It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic

John Fante, Full of Life, HarperCollins 2002, pp. 86-87. Originally published in 1952.

I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we wanted it. If she became a Catholic there would be all manner of complications. It was hard to be a good Catholic, very hard, and that was why I had left the Church. To be a good Catholic you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross. I was saving the break through for later. If she broke through I might have to follow, for she was my wife.

It was indeed hard to be a good Catholic in the 'fifties and earlier. You had to do this and refrain from that. It put you at odds with the secular. But then, in the 'sixties, the Church decided to become 'relevant' to use a prominent buzzword of the era. The effect of the pursuit of 'relevance,' however, was to render itself irrelevant. A Church that is just another pile of secular leftist junk is of no use to anyone. Not to true leftists who have no need for a superannuated substitute. The true hipster scorns the oldster trying to be hip. Not to the young who seek order and structure and transcendent guidance. Such seekers are nowadays drawn to Islam. One such was John Walker 'Jihad Johhny' Lindh. He was baptized and raised 'Catholic' but ran off to join the Taliban.

A more recent example is Jacob Williams, Why I Became Muslim.

On the Folly of the Vatican II 'Reforms'

Review of Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton

The review is by Gary WILLS, not Willis. It is well worth reading. But, as someone who has read all seven volumes of Merton's Journals, I find this unfair:

In 1965, to keep him [Merton] on the vast grounds of the abbey, the abbot approved a state of virtual secession within the monastery. Merton could live in his own hermitage, distant from the main house, where he asked that other monks not visit him. He said that he wanted more solitude, but he told the truth in his journal, that he wanted “all the liberty and leeway I have in the hermitage.” It gave admiring outsiders easier access to him and let him slip off the grounds to make unmonitored phone calls to them.

Merton was conflicted, no doubt, but his commitment to the eremitic life was genuine.

[Reviews] Shallow Calls to Shallow by Garry Willis | Harper's Magazine

Discussed in this essay: On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95.

D. G. Myers on Kurt Vonnegut

I admit to never having read any Kurt Vonnegut. But I have just read a gushing article in The Atlantic about his Slaughterhouse-Five, now 50 years old. So I thought I'd see what D. G. Myers has to say about Vonnegut. Some excerpts from No on Vonnegut:

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume covers ten years of writing from 1963 to 1973, the period during which the novels Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions and the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House were published. Although I have been unable to confirm the exact contents, Vonnegut’s books are short enough that the Library of America volume is likely to include all five.

There is no possible justification for Vonnegut’s enshrinement in the Library of America, which exists “to preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions. . . .” Even one of his champions—James Lundquist, in a 1977 single-author study—classifies his fiction as “ ‘naive’ literature because [Vonnegut] makes so much use of expected associations and conventions for the purpose of rapid communication with its readers.”

[. . .]

Until 1969, his most famous book was Cat’s Cradle, a silly fable that college students all over the country seemed to be reading in unison. Then came Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden during the last year of the Second World War. As in all his books, Vonnegut was careful to spell out the Message: “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.” It is difficult to understand how anyone could experience the rush of moral knowledge while reading that sentence, but perhaps a certain kind of young reader feels something like personal unification—a delirious sense that his rebellion against the adult world is finally taking the firm shape of settled conviction—when swallowing Vonnegut’s books.

A recent critic calls Vonnegut, who lived through the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, “the war’s second most famous survivor,” after Elie Wiesel. (Francine Prose based an entire novel on the empty posturing behind such a claim.) Perhaps, though, this remark provides the key to his fiction, if not a reason to reprint it in an authoritative edition. The survivors of massacres and holocausts are indemnified against ordinary criticism, but also against the ordinary expectations—of subtlety, memorable characterization, layered prose—that readers bring to a work of literature.

A Commonplace Blog

A Commonplace Blog is the best literary weblog that I am aware of. It is defunct, its proprietor and sole contributor, D. G. Myers, having died in September, 2014. I believe I first came upon it via Patrick Kurp's excellent Anecdotal Evidence.

Now while the literary knowledge and literary sensibility of this metaphysician and logic-chopper lag far behind those of the gentlemen mentioned, this has not prevented him from voicing some literary opinions of his own with which Professor Myers has generously but critically engaged. His discussions of my work can be found in six of his entries, here.

JUST OVER THE TRANSOM: THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE

Whatever you say about Jeff Bezos & Co., Amazon's service is amazonianly amazing. I order a book. They promise delivery in two days. It arrives the next day. Would that happen in a socialist shit hole, Bernie? Could a company such as Amazon even get off the ground in such a politically feculent locale as Cuba? You and your ilk didn't build that, Obama.

