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Three from Robin Tanner

Three Interesting Quotes on How Life has Changed

Three Interesting Quotes on How Life has Changed

We mourned for a lost Eden. Farming was becoming a noisy, mechanised, stinking business. Wagons, ploughs, and the horses that drew them were all disappearing. Wood and stone were giving place to asbestos and corrugated iron. Care and grace, and the old slow pace and the old thoroughness and craft were all abandoned. The farm tractor was now king, and speed was all-important. Thatched ricks, cut-and-laid hedges, shocks of corn and cocks of hay, handmade wooden gates and stiles, were rare sights now. The stone-breaker was no longer needed since the white limestone lanes were tarred. Flowers that were once common had become rare, and only a few of the old mixed pastures escaped the zeal of farmers keen to sow ‘leys’ without a ‘weed’. Those who never saw Edwardian England can have no idea of its beauty. Old photographs show this with great poignancy. True, the children in them often looked cowed and ill-clad, and the men and women are bowed with labour, but that need not have been the heavy price paid for beauty and naturalness: the brash angularity of today, its harsh shapes and unsympathetic textures, its litter of poles and wires, its makeshift, temporary appearance lie like an ugly palimpsest upon the old countryside.

* * * * *

In the sleepy England of my childhood it was an event to see a motor car, or watch a biplane for the first time until it became a speck in the distance and vanished. Nothing ever changed. Sugar was twopence a pound, and a letter required a penny stamp. Yet the ugly and stupid technological revolution was imminent. Over the years I have watched the change from age-old agriculture to a mechanised ‘agro-business’. Horses and men have gone, and traditional farming craftsmanship such as rick-building and thatching, coppicing and hedge-laying has been extinguished in the process. A hedge has become an obstacle to be removed, and wild flowers troublesome weeds to be exterminated.

* * * * *

Year by year we lose more and more of the things we have loved: ancient woodlands, flowery meadows, handsome old farm buildings, stiles and gates of oak and ash; things made of wool, linen or silk; cloth-bound books of lissom paper, their sections properly stitched so they open easily; and a multitude of domestic things that were good to handle – all made before the fatal invasion of synthetic substances and shoddy methods.—Robin Tanner, Double Harness (1987)

Keeping My Resolution

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If It Were Only That Simple!

If It Were Only That Simple!

On February 6, I made a kind of belated New Years’ resolution that I would not get so vitriolic about what Republicans are doing to this country. Well, so far, I’ve held to it, but as the sequestration looms. (First it was the Fiscal Cliff. What’s next, the Budget Apocalypse?)

Then I started looking at a website called Laudator Temporis Acti, which has some really interesting quotes, among which I found this one by Owen Felltham (1602?-1668) on the subject of being too censorious:

No man can write six lines, but there may be something one may carp at, if he be disposed to cavil. Opinions are as various, as false. Judgement is from every tongue, a several. Men think by censuring to be accounted wise; but, in my conceit, there is nothing layes forth more of the Fool….Frequent dispraises are, at best, but the faults of uncharitable wit. Any Clown may see the Furrow is but crooked, but where is the man that can plow me a streight one? The best works are but a kind of Miscellany; the cleanest Corn, will not be without some soil: No not after often winnowing. There is a tincture of corruption, that dies even all mortality. I would wish men in works of others, to examine two things before they judge. Whether it be more good, then ill: And whether they themselves could at first have perform’d it better.

Felltham has a point. I think I found here a website from which I’ll be drawing some interesting quotes in the future.

“The Divinity of the Groves”

Tree Cutting

Tree Cutting

Then we went to work to cut down the trees. The slim stems were an easy task to a good woodman, and one after another they toppled to the ground. And meantime, as I watched, I became conscious of a strange emotion.

It was as if someone were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading—something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman’s voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness unrepaid to the world. And what the voice told me was that I was destroying her last shelter.

That was the pathos of it—the voice was homeless. As the axes flashed in the sunlight and the wood grew thin, that gentle spirit was pleading with me for mercy and a brief respite. It seemed to be telling of a world for centuries grown coarse and pitiless, of long sad wanderings, of hardly won shelter, and a peace which was the little all she sought from men. There was nothing terrible in it. No thought of wrong-doing. The spell which to Semitic blood held the mystery of evil, was to me, of the Northern race, only delicate and rare and beautiful. Jobson and the rest did not feel it, I with my finer senses caught nothing but the hopeless sadness of it. That which had stirred the passion in Lawson was only wringing my heart. It was almost too pitiful to bear. As the trees crashed down and the men wiped the sweat from their brows, I seemed to myself like the murderer of fair women and innocent children. I remember that the tears were running over my cheeks. More than once I opened my mouth to countermand the work, but the face of Jobson, that grim Tishbite, held me back.—John Buchan, “The Grove of Ashtaroth,” The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies

Fire and Ice

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A Warehouse Fire in Chicago Presents Some Strange Contrasts

A Warehouse Fire in Chicago Presents Some Strange Contrasts

On one hand, we have global warming. We are already seeing shipping along the Arctic Sea north of Russia and Siberia. On the other, we can have some anomalies as the Chicago warehouse fire in single-digit (Fahrenheit) temperatures . The fire burns away amid ice and low temperatures.

