has taken over the job of finding representatives. It remains for choosing those with the job of electing the president, and presumably remains in State elections unless they too choose to overhaul the works.

It is a loss to be considered, but not without reflection on what a vote is for, and how often we cast it for less-than-creditable reasons, or in ignorance, or based on mere party enthusiasm, or in thrall to a carefully crafted advertising campaign.

The Don's Lenses

2009-11-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

"...y como a nuestro aventurero todo cuanto pensaba, veia o imiginaba le parecia ser hecho y pasar al mode de lo que habia leido, luego que vio la venta se le represento que era castillo con sus cuatro torres y chapiteles de reluciente plata, sin faltarle su puete levadiza y honda cava, con todos aquellos adherentes que semejantes castillos se pintan."

This is I suppose the central recurring joke of Don Quijote, and part of its claim to greatness. All that our hero thinks, sees, or imagines appears in the light of what he has read. He doesn't see the world straight on, and his taking a common inn for a castle introduces the first of an endless series of comic set pieces.

But do we see the world straight on, either? How has what we have read made us take inns for castles?

If I read the book of Genesis, and, in looking at my fellow human beings thereafter, see them as created in the image and likeness of God, am I seeing castles rather than inns?

And if I see the world in the light of reading Don Quijote de la Mancha, how do I think, see, or imagine the world differently?

Welcome, Cosette

2009-11-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

Those following the "dog thread" may recall the sad notice of the passing of the airedale Bonnie Brown of Old Town about a year and a half ago.

I am happy to report that, after a few visits to the local humane society, young Oliver, our surviving poodle/chihuahua, has joined us in welcoming Cosette, a similarly-marked, similarly-sized, same-aged poodle mix of some odd sort. Oliver has now survived the "shelter cold" Cosette brought home with her, and she, not so very long ago a stray and orphan of the storm, is now eating like a horse and generally dominating the poor fellow.

Les Miserables

2009-10-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

For the better part of the last decade I have been reading, on and off, Hugo’s Les Miserables, in French. Last month, with mixed emotions, I came to the end.

Such a huge, sprawling mess of a book, with its melodrama, its labyrinthine plotting, its stupefying coincidences, its insane digressions. But it really is a wonder, both as an entry into a particular, spectacularly-detailed and long-gone Paris, and as a passionate affirmation of a series of simple and essentially Christian themes—redemption, forgiveness, self-sacrifice.

In this there is an interesting contrast to the other huge book I’ve read in French, Dumas’ Le Compte de Monte Cristo. There also, at least toward the very end, as one of the villains is literally driven mad with grief, the protagonist comes to realize the terrible inhumanity of vengeance—but this is only after we’ve been enjoying it royally for more than a thousand pages. The tale of revenge carries a deep satisfaction, but the tale of redemption is much harder to carry off.

It has to be said, I think, that Jean Valjean an impossible character. Such selflessness surely can’t reside in a real self. And yet, partly, I suppose, through the length of our association with him, he becomes flesh and blood, struggling against a social condemnation wildly out of proportion to his initial fault, carrying a secret, and an inner guilt, which, instead of paralyzing, impels him to extremes of charity and paternal love. We follow him, and we fear for him.

The difficulty of dramatizing this theme is underlined by the difficulty of translating it onto the screen. Reading, except aloud with another, is a solitary act. Wanting to share some of this with my family, as I approached the end, I bought a DVD of the Liam Neeson movie treatment, to watch with them after I had finished to book. I was determined not to watch the movie before finishing because, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know any of the plot before this reading, and I didn’t want the movie to spoil it. As if it might! The movie’s ending was utterly changed, the characters distorted, and the focus of the ending of the film was the death of Inspector Javert, whom Valjean watches die with indifference, and then joy. Not exactly vengeance, but close.

But then the movie treatment made Javert an evil man, and one of the burdens of the novel is to demonstrate that, cold as he was, Javert was not evil, but merely just. He demonstrates the inadequacy of justice, how it invariably turns on you. Indeed, I think Hugo was being consciously ironic when he titles the first book of the first part, “Un Just,” referring to the good bishop whose leading characteristic is, in fact, not justice, but mercy.

There is, of course, a real villain in the wretched Thenardier, but even he is redeemed somewhat by his ragged children, and of course, in the novel’s penultimate scene, his cruel attempt at extortion unwittingly leads to the final scene of tearful reconciliation. His evil is real, but good inexplicably and rather improbably always comes out of it, beginning, fantastically, in his looting the dead at Waterloo.

And I’ll pat myself on the back for reading it in French. It wasn’t easy, and I have to admit that it probably made me miss a lot, even while not knowing I was missing it. The long digression on criminal “argot” was, yes, a long exercise in bleeping over unintelligible sentences. But, still, I think there is an importance in knowing, “These are his words,” even if one doesn’t get them all. The difficulty of the language creates a barrier, but at least it’s a barrier one is aware of, unlike the barrier, too quickly forgotten, erected by the translator.

But even now, it starts to fade. Such is memory. “L’herbe cache et la pluie efface.”

Postscript on the Long Novel

2009-07-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

(herein of definition)

What is the difference between the long novel and the series? The fact of the matter is that enormous numbers of people, including children, have, in the last decade, read a very involved story easily exceeding my twelve-hundred-page definition: the Harry Potter series of books. It raises the question of when a novel is a novel and when it is a chapter.

