Trinity Sunday

Today yielded two very different experiences of religious art:

First, during mass we sang a hymn I didn't much care for--"How Wonderful the Three-in-One" (in honor of Trinity Sunday):

How wonderful the Three-in-One,
Whose energies of dancing light
Are undivided, pure and good,
Communing love in shared delight.

Before the flow of dawn and dark,
Creation's Lover dreamed of earth,
And with a caring deep and wise,
All things conceived and brought to birth.

The Lover's own Belov'd, in time,
Between a cradle and a cross,
At home in flesh, gave love and life
To heal our brokenness and loss.

Their Equal Friend all life sustains
With greening power and loving care,
And calls us, born again by grace,
In Love's communing life to share.

How wonderful the living God:
Divine Belov'd Empow'ring Friend,
Eternal lover, Three-in-One,
Our hope's beginning, way and end.

I'm not sure what bothers me about this song, exactly--of course, "energies of dancing light" bothered me, and when I got to "greening power," I shut the hymnal. What is greening power? (What are energies of dancing light, for that matter?) Also, what is an "Equal Friend"? The Holy Spirit? Equal to whom? (Presumably to God and Christ.)

I guess the hymn seemed rather abstract and vague to me. It also seemed pretty emotive and a little cute ("between a cradle and a cross"). At least the homily was good--the service Stearns went to focused on the oil spill.


Second, I finally made it to the exhibit, "The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700" at the National Gallery with Hopkins (tomorrow is the last day of the exhibit). This little exhibit (it was contained in three rooms) was ... (I would say "very nice," except most of it was about the crucifixion and ecstatic experiences of saints, so "very nice" seems a little inappropriate); well, it was, at least, the opposite of vague.

The focus of the exhibit was the move toward realism at that time, which was evident in particular in the drops of blood and bruises and scrapes on the statues and paintings of Christ. What stood out to me, however, was the contemplation of Christ and his sufferings--there were paintings and sculptures of Mary holding Christ, of St. Francis and St. John of the Cross in ecstasy (St. John is holding a book with a little mountain on top of it--The Ascent of Mount Carmel), of Mary Magdalen adoring a crucifix. These representations of saints adoring Christ invited the viewer to join in that adoration. In one painting, Luke gazed up at the cross, palette and paintbrush in hand. In another, St. Bernard of Clairvaux leans his head on Christ's shoulder, smiling, with his eyes closed.

Another Sort of Learning

From Fr. Schall's utterly charming, Another Sort of Learning: Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to be Found.

One of these excellent book lists:

Four Novels, among Millions, the Most Incomplete of Lists:

1. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces.
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
3. Singred Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter.
4. Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day.
(And all of P.G. Wodehouse and Dostoyevsky--and all novels that show us the infinity of particular life, even when they are not very good novels--but do not neglect the best.)

Most of Fr. Schall's lists of books, which follow every essay in the collection, have more of a theme than this one. But this one (and his title) capture the whimsy of Fr. Schall, in addition to his ability to see truth everywhere (without neglecting the best).

In his essay, "What is a Lecture?," his charm is most apparent. Fr. Schall recounts the (ultimately successful effort) of the organizers of a conference at which he presented a paper to convince him to let them photocopy and distribute the lecture before he presented it:

"[A] very nice lady wanted to now if I had the text of my lecture. Well, as that is precisely one of those things one does not leave home without if he is to deliver it, I assured her that I indeed had this gem clutched in my very hands and planned to leave it with the conference director, as per request, when I had finished presenting it to the audience." Schall sounds a little like Wodehouse here, but the charm is buried in the middle of serious essays about serious topics.

Here are some poignant quotations from Chesterton that Schall includes in his essay, "On Doctrine and Dignity: 'Heretics' to 'Orthodoxy'": "I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the Church for a love affair than the person who leaves it for a long-winded German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey" (The Catholic Church and Conversion). And, "Something in his [Aquinas'] character ... led him rather to exaggerate the extent to which all men would ultimately listen to reason. In his controversies, he always assumes they will listen to reason. That is, he does emphatically believe that men can be convinced by argument. Only his common sense also told him that the argument never ends" (St. Thomas Aquinas).

