tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-196787322024-03-15T15:12:22.602-05:00The Blog of the American Chesterton SocietyThe official blog of the American Chesterton Society where we talk about anything Chesterton talks about or writes about; including everything and everything else.
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"You should not look a gift universe in the mouth." GKC
</ul>Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.comBlogger1654125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-76424068150296089062017-07-13T21:05:00.001-05:002017-07-13T21:05:09.292-05:00The Daily News June 26, 1901<div align="center" class="Normal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">CARLYLE, RUSKIN, BUCHANAN, AND KIPLING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">By G. K. Chesterton<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">The Daily News<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">June 26, 1901<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">Review of:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">"Robert Buchanan; and Other
Essays." By Henry Murray. Philip Wellby.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">These essays, by Mr. Henry Murray, are mainly reviews
reprinted, and the reprinting of reviews does not seem to me to be open to the
full condemnation often directed against it. If every writer for a daily paper
believed for a moment that his works would be reprinted, he would hardly fail
to make some greater effort to fulfil the object for which he is put in his
place - the doing of justice to literature. The decisions of a judge in a law
court may be made up on the spur of the moment, they may be delivered in the
course of twenty minutes, but he knows that they will be quoted and reiterated
as long as the English nation endures. It cannot be an entirely bad thing that
the judges in the high court of literature should see before them, potentially,
the same perilous immortality. They have a far more delicate and obscure task
than any Common Judge's: they have to detect virtues which are almost as secret
as crimes; they have to condemn crimes which to the common eye would seem as
innocent as virtues. They have far more temptations to imperceptible
partiality, to hidden kindness, to nameless cruelty, than any other class of
judges. Therefore, I welcome anything that makes them feel they are not
creatures of a day. I welcome anyone who, like Mr. Murray, inflicts nothing he
is not prepared to endure, and considers the article which may have blasted a
career at least open to be blasted in its turn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">Mr. Murray's essays, however, exhibit in a very
decided form the great fact that, other things being equal, praise is always
truer than blame. One of our greatest needs in this age is a vocabulary of eulogy
as varied, vivid, and picturesque as the vocabulary of calumny. There are a
hundred ways of calling a man a scoundrel, and only one way of calling him a
good man. Yet the goodness of one man differs from the goodness of another man
as much as bigamy differs from petty larceny, and vastly more than a good
sunset differs from a good horse. Praise, which was recognised in the Bible as
the universal thing, is almost always right; it is always better criticism to
admire a snake for having all the colours of the rainbow than to despise it for
not having two legs. Critics would almost always be right if they would only
refrain from being critical. And Mr. Murray's work is a perfect example of
this; the authors he likes he understands, the authors he does not like he does
not understand. With this kind of limitation we can all sympathise. <span style="background-color: yellow;">We all know
that the great men whose spirit we have really absorbed are simple and
splendid, and superior to all their detractors. We all have a wholesome and
generous indignation against the authors we have not read. </span>In this way it
happens that Mr. Murray is generous to Mr. Buchanan whom he has studied;
generous, just, and thoroughly suggestive on the subject of Ruskin, whom he has
also studied; thoroughly unjust to Carlyle, and thoroughly unjust to Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, two authors whom we can hardly believe he has studied very
carefully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">On the subject of Ruskin I feel Mr. Murray to be
particularly sound. Ruskin has clearly conquered him. Mr. Murray has all the
natural tendencies of a somewhat limited type of early Victorian positivist; he
seems sometimes to blush slightly at the mention of God, as if it were an
indecent expression. But, with all his secular orthodoxies, he has capitulated
to the multitudinous fancies and faultless harmonies of a somewhat fanatical
and even sectarian writer. Admiration of the kind which Mr. Murray gives to
Ruskin is the best kind of admiration. There is nothing so satisfactory as
finding that some man is better than we thought; there is no sensation so
pleasant to a generous spirit as being convicted of calumny. Mr. Murray
understands Ruskin, as he does not understand Carlyle. Nothing could be better
than the passage in which he points out that Ruskin was a Puritan and,
therefore, an almost entirely English product, since Puritanism "pervades
the entire English character as the perfume proper to a certain flower pervades
the whole structure of the flower." Other creeds and countries have
Puritanism, of course, in the sense of asceticism. But a certain sentiment of
restraint common to all men, a certain almost priggish satisfaction in making a
toil of a pleasure, is essentially English. Many foreigners think we are
hypocrites or slaves; the fact is that we love being restricted, and discipline
stirs us like a drum. We are arrogant of what we have gained and still more
arrogant of what we have given up. This is why our greatest art critic, whose words
were as sumptuous as sunsets of green and purple, was nevertheless
pre-eminently the priest of the Lamp of Sacrifice. It is extraordinary to me
that Mr. Murray, since he understands Ruskin so well, should not understand
Carlyle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">Thomas Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and as a
writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his "liver"
is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariable resulted in a "Sartor
Resartus," it would be a vastly more tolerable thing then it is. Diseases
do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with the healthy part
of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults and literary virtues ran somewhat
in the same line, he is only in the situation of every man; for every one of us
it is surely very difficult to say precisely where our honest opinions end and
our personal predilections begin. But Mr. Murray's attempts to denounce Carlyle
as a mere savage egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to
grasp Carlyle's gospel. "Ruskin," says Mr. Murray, "did, all the
same, verily believe in God. Carlyle believed only in himself." This is
certainly a distinction between the author he has understood and the author he
has not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have believed
in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt
that if everything else fell into wrank and ruin, they themselves were
permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or
in belief in themselves; they failed in belief in other people. It is not
enough for a prophet to believe in his message; he must believe in its acceptability.