Remembrance of Things Past is of course divided into seven parts, sometimes called novels, but it is usually characterized as a single novel. Why? Perhaps because the divisions between the parts are rather arbitrary. (Perhaps because no one really knows where The Fugitive ended and The Past Recaptured begins). With our Harry Potter books we have, in each, a beginning and an end which, arguably, give to each of the seven parts a certain unity.

Or take another popular series, the Aubrey/Maturin sea tales of Patrick O'Brien. There are, I think, 21 novels in the series. They tell a connected story. I've read five or six of them, but I've met more than one person who's read the whole series. Is it one long novel, or is it a series of separate novels?

I know, it's kind of a silly question, in the end, because the effect of these series is like that of the long novels I described in the last post, with the possible exception of the fact that the unity of an episode may make it more memorable.

Also less daunting. I have always said that my kids had the advantage over contemporary children when deciding to begin the Harry Potter series. They faced, every year or so, a new book with a setting or characters they loved and were already familiar with. Today's children face a formidable set of seven volumes. Same words, but, unhappily perhaps, a more daunting package.

The Long Novel

2009-06-18T04:26:00.001-07:00

It appears now that blogs are losing out to twitter, because blogs are too ponderous and wordy. So it got me thinking about "the long novel."

My admittedly arbitrary definition is simple: a novel longer than twelve hundred pages. Looking back, I can identify five of them read in the last thirty-five years: Don Quixote, War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, Le Compte de Monte Cristo, and Clarissa.

Dr. Johnson, on being told that Richardson was "tedious," replied that "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."

The contrast between story and sentiment is a good one. Some novels are long because they tell a long story. The Count of Monte Cristo certainly has sentiment--romance and vengence, primarily. But it is a great story of a vendetta, a complex story with many characters over many years, touching, true, at last, on the terrible interior toll, but the novel's focus is the plot, the rule undertaken, the trap, the execution, the satisfaction of an awful justice overtaking the wicked. One does not fret for the lack of a storyline.

By contrast, there is Proust's book. It's not quite true that nothing happens. But almost nothing, and three thousand pages is a lot of almost nothing. It is all surface, which is to say, all interior. It is the play of impressions, the minute observation of the overlooked, the exquisite analysis of motivation and judgement. It took me quite a few years to read, reading one of the seven parts once a year, happy to begin each, but happy to put each aside as completed, ready to substitute something with a commoplace plot.

But what to say about all of them? They slip out of the memory. They are too big to leave a single impression, like, say, Heart of Darkness. While being read they constitute something like a second life, presenting a complex of names and places and actions remote in time and place, with enough detail to feed the imagination, and with enough length to engage, like one's life, without any prospect or fear of termination anytime soon. But when I re-open them, I don't remember having been there.

Does what we don't remember change us? Surely it must. We don't remember very early childhood, but surely it changed us, made us. Does the experience of having read Don Quixote change one, even if the details are forgotten, the inns and roads, the absurd exchanges, fade beyond recall? How much of the vision remains, the detailed experience, of the insatiable knight, of the implacable count, of the virtuous and abandoned young woman, of the delicate socialite who, after a thousand pages, casually lets slip his first name?

So now, if you've paid any attention to what went before, I'm about four fifth of the way through Les Miserable, reading Hugo as I read Dumas, in French, something of a struggle for me. But it is a way to travel for one who, for various reasons, hasn't been able to travel, to see up close in this detail and that the great, pre-Haussman metropolis. Afterwards I hope to return to the first of the long novels, first read long ago, next, I hope, in the original Castellian, El ingenioso hidalgo, Don Quijote de la Mancha. Why read it again? Because that original impression, I suppose, never went away, and it's something worth renewing. Part of it is a simple desire to work on the Spanish language, but if that's all it is, surely it is arguable that one doesn't begin with the language as constituted in the seventeenth century.

Philosophy, physics and personality

2009-05-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

Though he truly would not have gotten where he did had he not stood on the shoulders of giants, Isaac Newton has as good a claim as any to have begotten a new era.

I came to the Principia Mathematica, in part, through frustration at trying to comprehend Einstein. Einstein's work itself takes much too much advanced mathematices for me to ever hope to get it from the root. But even his little book on Relativity, intended for a lay audience, baffles me after a pair of readings. I think each take, alternating with different popular treatments, becomes clearer. But there is still that sense of a veil I'll never overcome.

So, I thought, if the mathematics of the 20th century is incomprehensible, maybe that of the seventeenth isn't. The Principia is daunting, to look at, but maybe, in small bites, it might yield to understanding--especially since the University of California published a new English translation a few years back.

Now let me make clear I haven't yet spent enough time yet with the thing to know if I will make any headway. But I was given to a new train of thought in learning (through introductory material) that a great deal of the second of the three parts is given to refuting Descartes' "Principles of Philosophy," and its attempts to explain celestial mechanics with a notion of whirling vortici.

Now, in my head, Newton is a scientist, and Descartes a philosopher--even though Newton called his great work "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Part of the reason for that lies in the area of Newton's success and Descartes' failure; it was Newton whose "System of the World" successfully set out the laws that described the elliptical paths of the planets and other celestial objects in a comprehensive theory of gravity, undergirded by abstract notions of mass and force. Descartes is remembered for a more random miscellany of things: his method of doubt, his reworking of the ontological argument from the idea of "perfection," his notion of certainly as a function of clarity, his division of the world into the famous dualism of "thinking stuff" and "extended stuff." He does, granted, have a separate reputation among the mathematicians, and there I am not really ready to go.

