Friday, May 29, 2009
Happy Birthday GKC!
He would be 135 today. May his works be read and understood; that indeed would be a good birthday gift.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Discovered: Chesterton's Other Autobiography!
Alas, I have no time to write today - and perhaps it is best that I do not, since tomorrow is GKC's birthday, and I must prepare - uh - the festival: the Gype matches, the picnic on the roof, the tea-party on the floor, the grand birthday Party out in the Field beneath the Party-tree... And then Sunday is Pentecost, another birthday... We have so many things going on just now, I think I must take a nap. (No, no; that was Bilbo - or Aquinas. Sorry.)
As you no doubt read recently, our esteemed blogg-mistress was hunting for an interesting little detail about GKC, and that brought up an interesting project, which we might call Chesterton's other autobiography. That is, the Sybilline leaves of personal details scattered all over the prodigous writings of GKC.
Now, this is an example of where the power of AMBER is so handy. (That, and the curious little doctoral work of mine which applied the Cat-in-the-Hat's own method of Calculatus Eliminatus to ribosomal RNA sequences. Hee hee.) It's not very easy for some to search for phrases like "I am"... (We might recall Short Shrift, the Policeman in The Phantom Tollbooth saying: "it's the shortest sentence I know." The fact that it also happens to smack of the Divine Tetragrammaton is another topic for another day. It comes up over 7,000 times in AMBER, though only some of them are the ones we want.
So! If you'd like to read some, click here!
[2]
Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am a mediaevalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated.
[14-5]
I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is seldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call him a brick.
But, despite all these theories, I have struck my colours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I shall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist or Simple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character of the Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have already learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house that was made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was built of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like the tower of some Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters, "1908." That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarians' sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy.
My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate), asked me with some curiosity what I was doing.
"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to forty-three hansom cabmen."
"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside the radius."
"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into Cockney.
"If you will take my advice," said my friend, you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane you would utter a yell of joy."
Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible sternness. "Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold; and I mean to see it before I die. ... I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics love it."
[17-19, 21-22]
I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck, should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad. I am sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the human spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope for people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a people ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and the men that beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.
[40-41]
If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who had the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have the courage to live.
[90-91]
I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it contains things to eat. The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it can be realised by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white fir-wood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyère cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
[54-57]
The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine, as little, localised and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti glebis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast routes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recent and scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism. Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan civilisation. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ bad not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of people of all kinds of education.
[113-114]
Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I am glad they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's throw; quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first stone at the new house - not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the matter of new houses. ... Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not myself built over, like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of a temple, or an American clerk in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I am delighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which I am not only attracted by a strange affection, but to which also (by a touching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiring deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not in the desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting of them all right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest human house to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see; that, is my objection to the modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do not want him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through a telescope, nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of him with a microscope.
[161, 165-6]
For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is by this that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All romances that deal in extreme luxury, from the "Arabian Nights" to the novels of Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of dream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there is something as occasional as intoxication; if that is still counted occasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of dulness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head of an armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, if you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and alien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and not your own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of the Eighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year at Margate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protector of them."
[200-1]
For those interested in revolt (as I am) I only say meekly that one cannot have a Revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logical thing, has reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has (as every society should have) a part that perpetually leaps helplessly at the sky; and a part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowing down one's head in the dust is a very good thing, the humble beginning of all happiness. When we have bowed our heads in the dust for a little time, the happiness comes; and then (leaving our heads in the humble and reverent position) we kick up our heels behind in the air. That is the true origin of standing on one's head; and the ultimate defence of paradox. The wheel humbles itself be exalted; only it does it a little quicker than I do.
[216]
One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly horsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.
[239]
I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells, I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue. I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which I agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny. I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire biology. No truth which I can find can deny that I am seeking the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my mind...
[260 ellipsis in original]
Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred and his fort in Athelney, in the marshes of the Parrett? Not a very historical novel. Not about his Truth-telling (please) or his founding the British Empire, or the British Navy, or the Navy League, or whichever it was he founded. Not about the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (as an eminent historian says) to be called the Pact of Chippenham. But an aboriginal romance for boys about the bare, bald, beatific fact that a great hero held his fort in an island in a river. An island is fine enough, in all conscience or piratic unconscientiousness, but an island in a river sounds like the beginning of the greatest adventure story on earth. "Robinson Crusoe" is really a great tale, but think of Robinson Crusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen England and Spain from his inaccessible isle! "Treasure Island" is a spirt of genius: but what treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred? And then consider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that was more of an island than it looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; many a heavy harnessed Viking may have started bounding across a meadow only to find himself submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendour spreading round me; I see glimpses of a great romance that will never be written. I see a sudden shaft quivering in one of the short trees. I see a red-haired man wading madly among the tall gold flowers of the marsh, leaping onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft stand quivering in his throat. I cannot see any more, because, as I have delicately suggested, I am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustain me, and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.
[300-1]
As you no doubt read recently, our esteemed blogg-mistress was hunting for an interesting little detail about GKC, and that brought up an interesting project, which we might call Chesterton's other autobiography. That is, the Sybilline leaves of personal details scattered all over the prodigous writings of GKC.
Now, this is an example of where the power of AMBER is so handy. (That, and the curious little doctoral work of mine which applied the Cat-in-the-Hat's own method of Calculatus Eliminatus to ribosomal RNA sequences. Hee hee.) It's not very easy for some to search for phrases like "I am"... (We might recall Short Shrift, the Policeman in The Phantom Tollbooth saying: "it's the shortest sentence I know." The fact that it also happens to smack of the Divine Tetragrammaton is another topic for another day. It comes up over 7,000 times in AMBER, though only some of them are the ones we want.
So! If you'd like to read some, click here!
Before we begin, just a note on the source. So as not to overwhelm you, I shall just give some of the samples from only ONE of GKC's books, Alarms and Discursions, and the page numbers appear at the end of each quote, in brackets. All the rest from here on is GKC...I am neither a Protestant nor a Pagan, I cannot see without sadness the flame of Vesta extinguished, nor the fires of the Fifth of November: I cannot but be touched a little to see Paganism merely a cold altar and Protestantism only a damp squib.
--Dr. Thursday
[2]
Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am a mediaevalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated.
[14-5]
I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is seldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call him a brick.
But, despite all these theories, I have struck my colours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I shall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist or Simple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character of the Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have already learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house that was made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was built of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like the tower of some Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters, "1908." That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarians' sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy.
My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate), asked me with some curiosity what I was doing.
"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to forty-three hansom cabmen."
"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside the radius."
"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into Cockney.
'My heart leaps up when I beholdas I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The Classics Made Cockney' - it contained some fine lines.
A sky-sign in the sky,'
'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning
'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.'I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never realised that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why? It is because I have left it for ever."
"If you will take my advice," said my friend, you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane you would utter a yell of joy."
Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible sternness. "Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold; and I mean to see it before I die. ... I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics love it."
[17-19, 21-22]
I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck, should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad. I am sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the human spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope for people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a people ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and the men that beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.
[40-41]
If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who had the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have the courage to live.
[90-91]
I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it contains things to eat. The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it can be realised by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white fir-wood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyère cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
[54-57]
The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine, as little, localised and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti glebis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast routes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recent and scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism. Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan civilisation. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ bad not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of people of all kinds of education.
[113-114]
Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I am glad they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's throw; quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first stone at the new house - not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the matter of new houses. ... Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not myself built over, like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of a temple, or an American clerk in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I am delighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which I am not only attracted by a strange affection, but to which also (by a touching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiring deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not in the desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting of them all right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest human house to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see; that, is my objection to the modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do not want him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through a telescope, nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of him with a microscope.
[161, 165-6]
For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is by this that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All romances that deal in extreme luxury, from the "Arabian Nights" to the novels of Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of dream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there is something as occasional as intoxication; if that is still counted occasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of dulness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head of an armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, if you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and alien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and not your own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of the Eighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year at Margate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protector of them."