Christ, St. Francis, Bunyan, Wesley, Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of
indescribable variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating to his
reason and good feeling without fear and without condescension. It was this
simplicity of confidence not only in God, but in the image of God, that was
lacking in Carlyle and Ruskin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">But the attempts of Mr. Murray to discredit Carlyle's
religious sentiment most absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security
of Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet;
and it has the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets - humour. A
man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan
delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted
Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of
cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so
solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with
trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His
supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the
sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the
heavens; he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there
could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw
that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever
read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in
which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV as
"falling asleep in the Lord." "Enough for us that he did fall
asleep; that curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at
least will never, through unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more .
. . and we go on, if not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher
ones."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">Since Mr. Murray has practically called Carlyle an
egoist and an infidel, it is a smaller and more tenable matter that he calls
Mr. Rudyard Kipling a Jingo. Carlyle never was an infidel, whereas Mr. Kipling
has, just recently, become a Jingo, and has at the same moment ceased to be a
really interesting literary man. Since the present war he has not written one
single line which bears the definite impress of his mind. But when Mr. Kipling
was preaching his own Imperialism in his own literary style he was not a Jingo.
He was, perhaps, a good many bad things, but a Jingo was precisely what he was
not. Jingoism (we have only too good reason to know it nowadays) means
irresponsibility, hysterical cruelty, looseness, vulgarity, and verbosity. Kipling,
whatever his other faults, meant responsibility, severity, organization, and
silence. It is unfortunate that when great men are accused of faults it is
always of the wrong faults. What is the use of proving, as an argument against
Kipling, that bragging is unmanly, that riot is ridiculous, that city crowds
cannot judge a question of State? No one has written of these things so sternly
as Kipling himself; no one despised bragging as much as Stanley Ortliaris. If
Mr. Kipling has fallen away from this, at least his work cannot fall with him. To
anyone who fancies that Mr. Kipling's work, as work, is calculated to encourage
the Jingo spirit in democracies, I can only earnestly commend the first two or
three pages of "Judson and the Empire." In them the good Liberal will
find an admirable parabolic sketch of the British public in the present war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: EN-US;">Mr. Murray falls into the old mistake of supposing
that Mr. Kipling was, ethically, a Jingo; similarly he falls into the old
mistake of supposing that Mr. Kipling was, artistically, a realist. The talk
about Kipling being merely a photographer, about his stories being a mere
cinematograph, is about as shallow criticism as ever was penned in this world. It
is not true that Kipling's fame was founded on his being a realistic
journalist; there were hundreds of realistic journalists before he was born,
and will be after he is dead. Kipling's fame was founded on the fact that he
was, in his own way, a poet; that he saw that railway trains and Maxim guns,
and gossiping ladies and stupid subalterns were elemental things, just as new
and just as old, just as mortal and just as eternal as if they were snow or stars
or mountains. What gives to the Indian stories of Kipling their bitter and
bracing flavour is not the accumulations of English official detail, but the
eternal under-current of scornful Eastern wisdom: the sense that all these
things return again and again like an old song.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-27774492746114582112010-12-10T11:46:00.000-06:002010-12-10T11:46:29.570-06:00Good ByeThis is, indeed, and finally, our last post. But all is not lost. You may find us <a href="http://chesterton.org">here</a>, blogging, posting, and keeping you up to day about all things Chesterton, so come on over.Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-57940013749534096882010-11-30T13:18:00.001-06:002010-11-30T13:19:59.792-06:00Why We Still Need ChestertonComplete article <a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23902365-must-religion-keep-losing-the-argument.do">here</a>.<blockquote>Paradoxically, Christopher Hitchens must be due for canonisation as a secular saint. In the broadcast snatches of his Toronto debate against Tony Blair on whether religion is a force for good, Hitchens assumed a kind of divine grandeur.</blockquote><blockquote>I am no theological expert but this seems to overlook the religious virtue of humility. When G K Chesterton was asked by The Times to write on the theme, “What's wrong with the world?” he submitted the following: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G K Chesterton.” </blockquote><blockquote>Why didn't Blair produce Handel's Messiah as his witness? Perhaps followed by the Liberian war- lord, General Butt Naked, interviewed at the weekend, who apparently turned from inhuman slaughterer to meek and repentant sinner after a blinding vision of Christ.<br />
<br />
G K Chesterton advised the use of “fairytale” language properly to evoke the nature of the world. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. Hitchens and his fellow atheists talk of the superiority of reason over faith.<br />
<br />
Chesterton countered that “reason itself is an act of faith”. Demonstrating this should be Blair's Bewitched project.</blockquote>Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-49945113527037703152010-11-18T15:41:00.000-06:002010-11-18T15:41:47.892-06:00Chestertonian Homework HelpI recently had an email from a young University student who thankfully is studying Chesterton. Since there aren't Spark or Cliff notes for Chesterton's work, students can feel at a loss for help with Chesterton assignments.<br />