But what strikes me as a great difference between Newton's Principia Mathematica and what I have perused of Descartes' Principia Philosophia (in the French translation of the Pleides edition) is the disabling ambition of Descartes. He goes for explaining it all, not just the motion of Jupiter, but the motion of his own hand. The same, it occurs to me, can be said for his contemporary Leibnitz, another universal genius, another master in the history of mathematics (of whom Newton boasted he had "broken his heart" in the controvery over the discovery of the calculus). Leibnitz's ambition toward comprehensiveness led him to an atomism which attempted to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental component of matter. It went nowhere (except, I suppose, into the History of Philosophy textbooks).

Newton's genius is not just his remarkable insight, his mathematical proficiency, his synthetic abilities, his geometrical talent for proof, but also his self-limitation. His "Motion of Bodies" says nothing about the motion of human bodies (except to the extent that we are dead weights when the subject of an outside force). His "System of the World" is really the system of gravitational equilibrium, an important part of the the world, but only a part. He does not lack philosophy, and the various "scholia" throughout the Principia can only be described as philosophical takes on space, time, and, toward the end, God, and something called "spirit," which may be what we call spirit, and which may be what we would call the electro-magnetic force.

Newton's fault, then, isn't so much his own as that of his followers who, dazzled by his successes, fail to see that his success is a result of his reduced scope, and his "system" a system of only part of the world, and by no means necessarily the most important. The failures of Descartes and Leibnitz remind us how far we are from a true "system of the world," when the mysteries of life and consciousness and spirit remain.

Poetry in parts

2009-02-21T19:42:00.000-08:00

A post or two back I indicated I had ordered a book of Chinese poetry for beginners--in fact, How to Read Chinese Poetry, a self-styled "guided anthology" edited by Zong-Qi Cai, and published by Columbia.

Chinese poetry is one of those areas in which my ignorance is vast and profound. I had had, some years ago, a copy of a certain Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, which I enjoyed, but which was physically spoiled, somehow. Dropped in a rain gutter, something like that, and I never got around to replacing it.

Aside from that there was only Ezra Pound's Cathay, with a few pieces anthologized that I came across and always loved, especially "The River-Merchant's Wife," which ends:

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

But then there were those who said it was Pound and not Li Tai-Po, and how was I to tell?

The fidelity of a translation to the original is determinable only to the extent that you can make something out of the original. How accurate are the corresponding words, how closely is the form and the shape of the original preserved? And how can that be even guessed at with a language you know practically nothing about, like Chinese?

When I think back to my old Columbia Anthology I remember it was straightforward English verse, free verse as far as I remember, with no discernable form. Just Roman letters on the page.

Zong-Qi Cai's anthology provides the novice with a little more. With most poems we get the poem in three forms--the English translation, the original in Chinese characters, and a phonetic Pinyin romanization of the characters. This highlights the easily-overlooked fact that every poem has these three aspects: meaning, appearance, and sound. If I can read, I apprehend the meanings of the words automatically (though I may mistake one significance for another, or fail to grasp the meaning of the whole--see, e.g., Pound, Cantos).

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

It's hard to imagine how the sound of that passage could ever pass over into another language in substituting non-English words, meaning for meaning. Somehow, there is a sort of constant, a Heisenbergian limiting principle by which, if the meaning is preserved, the sound must fall short. And, short of learning the language, that's part of how I necessarily feel when looking at the dismembered parts of these Chinese poems: meaning, appearance, sound, which, passing from one to the other, I try to blur into a unity.

Sensibility

2008-10-18T08:24:00.001-07:00

I am continuing to read and enjoy Jacques Gernet's History of Chinese Civilization, but it is with a palpable sense of the extreme generality needed to cover such a huge subject in a single volume (I started to write "big subject" because the only obvious sign that this text is translated from French is the constant use of the word "big" where most English writers would use "large," "huge" or "enormous.").

The following passage, though, illustrates how even the sweeping generality can arrest one's attention with a hitherto unguessed explanation for a largely unconscious prior impression:

"We can attribute to Buddhism a deep and general transformation of sensibility: the new religion introduced into the Chinese world a taste for ornamentation, for the tireless repetition of the same motifs (a religious practice that was to give birth to wood engraving), a taste for the sumptuous (statues coated with gold, precious cloths, and so on), but also for the gigantic, the colossal. All these tendencies were in opposition to the classical tradition, which aimed at stripping away essentials, at vigorous conciseness, at exactness of line and movement."

This seems exactly right, even if, in fact, it would be surprising if ornament, repetition, and luxury were entirely absent from pre-Buddhist China. Strictly speaking, it might be more accurate to speak of the influence of Indian aesthetics than Buddhist religion. As we know, the beautiful spareness of the tradition will eventually return and itself give birth to the Buddhism of the Chan/Zen schools.

Absinthe

2008-09-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

“A green liqueur flavored with wormwood, anise and other aromatics.”

No, I’ve never tried it, and though I understand that its reputation for deranging the mind and debauching the soul is exaggerated, I don’t intend to.

But I wanted to say a word or two about Nietzsche. I’ve been reading about China lately--spurred by public things, like the Olympics, and the Tibetan situation, and by private things, like an intimate relation being taken off a vital medicine last spring when its Chinese manufacturer was suspected of tainting it to stretch it (shades of The Third Man). But China is a large subject, and its civilization a huge part of the human story, little known to me, so I started reading a history I’ve had on the shelf unread for a few decades, and ordered a book of Chinese poetry for beginners, and was re-dipping a little into Confucius and Lao Tzu.