[200-1]
For those interested in revolt (as I am) I only say meekly that one cannot have a Revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logical thing, has reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has (as every society should have) a part that perpetually leaps helplessly at the sky; and a part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowing down one's head in the dust is a very good thing, the humble beginning of all happiness. When we have bowed our heads in the dust for a little time, the happiness comes; and then (leaving our heads in the humble and reverent position) we kick up our heels behind in the air. That is the true origin of standing on one's head; and the ultimate defence of paradox. The wheel humbles itself be exalted; only it does it a little quicker than I do.
[216]
One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly horsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.
[239]
I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells, I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue. I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which I agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny. I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire biology. No truth which I can find can deny that I am seeking the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my mind...
[260 ellipsis in original]
Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred and his fort in Athelney, in the marshes of the Parrett? Not a very historical novel. Not about his Truth-telling (please) or his founding the British Empire, or the British Navy, or the Navy League, or whichever it was he founded. Not about the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (as an eminent historian says) to be called the Pact of Chippenham. But an aboriginal romance for boys about the bare, bald, beatific fact that a great hero held his fort in an island in a river. An island is fine enough, in all conscience or piratic unconscientiousness, but an island in a river sounds like the beginning of the greatest adventure story on earth. "Robinson Crusoe" is really a great tale, but think of Robinson Crusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen England and Spain from his inaccessible isle! "Treasure Island" is a spirt of genius: but what treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred? And then consider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that was more of an island than it looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; many a heavy harnessed Viking may have started bounding across a meadow only to find himself submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendour spreading round me; I see glimpses of a great romance that will never be written. I see a sudden shaft quivering in one of the short trees. I see a red-haired man wading madly among the tall gold flowers of the marsh, leaping onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft stand quivering in his throat. I cannot see any more, because, as I have delicately suggested, I am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustain me, and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.
[300-1]
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Dale's Tales of the Road
In the current issue of Gilbert, Dale Ahlquist tells of his journey to Nebraska to give a talk titled, "God is dead."
We heard a little bit about this at the time, about how some famous atheist was giving a talk the same night about 2 hours away, and how some folks from the campus where Dale was speaking actually snubbed his talk and traveled to the other guy's talk. Hmm. Some not so schmart folk there on that campus in Nebraska.
Anyway, Dale had coffee with the Philosopher's Club and sounds like he had a good time in Nebraska.
I noticed that after all the reported joy last month at the publishing (after years of begging) of Dale's speaking schedule, it was absent from this issue. I'm not sure what it means, but it has been noted.
We heard a little bit about this at the time, about how some famous atheist was giving a talk the same night about 2 hours away, and how some folks from the campus where Dale was speaking actually snubbed his talk and traveled to the other guy's talk. Hmm. Some not so schmart folk there on that campus in Nebraska.
Anyway, Dale had coffee with the Philosopher's Club and sounds like he had a good time in Nebraska.
I noticed that after all the reported joy last month at the publishing (after years of begging) of Dale's speaking schedule, it was absent from this issue. I'm not sure what it means, but it has been noted.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
What Color Were G.K. Chesterton's Eyes?
Today, working on a project, I happened to wonder, what color were his eyes? My immediate guess was blue, he being of that heritage that produces blue eye color quite a bit. But I asked an expert, who found this quote:
"I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big, gentle leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. There is a delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London, remarked, "Everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton."So there is a good description for you of the man, including those brilliant English blue eyes.
"Yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they don't they ask."
He really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright yellow. Physically he is the crackling electric spark of the heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver."
(so MW quotes a reporter in GKC pg.564-5
Monday, May 25, 2009
The "Cow" issue
I think by now, most of you have received your April/May 2009 issues of Gilbert. The one with the photograph of the cow on the front of it.
If you follow the cover to the story of Winkie, on page 35, you discover how to make a cow do anything you want it to do, which could come in handy some day.
The Lunacy and Letters portion of the magazine is looking for some opinions on this issue. If you have any, please write in to the Editor. What you liked, what you didn't like, etc. We want to hear from you.
I thought the opening Editorial titled "Pacifism" was quite interesting. Especially in light of a conversation I just had with my neighbor, who works in a local high school. She said the teachers are no longer allowed to touch the students. If two boys get into a fight, the teacher must stand by, stating firmly, "Stop fighting," or. "Please stop fighting," and never try to physically pull them apart, else they may be sued. It seems to me some level of pacifism at work here.
If you follow the cover to the story of Winkie, on page 35, you discover how to make a cow do anything you want it to do, which could come in handy some day.
The Lunacy and Letters portion of the magazine is looking for some opinions on this issue. If you have any, please write in to the Editor. What you liked, what you didn't like, etc. We want to hear from you.
I thought the opening Editorial titled "Pacifism" was quite interesting. Especially in light of a conversation I just had with my neighbor, who works in a local high school. She said the teachers are no longer allowed to touch the students. If two boys get into a fight, the teacher must stand by, stating firmly, "Stop fighting," or. "Please stop fighting," and never try to physically pull them apart, else they may be sued. It seems to me some level of pacifism at work here.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
UK Chesterton Society
Dear Chestertonian friends,
I have great pleasure in informing you that The Chesterton Society originally founded in 1974 at Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, is back in action.
Dr William Oddie, the new chairman has hit the ground running and started things with a smart new website we can be proud of.
Chesterton in the Chilterns which was always really a local group/branch of the Society however continued to flourish, and as Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society said, -
"kept the GKC torch burning in the British Isles".
I would urge British Chestertonians to please join the Society and give her every support; check out the website and take part in the Blog. I am going to leave a message of congratulations and provide a link for our own Chesterton in the Chilterns. We will have the opportunity to post our notices on this site and Dr. Oddie has agreed to allow us to have a page of our own.
Happy times ahead!
- See note on a GKC Conference July 4th.
Best Regards
Martin Thompson
I have great pleasure in informing you that The Chesterton Society originally founded in 1974 at Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, is back in action.
Dr William Oddie, the new chairman has hit the ground running and started things with a smart new website we can be proud of.
Chesterton in the Chilterns which was always really a local group/branch of the Society however continued to flourish, and as Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society said, -
"kept the GKC torch burning in the British Isles".
I would urge British Chestertonians to please join the Society and give her every support; check out the website and take part in the Blog. I am going to leave a message of congratulations and provide a link for our own Chesterton in the Chilterns. We will have the opportunity to post our notices on this site and Dr. Oddie has agreed to allow us to have a page of our own.
Happy times ahead!
- See note on a GKC Conference July 4th.
Best Regards
Martin Thompson
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Coloured Lands
You can purchase this book from the American Chesterton Society, (and at a discount if you are a member), but if you want to see inside to tantalize your appetite for it, check the Dover information page.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Learning a Lesson with a Looking Glass
Happy Ascension! Today might be said to be the feast day of mathematics, since it was the day Jesus told His apostles to go out and matheteusate all nations... The Greek was translated to the Latin discipuli which usually is left as "disciples" - but it has another English translation: "the Learners".
Yes, as I mentioned recently, math is easy - and today being its feast day, I thought we'd look at another odd but common truth which you would never guess is mathematical, yet is one of its most important stones in its foundation: the truth we call Right and Left...
((click here to proceed))
Of course you want to hear some Chesterton before you suffer through such an odd affair, so I will supply it:
What was Calvin's mistake? What was his father's mistake? What is going on here? Are we talking about money - investments and all - or something else? Is this the beginning of a sermon on ownership and property, a commentary on the Commandments, or an elaboration of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum with reference to Distributivism, Distributism, or something similar?
