What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

-----Ezra Pound, excerpt from "The Pisan Cantos"

Augustine would be proud.

IN DEFENSE OF "MUSLIM WOMEN'S SWIM TIME"

This past Sunday I went to the Princeton University pool to swim after church. I arrived a bit early, around 12:45. The pool wasn't supposed to open until 1pm. When I walked down into the basement of Dillon gym there was a sign on the door, "WOMEN ONLY SWIM, MEN KEEP OUT." Perplexed, I sat down on the steps outside the pool deck and waited for 1pm.

Not too long after I sat down, I was joined by a diminutive old man in a speedo who pulled a face when he saw the sign, and then sat down next to me. As we were sitting there---speculating to one another about why the pool was closed to men---two other guys in business suits (apparently touring the facility) walked past us into the pool area. Whereupon the lifeguard began yelling, telling them to clear out.

As the lifeguard ushered the two unsuspecting men off the pool deck, a lady in a one-piece suit with wild hair walked up and said, "what's all the commotion?" The old man and I shrugged. Then the lifeguard explained that the pool was closed so that female Muslim students could swim without revealing themselves to any men. This made perfect sense to me, and I was quite proud that Princeton had chosen to respect the wishes of their female Muslim students by setting aside this time. But just as I was about to respond to the lifeguard with this thought, the lady with the wild hair raised her voice and made the following comment; "You know what this is? I'll tell you what this is. This is the institutional perpetuation of the religious abuse of women!"

No lady, what this is... is in fact the freedom of religion and cultural sensitivity being carried out, it's meant to protect all of us from the tyranny of people like you.

"I felt it in myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this is what you might call 'technical arrogance' that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

-----Freeman Dyson, talking about his work on nuclear weaponry in the NYT Magazine

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

"I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way."

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpts from his unpublished last novel


After [his wife] left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in “Infinite Jest,” he is “catapulted home over . . . glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
Green returned home at nine-thirty, and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Little, Brown. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose.


“This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.”

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpt from a 1993 interview


“I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”

-----David Foster Wallace, from a letter to Don DeLillo

"Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke."

-----G.K. Chesterton, from the introduction to "Orthodoxy"....lest you thought he was kidding.

I'll be reading through "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" by John Climacus, a 7th Century Eastern monk, for Lent this year. What follows for the next month will consist of a collection of quotations that I like from the work. Feel free to leave comments or add quotations of your own.

"It is risky to swim in one's clothes. A slave of passion should not dabble in theology."

"Anyone trained in chastity should give himself no credit for any achievements.... When nature is overcome it should be admitted that this is due to Him Who is above nature.... The man who decides to struggle against his flesh and to overcome it by his own efforts is fighting in vain.... Admit your incapacity.... What have you got that you did not receive as a gift either from God or as a result of the help and prayers of others?.... It is sheer lunacy to imagine that one has deserved the gifts of God."

-----John Climacus, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent"

"Where the evil of the existing order is recognized, revolution is born. The revolutionary would like to overthrow the old order, replacing it with 'justice'. But in that he does so, he too claims for himself that which no human being can claim. He treats the 'right' as a thing which he can control: 'he forgets that he is not the One, the Subject of that freedom for which he thirsts; . . . not the Christ who stands over against the Grand Inquisitor but, on the contrary, always only the Grand Inquisitor who stands over against the Christ.' The revolutionary aims at 'the Revolution, which is the impossible possibility.' But instead, he carries out 'the other revolution . . . the possible possibility of dissatisfaction, hatred, insubordination, rebellion, and destruction.' What is the Christian to do in the face of this 'possible possibility'? She is to witness to the Revolution, by her 'not doing'; by not becoming angry, by not attacking and not destroying. She is to deprive the existing order of pathos, thereby starving it out of existence. That is the 'the great negative possibility'."

-----Bruce McCormack, quoting and explaining Karl Barth, from his book, "Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology"

Tolkien on exegesis. You can see here how he approached Christianity as myth become fact. I find this particularly interesting in light of the incompleteness of modern biblical criticism and the subsequent turn to theological/literary exegesis in biblical studies. It's also a strong argument against the reductions of classical materialism.

"We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled...By the 'soup' I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by the 'bones' its source or material--even when, (by rare luck), those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not forbid, of course, the criticism of 'soup' as 'soup'."

"The picture [of a tapestry] is greater than , and not explained by, the sum of the component threads. Therein lies the inherent weakness of the analytic (or 'scientific') method: it finds out much about things that occur in stories, but little or nothing about their effect in any given story."

"I had no special childish 'wish to believe'. I wanted to know. Belief depended upon the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or by the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of he tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in 'real life'. Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded."

"The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale---or otherworldly---setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophy, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."

J.R.R. Tolkien, excerpts from his essay "On Fairy-Stories" in "Essays Presented to Charles Williams"

My life before Sarah...

"I wonder whether you are on the right track in expecting 'stable sentiments' and successful adjustment to life.' This is the language of modern psychology rather than of religion or even of common experience, and I sometimes think that when the psychologists speak of adjustment to life they really mean perfect happiness and unbroken good fortune! Not to get - or, worse still, to be- what one wants is not a disease that can be cured, but the normal condition of man. To feel guilty, when one is guilty, and to realise, not without pain, one's moral and intellectual inadequacy, is not a disease, but commonsense. To find that one's emotions do not 'come to heel' and line up as stable sentiments in permanent conformity with one's convictions is simply the facts of being a fallen, and still imperfectly redeemed, man. We may be thankful if, by continual prayer and self-discipline, we can, over years, make some approach to that stability. After all, St. Paul who was a good deal further along the road than you and I, could still write Romans, chapter 7, verses 21-23."

-----C.S. Lewis, from a letter to Michael Edwards (BOD) in "The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III"

This is brilliant power-pop.

Bingo!

The Wassup boys are at it again...

This is beautiful. Reminds me of those Miguel Calderon paintings in the Royal Tenebaums.

"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has
bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a
human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to
create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And
that is nothing but murder."

-----Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"A life in academia formed, deformed and almost ruined David Foster Wallace's writing. Infinite Jest is nearly a thousand pages of exhausting, inexhaustible, hugely flawed and brilliant novel. It is followed by almost a hundred pages of endnotes (his editor made him cut as many again). The endnotes have footnotes. Wallace was, on one level, aware that he was cut off from ordinary America, but the knowledge put his prose into a hyper-analytic death spiral. Like so many academics, he became obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic. He spent much of his time attacking forms of language of which he disapproved (pharmaceutical jargon, advertising, corporate PR). This was literary criticism disguised as literature—grenade attacks on a theme park.

Wallace was not alone in this; it happens to most American academic novelists (like the superbly gifted writer George Saunders who, at 49, has still never written a novel or left school.) They waste time on America's debased, overwhelming, industrial pop culture. They attack it with an energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn't worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes".

-----Julian Gough, from "Prospect Magazine". Italics mine.

A conversation at Brussels Bistro in Laguna Beach last night with John Kittrell.

J:  "Chris, I'm sorry you missed my friend who is getting his PhD in Dublin in Philosophy of Mind.  He was here until yesterday.  You would have enjoyed talking to him."

C:  "Oh really?  I'm interested in Philosophy of Mind.  Is your friend a cognitive materialist?

J:  "No! (he said with contempt, and the slamming of a Belgian bier) he's a Christian!"

C:  (silence, immediately followed by uproarious laughter from all....)