There ought to be one nation on the face of the earth that celebrates the individual and his liberty. 'Diversity' demands it, don't you think?

Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't. Am I opposed to all government regulation? Of course not.

You say capitalism has its origin in greed? No more than socialism has its origin in envy. More on this topic later.

Enough Facebook for one day. I have done my daily bit in combating the Left and its destructive nonsense. Now it's your turn.

Do your bit. Speak out. Show some civil courage.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude"

Passion for Solitude BY CESARE PAVESE TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY…

On Sentence Fragments

I was taught to avoid them. The teaching was sound. But rules of style admit of exceptions. That too is a rule of sorts. My rule anent sentence fragments hitherto has been that they are to be deployed, if deployed at all, sparingly. That's what I taught my students.

Does my rule admit of exceptions? Is it in need of revision? Take a gander at the opening three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Bleak House:

Chapter 1 — In Chancery

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Not one complete sentence in these three paragraphs. And yet this is great writing. The fourth paragraph shows that the man can write complete sentences.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

To Write Well, Read Well

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

Hemingway on Wolfe

Is Line Editing a Lost Art? Excerpt:

Manuscripts, and spirits, are often saved by line editors. Ernest Hemingway began an October 1949 letter to Charles Scribner already in a mood: “The hell with writing today.” Then he opines about editor Maxwell Perkins and the novelist Thomas Wolfe: “If Max hadn’t cut ten tons of shit out of Wolfe everybody would have known how bad it is after the first book. Instead only pros like me or people who drink wine, not labels, know.” Years earlier, Hemingway had warned Perkins about his personality: “please remember that when I am loud mouthed, bitter, rude, son of a bitching and mistrustful I am really very reasonable and have great confidence and absolute trust in you.”

MavPhil suggestion: delete the commas in the initial sentence. Read the sentence out loud both ways and you will see that I am right.

Hyphens are a source of writerly vexation. I would have written 'loud-mouthed.' Papa was probably into his cups.

The Self-Reliant Don’t Snivel

Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam, 1989, p. 180:

Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say that I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better. Often I wished they were, and often found myself wishing for some sudden windfall that would enable me to stop wandering and working and settle down to simply writing. Yet it was necessary to be realistic. Nothing of the kind was likely to happen, and of course, nothing did.

I never found any money; I never won any prizes; I was never helped by anyone, aside from an occasional encouraging word – and those I valued. No fellowships or grants came my way, because I was not eligible for any and in no position to get anything of the sort. I never expected it to be easy.

It is very difficult these days to explain the classic American value of self-reliance to 'liberals,' especially that species thereof known as the 'snowflake.' Not understanding it, they mock it, as if one were exhorting people to pull themselves up by their own boot straps.

Catholicism as a Literary Affair?

William Giraldi in Commonweal:

Because I want nothing to do with hocus-pocus, because dogma and decrees are closed to real contest, and because corporations make me glum (the Vatican is, among other things, a corporation), Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition. Homilies and hymnals, liturgies and sermons done right, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo: these are literature no less than The Iliad is.

One problem with cleaving to the aesthetics of Catholicism while dumping the metaphysics is that, post-Vatican II, there is not much to cleave to: the pageantry and liturgy have devolved in the direction of the insipid and ugly. There is no need to rehearse the litany of complaints. But that is not the main problem.

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.

Giraldi makes it clear that he is an atheist. In this respect he is on the side of the "mouthy unbelievers." But he thinks that the latter deliberately (!?) miss the point of the doctrine of Original Sin. But how could that doctrine have any point if there is no God? Sin, by definition, is an offense against God; if there is no God, then there is no sin either, and, a fortiori, no Original Sin. The Doctrine has a point only if man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, offended God and lost his prelapsarian right relation to God. Otherwise the Doctrine refers to nothing real. The Doctrine refers to something real only if (i) God exists as the supreme moral authority of the universe, (ii) man exists as a spiritual being possessing free will and thus not as a mere animal, and (iii) man freely rejects divine moral authority in a doomed quest to become like God.

It is difficult to see how 'Original Sin' could be plausibly taken to be a metaphor for a blighted human condition brought about by evolution gone wrong. The blight Giraldi mentions consists in factual defects in our mammalian constitution: teeth subject to rot, hormones prone to run riot, etc. Now while the Doctrine as interpreted by many theologians does imply a certain fallenness in nature herself, the main point of it is moral and thus normative, not factual. Man is morally messed up, not merely messed up in his empirical psychology and in his knees and joints. He is intellectually defective to boot, living as he does in deep ignorance of God, himself, and the ultimate why and wherefore. This deep ignorance is a spiritual condition, not one explainable in terms of neurons and hormones.