No. (Though it could be... but not this time.) It is my attempt at trying to awaken you to a very mysterious property, one of the most well-known relations of all the relations of things that we know of: the property of adjacency, of "things-being-next-to-each-other" - that is, of the mystery of Right and Left. Calvin's father is a lawyer and so he never studied the special branch of mathematics called "Set Theory" - which can go by other names like "Discrete Math" or "Number Theory". I am not going to scare you, but I want you to read on, and try very hard to start noticing something you are seeing constantly - and then realize that there was once a time that you did not yet grasp it, as Calvin did not grasp it... and finally you learned it. Alas, you learned it too well, for it became a commonplace, and you forgot about it... until a lunatic like me comes along and reminds you that it is still there.
One of the things we are taught - I mean we computer people, and we scientists, and we mathematicians - is to pay attention to detail, and try to see things as they are. That is very Chestertonian, and you no doubt have heard me quote such things before:
It is so dreadfully obvious to us in computing, since we have to work with a MACHINE, which does NOT understand, and will not EVER understand... yes, it may be hard for you to realize, but we can do NOTHING AT ALL with computers unless we use the very small collection of tools which are part of the machine - these are symbols, actually, which stand for certain simple kinds of actions or tasks. Most people walk around assuming computers can do "math" - by which they mean adding and stuff like that.
Here I must be Scholastic, and shout, with a blow on the table, distinguo! (I distinguish!)
Of course they do NOT add. No more than a smaller river "adds" when it pours its water into a larger one at the confluence of the waters. (I thank my good friend lUkE for this analogy; you may also recall a Tom Petty song about the river kissing the ocean...)
But as interesting (or dull) as this question is, we are not going to talk about that today and here. It would take a while, too, and though it is interesting, we need to get at something far more interesting and hard to explain - the idea that Calvin's father was trying to teach.
What do we mean by addition? What do we mean - I use this word "mean" here and I do not know what other word to use - what do we mean when we place something next to something else and try to consider them in the joint sense, as something which is now single, though paradoxically it remains composite and multiple?
Is this sounding fantastic? Or confusing? Oh, why am I struggling to write about this as I wish?
Pardon me while I invoke my muse...
AHA.
Ah. Now we have something. Let us try with both hands.
(I must control myself here - the hand is a wonderful thing, and there are books about it, not counting those on anatomy, but I must not write another just now.)
In order to proceed, let us talk about another kind of number: number as used the grammarians, which means whether a word is "singular" (that is, just one) or "plural" (that is, more than one). This idea is so dramatic and so penetrating of thought that many languages embed the "number" in a word as an ending or suffix. (Some, like Vietnamese, use another method.)
But did you know that Greek and Egyptian and Hebrew have a third form of this grammatical number? Yes - besides "one" or "many" they had a special word for "two" of a thing. Even Latin and English have traces of this powerful urge to call attention to those very special things that come in pairs, like hands and gloves, feet and shoes - twins of various kinds.
There is something very interesting about our hands, and I might talk about the important idea of "chirality" (which comes from the Greek word for "hand") in chemistry, and note how most of the molecules of living things are "handed" - the amino acids are all "left-handed", and there are sugars named from the Latin words for right (dextrose) and left (levulose) - and then there are things in physics like the "right-hand rule" for electric current and magnetism, or the "spins" of subatomic particles... what a world. No wonder Gabriel Syme found them troublesome!
But there is another aspect of our hands which provides the foundation for addition, the one which Calvin's father was trying to teach his son... From an incredibly young age, we get used to the idea that we have "sides" to our bodies, and that we can place things on our left or on our right, and that we bring things together by reaching out our hands and then pulling inwards - we carry or bring back those two separate things, and by our own hands we make them ONE.
Hence, by our "trying with both hands" we take two things and "bring them back" to be one... In Latin, they said relatio. That is what a relation is, the bringing back, of two things, to be one thing.
Now, immediately there springs up a quirk, which is what neither Calvin nor his father grasped, and why I have needed to write about this at such length. Dad had eight pennies, Calvin had four. The pennies are put together, but in what kind of "together" were they put? Calvin saw ownership persisting even in the collection - perhaps those were his four rare Indian-head pennies, and did not want to lose sight of them. Calvin's dad saw the dreary summation he kept a calculator to help him with, and merely counted the collection as "twelve".
There are other views. If you look at digits rather than words, and try adding - no let us say placing together - Dad's 8 with Calvin's 4, you might say the result is 84 or maybe 48. Here you show a mystic wisdom, for this is "addition" of another form, know to computer scientists as "concatenation" or more formally "addition of the free monoid over a finite alphabet"... but I am scaring you with these terms.
Do not be scared. This is a good insight, and points out Syme's struggle with right and left. You most likely know that Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left. Perhaps you have heard that there was a form of ancient Greek that was written in "boustrophedon" = as the cow plows, or as we might say these days, as the ink-jet printer prints: on the first line print from left-to-right, and then go down and print from right-to-left. But, you scream, there is a big difference between "dog" and "god"! Correct. And from the gloomy halls that you just ran from, the theoretician responds:
"That is because the free monoid is not commutative."
You wanted an answer, now try with both hands. But Chesterton also has answered for us:
And that is the great mystery I am trying to reveal. It is not only the very living parts of our bodies which possess handedness, but also the powerful and splendid human invention of letters and numbers.
We need to see this, as hard as it may be. And if you need a further demonstration,
!rorrim a tuohtiw siht daer ot (sdnah htob htiw) yrT
Even the very letters and numbers use so casually have their right and left hands - a separation as final as the Last Judgement:
Yes, as I mentioned recently, math is easy - and today being its feast day, I thought we'd look at another odd but common truth which you would never guess is mathematical, yet is one of its most important stones in its foundation: the truth we call Right and Left...
((click here to proceed))
Of course you want to hear some Chesterton before you suffer through such an odd affair, so I will supply it:
[Syme the policeman poet said] "...So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government?"In order to set my stage, I shall invoke another text, sometimes very Chestertonian in form, and one of my favourite sources of delight: the famous "Calvin and Hobbes" comics of Bill Watterson. If you have the collection called Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons you will find them on pages 35 and 37. Yes, perhaps they are on-line somewhere, but I cannot take the time to find them, so I will merely give you the dialog. You must bear in mind that "Calvin" is a six-year-old boy and "Hobbes" is his stuffed tiger who often speaks with Calvin when they are alone...
"To abolish God!" said Gregory [the anarchist] opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:490]
Calvin: (to Hobbes) Help me with this homework, OK? What 6 + 3?Now, assuming you've stopped laughing, you are wondering what this has to do with Chesterton. Oh, ye of little faith! How soon you have forgotten this important line:
Hobbes: 6+3, eh? Well, this one is a bit tricky. First we call the answer "Y" as in "Y do we care?" Now Y may be a square number, so we'll draw a square and make this side 6 and that side 3. Then we'll measure the diagonal. (He draws the square and labels it.)
Calvin: (staring at the drawing) I don't remember the teacher explaining it like this.
Hobbes. (waving the pencil knowingly) She probably doesn't know higher math. When you deal with high numbers, you need higher math.
Calvin: (measures the diagonal) But this diagonal is just a little under two.
Hobbes: OK. Here, I'll draw a bigger square.
Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.Obviously, Hobbes is proposing to do just that. In the intervening pages, Calvin's mom goes to meet with his teacher, producing some very funny allusions much in the style of A. C. Doyle's references in the "Sherlock Holmes" stories to mysterious cases about which we never hear anything more... (All C&H readers recall the "Noodle Incident" and all those sirens at noon...) Be that as it may, Calvin's father takes a hand and tries to instruct his son in the far greater mystery of simple addition:
[GKC Heretics CW1:117]
Dad: Here, maybe this will make more sense. (pun in the text) I have eight pennies. I ask you for four more.Ah... yes, please finish laughing. And now attend.
Calvin: I say forget it. You're the one with a steady paycheck.
Dad: Just give me four pennies. Good. How much money do I have now?
Calvin: Investments and all?
Dad: (exasperatedly) No. Just here on the table.