But last Saturday at the Santa Fe Public Library’s overstock store I came across three volumes of Nietzsche for two bucks each and I couldn’t resist. Nietzsche is one of philosophy’s guilty pleasures, but if Confucius’ words are like a hot cup of black tea, and Lao Tzu’s like a bracing drought from a cold mountain stream, Nietzsche’s are like absinthe. He is radical and disorientating and intoxicating, and thank God almost no one reads him today except scriveners working on dissertations. The madness he names is real, but I wonder whether we might not be better off not trying to comprehend that reality in all its vertigo and bitterness.

But he has his attractions. This, I think, is from a late introduction to his earlier Birth of Tragedy, on madness at the heart of vibrant cultures:

Ist Wahnsinn vielleicht night notwendig das Symptom der entartung, des Niedergangs, der ueberspaeten Kulture? Gibt es vielleicht—eien Frage fuer Irrenaertzte—Neurosen der Gesundheit? Der Volks-Jugend und –Jugendlichkeit? Worauf weist jene Synthesis von Gott and Bock im Satyr?

How many worlds away is the Chinese sage?

“Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. When the Master was told of this, he commented, ‘Twice is quite enough.’”

The Dog Days less Doggy, alas

2008-08-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

A passing tribute to

Bonny Brown "of Old Town" Allen

1998-2008

A faithful Airedale Terrier of Great Heart

And unsurpassed skills at getting under

any gate made by man.

Survived, inter alia, by the companion of her old age

Oliver Allen,

half poodle, half chihuahua, now stranger than ever.

Ora pro nobis

2008-06-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

I would be remiss if I did not at least note today's commemoration of my own patron, St. Thomas More, and of St. John Fisher.

Imagining Egypt

2008-06-12T03:18:00.000-07:00

This last year I have been on something of an Egyptian kick. This was brought on mostly by two traveling Egyptian shows, an exhibition of objects from the Petrie Museum of Archaeology, at the Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and an almost contemporaneous exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum of Egyptian art from the collection of the British Museum.

Seeing these prompted me to finish Alan Gardiner's "Egypt of the Pharaohs," which has been on the shelf for about eight years, and, at a time I have been trying to pare my library rather than augment it, to purchase two books on hieroglyphics.

One of the things that so distances the Egyptians from us is the scarcity of an engaging literature. There is nothing comparable to the history, drama, or poetry that we have from the Greeks, Romans or Hebrews. There is a rich store of mythological writing, some chronicles, and some reflective literature we would readily see as parallel to what one would find in, say, Proverbs. And there are texts like the Pyramid Texts, or the Book of Going Forth by Day. But the most popular of the Egyptian myths, for example, the story of Isis and Osiris, comes to us through Plutarch.

For me, in trying to imagine life in ancient Egypt, it is their visual art that predominates. Within the confines of the strange conventions of representation--the body straight on with the head in profile, the smoothly harmonious abstraction of natural objects,--there is a distant and distinctive beauty about it. Whether the funereal aspect was always pervasive, or only a consequence of the perdominanat survival of objects in tombs, there is a great melancholy about it, as well as that sense of vanished grandeur: "I am Ozimadius the Great; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

There is also the sheer impressiveness of age. At the Petrie show there was a small relief, of great delicacy, dated at roughly 2500 BC. Perhaps it's only because I'm cleaning out my garage today, but there is something awesome about anything, not only lasting 4500 years, but retaining its form and beauty over such a span of time.

Because, as noted above, I was also reading Mommsen's History of Rome this last year, I was much taken, in the Petrie show, with a small Hellentistic carved head, identified as Caesarian, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. I don't think the boy survived his childhood, and, I assume he remained entirely unaware of and indifferent to the rather massive role his parents played in the history of the West.

Understanding and Retention

2008-05-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

Surely one of the uses of a private library is to preserve what one once knew and can't retain.

I am no mathematician, but was curious about Goedel's proof, and so read a few years back a book taking the non-mathematician through an outline of the ideas and the course of the proof. I remember having a great deal of difficulty, but also, toward the end, grasping, to some limited extent, the idea. But I haven't retained that momentary sense of understanding, and the book still sits on the shelf as a reminder of what I once knew.

Mathematics is perhaps the field in which this happens most obviously. When my son was taking high school calculus I pulled out my old high school calculus textbook, and found folded inside it a piece of paper, with my name on it, and in my old handwriting, covered with symbols I didn't understand. I struck me as very strange that here I was looking at my own work--even something as simple as a randomly preserved set of math exercises--and I did not understand it.

Don Novello's Father Guido Sarducci does a little routine (it's easy enough to find on You Tube) called the five-minute university, based on the idea that, in five minutes, you can teach, not everything you learned in four years of college, but everything you will remember from college five years after graduating. Two years of college Spanish? "Como esta Usted?" "Muy bien." That's it.

It's funny, but there's some truth behind it. And it's not just facts, but insights and intuitions and perceived connections that will fade with time, leaving some faint but inexplicable sense that something may well be the case without the confidence that I can explain or even know exactly why.

The medieval philosophers, if I remember correctly, identified the three faculties of the soul as memory, intelligence, and will. Is memory inevitably so mutable? Is some sort of re-charge or repetition necessary? And is that why I keep that silly book about Goedel's proof on the shelf?