Silence (Spoilers)

This novel has been on my list for quite some time--Graham Greene has a blurb on the back, and the introduction pulls no punches in comparing the author, Shusaku Endo, to Graham Greene. Indeed, the themes are similar--Endo writes about a priest in Japan who apostasizes.

Endo writes about the persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan--a Portuguese priest, Sebastian Rodrigues, sails to Japan in order to look for Father Ferreira, his old teacher, who is purported to have apostasized. Padre Rodrigues ministers to underground Christians that Kichijiro, who sailed over with him, leads him to. But in every place where he hears confessions, baptizes babies, and teaches the people, the authorities come and torture the people, looking for him. Finally, he realizes that Kichijiro has betrayed him--he sees Kichijiro as his Judas and struggles with forgiving him. Padre Rodrigues finally betrays Christ, becoming like Kichijiro. Rodrigues isn't tortured himself; rather, the officials torture the Christians he knows. Rodrigues watches their martyrdom, but finally apostasizes in order to prevent further torture. He struggles with the silence of God in the face of the torture of Christians, until he himself intervenes. The Japanese maintain that Christianity cannot work in Japan--that even when missionaries come, the people combine Christianity with their own religion in a sort of syncretism. It is Rodrigues himself, however, who, ironically, believes this syncretism at the end--he sees his own notion of love and mercy and his own way of loving and being merciful as better than Christ's. He breaks down the distinction between God and him. He becomes, at the end of the novel, a puppet for the Japanese government, who gives him a Japanese name and wife and require certain services of him that lead to the death of more Christians.

This novel is powerful and moving. The government tries to get the people to trample on a picture of Jesus to show that they aren't Christians. What the officials look for, however, is the look in their eyes as they trample the picture--for the Christians will have a look of pain on their face.

The novel meditates on Christ's very confusing words to Judas, "What thou dost, do quickly"--in fact, when Rodrigues is offered a picture of Christ to trample, he senses Christ telling him, "Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross."

One of the most Graham Greene-like aspects of the novel is the consideration of both strong Christians (in this novel, the ones who are martyred), and weak Christians (such as Kichijuro). While Kichijuro's and Rodirigues's actions are condemned by Endo, the complexity of their problem and their struggle is made clear, and the possibility of forgiveness for them is clear.

Also: Traveling

I am at the Outer Banks for a week that calls for scattered thunderstorms every day (you should see the 10-day forecast). Alas. But the beach is always lovely--the smell of the salt air alone is worth it.

Weddinging

Emily: "Is that a giant flying dinosaur? ... On no, that's a whale!"

(Wystan and I were at a wedding reception, which was, interestingly, held in a museum of North Carolina natural science, where we mingled over appetizers and stuffed panthers and swimming fish and hanging whale bones, among other things. The most interesting part of this wedding, besides the braiding of the cord of three strands, which I'd never seen before, was that the seven-ish guests who all knew each other and of whom I was part, were all seated in a line along one side of a long rectangular table. Wystan said that that was a result of the wedding being between two scientists--this is how their brains work: These people all know each other, let's seat them in a line; now they're taken care of.)

Whitman and Dickinson

These very smart "Positive, Postmodern, and Conservative Comments on Walt Whitman" highlight some almost Tocquevillian insights of Whitman's--his affirmation of the great man (and of inequality), his acknowledgment of the value of practice and of the value of the ordinary. Lawler writes, "we can see that Whitman has taken with dead seriousness the poetic project Tocqueville laid out of reconciling the greatness of aristocratic individuality (which always depended to some extent on vain illusions that justified injustice) and democratic justice."

It seems to me that the great men that Whitman affirms--especially himself as democratic poet, and Abraham Lincoln and America (okay, great beings, as America clearly isn't a man)--are great only in the service of spreading democracy. For instance, in "O Captain! My Captain," Whitman honors Lincoln because he "anchor'd" the ship and "closed" the voyage. Elsewhere Whitman describes Lincoln's virtues: "honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop,) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense" ("Death of President Lincoln).

Whitman does argue for the development of individualism in order to complement the development of democracy. However, it is an individualism that is detached. This can especially be seen with regard to religion: "it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable" (Democratic Vistas).