<br />
I'll post her question first:<br />
<blockquote>We are to write about the moral discoveries that Father Brown made in “<a href="http://www.literaturepage.com/read/chesterton-wisdom-of-father-brown-69.html">The Mistake of the Machine.</a>” However, I am having a very difficult time since, as I stated above, I can not fully grasp what the writing means.</blockquote>So here's my answer:<blockquote>I guess I want to suggest reading it again, with some thoughts in mind. There are two very major themes in this story. One is that Man is NOT a machine, although Father Brown calls Man a machine several times, just to confuse you. But the contrast of Man and Machine is a theme. Can a machine tell one the truth? Can a MAN tell one the truth? Can a machine lie? Can a man lie? Can a machine read a man's heart (motives, for example)? Can a person act in a way contrary to his human nature?<br />
<br />
The second theme is the assumption of who a person is based on appearance.<br />
<br />
Both of these themes take place within the conversation between Father Brown and the Governor/Detective Greywood Usher, Greywood taking the "scientific" view point, Father Brown taking the more reasonable, faithful view point, the view point that allows for man to act as a man, and not as a machine (scientifically, in other words, science cannot explain a man's motives, his "heart") which was brought out in the beginning by talking about blood and circulation, etc. The word blood is repeatedly used, in both scientific terms and in terms of class "blue-blooded" etc. to emphasize the assumption that blood makes a man what he is, which science or even aristocrats may believe. But a rational person like Father Brown knows that blood is just blood, and tells one nothing about man's soul.<br />
<br />
So, I hope I've pointed you in the right direction and given you some clues and hints to work from.<br />
<br />
Chesterton is difficult. I totally understand that. When I had to read Chesterton in college, I really, truthfully, hated it, because I couldn't understand it. But hang in there, he does get better with time.</blockquote>And the young student said it helped her write her paper. So there you go, we'll call them ChesterNotes.Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-64607228279433035322010-10-30T14:11:00.003-05:002010-10-30T14:14:45.333-05:00Make a Small Donation, Get to Hear it First!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM-grO2xm2SsGJrX2nairbtnI94XZ8ISW5qXozS9fDzweDArBrUCLwi8hHzjw4QUcy91grg2qJvptnb20DWEuvND_WY0Ru6sJ7lL-ZKI3iYoZa5acDzIQhzJzbt0M1stx9dq0icA/s1600/thursdaylamppost-80x90.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM-grO2xm2SsGJrX2nairbtnI94XZ8ISW5qXozS9fDzweDArBrUCLwi8hHzjw4QUcy91grg2qJvptnb20DWEuvND_WY0Ru6sJ7lL-ZKI3iYoZa5acDzIQhzJzbt0M1stx9dq0icA/s1600/thursdaylamppost-80x90.jpg" /></a><br />
Your donation will help us with the production costs, which include audio equipment, room rental, music and sound effects. In return, we have some gifts for you!<br />
<br />
$10 will get you the free MP3 files two weeks before the public!<br />
$40 will get you the above plus a free 3-Disc CD set when the project is complete!<br />
<br />
In the absence of the money to make a feature film, “The Man Who Was Thursday” will come alive as a high quality, fully produced radio play. Actors breath life in the characters, sound effects and foley keep you in the scene, and a musical score ties it all together.Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-15515322037801162572010-10-29T09:12:00.001-05:002010-10-29T09:12:41.583-05:00Ink and Fairydust MagazineA fairly new e-zine, created by talented young people interested in literature and Chesterton and a whole lot more, who provide Something Good To Read. Check out <a href="http://www.inkandfairydust.com/">Ink and Fairydust Magazine</a> now!Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-60086584813325859212010-10-15T18:06:00.000-05:002010-10-15T18:06:22.766-05:00The Start of the Transition to Something NewI'm pleased to announce that we are beginning the transition to a new American Chesterton Society web site, one that will combine the best of the <a href="http://chesterton.org/">old site</a> with the best of <a href="http://www.gilbertmagazine.com/">the Gilbert Magazine site</a>, with an interactive component like a blog. So it will be the best of three worlds combined into one.<br />
<br />
You'll be able to get more content, interact with Gilbert columnists and readers, and much, much more.<br />
<br />
As soon as the new site is ready, you'll be the first to know. And thanks for 5 great years of blogging here.Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-124637537395482352010-10-07T08:45:00.002-05:002010-10-07T08:50:16.392-05:00Coming to a Conclusion<blockquote>The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. <br />[GKC <i>Heretics</I> CW1:196]</blockquote>Yes - we have come to a conclusion. This the last column I am writing for Nancy, since this blogg is being closed. There must be some mystical significance to this, since today is the feast of the Holy Rosary: the anniversary of Lepanto and the victory over our dark enemy; but then this blogg began on a Marian feast nearly five years ago, and it seems fitting that my role end on one.<br /><br />God willing, I shall continue to write on my own blogg, <a href="http://francesblogg.blogspot.com">"GKC's Favourite"</a>. I also contribute to <a href="http://theduhemsociety.blogspot.com">The Duhem Society</a>, which studies the work of Pierre Duhem and S. L. Jaki, great historians of science.<br /><br />Apologia: Lest there be any doubt, I am not so much interested in Chesterton except for the way in which he proclaims the truth of Jesus Christ, and the cosmos made through Him. I hereby submit all my work to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church; if any of my writing is at odds with her teachings, I humbly ask for her correction. <br /><br />And so... well... what really has to be said in such a conclusion? Only this: Let us take GKC's warnings about pride seriously, and let us keep things in their proper order: let us strive to be Christians who also read Chesterton, not Chestertonians who also read the gospels. Let us heed the warning given in GKC's own discussion of St. Francis, who did not want people to follow him, but to follow Christ. And good things may come from bloggs, as we Chestertonians happen to know, far better than others... (hee hee!) <br /><br /><blockquote>A Chestertonian blogger once asked me: "You don't expect me to revolutionize society on my blogg?"