It’s an interesting contrast. I don’t envy the firefighters, though, who get to choose between frostbite and severe burns.

 

Expires Soon!

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Don’t Be a Sucker for Sales!

Don’t Be a Sucker for Sales!

I used to follow all the sales, and I would be mobilized into action by hearing that the low price would “expire soon” As a result, I bought a lot of junk I didn’t need. And instead of saving money, I ran up my credit cards thinking I was getting a terrific bargain. Now I get this cynical smirk on my face when being offered a low price. Remember: You will be paying an even lower price if your spending is zero.

Unfortunately, with the economy being the way it is today, it would help if more people were spendthrifts—but not if, by so doing, they got into serious debt.

For me, the biggest temptation was—and still is—books. On Sunday, Martine and I took a walk on the campus of Loyola-Marymount University in Westchester. Because I’ve seen as much of the campus as I want to, I usually accompany Martine for only the first half of the walk and spend the rest of the time in the nice new Hammond Library.

While there, I took a look at a relatively new book by Karl Schlögel entitled Moscow, 1937. It was a fascinating picture of the Soviet capital during Stalin’s purges. I was so enthralled that I read the first chapter in its entirety (about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita) and scanned the rest of the book page by page. The illustrations and maps were amazing.

Needless to say, I was sold. That evening, I found a cheap new copy on eBay and purchased it. As you can see, I can present myself as a bit of a cheapskate; but I still have, hidden not so deep within myself, a raging spendthrift.

 

Gooble Gobble, One of Us!

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Scene from Tod Browning’s FREAKS (1932)

Banquet Scene from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932)

I’m going to talk about some tricky concepts here, and I’m not altogether confident that I can explain them to everybody’s satisfaction. I read an interesting review by Thomas Nagel entitled “The Taste for Being Moral” in the December 6, 2012, issue of The New York Review of Books. In passing, it takes up the difference between Liberals and Conservatives in a way I found to be interesting.

According to Nagel, American Conservatives tend to follow the norms of their own group, especially in the light of categories that the author refers to as Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to extend their aegis to all fellow men. According to Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.

The “free riders” referred to can be Hispanic immigrants, African-Americans on welfare, single mothers, gays, people on Social Security and Medicare (according to Paul Ryan), and environmentalists. Even though the Catholic catechism tells us we were all made in the image of God, not all Catholics, let alone Evangelicals,. take this to heart.

The title of this blog comes from Tod Browning’s classic film Freaks (1932). It is part of a sung toast at a banquet attended by circus freaks and normal people sympathetic to them: “Gooble, Gobble! Gooble, Gobble! One of us! One of us!” We tend to place a higher value on the groups to which we belong than to outsiders or the general public as a whole—irrespective of what Christian teaching tell us to do.

Conservatives tend to view people outside their group as either “free riders” or as some unspecified threat to the values they hold dear. Think of the gun fanatics facing some unspecified threat to their God-given right to own assault weapons and enough ammo to blast all their enemies into the next world.

I, on the other hand, believe with Immanuel Kant that “the only thing that is good in itself and without qualification is good will—a will that obeys universal laws of morality…. It is in virtue of their capacity for morality—as both the authors and subjects of the moral law—that humans are ends in themselves and must always be treated as such.”

Of course, one has only to read my blog posts to note that I, too, am a member of a group, one that views American Conservatives with alarm and loathing. In my heart of hearts, which is in there somewhere, I would like to effect some sort of reconciliation with them. That will, however, be a long process. I’m only human, after all!

 

A Chinless Villain

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Do Chins Matter in Assessing Villainy?

A Cladistic Apomorphy?

We don’t tend to know much about chins, except that we are the only hominid which seems to have one. (Elephants have chins, but it is by no means clear why.)

Chins are classified as a cladistic apomorphy, according to Wikipedia, “partially defining anatomically modern humans as distinct from archaic forms.”

Now there are several myths extant about chins which result in our being prejudiced against males who are deficient in the size or shape of their chins. We tend to emphasize a strong chin with overall strength and decisiveness.