I still prefer Emily Dickinson's urge for privacy and isolation (a retreat not from all society, but rather a retreat to the society of her family and friends) in her search for individualism (responding to the herd mentality that Tocqueville foresaw as a potential result of democracy):

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

In this poem she points to the pressure to conform to the mass, the majority. The majority defines sanity as assenting, and insanity as dissenting.

I ’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Again, in this poem, Dickinson retreats from the "public" world, the mass world--"an admiring bog." Dickinson's response to the democratic mass is to hide (this is in stark contrast to Whitman's response--to sing and publish and be as public as possible). It's interesting, though--in this poem she articulates her desire to hide, and yet she doesn't want to be expelled or banished. She sees the best possibility for individuality in privacy, where she can develop her divinest sense, which the majority would reject as madness. Perhaps this is just an example of the withdrawal the Tocqueville feared. But I think it's also possible that it's a fitting withdrawal to local, concrete commitments. It's these local, concrete commitments that Whitman never seems to look for; his solution for uniting individuals is patriotism--love of American democracy.

Guestblog: Whigwham on Fickleness

I recall having a debate with you once about whether women are more fickle than men. The controversy stemmed from a passage from Persuasion, quoted below. In it, Anne claims that books can't be used as authorities in the argument. Well, at long last, we have a medium which can settle the issue once and for all!





(When I heard this song on the radio, I was wondering if the singer was a girl or a dude. After watching the video, I'm still not sure. How avant-garde!)

`There is no hurry on my side. I am only ready whenever you are. I am in very good anchorage here,' (smiling at Anne,) `well supplied, and want for nothing. No hurry for a signal at all. Well, Miss Elliot,' (lowering his voice,) `as I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you - all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.'

`Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.'

`But how shall we prove anything?'

[Editor's note: Oh, Whigwham, Captain Wentworth even allows that songs should be excluded--especially a song sung by two men/boys! Plus, this song rants against a bad, fickle chick, not all, nor even most, women as fickle.]

Hollandaise Sauce.3

Today, I made hollandaise sauce with Rose's lime juice (Wystan had no lemon juice). The sweetness (especially against the kick of the cayenne pepper) was a little much, but it emulsified fine.

On Hooding Ceremonies

(This photograph is not of Wystan. It is simply a random one from the internet.)

I went to my first one this weekend in order to see Wystan hooded. It was about 92 degrees, so you might imagine how much he liked wearing the thick, heavy Ph.D. robes. Hooding is awkward--there are no two ways about it. No one really knows how the hoods hang--which side is right-side-out. Plus, it's a bunch of academics doing a ceremony--they mostly don't have minds for these sorts of details. The hoods were, of course, twisted, backwards, inside out, etc. (okay, fine, no one put one on backward).

Most delightful were the remarkably tall men who were being hooded by tiny little women. The hooding candidate stood there awkwardly, hunched way down so the professor could reach over their heads, waiting for the hood to come down over them.

It was nice to see the great variety of academic get-up: some of the men were too warm to wear their robes, so they just showed up in khakis. Some women didn't zip up their robes and wore mini skirts underneath. Most women asserted their individuality with bright, interesting shoes. One man was wearing a tartan hood. Some had on hot pink or hot orange gowns. Some hats were floppy; others were flat. One woman had an awesome felt bowler.

The Sun Also Rises

Stearns and I listened to The Sun Also Rises on our recent Mother's Day trip to Williamsport (Stearns: "Why do we have to get her flowers? Isn't coming home enough?"). For a little while I fell asleep and when I woke up, I asked Stearns what had happened. Stearns exclaimed, frustrated: "Nothing happened. Nothing happens in this whole book!"

The reader was terrible. He read twice as slowly as necessary and provided emphasis at all of the wrong points.

However, upon this reading, I enjoyed the book far more than I did the first time, when I don't think I even comprehended what Jake's injury was. The pace of the novel was very slow. Hemingway noted, almost ironically, very minute details. And he always noted what the group was drinking: most of the time some specific sort of alcohol, some of the time coffee (and, at other times, both at once, which I highly approve of). Jake's Catholicism is calm and understated.

Hemingway gets so many details of life right--the way in which groups form and seem to be more than they are--a new being is created. When one or two people leave the group, a great loss is felt. He gets the way that life is manageable during the day and much, much more difficult at night: "There is no reson why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off."

Brett walks over all the men. And yet we see some of the pain that has made her the way that she is.