<br />And I looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly. "No, I don't, but I suppose that if you were serious about your Chesterton that is exactly what you would do."<br />[cf. GKC TMWWT CW6:481]</blockquote>Let us be serious about our Chesterton, and thereby turn society back - to our Lord.<br /><br />May God bless you always, and your families!<br /><br />Let us conclude with Chesterton's own last words:<br /><br />"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-80311262129141678322010-09-30T09:26:00.008-05:002010-09-30T09:48:14.377-05:00Conjugating your sonnets and integrating your relations<b>Caution: HUMOR WARNING. This posting contains Funny Material. Laughing may result. Prolonged laughing has not been observed in lab rats so all those government-acronym places don't know what will happen and don't really care. (Recent studies indicate they have no sense of humor.) But you have been warned. Hee hee.</b><br /><br />You get a bonus today: this posting contains a lesson in elementary heraldry. You see, I was thinking again about heraldry, since I am trying to work up a coat-of-arms for one of the organizations in my Saga... Actually I probably need at least two more. Neither are critical to the story, at least as far as I can tell at present, but one never knows. The others I have made are already in play: I built one merely from a certain artistic sense - it actually derives from Chesterton's last words about the battle between light and darkness (See Ward, <i>Gilbert Keith Chesterton</I> 650). This is Joseph Chandler's arms, from my Saga:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDMlwuPyr7GobFWU2GuEbKbkrLmv2erAP9Ze11-IWXnpKZJ4B-AB3iCdPikVHBZDUYvWM4Km4aLdvE6Vpq7AZyHu3r4rTfYfyWst5__d9q1AVJsuQywCEyojSRA7xRPW37mwiR/s1600/CHAND.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 262px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDMlwuPyr7GobFWU2GuEbKbkrLmv2erAP9Ze11-IWXnpKZJ4B-AB3iCdPikVHBZDUYvWM4Km4aLdvE6Vpq7AZyHu3r4rTfYfyWst5__d9q1AVJsuQywCEyojSRA7xRPW37mwiR/s320/CHAND.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522713321752688754" /></a><br /><br />Sable, a chevron Or; in chief an antique lamp fired proper, radiated of the second.<br /><br />But as my writing progressed, this interesting design has proven to fit into the plot in a way which almost shocked me - one rarely expects such minor details as a fictional coat-of-arms for a fictional character to have any significance. Though, as we Chestertonians know, it ought to. We might try an epigram, sort of like this: "There is no such thing as a minor detail". And this is borne out in other authors, if one pays attention. I just finished re-reading Tolkien's <i>The Hobbit</i>, which I had to reference in my own work (it's a GREAT quote, really cool in the context, and connected with the above arms) and if you've been to Middle Earth you know that Tolkien's names are - ah - what verb - perhaps <i>sculpted</I>. He is very careful to provide an entire history and etymology for his roots. No wonder it took him so long to write. I have a similar difficulty, not because I am a philologist but because I am a computer scientist, and have to be sure to arrange every last BIT of things... hee hee. The challenge, whether one writes software or stories, is to be sure that one writes with an END in mind - that is, one must have a purpose, and every word ought to be justified - it should be chosen and placed, as a mosaic artist selects tesserae. Chesterton was aware of this. I would not attempt to argue about Chesterton's choice of words in general, and (since I am not a lit'ry scholar) I would prefer to avoid such criticism of his work. Rather, let's consider how GKC applies this consideration to another great English writer:<blockquote>There was never a better criticism of Chaucer than that written within a hundred years of his death by old Caxton the printer; nor has this particular aptitude with words been expressed in words so apt. The medieval master printer's estimate is worth libraries of the patronizing pedantry, that has been written in the four hundred years that followed. 'For he writeth no void words; but all his matter is full of high and quick sentence'; that is, sense; sententia. The melodious but monotonous etiquette of much medieval poetry was a perpetual temptation to write void words; like the void words of modern journalese; except that the medieval words at least were graceful and the modern words base. <br />[GKC <i>Chaucer</I> CW18:319]</blockquote>Now, any programmers who are reading this (especially those who are familiar with the language called "C") will have to laugh, since in "C" there is a keyword "void" which has a particular meaning and usefulness; hence excellent and efficient programs will often have "void words", hee hee. If you aren't laughing, don't worry, it's not that funny. But then don't expect me to laugh at your horrible 17-line sonnets. Hee hee. (I hope you noticed my title; that's one of the points I'm getting at.)<br /><br />One of the interesting challenges in building a story, as in building a computer program, is the selection of names. I have used several different mechanisms, depending on my mood, or the particulars of the person (or data item) at hand... but this isn't a "meet the author" (or programmer) column, and I am NOT telling my very cool secrets here! But I bring up the issue since Chesterton talks about it in at least two places I can recall even without consulting the texts. The one is the exceedingly famous encomium in <i>Heretics</i> of the great and awesome name "SMITH" and if you EVER want to write fiction or anything where you will need names - <i>including software</I>, I must add - you ought to know this excerpt, and keep it near you as you work:<blockquote>I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith Family," or some such thing. He said, "Well, you won't get any of your damned mysticism out of this," or words to that effect. I am happy to say that I undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy. In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected, it could claim half the glory of that <i>arma virumque</i> which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.