Cinco de Mayo Atrasado

2008-05-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

Cinco de Mayo originally commemorated the Mexican victory over French expeditionary forces at Puebla on May 5, 1862. In the United States it's come to have as little to do with the victory over the French as St. Patrick's day has to do with the missionary bishop, having morphed into a celebration of a particular ethnicity, for everybody, with emphasis on food, drink, and music.

Still, alongside the welcome excuse for breaking out guacamole and Dos Equis, I've now for some fifteen years, every Cinco de Mayo, revisited a chapter from Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio, "The Emperor Maximillian at Queretaro."

The book itself was published in the early 1950's, an account, possibly much fictionalized, of the German-born author and her friend "E" traversing the Mexican Republic among stoic "Indios," non-helpful guides, chivilrous retired generals, ruined Creole aristocrats, daft British ex-pats, roads to nowhere and two-story hotels lacking staircases. Naturally she is drawn to the strange tale of Maximillian, which she first broaches in a chapter on Cuernavaca:

Why is it so fascinating?...There was not an event in the 1850's and 60's that did not help to shape the Mexican Empire; not a power, a faction, a person in a privileged position, an interest vested or on the make, that did not have a finger and a stake in that particular pie. Ambitious mothers, a soured brother, a prudent father-in-law and indifferent cousins; Austrian policy in Italy, French policy in Austria, the vacancy of the throne of Greece, Bonaparte insecurity and Coburg consolidation, the Mexican debt in England and the Mexican debt in Spain, the fear of Bismarck in many quarters and the American Civil War. Pio Nono, Napoleon III, the Emperor Franz-Joseph. The Archduchess Sophie of Austria, the Empress Eugenie, Louise-Phillippe's widow, Queen Marie-Amelie who shrieked on her deathbed, "Les pauvres enfants, ils seront assasines!" Lincoln, Don Pedro of Brazil, white Mexicans in Paris; French militarism and French radicalism; King Leopold of the Belgians, Victor Hugo, and the shades of l'Aiglon.

Few of these persons were dunces. A number of them were astute, at least three were brilliant. The men knew their statecraft and their world. All calculated; some meant well. Not one of them knew the first thing about Mexico.

It is an account I can only recommend here--if the book is indeed still in print. After one of those old-fashioned mottos at the beginning of the chapter (Presque toute l'histoire n'est qu'une suite d'horreurs--Chamfort), she begins:

Maximillian of Habsburg was sentended to death by court martial at Queretaro on June 15th, 1867, and shot four days later on a hill outside that town. He was not the first man to die through violence in that vicinity, though during those four days many people tried to save his life.

After a long catalog of the heads of state and literary figures who asked for clemency, and a brief summary of President Juarez's long and desparate fight against the French occupiers, she continues,

He had been in the wilderness a very long time. There had been death and death again. And now he was asked to spare the life of one man. The moral pressure put on Juarez was great; perhaps it was too much, perhaps it came from the wrong quarters. He did not like Europe, and he was most self-consciously not a respecter of persons. He sent a telegram to Queretaro confirming the death sentence the day after it had been pronounced.

She then recounts in some detail the parallel stories of the incorruptable Indian Liberal and the well-intentioned Austrian Habsburg--the outbreak of the Reform wars, the intervention of rapacious European creditors, the plebecite that "did not bear looking too closely into," the reproduction of Austrian court etiquette for the "Crown of Montezuma," the emptying treasury, the wavering of the French, the advances, the retreats, the madness of the Empress Carlotta in the Vatican, and the final decision to set out for the indefensible Queretaro. For me it is almost local history, but aside from that it is beautifully written, and worth the occasion afforded by our annual south-looking fiesta.

Pagans and Christians

2008-04-29T03:20:00.000-07:00

Christian writers have, from the beginning, displayed an ambivalence toward paganism. On the one hand it was obviously, in the the early years of the faith, one of the chief rivals for allegiance, and the occasion for polemical and apologetic works contra gentiles.

On the other hand, there was always some appreciation for the noblest of the pagans--Plato, Aristotle, Cicero--and a conception of paganism as a preparatio evangelium, analogous if not comparable to the more direct foundation of the Torah and prophets of Israel.

I came across what I think an intersting example of the contrast, contained in a single document, in Pius XI's 1937 encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge."

On the one hand the faithful priests and laity are commended for their steadfastness in the face of an aggressive and anti-Christian "new paganism" of the National Socialist regime:

Wir danken Euch, Ehrwürdige Brüder, Euren Priestern und all den Gläubigen, die in der Verteidigung der Majestätsrechte Gottes gegen ein angrifflüsternes, von einflußreicher Seite leider vielfach begünstigtes Neuheidentum ihre Christenpflicht erfüllt haben und erfüllen.

On the other hand, the setting aside of simple morality on the basis of the will of "das Volk" is condemned, not only on Christian principles, but even in light of "the old paganism" and its high morality (I think that it's Cicero who's here being cited):

Mit diesem Maßstab muß auch der Grundsatz: „Recht ist, was dem Volke nützt“, gemessen werden, wenn man unterstellt, daß sittlich Unerlaubtes nie dem wahren Wohle des Volkes zu dienen vermag. Indes hat schon das alte Heidentum erkannt, daß der Satz, um völlig richtig zu sein, eigentlich umgekehrt werden und lauten muß: „Nie ist etwas nützlich, wenn es nicht gleichzeitig sittlich gut ist. Und nicht weil nützlich, ist es sittlich gut, sondern weil sittlich gut, ist es auch nützlich.“ Von dieser Sittenregel losgelöst, würde jener Grundsatz im zwischenstaatlichen Leben den ewigen Kriegszustand zwischen den verschiedenen Nationen bedeuten.