And the descriptions of Spain and bullfighting are wonderful. And passion--aficionado. And there are plenty of euphemisms for being drunk, including tight, and daunted (my favorite). Bill: "Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public."

Grading.4

One of my students wrote on her paper, "Pr. Smith"--not Dr., not Professor--Pr.

Fat Albert Rat Game

Today, with a wind advisory in effect, we played doubles tennis: Papa Leopard and the three little Leopards--Stearns, Ilana, and me. It wasn't exactly tennis--"Play for wind," Papa Leopard said, meaning, "Just adjust your game for 30 mph gusts and you'll be fine." Oh, the competitive side of my family...

In the evening, Gypsy came over. Gypsy is pregnant with a little girl we will ironically call, Uriah. We first went to the carnival down the road. We have many delightful memories of the carnival when we were little. Stearns maintained that the paratroopers wouldn't be nearly as scary as they were when we were little, and then left Ilana and me to ride them. Boy, they were scary!

But the real highlight of the carnival was not the paratroopers, nor the game where you shoot solo cups with corks, nor the game where you throw little hoops over the handles of knives, but the Fat Albert Rat Game.














As I had never seen a game with a rat at a carnival, I knew immediately that we would have to play it. What happens is, you buy a token and bet it on a color or pattern. The color or pattern corresponds to a wedge on a rotating wheel. On the end of the colorful wedges on the rotating wheel are holes. The man in charge of the game takes an albino rat in a small jar and sits it in the middle of the rotating wheel. Then, he starts ringing a bell right beside the rat in a jar. (Now, I'm not sure what the bell has to do with anything. Perhaps it makes the rat want to climb out of the jar because he can't stand the sound of it. Perhaps the bell has no role at all, except to heighten the drama.) Then, the rat climbs out of the jar and runs into one of the holes. If he runs into the hole that you betted on, you win a stuffed animal.

So, the man put the rat on the wheel. The rat climbs out. At this point, Stearns starts shouting, "Camo, camo," for Camo is the pattern that she bet on and she's rooting for it. The rat, consequently, runs straight for the camo hole. Stearns, consequently, starts screaming and waiving her hands in the air, so that the man in charge can tell who won (only five people played the game; four of them were Gypsy and the three Leopards). Stearns later did not remember screaming or waving her hands, as she was so caught up in the moment.

She picked out a teddy bear with an ice cream cone (as the next stop on our trip was Eder's Ice Cream) and will give it to Uriah one day.

Eder's Ice Cream is delicious and gigantic (you have no idea how big these cones are, and if you come with us to Williamsport, we will take you there), plus, they help send their workers to college (as Stearns reminds us, and is verified by the existence of a tip jar that says "College Fund"). The smallest Eder's Ice Cream cone is called a "baby" and holds one scoop. The next biggest size is a "small," which holds two scoops. I've never met anyone who's eaten any ice cream cone size bigger than a small at Eder's.

Gypsy ordered a small, which they made even bigger than usual. As she walked away, she muttered, "I should've gotten a baby." Of course, Stearns, Ilana and I could not resist: we called after her in unison, "You've already got one!"

The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding

Stearns and I had Hopkins and Whigwham over last night to read the last two of the Four Quartets. Rule #1 for reading poetry: do not get your friends drunk first by opening a gigantic bottle of Riesling and then claiming y'all must finish it since you're going out of town. When it was my turn to read, I inevitably started giggling uncontrollably somewhere in the middle of my section.

Okay, so it worked out well in the end. As Whigwham wrote afterward, "I can really get into this way of poetry reading. Hit the drinks first, then go with the flow!" (edited for capitalization). Another Whigwham gem: "When I eat mushrooms, I feel like I'm eating pinky toes."

There's much I don't understand in these poems. This time I was struck by the line, "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration." It seems to me that this is a comment on the similarities between the via negativa and the via affirmativa. At the end of the poem, I think Eliot takes this even further when he writes that "the fire and the rose are one." The end of Little Gidding is wonderful in weaving together the themes from the other quartets.

Next up: The Cocktail Party, The Waste Land, and The Wreck of the Deutschland.

Twitter

I always thought that "the salad days" meant "the days when I was young and thin because I ate only salads."

Nope. It's from Shakespeare.