<br />Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence," which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond," which means nothing, when it is in their power to give him this sacred name of Smith - this name made of iron and flame. It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every one whose name is Smith. Perhaps it does; I trust so. Whoever else are parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus. From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor. <br />[GKC <I>Heretics</i> CW1:54-5]</blockquote>(By the way, if you don't know what <i>arma virumque</I> means, check back next Tuesday and you'll find out.) Gosh it's almost enough to make me want to change my name!<br /><br />The second instance where GKC discusses the selection of names for fiction is quite funny, and comes up in a notable setting. His brother's wife Ada, was also a writer and (gasp!) undercover reporter. She got sued because she had used a name in one of her fictional stories - and there happened to be a <i>real person</i> with that name. You really need to read two essays, but I don't have room to quote them all. But... be forewarned! This one is REALLY funny. It has some of GKC's best creative stunts, where he approaches (asymtotically, perhaps) to the mathematical stuntmanship of that famous mathematician, Professor Dodgson.. but you don't care. I just want you to realize I laughed VERY loud when I first read this, and I expect you may also. So finish your food and drink before you read this next excerpt:<blockquote>Legal decisions lately made bring this tomfoolery to the point of the intolerable. It is the judges' business to explain the law; and the law may be as the judges said: in those cases the law is what Mr. Bumble said it was. But it is not only an ass, but a wild ass; one capable of kicking down whole cities and civilisations. The cases to which I refer are those in which gentlemen obtained damages from newspapers because articles in them contained characters with their names. It was not alleged that the characters specially recalled or suggested the plaintiffs; it was not alleged that the characters were specially unpleasant. But it was laid down by the judges that damages for libel were due. Well, if that is the law, let us alter it. But, indeed, it is not properly a law, but one of the accidents of an anarchy.<br /><br />I need not point out the insanely perilous position in which it places that already harassed and emaciated person, the author. He must take names for his tales; and if he takes natural or possible names, he must know that there are probably many real people who bear them. In fact, some of the most famous and isolated figures in fiction bear names that are common and general in reality. On this principle many a mild Welsh dissenting minister may consider himself saddled with the private life of Tom Jones. On this principle, every person bearing two other ordinary names may be found nervously consulting his own character in "Tom Brown at Oxford." For the matter of that Iago is a very common name in Spanish; and if we only pushed this legal logic a little further, the translation of such names might be included, and we might have a man forbidding the performance of "Othello" on the ground that his name was James. These cases seem to me no crazier than the actual cases as settled.<br /><br />The question, of course, is simple enough: what is a novelist supposed to do? Is he to leave blanks for the names, or number them? Should he advertise first for all the claimants to a title and square them moderately beforehand? The only other way I can think of would be to give the characters names that no one of ordinary strength could possess, pronounce, or endure - say, "Quinchbootlepump" or "Pottlehartipips." One might cherish a hope that few prosecutors could establish a claim to these. How far they would enrich or weaken the style of the author it would, of course, be more difficult to say. One must think mainly of the average romantic novel; one must imagine some paragraph like this: "As Bunchoosa Blutterspangle lingered in the lovely garden a voice said 'Bunchi' behind her, in tones that recalled the old glad days at the Quoodlesnakes'. It was, it was indeed the deep, melodious voice of Splitcat Chintzibobs." It seems to me that this method would ruffle, as it were, the smooth surface of the softer and more simply pathetic passages. <br />[GKC ILN Feb 11 1911 CW29:36-7; the law case is discussed in ILN Dec 9 1911, CW 29:201]</blockquote>Several times at Chesterton Conferences I have considered altering my name tag to read "Hello my name is Doctor Splitcat Chintzibobs" - except that Dale would probably expect me to change it to something else. I would, too - except those name tags are too small to fit "Hello my name is Doctor Plakkopytrixophylisperambulantiobatrix". Ah, well. So I don't. And besides, people would wonder if I had a twin brother. (I do, but I am the evil twin. Hee hee. Gosh I wish you could hear what "hee hee" actually sounds like when I do it; I had a whole course in grad school on how to do that sinister doctoral laugh. It's very effective.)<br /><br />You can also find a very good commentary by GKC on Dodgson's use of fantasy words - no, I don't mean those like Tolkien's. I mean "brillig" and the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub bird and that sort of thing, as well as "uglification". You may think this is crazy - but then you weren't in the assembly language class (which I taught while I was doing my doctorate) when I read to them from Dodgson's text. People still think I am crazy, but what do they know. If you want to understand the first and most important technical aspect of flow-of-control in computer programming, you can find no better text than <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i>. (I was going to quote it, but I think this time I will let you do some research.)<br /><br />I was going to talk some more about this, and relate it to my title, but I decided to do it another time. Instead I want to talk about heraldry a little more, since heraldry really is both art and science at once, and ought to be more widely known. I've seen some exceedingly HORRID web sites which would be greatly and easily improved if their designers knew that very first rule of heraldry. I've seen commercial trucks and advertising banners and even license plates which break the rule as well, so perhaps it will be worth our consideration. Besides, it's fun, and really very easy, and you can do it with kids if you have any around. Be sure to get some crayons and nice white paper if you don't have any. You can probably find kids at the store too, if you don't already have some at home. If not, you will have to act like a kid for a little while; it doesn't hurt. Even if you <i>are</I> at work, or perhaps at some unfortunate "institute of higher learning" you ought to keep a box of crayons and some clean paper with you. It is very helpful, and also people will wonder what that smell is (ah the good smell of a crayon!) and then they will want to work on heraldry too, and they will improve their web sites... who knows how much good may result!