I go under the knife tomorrow–knee replacement surgery. Expect things to be relatively quiet here for a couple of days. –They can rebuild me; they have the technology.
Tagore’s Lament
I read this recently in Tagore’s Gitanjali. Interestingly parallel to Paul’s famous lament late in Romans 7.
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
2011 in review
Don’t really know what any of this means, but I thought some of you might be interested in it.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Well, So That is That…A Christmas Oratorio (Auden)
Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done,
That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
Yankee No-Dawdle Dandy
And so, off to the capitol city. If any readers of the blog are going to be at the APA, look me up. Auburn will have a table at the Reception.
Lancelot Andrewes, Glory and Peace
St. Luke ix. 14: — “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
Glory and Peace are coupled together with an “and” — ” and on earth peace ;” that Glory would not be sung alone, but Peace together with it. We will not, we may not skip the copulative; that couples together high and low. Heaven and earth, and in them God and man; but that which I respect specially. Glory and Peace must be sung together. If we sing Glory without Peace, we sing but to halves. No Glory on high will be admitted without Peace upon earth. No gift on His Altar, which is a special part of His glory, but “lay down your gift and there leave it, and first go your way and make peace on earth; ” and that done come again, and you shall then be accepted to give glory to Heaven, and not before. And O that we would go and do the like, have like regard of His glory that He hath of our peace. But this knot of Glory and Peace is against those that are still ever wrangling with one thing or other, and all for the glory of God forsooth, as if these two could not join — God could not have His glory if the Church were at peace, as if no remedy the Angels’ “and” must out.
Glory and Peace; but Glory first, and then Peace. There is much in the order. Glory to be first, else you change the clef, — the clef is in Glory, that the key of the song. That is to be first and before all. Peace to give place to her; Glory is the elder sister. And no Pax in terris, unless it be first considered how it will stand with Gloria in excelsis. To set Peace before Glory is to set earth above Heaven. Keep the order then, each in her place. So goeth the song; the Child born is God and man — God from on high, Man from the earth. They keep the right order in singing of Him; we to do the like, Heaven’s part ever to be first.
Moral Kangaroos
A key passage (and one of my favorites) from Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Cynthia is talking to Molly.
“Nonsense, Molly! You are good. At least, if you are not good, what am I? There’s a rule-of-three sum for you to do! But it’s no use talking; I am not good, and I never shall be now. Perhaps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I know.”
“But do you think it easier to be a heroine?”
“Yes, as far as one knows of heroines from history. I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation–but steady, every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo!”
The Message (John 1:14)
While I am no fan of The Message translation of the Bible, I did find this translation of John 1:14, in its flat-footed matter-of-factness, striking (H/T Jim Brinkerhoff). A nice turn to the thought of the season:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.
When Spam Becomes Poetry
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“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Marcel)
My post on combative clarity (immediately below) was in part, and roundaboutly, a reaction to a point made in the closing sections of Marcel’s Introduction to The Mystery of Being. He summarizes the point so: Philosophical research is “research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken without loss of all reality to the result.”
I want to attend again to that Introduction. It ends in a way particularly appropriate to the Nativity season. Marcel mentions the notion of good will found in the Gospels, and goes on:
It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own day the notion of ‘the man of good will’ has lost much of its old richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic reverberations. But there is not any notion that is more in need of reinstatement in our modern world. Let the Gospel formula mean “Peace to men of good will” or “Peace through men of good will,” as one might be often tempted to think it did, in either case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be too much underlined. Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts to the same thing, in conditions which permit peace to be assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which allows us to describe it as specifically a good will. ‘Content’, however, is not quite the word I want here. I think rather that the goodness is a matter of a certain way of asserting the will, and on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which, in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether war in men’s hearts or what we would call ‘real war’, must be regarded as intrinsically evil. We can speak then of men of good will or peacemakers, indifferently.
A philosophy of peace, a weapon of peace–that is Marcel’s thinking. Marcel writes philosophy so as to seek peace and ensue it. –There are less noble motives.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 