Guestblog from Ilana Davita: On Being in the Middle of Times Square with a Malfunctioning Bomb

I was standing in the center of Times Square in New York City on Saturday, and I was overwhelmed by the number of flashing lights and advertisements, when I heard a loud bang, followed by several moments of silence. It was odd to be in such a busy area and then have everything go quiet. I was amazed that nobody really ran away or seemed concerned, but people were more interested in gathering around to see what had made the sound. One of the members of my group asked a policeman what the sound was, and he told us that it was the police deactivating something from the car that was on fire. It did not seem like a big deal, so our group headed over to get ice cream. We were exhausted from getting up at 5:00 that morning and walking around the city for the whole day that we were thinking more about getting to our vans so we could go home and less about the fact that a car was on fire in Times Square. The next morning, when I read the news, I was thoroughly surprised that the noise we heard was a malfunctioning bomb in Times Square and that we were there just shortly after it was discovered.

Dinner Party.13

Tonight Stearns threw a Little Gidding dinner party--the theme was distinctively Southern and delicious--pork with a bourbon-mint sauce, sweet potatoes, cheese biscuits, green beans with mushrooms and almonds, and pecan pie for dessert (with a touch of orange in the filling). And, of course, mint julips, thanks to Sr. Margarita Aloysius. I made scallops as the appetizer--scallops wrapped in bacon, which was coated with a mixture of brown sugar, curry and cayenne pepper. I would definitely make that again.

The Southern theme was appropriate, since we had a Kentuckian and a Louisianan. We also had an Ohio-ite who, interestingly, persisted as a defender of agrarianism. I always think that someone ought to develop a good northern agrarianism. Fr. DH entertained us with stories of being pulled over for speeding and being let off with a "say three Hail Mary's for your penance" (which was brought up because Sr. Margarita Aloysius had tried that evening [and failed] to beat my DC-Durham record from my pre-speeding ticket/books on tape days).

Speaking of, I just finished P.D. James' The Lighthouse, which was delightful. There were hints of (but not too much) romance--just enough for a mystery novel. There was a little bit of poetry: Auden's, "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return" and not Auden's, "but that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead" (which I know not from its original use but from Eliot turning it into an epigraph). Plus, SARS makes an appearance. As to the mystery itself, it didn't surprise you by turning out to be the person that you least expected. On the other hand, the motivation was rather surprising and unexpected.

Dissertation Proposal Defense.6

Awesome.

I definitely want to defend a dissertation from a ninja on a unicycle.

The Sweet Little Boy on the Subway

When Hopkins, Stearns and I were riding the subway in New York City a couple of weeks ago, we saw a little boy who cracked us up. I keep thinking about him again and again. The boy was about three years old and was with his mother and slightly older brother. The boy and his brother had been entertaining themselves with lollipops. And then a man entered the subway and began to play his guitar to entertain the riders. The man with the guitar got his attention. As the man played, the boy was absolutely enthralled. He started moving and dancing and nodding his head and playing air guitar with only one hand (he sort of looked like a monkey scratching his stomach). He held his mother's hand so that he could stand upright through the stops and starts of the subway, but his attention was absolutely engaged by the man and the guitar. Every once in a while, he would come out of his trance, notice everyone watching him, get incredibly self conscious and shy. And then the music would go faster and he would lose himself in it again. He couldn't help it. He would dance and scrunch up his face and nod his head.

I think this little boy was particularly intriguing to me because he was utterly absorbed in something in a way I haven't seen a lot of adults get. I like that he absolutely lost himself in the music, even when other people were around (okay, from time to time he was aware of other people existing, but this awareness that he wasn't alone was only passing). I think this is at least part of what we hope to get from art--to forget about ourselves and be absorbed in the work itself, and to just be absolutely delighted and utterly enjoy the work of art.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Prayer

Creator of all things, true source
of Light and Wisdom, lofty
source of all Being, graciously
let a ray of Your Brilliance
penetrate into the darkness of
my understanding and take from
me the double darkness in
which I have been born, sin and
ignorance.

Give me a sharp sense of
understanding, a retentive
memory, and the ability to grasp
things correctly and
fundamentally. Grant me the
talent of being exact in my
explanations, and the ability to
express myself with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning, direct
the progress, help in the
completion.

Through Christ, Our Lord.