Which brings us to the subject of this blog, the embattled President of Syria—for the time being anyway—who is responsible for the deaths of some 60,000 of his people in an attempt to hang on to his power. Every time I see a picture of him, such as the one above (which makes him look somewhat like an ostrich), I keep saying to myself, “There’s something wrong here: The man has no chin whatsoever.”

We tend to hold many superstitious beliefs about people based on their superficial appearance. Because of the size of her Adam’s apple and her hands, I would naturally infer, for example, that Ann Coulter is actually a guy in drag. If so, that would explain a lot of things; but I am not absolutely sure that I’m right. Another example: American corporations like to choose as CEOs men who are taller than the average, perhaps because their size makes them look stronger and more decisive. But then, many of the CEOs who have been vilified for their role in fomenting the current recession fit this profile.

Maybe being tall doesn’t really make you stronger. Take Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and Josef Stalin for example. The tallest of the three was Hitler at 5 feet 8 inches.

It would be interesting to make a study bringing together all these superficial observations and our myth making based on our perception of them. None of us are immune, particularly when it comes to choosing a mate. But then that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.

 

“Life Is a Pure Flame”

Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne

There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning, may be confident of no end;—all others have a dependent being and within the reach of destruction;—which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself;—and the highest strain of omnipotency, to be so powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from the power of itself. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory. God who can only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration; and to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.

Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human discovery. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death, and having a late part yet to act upon this stage of earth. If in the decretory term of the world we shall not all die but be changed, according to received translation, the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilations shall be courted.

While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined them, and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla, that thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next; who, when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.

Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.

Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.

To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to lie in St Innocent’s church-yard as in the sands of Egypt.—Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

Happy New Year!

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Yet Another Year...

Yet Another Year…

Okay, so we’re all poised to dive off this Fiscal Cliff. And now I hear that Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned FLDS leader is saying that the world will end before the New Year. Is he plotting some kind of remote control Jim Jones type of Götterdammerung to astonish and sicken us all with tomorrow morning’s coffee?

Yes, both craziness and sanity exist side by side in this most imperfect of all worlds. Some are preparing for the worst, others are calmly trying to get on with their lives while alarms are ringing all around them. House Speaker John Boehner and his Tea Party minions are pretending that nothing bad will happen if they jerk our chains so bad that we are strangled by them. And Barack Obama is laughing as if he knew something we didn’t.

The earth is heating up rapidly, and the land is ravaged by superstorms of increasing intensity. We continue to assume that peak gasoline will never arrive: After all, can’t we just ramp up the fracking?

In 2013, life will continue to change at a frumious [sic] pace. Little by little, some of us will fall off the jet-powered skateboards we are on and refuse to get back on. Suddenly, we will start remembering things—little things—that are no more, even if they are as innocuous as Twinkies or a favorite brand of hair shampoo or spicy cookies shaped like Dutch windmills or bookstores or Westerns or Moderate Republicans. Inevitably, they are replaced with new things, some of which are worthy replacements, others of which are strictly blow lunch, to use an old Dartmouth expression.

We will struggle on. Some of us will fall by the wayside, only to replaced by new people, people who are different but undoubtedly have many things to recommend them.

In the New Year, some horrible things will happen. Crazy people will shoot up innocents and turn their guns on themselves, thinking they will go to hell with plenty of company. Sports teams will break records. Individual athletes will break records, sometimes without the help of performing-enhancing drugs.

How will we keep our sanity? In the novel I am reading, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, there is a quote I particularly like: “The world has progressed no further than the truth spoken by a sixth-century Christian: ‘Condemn the sin and forgive the sinner.’”

 

Uayeb

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It’s the Shortest Month of the Year

It’s the Shortest Month of the Year

We’ve been hearing a lot about the Mayan Calendar lately, mostly in connection with The End of the World last week. Well, it didn’t end; and the Mayan Calendar goes on into a new baktun.

In the Haab’, or Mayan Solar Calendar, there are eighteen months of twenty days each. Where does that leave the other 5.25 days? To account for the difference, the Mayans created an intercalary five-day month referred to as the uayeb. Unlike other days in the Solar Calendar, the five days of the uayeb are thought to be a dangerous time (and so they are with the so called “Fiscal Cliff” looming).

According to Lynn Foster in Handbook to Life in the Ancient Mayan World, “During Wayeb, portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolved. No boundaries prevented the ill-intending deities from causing disasters.” It was a time of fasting with abstention from sex and all celebrations. People avoided washing their hair or even leaving their huts during this time.

As we in the United States come to the end of another uayeb, I hope we are ready for what 2013 brings. Because, ready or not, here it comes….