<br /><br />All right, so let us begin. I won't give the usual introduction today - another day perhaps - but leap right to the chapter about colors. <br /><br />In heraldry we use just SIX different pigments - generally. There are two or three others but they are rarely used, and there a few other oddities, one of which is extremely high-tech, but we're just starting out today, and we'll come back to those special things later. Since heraldry is an ancient art, we use some very interesting terms for the hues we already know, and we group them into two main classes. (This is not hard, it just takes getting used to; it's a technical language like any science or art.) Here are the six:<br /><br />There are TWO "metals":<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkrTpAIy5_BCXkShIrK0G8qcL7B7i3KQF68OzNjncYoeC9Ch_RhmlVkmexTKIZpIr3iyGydOszfI7IDhWCciX6O7QI1tEYxYmSu3EjitbsLH7W1cKYaBzdVMMPdIgkJEFMlzEX/s1600/or.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 137px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkrTpAIy5_BCXkShIrK0G8qcL7B7i3KQF68OzNjncYoeC9Ch_RhmlVkmexTKIZpIr3iyGydOszfI7IDhWCciX6O7QI1tEYxYmSu3EjitbsLH7W1cKYaBzdVMMPdIgkJEFMlzEX/s320/or.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522714947892577378" /></a>1. "Or" which is gold or yellow. Note: we always capitalize this word; it comes from the Latin <i>aurum</i> = gold. You can use a yellow crayon or paint when you make yours; if you have money and work out your own arms, perhaps someday you might buy gold leaf and use that... but see what GKC says about gold first, as you may be disappointed.)<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimiWl6v32QvwELR97Q4TLGUCAT_uuvriGT8FwqdbNCDQKdg2rVB4Pl5L2bBZzIih_GopOtv8Sqfi3E_gPIoTLUcusRfYDp5POA3CrLYkiC3i7tqc9ly8vHPIVKPZE_N4qv6UUk/s1600/argent.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 136px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimiWl6v32QvwELR97Q4TLGUCAT_uuvriGT8FwqdbNCDQKdg2rVB4Pl5L2bBZzIih_GopOtv8Sqfi3E_gPIoTLUcusRfYDp5POA3CrLYkiC3i7tqc9ly8vHPIVKPZE_N4qv6UUk/s320/argent.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522714954640469666" /></a>2. "Argent" which is silver or white. Note: that's like the Latin for silver. When you make yours, you can just leave the paper blank, unless you are painting and have some of that fantastic Titanium White, or can buy some silver leaf.<br /><br /><p><br />Then there are four "colors": <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyGnNNiM7LZzNbOFp-vqOTg5WBEwN7r1v6Wqp5EaVacrOjhs0hoNrUghpMjC3o5yFZRkZKf2yVB7d6Wkl51DH2atxiEaTtLHZuw68V2dB2uQ33LKE-zDjTG6q-ur2XgMMvq_K/s1600/gules.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 136px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyGnNNiM7LZzNbOFp-vqOTg5WBEwN7r1v6Wqp5EaVacrOjhs0hoNrUghpMjC3o5yFZRkZKf2yVB7d6Wkl51DH2atxiEaTtLHZuw68V2dB2uQ33LKE-zDjTG6q-ur2XgMMvq_K/s320/gules.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522714955651595218" /></a><br />1. "Gules" which is red. You can use any bright red, though perhaps sometimes you'll make it deeper. Remember, it is an ART; you must do it RIGHT.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhByuLh7H05YHDmJI6XnfRH5ZO-uqk2aLjDKqMuq6Pbo4oAYQQJ3XPsZN0_aK8brUgsLuquOFSbaHpHcvT6bZyM4pT9azQLVES5Y8kuM6BQRy4iBcjkptIQjRGFYbf4Ee7fWm7G/s1600/vert.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 136px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhByuLh7H05YHDmJI6XnfRH5ZO-uqk2aLjDKqMuq6Pbo4oAYQQJ3XPsZN0_aK8brUgsLuquOFSbaHpHcvT6bZyM4pT9azQLVES5Y8kuM6BQRy4iBcjkptIQjRGFYbf4Ee7fWm7G/s320/vert.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522714960482380722" /></a>2. "Vert" which is green. You can use any bright green - again paying attention to what it is that you are making.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdricZQx7R744DhfxJQl-cGdzEJPgz-R_D5pXIUPoxYYkifbt9EQmSjfBcIU7GKTwBgZEEiZ05LrE_QbJb9m0-Dl7-NRdwX89vA6O_BICYXsFgJ3r7aT816a9lS77KPibGJkwW/s1600/azure.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdricZQx7R744DhfxJQl-cGdzEJPgz-R_D5pXIUPoxYYkifbt9EQmSjfBcIU7GKTwBgZEEiZ05LrE_QbJb9m0-Dl7-NRdwX89vA6O_BICYXsFgJ3r7aT816a9lS77KPibGJkwW/s320/azure.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522715407307317330" /></a>3. "Azure" which is blue. The same, but this time any bright blue.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb3WXcgo1q4Hf61kRb-vqPG9l2ZKbPQI-_3kHuMvxQHimYPWBY1r6oA20qYcFr0_njZ3q6ViMtqcWJzRlvdnQrDnQOmH0VfXsgEBflh2xhai-62qNGR8l70fnXy3XHGY7zQaA6/s1600/sable.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 136px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb3WXcgo1q4Hf61kRb-vqPG9l2ZKbPQI-_3kHuMvxQHimYPWBY1r6oA20qYcFr0_njZ3q6ViMtqcWJzRlvdnQrDnQOmH0VfXsgEBflh2xhai-62qNGR8l70fnXy3XHGY7zQaA6/s320/sable.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522715410591885762" /></a>4. "Sable" which is black. This is black. You may think the term "bright black" is sheer lunacy - <i>but the Romans didn't think so!</I> Oh yes: Latin has two words for black: <i>niger</i> which is bright or "shining black", and <i>ater</I> which is dull or "dead black"; the dictionary also just translates it "dark". Very interesting, but let's get back to heraldry.<br /><br />All right. There are the six heraldic pigments: the metals Or and argent, the colors gules vert, azure and sable. Now, you need to know the RULE. It is very simple:<blockquote><b>Never place metal upon metal, or color upon color.</b></blockquote>Do you understand? For example, don't use anything white against a yellow blackground, or red against green, or blue against black (and so forth).<br /><br />Why? you ask. <br /><br />Well... remember that business - I must have quoted it a hundred times - about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the 13th century in order to get things done? Heraldry was NOT just fun art. It was something of extreme importance... but I will give you that explanation in my introduction some other time. (Have you caught on? I'm breaking the flow of control rule, just to demonstrate how one conjugates a sonnet. Hee hee.)<br /><br />The quick reason is this: the purpose of a coat-of-arms - or of any real piece of art - is to get a message across. For example: <br /><br /><font color="ffff00">If you write yellow letters on a white background, it will be hard to read.</font> <br /><br />Could you read that? That is (in heraldic terms) placing metal on metal, "Or upon argent". It's difficult to read. Here's what I wrote, but obeying the rule, and placing "sable upon argent" (color on metal):<br /><br />If you write yellow letters on a white background, it will be hard to read.