Calvin: Eight cents.
Dad: No, eight plus four is twelve, see? Count them up.
Calvin: But those four are mine!
What was Calvin's mistake? What was his father's mistake? What is going on here? Are we talking about money - investments and all - or something else? Is this the beginning of a sermon on ownership and property, a commentary on the Commandments, or an elaboration of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum with reference to Distributivism, Distributism, or something similar?
No. (Though it could be... but not this time.) It is my attempt at trying to awaken you to a very mysterious property, one of the most well-known relations of all the relations of things that we know of: the property of adjacency, of "things-being-next-to-each-other" - that is, of the mystery of Right and Left. Calvin's father is a lawyer and so he never studied the special branch of mathematics called "Set Theory" - which can go by other names like "Discrete Math" or "Number Theory". I am not going to scare you, but I want you to read on, and try very hard to start noticing something you are seeing constantly - and then realize that there was once a time that you did not yet grasp it, as Calvin did not grasp it... and finally you learned it. Alas, you learned it too well, for it became a commonplace, and you forgot about it... until a lunatic like me comes along and reminds you that it is still there.
One of the things we are taught - I mean we computer people, and we scientists, and we mathematicians - is to pay attention to detail, and try to see things as they are. That is very Chestertonian, and you no doubt have heard me quote such things before:
I would insist that people should have so much simplicity asYes. Now here is the idea I want you to see: What do we mean by addition? Can there be various kinds of such a basic and obvious thing?
would enable them to see things suddenly and to see things as they are.
[GKC ILN July 13 1907 CW27:506]
...the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles 6]
It is so dreadfully obvious to us in computing, since we have to work with a MACHINE, which does NOT understand, and will not EVER understand... yes, it may be hard for you to realize, but we can do NOTHING AT ALL with computers unless we use the very small collection of tools which are part of the machine - these are symbols, actually, which stand for certain simple kinds of actions or tasks. Most people walk around assuming computers can do "math" - by which they mean adding and stuff like that.
Here I must be Scholastic, and shout, with a blow on the table, distinguo! (I distinguish!)
Of course they do NOT add. No more than a smaller river "adds" when it pours its water into a larger one at the confluence of the waters. (I thank my good friend lUkE for this analogy; you may also recall a Tom Petty song about the river kissing the ocean...)
But as interesting (or dull) as this question is, we are not going to talk about that today and here. It would take a while, too, and though it is interesting, we need to get at something far more interesting and hard to explain - the idea that Calvin's father was trying to teach.
What do we mean by addition? What do we mean - I use this word "mean" here and I do not know what other word to use - what do we mean when we place something next to something else and try to consider them in the joint sense, as something which is now single, though paradoxically it remains composite and multiple?
Is this sounding fantastic? Or confusing? Oh, why am I struggling to write about this as I wish?
Pardon me while I invoke my muse...
Oh dear little Alice, whose name is Truth:Ah... I could try all day to explain this, and yet fail - even if I tried with both hands...
Oh thou who dwellest in the Wonderland of the Real World,
Call upon the Holy Spirit, Who pours out fire in sevenfold stream on those who beseech His aid,
and give me the words that will bring true light. Amen.
AHA.
"I'm sure I didn't mean" Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.
"That's just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn't deny that, even if you tried with both hands."
"I don't deny things with my hands," Alice objected.
"Nobody said you did," said the Red Queen. "I said you couldn't if you tried."
[Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter 9 "Queen Alice"]
Ah. Now we have something. Let us try with both hands.
(I must control myself here - the hand is a wonderful thing, and there are books about it, not counting those on anatomy, but I must not write another just now.)
In order to proceed, let us talk about another kind of number: number as used the grammarians, which means whether a word is "singular" (that is, just one) or "plural" (that is, more than one). This idea is so dramatic and so penetrating of thought that many languages embed the "number" in a word as an ending or suffix. (Some, like Vietnamese, use another method.)
But did you know that Greek and Egyptian and Hebrew have a third form of this grammatical number? Yes - besides "one" or "many" they had a special word for "two" of a thing. Even Latin and English have traces of this powerful urge to call attention to those very special things that come in pairs, like hands and gloves, feet and shoes - twins of various kinds.
There is something very interesting about our hands, and I might talk about the important idea of "chirality" (which comes from the Greek word for "hand") in chemistry, and note how most of the molecules of living things are "handed" - the amino acids are all "left-handed", and there are sugars named from the Latin words for right (dextrose) and left (levulose) - and then there are things in physics like the "right-hand rule" for electric current and magnetism, or the "spins" of subatomic particles... what a world. No wonder Gabriel Syme found them troublesome!
But there is another aspect of our hands which provides the foundation for addition, the one which Calvin's father was trying to teach his son... From an incredibly young age, we get used to the idea that we have "sides" to our bodies, and that we can place things on our left or on our right, and that we bring things together by reaching out our hands and then pulling inwards - we carry or bring back those two separate things, and by our own hands we make them ONE.
Hence, by our "trying with both hands" we take two things and "bring them back" to be one... In Latin, they said relatio. That is what a relation is, the bringing back, of two things, to be one thing.
Now, immediately there springs up a quirk, which is what neither Calvin nor his father grasped, and why I have needed to write about this at such length. Dad had eight pennies, Calvin had four. The pennies are put together, but in what kind of "together" were they put? Calvin saw ownership persisting even in the collection - perhaps those were his four rare Indian-head pennies, and did not want to lose sight of them. Calvin's dad saw the dreary summation he kept a calculator to help him with, and merely counted the collection as "twelve".
There are other views. If you look at digits rather than words, and try adding - no let us say placing together - Dad's 8 with Calvin's 4, you might say the result is 84 or maybe 48. Here you show a mystic wisdom, for this is "addition" of another form, know to computer scientists as "concatenation" or more formally "addition of the free monoid over a finite alphabet"... but I am scaring you with these terms.
Do not be scared. This is a good insight, and points out Syme's struggle with right and left. You most likely know that Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left. Perhaps you have heard that there was a form of ancient Greek that was written in "boustrophedon" = as the cow plows, or as we might say these days, as the ink-jet printer prints: on the first line print from left-to-right, and then go down and print from right-to-left. But, you scream, there is a big difference between "dog" and "god"! Correct. And from the gloomy halls that you just ran from, the theoretician responds:
"That is because the free monoid is not commutative."
You wanted an answer, now try with both hands. But Chesterton also has answered for us:
I remember a man ... who told me he was on a spiritual plane ("we are on different planes") on which yes and no, black and white, right and wrong, right and left, were all equal. I regarded him as I should any boastful aviator who told me that from the height to which he had risen all London looked like an exact chess-board, with all the squares and streets the same size. In short, I regarded him as a liar. London streets are not equally long, seen from a flying-ship or from anywhere else. And human sins or sorrows are not equally serious, seen in a vision or anywhere else.Yes, Alice, there is a difference between left and right. The amino acids in living things are "left-handed". If someone brewed a batch of right-handed amino acids in a lab, they would be chemically identical, and contain nothing extra, and have nothing left out - yet no earthly thing could use them to build proteins, any more than a right shoe can go onto a left foot.
[GKC ILN Aug 15 1914 CW30:145]
And that is the great mystery I am trying to reveal. It is not only the very living parts of our bodies which possess handedness, but also the powerful and splendid human invention of letters and numbers.
We need to see this, as hard as it may be. And if you need a further demonstration,
!rorrim a tuohtiw siht daer ot (sdnah htob htiw) yrT
Even the very letters and numbers use so casually have their right and left hands - a separation as final as the Last Judgement:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, butTherefore what God has separated, let no calculator join...
the goats on his left. [Matt 25:33]
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Call for Papers
Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Annual Conference – Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2009
Hilton Boston Logan Airport
Special Session: G.K. Chesterton
Jill Kriegel
Florida Atlantic University
The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites
academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and
artists to submit papers for the annual conference as listed above. An
inclusive professional organization dedicated to the study of Popular
Culture and American Culture in all their multidisciplinary manifestations,
MAPACA hosts presentations in a wide range of areas. Please send by e-mail
a one-page abstract to the appropriate area chair by June 15, 2009. Include
a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person
panels and roundtables, are encouraged. Sliding scale registration fees
apply.