Note also that it make no sense to speak of evolution by natural selection as MALfunctioning, when interpreted in the light of metaphysical naturalism, to which mast Girladi nails his colors. Evolution is just a natural process driven by natural selection operating upon random variations. No providential Intelligence directs it, and no internal teleology animates it. To say that evolution malfunctioned in the case of h. sapiens presupposes a normative point of view external to it which is incompatible with a hard-nosed naturalism.

Another reason why Original-Sin-as-metaphor is at best a very bad metaphor is that the Fall stands at the beginning of human history or at a time just before human history. Our mammalian miseries, however, come not at the start of evolution but near the end.

Catholicism as a literary affair? Why bother?

In any case, what seems really to interest Giraldi judging by the Commonweal piece are not so much the aesthetics of the rites, rituals, prayers and such of Catholicism, watered-down as they have become, but the aesthetic values of the products of Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor.

Cactus Ed on Sweet Gone Jack

Here:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

James Soriano, The Sin of Silence

Yesterday I quoted Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001) in the Clinton Administration: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." The context was Albright's urging of women to vote for a woman, Hillary Clinton.

This just in from James Soriano, "a retired Foreign Service Officer who spent three decades in the State Department, most of them in the Middle East." (from his mini-bio):

I remember Madeleine Albright saying that a couple of years ago, and in a bit of rhetorical jiu jitsu I used the phrase as the punch line in an essay Crisis Magazine posted yesterday.

I was inspired to write the piece because of what Francis The Leftist said of the Vigano revelations: "I won't say a word about it." Francis has many opinions about leftist enthusiasms, but maintains radio silence on issues of great concern to traditionalists.

Francis' silence on critical Church teachings somehow reminds me of the scene in the Inferno with Ugolino, who was starved to death in a Pisan tower with his sons. He was a father who said not one word to his children in their pain and anguish. Bergoglio e Ugolino. I tried to twin them. The editor thought it was a bit of stretch, but the commenters seem to have gotten the point.

Regards,

Jim

Some 19th Century Rules for Social Intercourse

The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.

Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Timothy O. Porter 1839, 831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):

Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. — This is my rule.

A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist?

"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing." This is sage advice for almost all social situations.

I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble. And so on.

Should we go all the way with Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:

Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.

That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths. The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.

My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

Related: Safe Speech

Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'

Of Trump and The Tempest

Roger Kimball:

I suspect that, come 2024, when President Trump completes his second successful term, Americans will indeed look back, but to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a second President Clinton in 2016. They will then wonder how they could have been so misguided as to have elected a naive, anti-American race-hustler like Barack Obama not once but twice, and they will thank their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet of a Hillary Clinton administration, which would have completed the anti-freedom agenda of the deep state and assured generations of economic lassitude and dependency.

Cohen is correct that Shakespeare is relevant to the Trump administration. But the pertinent play is The Tempest, not Macbeth. In Act II, a few of the shipwrecked men are taking stock of their situation on Prospero’s enchanted island. It soon becomes clear that the island appears very different to different characters:

ADRIAN: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs and rotten ones.
ANTONIO: Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen.
GONZALO: Here is everything advantageous to life.
ANTONIO: True; save means to live.
SEBASTIAN: Of that there's none, or little.
GONZALO: How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!
ANTONIO: The ground indeed is tawny.
SEBASTIAN: With an eye of green in't.
ANTONIO: He misses not much.
SEBASTIAN: No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.

As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that Gonzalo sees the world aright while Antonio and Sebastian are caught in the grip of a fevered delusion. Their animus and hatred blinded them to reality. The increasingly fanatic and hysterical anti-Trump chorus would do well to reflect on that phenomenon. Their hyperbole has begotten an alarming disconnection from the real world of solid political accomplishment. The situation is pitiable as well as contemptible. But the malignancy of their vituperation disarms pity before it can even engage. All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger.

Cesare Pavese, “Passion for Solitude”

Passion for Solitude

BY CESARE PAVESE

TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY BROCK

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.

The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.

Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,

after a short walk, to open fields.

I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows

how many women are eating now. My body is calm:

labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch

the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,

but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.

I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining

among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.

A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life

of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.

A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,

in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,

which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.

All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,

just as I know that blood flows in my veins.

The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,

a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,

lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins

with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky

whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star

struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,

from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,

it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,

my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude" from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. Copyright © 2002 by Cesare Pavese. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org. Source: Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

………………………

Who knows how many women are eating now, women dulled by labor, thought of by Cesare, alone at table, in a dark room, who, like the struggling star is alone, but unlike the star, is enough for himself, body calm and in charge feeling no need for a woman.