<br /><br />It's true. It's not impossible - but it's not as clear. However, metal on color, or color on metal is quite easily seen and grasped. But let us see some example coats-of-arms - just simple ones which will demonstrate the rule. You can try drawing these for practice. All three are from Chesterton:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXUmPvh09bA0L7ADEpIPNRpbSaUdiWQJsYzeWgtLpz_Nn0oUYZgviG2DDqJEI0ECG0BoxejUnGtjWIX1ljpBdUqVruwfXNtvSjhrdIB_mqKCerlhAd3UfQx20yivFvwqNF_m7P/s1600/stgeo.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 133px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXUmPvh09bA0L7ADEpIPNRpbSaUdiWQJsYzeWgtLpz_Nn0oUYZgviG2DDqJEI0ECG0BoxejUnGtjWIX1ljpBdUqVruwfXNtvSjhrdIB_mqKCerlhAd3UfQx20yivFvwqNF_m7P/s320/stgeo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522714150990071410" /></a><br /><b>Argent, a cross gules.</b><br />The national flag of England is the Cross of St. George, and <i>that</i>, oddly enough, was splashed from one end of Dublin to the other; it was mostly displayed on shield-shaped banners, and may have been regarded by many as merely religious; but it was the authentic St. George's Cross; gules on a field argent, with the four arms of the cross meeting the edges of the flag.<br />[GKC <i>Christendom in Dublin</i> 9]<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwO1cJ1JAVa-xuD-yltMewUhW_J2yKpqm8LqTQFDExPL8OePmbgQ1I5jji5Doy_7fArlHKs0C_baEXcBkJ3FsCNDnDZFTE2QkN4CDj5KeHFV76hw-G-FkNeS5nu4c07dHtSjRz/s1600/syme.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 136px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwO1cJ1JAVa-xuD-yltMewUhW_J2yKpqm8LqTQFDExPL8OePmbgQ1I5jji5Doy_7fArlHKs0C_baEXcBkJ3FsCNDnDZFTE2QkN4CDj5KeHFV76hw-G-FkNeS5nu4c07dHtSjRz/s320/syme.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522713966542750930" /></a><br />"Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are '<b>argent a chevron gules charged with three cross crosslets of the field</b>'." <br />[GKC <i>The Man Who Was Thursday</i> CW6:565]<br /><br /><p><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIbWkfNxq-NWWnDRcJk4EsGH84mjEDsMTo9xBqba6etf2Ax3fgF9zTNHyNDh-9MEXKCJI91V-SuIIhQyLhd5cN72_Fb03_ic-auQbI988mwdrV5dMnYE1CjDV6lM6CnwvBCQ-B/s1600/scrope.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 117px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIbWkfNxq-NWWnDRcJk4EsGH84mjEDsMTo9xBqba6etf2Ax3fgF9zTNHyNDh-9MEXKCJI91V-SuIIhQyLhd5cN72_Fb03_ic-auQbI988mwdrV5dMnYE1CjDV6lM6CnwvBCQ-B/s320/scrope.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522713736826473202" /></a>The arms borne by the great Border family of Scrope, in popular language a blue shield with a gold band across it (I can say '<b>azure a bend or</b>' quite as prettily as anybody else) was found to have been also adopted by a certain Sir Thomas Grosvenor, then presumably the newer name of the two.<br />[GKC <i>Chaucer</I> CW18:214]<br /><br /><br />Now that you have learned the first rule of heraldry, you are in a position to understand a curious little line in one of GKC's essays. I will just give it to you - see what you make of it:<blockquote>The alphabet is one set of arbitrary symbols. The figures of heraldry are another set of arbitrary symbols. In the fourteenth century every gentleman knew one: in the twentieth century every gentleman knows the other. The first gentleman was just precisely as ignorant for not knowing that c-a-t spells "cat," as the second gentleman is for not knowing that a St. Andrew's Cross is called a cross saltire, or that vert on gules is bad heraldry.<br />[GKC ILN Dec 2 1905 CW27:70-71]</blockquote>I would like to say more about that powerful bit about how the alphabet is a set of arbitrary symbols - recently I tried (with both hands I tried) to tell you a little of that mystery. But of course this is one of those odd little Traditions "liberals" require - just as "Free Speech" is one of those little Liberties "conservatives" demand. The challenge to us is to recall what Chesterton said in his book on Browning: "Free speech is a paradox". So, in many ways, is heraldry.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-78291912465979015182010-09-29T08:32:00.002-05:002010-09-29T08:44:58.536-05:00The Secret of the Sword<blockquote><br />"To St. Michael, In Time Of Peace" <br /><br />Michael, Michael: Michael of the Morning, <br />Michael of the Army of the Lord. <br />Stiffen thou the hand upon the still sword, Michael, <br />Folded and shut upon the sheathed sword, Michael, <br />Under the fullness of the white robes falling, <br />Gird us with the secret of the sword.<br /><br />When the world cracked because of a sneer in heaven, <br />Leaving out of all time a scar upon the sky, <br />Thou didst rise up against the Horror in the highest, <br />Dragging down the highest that looked down on the Most High: <br />Rending from the seventh heaven the hell of exaltation <br />Down the seven heavens till the dark seas burn: <br />Thou that in thunder threwest down the Dragon <br />Knowest in what silence the Serpent can return.<br /><br />Down through the universe the vast night falling, <br />(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Morning!) <br />Far down the universe the deep calms calling, <br />(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Sword!) <br />Bid us not forget in the baths of all forgetfulness, <br />In the sigh long drawn from the frenzy and the fretfulness, <br />In the huge holy sempiternal silence, <br />In the beginning was the Word.<br /><br />When from the deeps a dying God astounded<br />Angels and devils who do all but die,<br />Seeing Him fallen where thou couldst not follow,<br />Seeing Him mounted where thou couldst not fly,<br />Hand on the hilt, thou hast halted all thy legions, <br />Waiting the Tetelestai and the acclaim, <br />Swords that salute Him dead and everlasting <br />God beyond God and greater than His Name.<br /><br />Round us and over us the cold thoughts creeping,<br />(Michael, Michael: Michael of the battle-cry!)<br />Round us and under us the thronged worlds sleeping,<br />(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Charge!)<br />Guard us the Word; the trysting and the trusting<br />Edge upon honour and the blade unrusting.<br />Fine as the hair and tauter than the harpstring,<br />Ready as when it rang upon the target<br /><br />He that giveth peace unto us; not as the world giveth: <br />He that giveth law unto us; not as the scribes: <br />Shall He be softened for the softening of the cities <br />Patient in usury; delicate in bribes? <br />They that come to quiet us, saying the sword is broken, <br />Break men with famine, fetter them with gold, <br />Sell them as sheep; and He shall know the selling, <br />For He was more than murdered. He was sold.