Click here for conference information.
More info.Special Session on G. K. Chesterton, MAPACA 2009
Area Chair: Jill Kriegel, Florida Atlantic University
jill1227@bellsouth.net
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.
In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.
Annual Conference – Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2009
Hilton Boston Logan Airport
Special Session: G.K. Chesterton
Jill Kriegel
Florida Atlantic University
The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites
academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and
artists to submit papers for the annual conference as listed above. An
inclusive professional organization dedicated to the study of Popular
Culture and American Culture in all their multidisciplinary manifestations,
MAPACA hosts presentations in a wide range of areas. Please send by e-mail
a one-page abstract to the appropriate area chair by June 15, 2009. Include
a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person
panels and roundtables, are encouraged. Sliding scale registration fees
apply.
Click here for conference information.
More info.Special Session on G. K. Chesterton, MAPACA 2009
Area Chair: Jill Kriegel, Florida Atlantic University
jill1227@bellsouth.net
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.
In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Got Gilbert?
My new "Cow" Gilbert came today, so named because of Betsy's portrait on the front cover.
Busy reading...
Busy reading...
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Save the Three Cups Hotel!
This place has important historical Chestertonian (and more) significance. If only we lived in England! We could go to the meeting June 5th.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Chesterton Paraphrase
Using the words "vehicular cycling techniques" no less. Someone in Dallas who loves biking seems to also love Chesterton.
Check the side bar on the right for the quotes.
Check the side bar on the right for the quotes.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Solving the Problem
I was speaking with a friend recently about how some time ago (when I was doing my PhD) there was a big to-do about one of those talking dolls that said "Math is hard". (No, there is no hidden joke here because today is the feast of St. Matthias.) In one of those impromptu seminars grad students have in the hall or in the lab, we discussed the topic and I volunteered to try to find the official answer. Of course, I found it in Aquinas, but the answer came as a surprise to some.
((click here to find out the answer!))
The answer is that math is easy. Oh, yes, I know this provides just another reason to detest Aquinas and Thomism and medieval philosophy and the Catholic Church - or at the least, Chestertonian computer scientists who write about such things. I know you were expecting a discussion of that question, and you can find a short one here, but I have another topic today - though a related one. Hee hee.
Instead of dolls, I want to talk about another aspect of education, which may help me make some progress in my study of pedagogy... Incidentally, did I ever tell you that I used dolls to help teach computer science? Oh, yes, I did, I had forgotten. (See here for details!) What was I teaching? The curious and very general tool called "recursion" which also happens to be related to today's topic.
So what is today's topic again?
It's the very strange term which one hears in the Media from time to time, usually referring to how some grade-school teacher doesn't want to teach addition or such things, because she wants the children to learn "problem-solving skills". I've heard that a few too many times now, and think it is silly. You see, I am a computer scientist, and have been in the field for over 30 years, having faced a bizarre range of wacky questions both in academics and in industry - and except for a very tiny handful of tools, I cannot even imagine what they mean by a "problem-solving skill". One of the most powerful I have is finite state machines - I would undertake to teach an attentive fifth-grade class this, and have them reasonably fluent in a few weeks - but I doubt that anyone teaches that. It's too hard. Another tool very powerful, is recursion - which I taught to college students with those wonderful nesting dolls. But I am sure there would be restrictions to that pedagogical method, not to say a series of odd comments about the sanity and stability of the professor.
Well, I do not know what skills they mean, since the few useful methods we have to actually solve problems are not the ones they teach! And when I mention something that is traditionally taught in grade school - I guess I ought to say had been traditionally taught - that is, long division - these people throw things at me, whining about how we have calculators now. But I am not going to talk about long division either - maybe another day. Oddly enough if you cannot do long division, certain parts of mathematics and computer science will be forever closed to you as being beyond your understanding. How sad. (And I thought they say how they want the children to learn problem-solving skills???)
Let us instead look at another branch of mathematics, which you may have heard about indirectly without knowing there is such a thing. It is a very splendid and interesting branch, with very easy and fun parts, as well as very hard and exciting and difficult parts, rather like hikes or sporting events or even cooking recipes... I was motivated by a posting by our friend "Old Fashioned Liberal" who alluded to "degrees of separation". I have never seen the movie, but I seem to recall that the number "six" is used.
Now, I might spend a lot of energy - and blogg-space - writing about six. It is a very interesting number. It is called "perfect" because its factors other than itself sum to itself. (Two others like this are 28 and 496.) Or we might bring up "psephy": the very curious old trick from ancient days, wherein numbers are written as letters, and discuss the "number of the beast" (Rv 13:18) which has three sixes. But I won't.
Instead, I will tell you just two things about six, which perhaps may augment the topic of the movie - which I seem to recall hearing was the suggestion that each human is "related" by no more than "six degrees of separation" to each other human. Demonstrating such a thing would require a "problem solving skill" in spades - and I don't know if they proved it in the movie or just assumed it. But I happen to have a small acquaintance with one "problem solving skill" - that interesting branch of mathematics called "graph theory" - and it might play a role in solving the problem.
However, I don't feel up to tackling that issue today, so I will tell you about two others which are much easier and more fun. But first, since you may be thinking you got onto some math guy's blogg, and not the Chesterton blogg, I will give you the relevant Chesterton quote, which is really wonderful and may give you chuckles...
First, I will give you a very curious fact from graph theory, but translated. (I suspect this is the fact that lurks behind that movie.)
Proof? You want proof? Hee hee. I'd rather ask another question, oh "skilled problem-solver": How many kinds of groups of six people can be formed, considering just the relation of being acquainted? How can you find out?
Please don't grab a sheet of paper, it will take you quite a little bit of time, since there are 156. (See here if you wish to see what they look like!) These groups run from six total strangers to six mutual acquaintances. If you thought there were 32768, you get partial credit, since that's how many distinct groups of "six-humans-related-by-acquaintance" there are, but not the kinds of groups. Here's what I mean. If one group has all strangers except for Andy and Bill, and another all strangers except for Edith and Francesca, these are the same "kind" since both have one pair of acquaintances.
(In graph theory I have asked the number of graphs having six vertices, which are unique up to isomorphism.)
The fun thing is to show it... but as you have pointed out, this is not a mathematics blogg.
Now, let us take something a bit more profound - and a bit more human - which also has six in it, though it requires seven people.
Huh? you say. How can that be?
That is the famous "fencepost problem", sometimes called "the error of plus or minus one" - a certain organist I know has a musical way of putting it: "Consonance is always just a half-step away." (hee hee) But you are distracting me, and you will understand in just a moment!
Here's the statement of the fact:
As you can see, there are seven individuals, and six links between them. In another class during grad school our professor called attention to this hierarchical structure, pointing out there are just four levels to the tree... he noted that the comparable structure for academics is far deeper. And yes, in case you hadn't caught on, the very common file technique for Unix and Windows and all comparable systems - the hierarchical file system of directories and files - parallels the structure of the Catholic Church! (Oh, yes, the "root" directory is just the computer's analogy for the Pope. How elegant that computing offers a demostration of the distinction between clergy and laity... alas, but that is a topic for another time and place.)
Lest you think I have gone completely askew into the depths of my tech world and forgotten Chesterton, I shall present Chesterton's own explanation, which keeps things linked, yes, whether pork or pyrotechnics, pigs or the binomial theorem...
((click here to find out the answer!))