Its unusual to see these contrasting characterizations in the same document, but there's no real anamoly in light of the attitude enunciated at Vatican II governing relations with other world religions:

Ecclesia catholica nihil eorum, quae in his religionibus vera et sancta sunt, reicit. Sincera cum observantia considerat illos modos agendi et vivendi, illa praecepta et doctrinas, quae, quamvis ab iis quae ipsa tenet et proponit in multis discrepent, haud raro referunt tamen radium illius Veritatis, quae illuminat omnes homines.

Caesars

2008-04-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

I am coming to the end of Mommsen's History of Rome and am increasingly puzzled by his judgments on the the individuals who play out the ruin of the Republic and the foundation of what he calls the military monarchy.

Mommsen seems to value men and events by their success in founding what we would call "states." He gives an almost normative significance to the "unification of Italy," seeing that as the great achievement of the Republic, and the acquisition of the provinces as almost accidental. In this he seems to reflects the values of the century that saw the unification of both Italy and his own Germany, and their acquisition of dependent colonies in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the Age of Empire.

I suppose that accounts for his worshipful treatment of Gaius Julius Caesar:

Of mighty creative power and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.

This is quite remarkable language for one whose primary achievement seems to me to have been the final annihilation of the Republic. And while the virtues of the Republic even at its best were far from those later espoused by Christendom, its final century was admittedly one of such chaos and violence that it is understandable that there should be a certain relief in the recognition of its ultimate failure and return to monarchical rule.

Nevertheless, what still surprises is that Mommsen retains something of the moralistic outlook in his treatment of the last of the party of the senate, Cato the Younger. In the narrative that precedes his suicide before Caesar's advancing armies, Cato is ridiculed mercilessly, leaving us unprepared for the encomium Mommsen supplies him on his death:

The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so, was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica. For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it, long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory. But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived....There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life. Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for all time, as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system doomed to destruction.

Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part in history than many men far superior to him in intellect. It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact, that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue. He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went as the first monarch came--a protest which tore asunder like gossamer all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis of which despotism grew up. The unrelenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later, against the Caesarian monarchy--a warfare of plots and of literature-- was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies. This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude-- stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid, hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans, in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.

This unexpected and decidely mixed tribute precedes the characterization of Caesar as "the entire and perfect man"--surely still an extreme judgment, even from countryman and near-contemporary of Marx and Nietzsche.

Mommsen's regard for Julius Caesar was such that he seems not to have been able to bear to bring his narrative to his death, and the final chapter (which I have not yet completed) details and credits him with the creation of the Principate, which I would have thought more properly attributable to Octavius. Both Caesars, however, were surprisingly careful to avoid the title of "king," and grasped how the retention of form could satisfy republican scruples. Thus only could Octavius have caused to be inscribed across the Roman world the great lie of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti:

Ín consulátú sexto et septimo, bella ubi civilia exstinxeram per consénsum úniversórum potitus rerum omnium, rem publicam ex meá potestáte in senátus populique Romani arbitrium transtulí. Quó pro merito meó senatus consulto Augustus appellátus sum.

Three sentences for Holy Saturday

2008-03-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

The first is the beginning of the well-known ancient, anonymous homily from today's Office of Readings:

"Quid istud rei est? Hódie siléntium magnum in terra; siléntium magnum, et solitúdo deínceps; siléntium magnum, quóniam Rex dormit; terra tímuit et quiévit, quóniam Deus in carne obdormívit, et a sæculo dormiéntes excitávit. Deus in carne mórtuus est, et inférnum concitávit."

The second is from Psalm 51, a line I've always found both distressing and comforting:

זִבְחֵי אֱלֹהִים רוּחַ נִשְׁבָּרָה
לֵב-נִשְׁבָּר וְנִדְכֶּה-- אֱלֹהִים, לֹא תִבְזֶה

The third is from the essays of Francis Bacon:

"THE joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter. They increase the cares of life; but they mitigate the remembrance of death."

More Folly

2008-03-14T05:48:00.001-07:00

The following from Utopia is of course to some extent a platitude--but would that we could even live out our platitudes.

More has suggested that his friend, with all his experience, should be counseling princes. Hythlodaeus thinks such attempts futile, and expands on the blindness of princes in desiring power abroad when they are incapable of caring for their own subjects at home.

(If it's not obvious, the Latin is followed by an English translation.)

Hic, inquam, in tanto rerum molimine, tot egregijs uiris ad bellum sua certatim consilia conferentibus, si ego homuncio surgam, ac uerti iubeam uela, omittendam Italiam censeam & domi dicam esse manendum, unum Galliae regnum fere maius esse, quam ut commode possit ab uno administrari, ne sibi putet rex de alijs adijciendis esse cogitandum.

Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining counsels how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up and wish them to change all their counsels—to let Italy alone and stay at home, since the kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it;

Tum si illis proponerem decreta Achoriorum populi, Utopiensium insulae ad Euronoton oppositi, qui quum olim bellum gessissent, ut regi suo aliud obtinerent regnum, quod affinitatis antiquae causa sibi contendebat haereditate deberi, consequuti tandem id, ubi uiderunt nihilo sibi minus esse molestiae in retinendo, quam in quaerendo pertulerunt, uerum assidua pullulare semina, uel internae rebellionis, uel externae incursionis, in deditos ita semper aut pro illis, aut contra pugnandum, nunquam dari facultatem dimittendi exercitus,

and if, after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the south-east of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom, to which he had some pretensions by an ancient alliance: this they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army;

compilari interim se, efferri foras pecuniam, alienae gloriolae suum impendi sanguinem, pacem nihilo tutiorem, domi corruptos bello mores, imbibitam latrocinandi libidinem, confirmatam caedibus audaciam, leges esse contemptui, quod rex in duorum curam regnorum distractus, minus in utrumuis animum posset intendere.

that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their king without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that, their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their king, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interest of either.

Cum uiderent alioqui tantis malis nullum finem fore, inito tandem consilio, regi suo humanissime fecerunt optionem retinendi utrius regni uellet. nam utriusque non fore potestatem, se plures esse, quam qui a dimidiato possint rege gubernari, quum nemo sit libenter admissurus mulionem sibi cum alio communem. Ita coactus est ille bonus princeps, nouo regno cuipiam ex amicis relicto (qui breui etiam post eiectus est) antiquo esse contentus.

When they saw this, and that there would be no end to these evils, they by joint counsels made an humble address to their king, desiring him to choose which of the two kingdoms he had the greatest mind to keep, since he could not hold both; for they were too great a people to be governed by a divided king, since no man would willingly have a groom that should be in common between him and another. Upon which the good prince was forced to quit his new kingdom to one of his friends (who was not long after dethroned), and to be contented with his old one.

Praeterea si ostenderem omnes hos conatus bellorum, quibus tot nationes eius causa tumultuarentur, quum thesauros eius exhausissent, ac destruxissent populum, aliqua tandem fortuna frustra cessuros tamen, proinde auitum regnum coleret, ornaret quantum posset, & faceret quam florentissimum. Amet suos & ametur a suis, cum his una uiuat, imperetque suauiter, atque alia regna ualere sinat, quando id quod nunc ei contigisset, satis amplum superque esset. hanc orationem quibus auribus mi More, putas excipiendam!

To this I would add that after all those warlike attempts, the vast confusions, and the consumption both of treasure and of people that must follow them, perhaps upon some misfortune they might be forced to throw up all at last; therefore it seemed much more eligible that the king should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big, for him:—pray, how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?”

Small things

2008-03-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

One of the satisfactions of trying to read familiar passages in their original language is the occasional discovery of small intimations that didn't make it through into English.

Here is a sentence from the story of Hagar and Ishmael being driven out from the household of Abraham in the twenty-first chapter of Genesis:
וַתֵּרֶא שָׂרָה אֶת-בֶּן-הָגָר הַמִּצְרִית, אֲשֶׁר-יָלְדָה לְאַבְרָהָם מְצַחֵק.

"Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she bore to Abraham, playing." That last word, "m'tzacheq", the participle, is sometimes also translated "mocking" or "laughing." And it's from the same three letter root from which the name of the son of Abraham by Sara is taken, יִצְחַק, "yitzchaq," our "Isaac." And since the mem at the beginning of the word "m'tzacheq", marking it as a participle, also can function as a prepositional prefix, the suggestion of the word "m'tzacheq" is not only that Ishmael was playing, or even mocking, but that, whatever he was doing, it was "from Isaac," taking something from Isaac.

Understand, it doesn't say that grammatically, but it suggests it with a sort of rough pun on the two uses of the prefix. It's not a large point, or one not made apparent by the whole context in any case. And, as one purely self-taught in this language, I recognize that I may be reading things in that aren't there. No way to really know. A small thing, really.

Poverty

2008-03-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

I have had a lot of time lately with Les Miserables, and have had occasion to think about it in conjunction with Utopia--very different books, very different spiritual and emotional atmospheres, but both concerned very directly with the issue of poverty.

St. Thomas' readers know of the poverty of their countrymen; he doesn't bother to paint a world as Hugo does. More's approach is prescriptive, but very different in Utopia's two parts. In part one he is the reformer, highlighting the inability of savagely disproportionate punishments to deter the theft that seems ubiquitous. He points to a contemporary source of poverty, the enclosure of commons for sheep-herding and wool production, and the consequent impoverishment of those ejected from their livelihoods. And he laments the bad counsel given to princes who waste needed resources for foreign adventures, noting that few can govern well the kingdoms they already possess. In the second part, of course, More more famously portrays the more radical solution, in the Utopian scheme for equality of material possessions.

I'm about half way through Les Miserables. Hugo has taken off into one of his famous digressions at the beginning of Part Four, noting the problem that the creation of great wealth doesn't solve anything if it results only in great disparties of wealth and poverty. He gives contemporary England and the older Venetian Republic as examples of regimes able to prosper, but at the expense of the misery of their poorest citizens. And he reflects on the world's reaction to their inevitable fall, in the sentence that struck me here:

"Et le monde vous laissera mourir et tomber, parce que le monde laisse tomber et mourir tout ce qui n'est que l'egoisme, tout ce que ne represente pas pour le genre humain une vertu ou une idee."

These past three weeks I have mostly been resident in a children's hospital, a terrible place because of the problems being addressed, but a wonderful place because those problems are being addressed, and, because done under the auspices of a large charity, this healing is done gratis for all of us with children in need. I cannot help but think that this is a glimpse of how things can be and ought to be, but I am also brought short by the reality that this place is exceptional, and it ought not to be.

Recalled to Life

2008-02-21T20:57:00.000-08:00

Something very serious and considerably more important will occupy me in the next few weeks. So, if any stumble by here, welcome, but expect nothing but silence for a while.

Aspiration and Pretense

2008-02-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

I have begun adding some links to the left, and it seems to me one of the positive wonders of the internet that such things are easily available here whch are sometimes unavailable in print, or prohibitively expensive.

That I link to something not in English doesn't necessarily mean that I can read it, or, in some cases, do much more than painfully decipher it, word by word. So at least some of the links should be understood as where I'd like to be able to go, rather than where I am able to go presently.

And I hope they make it easiler to pick up what may be under consideration, say, for example, the following passage from yesterday's reading for the second Sunday of Lent:

וַאֲבָרְכָה מְבָרְכֶיךָ, וּמְקַלֶּלְךָ, אָאֹר

וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ כֹּל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה

"And I will bless those blesssing you, and those cursing you, curse, and will be blessed in you all families in the earth ("ha-adamah")."

As I have not yet figured out how to type in a foreign alphbet it may be helpful to be able to lift things from text already any in it.

Rome

2008-02-14T03:23:00.000-08:00

I have lately been reading, simultaneously, Theodore Mommsen's History of Rome and the third and last volume of John Julian Norwich's history of Byzantium. In Mommsen I have reached his last section, the imposition of the military monarchy, in Norwich the declining fortunes of the Greek empire during the first century of the crusades.

Mommsen describes what has become a sort of paradigmatic shift for us (embodied lately in "Star Wars," of all places), the collapse of the Republic into the (evil) Empire--except that Mommsen has no sympathy with the democratic tendencies of the "revolutions" of the second century B.C. under the Gracci, and his favorable treatment of the murderous Sulla portends a sympathy with the imposition of the military monarchy that is somewhat averse to our normal American scale of values. At least until the recent present.

Twelve hundred years later the Byzantine emperors are in the midst of another situation well-beloved of our phrase-turners, the Barbarians at the Gate--barbarians including not only the Turks and Syrians, but the Franks, Germans, Venetians, and those perpetual and insatiable warmongers, the Normans. Norwich's Byzantium vacilates between holding the balance as the great center of civilization and plunging into periods of almost unbelievable cruelty and xenophobia. A massacre of Franks under Andronicus doesn't excuse the Fourth Crusade (still far off, as Crusader Jerusalem still stands), but it portends the growing hatred that will be exploited by expansionist powers in the West for short-term plunder and the long-term collapse of Christendom in Asia.

Tribute to a Dog

2008-02-13T03:08:00.000-08:00

Amy June, 2000-2008

Mutt, mostly terrier, small dog with Napoleon complex

Killed after digging out under fence and being hit by a car

Survivors include one very broken-hearted teenage girl

CAVE CANUM

Kaum ein Hauch

2008-02-12T03:18:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I read in the on-line version of the New York Review of Books that there are about 100 million blogs. A hundred million and one, now.

This is from a volume of collected poems by Goethe, published by Suhrkapf a few years back.

I have not yet figured out how to do umlauts and the like. So here I just follow the umlauted letter with an "e."

Ueber alle Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In alle Wipfeln
Spuerest du
Kaum ein Hauch;
Die Voegelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

A little piece like this is untranslatable, of course. Interestingly, in this volume, there is not only the translation of the editor, Robt. Middleton, but an additional one by Longfellow.

So I couldn't resist trying my own hand at it:

Over the hilltops
It is still,
Throughout the copse
You can feel
Hardly a breeze.
The birds have ceased their tune.
Be patient. Soon
You too will be at ease.

Simplicity

2008-02-11T03:19:00.000-08:00

When, some years ago, I was considering what looked like a retreat into simplicity, I remember thinking much of Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree." The following from Fray Luis de Leon has been occupying my thoughts in a similar way more recently:

Dichose el humilde estado
del sabio que se retira
de aqueste mundo malvado,
y con pobre mesa y casa,
en el campo deleitoso
con solo Dios se compasa,
y a solas su vida pasa,
ni envidiado ni envidioso.

This is from an anthology recently published called "The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance," with parallel English translation by Edith Grossman.

Vanity

2008-02-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

There is a scene in "The Jerk" in which Steve Martin's character goes into ecstacies when he first finds his name in a phone book: "I'm somebody!" It's a somewhat similar thing with a blog, I think--awfully easy to be fooling around on the net one day, come across an invitation to create one of these things, and then it's done and there you are up in front of the whole world (even if nobody else is there). This, too, may be vanity.

But, what the heck, give it a try. The title is of course Erasmus' "The Praise of Folly," with a pun on the name of his friend Thomas More, and the two exemplify for me a sort of Christian humanism that I take as a personal ideal.

So, should I persevere, I hope to reflect here on some things that interest me--philosophy, religion, literature, history, law and politics. I like to fool around in the other languages I've tried to pick up, but I'm a beginner in all. And I've no intention of getting too very personal, certainly revealing no secrets and making no confessions.

Welcome

2008-02-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

Vanite de vanites, dit Qohelet;
vanite de vanites, tout est vanite.
Quel profit trouve l'homme a toute la peine
qu'il prend sous le soleil?
Un age va, un age vient,
mais la terre tient toujours.