The answer is that math is easy. Oh, yes, I know this provides just another reason to detest Aquinas and Thomism and medieval philosophy and the Catholic Church - or at the least, Chestertonian computer scientists who write about such things. I know you were expecting a discussion of that question, and you can find a short one here, but I have another topic today - though a related one. Hee hee.
Instead of dolls, I want to talk about another aspect of education, which may help me make some progress in my study of pedagogy... Incidentally, did I ever tell you that I used dolls to help teach computer science? Oh, yes, I did, I had forgotten. (See here for details!) What was I teaching? The curious and very general tool called "recursion" which also happens to be related to today's topic.
So what is today's topic again?
It's the very strange term which one hears in the Media from time to time, usually referring to how some grade-school teacher doesn't want to teach addition or such things, because she wants the children to learn "problem-solving skills". I've heard that a few too many times now, and think it is silly. You see, I am a computer scientist, and have been in the field for over 30 years, having faced a bizarre range of wacky questions both in academics and in industry - and except for a very tiny handful of tools, I cannot even imagine what they mean by a "problem-solving skill". One of the most powerful I have is finite state machines - I would undertake to teach an attentive fifth-grade class this, and have them reasonably fluent in a few weeks - but I doubt that anyone teaches that. It's too hard. Another tool very powerful, is recursion - which I taught to college students with those wonderful nesting dolls. But I am sure there would be restrictions to that pedagogical method, not to say a series of odd comments about the sanity and stability of the professor.
Well, I do not know what skills they mean, since the few useful methods we have to actually solve problems are not the ones they teach! And when I mention something that is traditionally taught in grade school - I guess I ought to say had been traditionally taught - that is, long division - these people throw things at me, whining about how we have calculators now. But I am not going to talk about long division either - maybe another day. Oddly enough if you cannot do long division, certain parts of mathematics and computer science will be forever closed to you as being beyond your understanding. How sad. (And I thought they say how they want the children to learn problem-solving skills???)
Let us instead look at another branch of mathematics, which you may have heard about indirectly without knowing there is such a thing. It is a very splendid and interesting branch, with very easy and fun parts, as well as very hard and exciting and difficult parts, rather like hikes or sporting events or even cooking recipes... I was motivated by a posting by our friend "Old Fashioned Liberal" who alluded to "degrees of separation". I have never seen the movie, but I seem to recall that the number "six" is used.
Now, I might spend a lot of energy - and blogg-space - writing about six. It is a very interesting number. It is called "perfect" because its factors other than itself sum to itself. (Two others like this are 28 and 496.) Or we might bring up "psephy": the very curious old trick from ancient days, wherein numbers are written as letters, and discuss the "number of the beast" (Rv 13:18) which has three sixes. But I won't.
Instead, I will tell you just two things about six, which perhaps may augment the topic of the movie - which I seem to recall hearing was the suggestion that each human is "related" by no more than "six degrees of separation" to each other human. Demonstrating such a thing would require a "problem solving skill" in spades - and I don't know if they proved it in the movie or just assumed it. But I happen to have a small acquaintance with one "problem solving skill" - that interesting branch of mathematics called "graph theory" - and it might play a role in solving the problem.
However, I don't feel up to tackling that issue today, so I will tell you about two others which are much easier and more fun. But first, since you may be thinking you got onto some math guy's blogg, and not the Chesterton blogg, I will give you the relevant Chesterton quote, which is really wonderful and may give you chuckles...
An infinite number of years ago, when I was the chief weakness of a publisher's office, I remember that there was issued from that establishment a book of highly modern philosophy: a work of elaborate evolutionary explanation of everything and nothing; a work of the New Theology. It was called "The Great Problem Solved" or some such title. When this book had been out for a few days it began to promise an entirely unexpected success. Booksellers sent to ask about it, travellers came in and asked for it, even the ordinary public stood in a sort of knot outside the door, and sent in their bolder spirits to make inquiries.Now, I promised two interesting things about six which will shed some light on OFL's phrase about "degrees of separation".
Even to the publisher this popularity seemed remarkable; to me (who had dipped into the work, when I should have been otherwise employed) it appeared utterly incredible.
After some little time, however, when they had examined "The Great Problem Solved", the lesser problem was also solved. We found that people were buying it under the impression that it was a detective story. I do not blame them for their desire, and most certainly I do not blame them for their disappointment. It must have exasperated them, it would certainly infuriate me, to open a book expecting to find a cosy, kindly, human story about a murdered man found in a cupboard, and find instead a lot of dull, bad philosophy about the upward progress and the purer morality. I would rather read any detective book than that book. I would rather spend my time in finding out why a dead man was dead than in slowly comprehending why a certain philosopher had never been alive.
[GKC "Reading the Riddle" in The Common Man 60]
First, I will give you a very curious fact from graph theory, but translated. (I suspect this is the fact that lurks behind that movie.)
In any group of six people, there must be either three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers.And now you prove it, Doctor?
Proof? You want proof? Hee hee. I'd rather ask another question, oh "skilled problem-solver": How many kinds of groups of six people can be formed, considering just the relation of being acquainted? How can you find out?
Please don't grab a sheet of paper, it will take you quite a little bit of time, since there are 156. (See here if you wish to see what they look like!) These groups run from six total strangers to six mutual acquaintances. If you thought there were 32768, you get partial credit, since that's how many distinct groups of "six-humans-related-by-acquaintance" there are, but not the kinds of groups. Here's what I mean. If one group has all strangers except for Andy and Bill, and another all strangers except for Edith and Francesca, these are the same "kind" since both have one pair of acquaintances.
(In graph theory I have asked the number of graphs having six vertices, which are unique up to isomorphism.)
The fun thing is to show it... but as you have pointed out, this is not a mathematics blogg.
Now, let us take something a bit more profound - and a bit more human - which also has six in it, though it requires seven people.
Huh? you say. How can that be?
That is the famous "fencepost problem", sometimes called "the error of plus or minus one" - a certain organist I know has a musical way of putting it: "Consonance is always just a half-step away." (hee hee) But you are distracting me, and you will understand in just a moment!
Here's the statement of the fact:
Every Catholic is related through no more than six links to every other Catholic.Yes, and here is how the chain works:
Joe CatholicNow, this particular kind of graph is called a "tree" - er - but I have no time to give you all the details now. (You may recall the words in St. John's Gospel about "I am the vine and you are the branches", which suggests that our Lord also knew about this.)His parish priestAnother CatholicHis bishopAnother priestThe PopeAnother bishop
As you can see, there are seven individuals, and six links between them. In another class during grad school our professor called attention to this hierarchical structure, pointing out there are just four levels to the tree... he noted that the comparable structure for academics is far deeper. And yes, in case you hadn't caught on, the very common file technique for Unix and Windows and all comparable systems - the hierarchical file system of directories and files - parallels the structure of the Catholic Church! (Oh, yes, the "root" directory is just the computer's analogy for the Pope. How elegant that computing offers a demostration of the distinction between clergy and laity... alas, but that is a topic for another time and place.)
Lest you think I have gone completely askew into the depths of my tech world and forgotten Chesterton, I shall present Chesterton's own explanation, which keeps things linked, yes, whether pork or pyrotechnics, pigs or the binomial theorem...
...a philosophical connection there always is between any two items imaginable. This must be so, so long as we allow any harmony or unity in the cosmos at all. There must be a philosophical connection between any two things in the universe; if it is not so, we can only say that there is no universe, and can be no philosophy. A possible connection of thought there is, then, between any two newspaper paragraphs, though we may not always happen to think of it. And, as I say, it is my mental malady that I almost always do happen to think of it.And if that does not help, I will give you the real stinger, which goes back to my original matter of pedagogy and the far larger topic of the purpose of things...
[GKC ILN Feb 17 1906 CW27:127]
I am sure that, in so far as there is any sort of social breakdown, it is not so much a moral breakdown as a mental breakdown. It is much more like a softening of the brain than a hardening of the heart. What does seem to me to have slackened or weakened is not so much the connection between conscience and conduct clearly approved by conscience, as the connection between any two ideas that could enable anybody to see anything clearly at all. It is not a question of free thought but of free thoughtlessness. The difficulty is not so much to get people to follow a commandment as to get them even to follow an argument. It seems to tire their heads like a game of chess when they are in the mood for a game of tennis. And in truth their philosophy does seem to be rather like a game of tennis, with the motto of "Love all." But, it will be noticed that the rules of tennis are really rather more arbitrary than the rules of chess; only, while they claim the same obedience, they are easier to obey. It seems to me that this modern mood does not mind anything being arbitrary so long as it is also easy. It does not inquire into the authority or even the origin of any order which it has come to regard as ordinary. It only asks to move smoothly along the grooves that have been graven for it by unknown and nameless powers - such as the powers that organise the tubes or the trams. It does not object to ruts if they are also rails. It does, indeed, wish to be comfortable, and will sometimes abandon convention for the sake of comfort. But it seems to me that this generation has rather less than its fathers and grandfathers of the special sort of discomfort that used to be called divine discontent. Divine discontent, of the older sort, was disposed to drive its questions backwards against the movement of existence and discover the causes of things. The old abstract revolutionist would have had the star-defying audacity to ask who it is who really runs the trams or controls the tubes. Most of the young rebels of to-day are content to ask whether they will not soon be made a little bigger or a little quicker or a little more convenient. In other words, the individual has indeed a certain kind of independence but I am not sure that it is the kind of independence which requires most intelligence.Maybe we need to start teaching graph theory in grade school... along with long division. It might just solve the problem! Math is easy, you know...
[GKC ILN March 13 1926 CW34:58]
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
What Conference Traditions Remain the Same?
I suppose the biggest question on anyone's mind is will Miki make Petta wine? (Is Miki coming?)
I also wonder, will anyone be bringing Stilton cheese?
Will there be cheese and crackers and wine between talks?
Will there be roast hot dogs and home brew after talks?
I think meals will be different, except for the Saturday Night Banquet. It looks like we may eat our meals in our own dorm cafeteria? Or maybe there is a general cafeteria where we'll go? I just noticed that when I signed up for my dorm room, it said breakfast and lunch were included. So I'm also wondering, what about supper Thursday and Friday?
Dale Answers All Questions If Only You Click Here!
From Dale Ahlquist:
I also wonder, will anyone be bringing Stilton cheese?
Will there be cheese and crackers and wine between talks?
Will there be roast hot dogs and home brew after talks?
I think meals will be different, except for the Saturday Night Banquet. It looks like we may eat our meals in our own dorm cafeteria? Or maybe there is a general cafeteria where we'll go? I just noticed that when I signed up for my dorm room, it said breakfast and lunch were included. So I'm also wondering, what about supper Thursday and Friday?
Dale Answers All Questions If Only You Click Here!
From Dale Ahlquist:
It would be nice to preserve every conference tradition, but that sort of stopped when St. Thomas brought down the hammer last year, which is why we fled. We are going to look at this as a great opportunity to bring Chesterton cheer to a different city every year.
The plan is to serve wine and snacks during the conference, as in years past, something that we were prevented from doing last year at St. Thomas.
As of right now, Miki is planning to come with homemade wine.
There will be Stilton.
Hot dogs were always a spontaneous event in other years, so there is no way of knowing what will happen in that regard. There will, however, be an excellent cigar smoking area in a lovely garden setting for late night philosophical discussions.
All the meals, except the banquet, will be at the university cafeteria and can be purchased right on site. However, the cost for breakfast and lunch on Friday and Saturday is included in the price of the rooms. It was just an odd requirement we had to deal with from Seattle University.
The only meal we have to pre-sell is the Saturday Banquet, which is catered.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Chesterton Conference Firsts
This year's conference has many firsts.
This is the first time the conference has been held in Seattle.
This is the first time the conference has charged a fee for attending.
This is the first time there is a picture of a chandelier at the bottom of the conference info page. (What's that all about?)
This is the first time I know if that a movie will premiere at the conference.
There may be more firsts, have you found any?
This is the first time the conference has been held in Seattle.
This is the first time the conference has charged a fee for attending.
This is the first time there is a picture of a chandelier at the bottom of the conference info page. (What's that all about?)
This is the first time I know if that a movie will premiere at the conference.
There may be more firsts, have you found any?
Friday, May 08, 2009
Thursday, May 07, 2009
The Monster Zero
I have a lot of projects just now, which is usual - and you might be interested in one of the newest, which may end up being a commentary on pedagogy: the "science" of teaching, especially as it deals with mathematics and the sciences. No, I am not going to take a hint from Fr. Jaki and write Chesterton a Seer of Mathematics - though that would make a very interesting collection. It would send all our lit'ry friends screaming down the hall. But it is certain that he mentions mathematics with at least some reasonable skills, even if he was no specialist - but then that is Jaki's argument in Chesterton a Seer of Science. How else could someone write something as wonderful as this:
Nor can you evade clicking here if you wish to read more...
Quite some time ago, I wrote a column on my own blogg linking numbers and Chesterton and Aquinas and that old whine about the Barbie doll that said "Math is hard". As usual my rambling discourse was larded with several Chesterton quotes - and part of this argument gets to the root of the matter: the mystical and difficult topic of epistemology - the science of knowledge itself, as well as pedagogy: What do we know, how do we know it, how do we impart that knowledge to others?
Since I have only a limited time today, and I do not expect to begin the writing of this massive text just now, I must try to take another and Chestertonian approach. Rather than proceeding formally, I would try to do what Chesterton di, and propose sample ideas which may help get to the larger abstractions. For example:
One of the issues which comes up in any discussion of mathematics is the spectacular thing called "zero". It is easy enough to begin talking about the history of the idea, or about the convenience it provides - the grand simplification we have in our "base ten" scheme of writing numbers is a fantastic advance over what the Romans had, and even the Greeks for all their mathematical cleverness (think Euclid!) If you doubt this, just get out a nice big sheet of paper and try multiplying LXXVII by CIX. Or, if that is too easy, try multiplying oz by rq. Take your time... then try multiplying 77 by 109, and see how much easier a time you have!
But there is another aspect of zero which is lots more interesting than its history or its convenience in numeric notation. It is a place where something deeper lurks - at least according to some writers, it touches on metaphysics. They begin with the idea that it is a kind of word - a "something" - which stands for what they call "nothing"... but I cannot go there. For one, I think there is a difference between the number zero and the idea of nothing, since zero is just as "real" a thing as every other number. But I was not just being a rebel - at least I didn't think I was. (Besides, there's a time when it may be good to be a rebel: we saw that not so long ago when we read Orthodoxy, remember?)
So I sat and thought about this, trying to figure out what was going on. I remembered the technical definition of zero as a number - I mean a value - and not as a digit (a symbol) which is a convenience for writing numbers.
You mean there's a real definition, Doctor?
Oh, yes. Zero is the identity in what we call the monoid of the integers under the operation of addition. (Yes, zero is also the identity for the reals, and so forth, but we'll leave that for another day.) What does that mean? It means you can add zero to any number and not change that number. Obvious, you say - but there didn't have to be such a thing. There are other things in mathematics called "semigroups" which do NOT have zero! Sure they are strange, but contrary to Barbie, math is easy - St. Thomas Aquinas himself said so.
OK... but.. what does all this blather about zero have to do with Chesterton, Doctor?
Well, I wondered whether GKC had anything at all to say about "zero" and it turns out that "zero" comes up very rarely in the AMBER collection. But when it does, it sheds a marvellous light on the topic. Just consider this,
P.S. Having reread this before I posted it, I find it hilarious that he uses the word "significant" there - it is a clue to understanding the use of zero as a digit, for the zero in "10" or "100" or "1000" is quite significant for a mere nothing... Hee hee.
You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him.No - but if we are serious about God and Chesterton we cannot evade mathematics, just as we cannot evade technology...
[GKC Daily News Dec. 12 1903 quoted in Maycock The Man Who Was Orthodox]
Nor can you evade clicking here if you wish to read more...
Quite some time ago, I wrote a column on my own blogg linking numbers and Chesterton and Aquinas and that old whine about the Barbie doll that said "Math is hard". As usual my rambling discourse was larded with several Chesterton quotes - and part of this argument gets to the root of the matter: the mystical and difficult topic of epistemology - the science of knowledge itself, as well as pedagogy: What do we know, how do we know it, how do we impart that knowledge to others?
Since I have only a limited time today, and I do not expect to begin the writing of this massive text just now, I must try to take another and Chestertonian approach. Rather than proceeding formally, I would try to do what Chesterton di, and propose sample ideas which may help get to the larger abstractions. For example:
One of the issues which comes up in any discussion of mathematics is the spectacular thing called "zero". It is easy enough to begin talking about the history of the idea, or about the convenience it provides - the grand simplification we have in our "base ten" scheme of writing numbers is a fantastic advance over what the Romans had, and even the Greeks for all their mathematical cleverness (think Euclid!) If you doubt this, just get out a nice big sheet of paper and try multiplying LXXVII by CIX. Or, if that is too easy, try multiplying oz by rq. Take your time... then try multiplying 77 by 109, and see how much easier a time you have!
But there is another aspect of zero which is lots more interesting than its history or its convenience in numeric notation. It is a place where something deeper lurks - at least according to some writers, it touches on metaphysics. They begin with the idea that it is a kind of word - a "something" - which stands for what they call "nothing"... but I cannot go there. For one, I think there is a difference between the number zero and the idea of nothing, since zero is just as "real" a thing as every other number. But I was not just being a rebel - at least I didn't think I was. (Besides, there's a time when it may be good to be a rebel: we saw that not so long ago when we read Orthodoxy, remember?)
So I sat and thought about this, trying to figure out what was going on. I remembered the technical definition of zero as a number - I mean a value - and not as a digit (a symbol) which is a convenience for writing numbers.
You mean there's a real definition, Doctor?
Oh, yes. Zero is the identity in what we call the monoid of the integers under the operation of addition. (Yes, zero is also the identity for the reals, and so forth, but we'll leave that for another day.) What does that mean? It means you can add zero to any number and not change that number. Obvious, you say - but there didn't have to be such a thing. There are other things in mathematics called "semigroups" which do NOT have zero! Sure they are strange, but contrary to Barbie, math is easy - St. Thomas Aquinas himself said so.
OK... but.. what does all this blather about zero have to do with Chesterton, Doctor?
Well, I wondered whether GKC had anything at all to say about "zero" and it turns out that "zero" comes up very rarely in the AMBER collection. But when it does, it sheds a marvellous light on the topic. Just consider this,
The great psychological discovery of Paganism, which turned it into Christianity, can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase. The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else. Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed out in words too excellent to need any further elucidation, the absurd shallowness of those who imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a materialistic sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only intellectually even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself spiritually. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of it, a very natural thing to do. Now, the psychological discovery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero.That last might well set the tone for my text, if it is ever written - just read this bit again:
[GKC Heretics CW1:127]
...something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol. It was then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet, and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero. The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator, but at every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high; because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence. And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus leap up like fountains of praise....
[GKC G. K.'s Weekly Dec 13, 1934 quoted in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." It was in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It was by this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few people have enjoyed them; and they are in themselves the best working example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved, and more indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is significant and not when it is insignificant; and a monster, shapeless or dumb or merely destructive, may be larger than the mountains, but is still in a literal sense insignificant. For a mystic like St. Francis the monsters had a meaning, that is, they had delivered their message. They spoke no longer in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning of all those stories, whether legendary or historical in which he appears as a magician speaking the language of beasts and birds. The mystic will have nothing to do with mere mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery of iniquity.
[GKC St. Francis of Assisi CW2:73-4]
...he sees more of the things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is significant and not when it is insignificant...Perhaps by now zero has become just a tiny bit extraordinary to you - which, if it is nothing at all, is quite a trick.
P.S. Having reread this before I posted it, I find it hilarious that he uses the word "significant" there - it is a clue to understanding the use of zero as a digit, for the zero in "10" or "100" or "1000" is quite significant for a mere nothing... Hee hee.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Your Challenge: Write a Clerihew about the Swine Flu
Blog challenge: write a clerihew where instead of a person, we put in "swine flu" or H1N1, if you can find a rhyme for that.
Class, get to work!
Class, get to work!
Monday, May 04, 2009
Chesterton on Swine Flu
I just know Chesterton would have come up with some good humorous ways to talk about swine flu. Have you heard any? Thought of any?
I can just hear him saying something like, "Apparently, I shall now have to give up the habit of kissing bovine, a habit which I had, up till now, preferred not to indulge in. However, it seems to me as though it isn't that different than kissing a frog, something which princesses have done through all the ages. As I am not a princess, however, it seems more likely that those of you so inclined shall have to give up kissing me, temporarily, I hope. Let this be a lesson to us all. Kiss with trepidation and fear, cautiously and sanitarily. The prince you kiss may turn to swine before his time." Or perhaps something better than that. Your turn.
I can just hear him saying something like, "Apparently, I shall now have to give up the habit of kissing bovine, a habit which I had, up till now, preferred not to indulge in. However, it seems to me as though it isn't that different than kissing a frog, something which princesses have done through all the ages. As I am not a princess, however, it seems more likely that those of you so inclined shall have to give up kissing me, temporarily, I hope. Let this be a lesson to us all. Kiss with trepidation and fear, cautiously and sanitarily. The prince you kiss may turn to swine before his time." Or perhaps something better than that. Your turn.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Patience Is A Virtue
Is anyone else checking the ACS web site 10 times a day in hopes that the conference details will be announced? Especially in light of the fact that the site declares the information will be released at the "end of April", a date which has, in fact, passed.
I am eagerly looking forward to the conference in Seattle this year; for one, there are some interesting speakers and events taking place (i.e., Israel Gow and Manalive); for two, I have an e-friend in Seattle that I will actually get to meet when I get there; and for three, I will get to see Mark Shea again in person, a delight to be sure. Last time I met him, he tipped me off to a movie that our family has enjoyed over and over again (maybe you can vote on whether or not I tell you the title of that movie, it's one you either love or hate so I hesitate to mention it, because when you find out we love it, you may think differently about me and my family--in case you already don't, that is :-))
Meanwhile, I keep telling myself to be patient. And then I go check the site again :-)
I am eagerly looking forward to the conference in Seattle this year; for one, there are some interesting speakers and events taking place (i.e., Israel Gow and Manalive); for two, I have an e-friend in Seattle that I will actually get to meet when I get there; and for three, I will get to see Mark Shea again in person, a delight to be sure. Last time I met him, he tipped me off to a movie that our family has enjoyed over and over again (maybe you can vote on whether or not I tell you the title of that movie, it's one you either love or hate so I hesitate to mention it, because when you find out we love it, you may think differently about me and my family--in case you already don't, that is :-))
Meanwhile, I keep telling myself to be patient. And then I go check the site again :-)
Chesterton Music Video Appearance
Via Chesterteens, thanks to Clare, here is an oldish Rickie Lee Jones singing Satellite video in which Chesterton makes a "guest" appearance.
Pretty fun, thanks Clare!
Pretty fun, thanks Clare!
Friday, May 01, 2009
Art Livingston to Speak in Chicago
Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, 7419 W. Madison St., Forest Park. (708) 771-7243.
May 9, 2 p.m.: G.K. Chesterton Society will host lecturer Arthur Livingston presenting "The Yeoman Farmer in the Old South."
May 9, 2 p.m.: G.K. Chesterton Society will host lecturer Arthur Livingston presenting "The Yeoman Farmer in the Old South."
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