<br /><br />Michael, Michael: Michael of the Mastering, <br />Michael of the marching on the mountains of the Lord, <br />Marshal the world and purge of rot and riot, <br />Rule through the world till all the world be quiet: <br />Only establish when the World is broken, <br />What is unbroken is the Word. <br /><br />[GKC CW10:174 et seq]</blockquote><br /><br />Please don't forget: today begins our annual Rosary novena, inspired by our memory of Mary's gift of victory to the naval forces of the West at Lepanto. There is so much evil in our world, and our foe is deadly - but we have a far more powerful ally. Let us unite in prayer, contemplating the mysteries of our Lord's life, death, and resurrection, and together ask for aid in our battle.<br /><br />PS: if you need something to aid in your appreciation of this truth, please read Janney's <i>The Miracle of the Bells</i>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-52625794719548426092010-09-28T12:05:00.003-05:002010-09-28T12:17:18.138-05:00Tuesday's Bit of Latin: Franciscan HumourSince next Monday is the feast of St. Francis, I thought I would post this in advance so you can tell your Franciscan (and Benedictine) friends about it.<br />--Dr. Thursday.<br /><blockquote>There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of <i>Benedictus benedicat</i>, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted <i>Franciscus Franciscat</i>. It is something of a parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb <i>Franciscare</i> it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and <i>Benedictus benedicat</i> is very precisely the motto of the earliest mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed bless.<br />[GKC <i>A Short History of England</i>]</blockquote>In case you don't get it, the Latin <i>Benedictus benedicat</i> means "May Benedict bless..." As GKC points out in his introduction, there isn't any Latin verb <i>Franciscare</I> or rather <i>Franciscere</I> - but that really is the whole point of the joke. You know, it's when the door isn't a door that it's a jar. Or about getting down from the duck. It's how you get UP on the duck in the first place which is the mystery.... hee hee. Perhaps when you are a Franciscan, you know how.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-47533172988403478152010-09-23T09:44:00.002-05:002010-09-23T09:52:01.118-05:004294967295, or, the Last NumberToday is the Equinox, the beginning of Autumn. As I am sure you know by now (as Chesterton points out) since the God of Christianity is the real God of the universe, Christianity has something say about everything from pork to pyrotechnics, from pigs to the binomial theorem - so too, Christianity has something to say about Autumn. I apologise for the pun, but I cannot resist...<blockquote>Christianity spoke again and said: "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is - the Fall."<br />[GKC <i>Orthodoxy</I> CW1:321]</blockquote>Yes, the Fall. (Which means that business with the snake and the fruit in the Garden happened in late summer, hee hee.) With the arrival of the autumnal equinox, Autumn (or the Fall, if you call it what it is) comes to our Northern Hemisphere, and our thoughts are naturally urged to contemplate the mystery of time.<br /><br />Now, everyone will expect some sort of stiff physics or perhaps speculative cosmology - but that is not suitable for our column, even though GKC certainly mentioned Einstein nearly a hundred times in his various writings. I especially like the bit about how people ought to be fined if they mention his name without knowing what they are talking about. (That's in ILN May 23 1931 CW35:526) But we are not going into that sort of thing here - at least not today. If you're moving near the speed of light, however, perhaps we'll go into it yesterday, hee hee.<br /><br />No; actually I was thinking more about numbers - which sometimes happens for me, since I play with numbers a lot - but also because of my recent writing about the chirality of letters. Now, the common Man (as GKC loved to say) does not normally think there is any difference between a NUMBER and a DIGIT. In fact, the use of that word "difference" is a hilarious pun, and gets into one of those things that - uh. As usual, Chesterton has gone into this, and he says it far better than I can:<blockquote>They differed from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth.<br />[GKC TEM CW2:245]</blockquote>"They differ from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were." There is a huge difference between a number and a representation of that number - and there is no pun at all in that context, since the "difference" isn't the mathematical kind of subtraction. One does not subtract paintings from English sovereigns; it is that old line about mixing apples with oranges... the possibility of fruit salads notwithstanding. Indeed, it is this grand conundrum which has misled several otherwise wise writers into distortions which ought not be dignified by the term "paradox", even though that is the word which is usually applied. But I am wandering and you are lost too. (Whew!) Let us return to numbers, or rather words about numbers, and about digits.<br /><br />You see, I was thinking about time, and starts and ends - about measuring (as God states was His design in fashioning the various lamps in the sky, Gen 1:14) and about giving order to things. As soon as we examine this truth, we find a paradox, and we don't have to be a Chesterton to appreciate it. The paradox is that the sun and the moon do just one thing: the sun appears to travel, from east to west, over and over again. The moon does the same, while it slowly gets bigger and then smaller, and moves slowly from west to east against the background of the stars. (Yes there are some other wobbles but we'll let those details aside for today.) The sun and moon appear to make the same motions - but they make them in seeming endlessness. We have that grand insight into science given by GKC in his "Ethics of Elfland" chapter of <i>Orthodoxy</I> about how God says "Do it again!" to these heavenly bodies - and even if you have already read that chapter I urge you to Do It Again.<br /><br />Ah, the intoxicating grandness of astronomy, where everyone on earth "has access at all times to the original objects of his study ... the masterworks of the heavens belong to him as much as to the great observatories of the world." [Robert Burnham Jr., <i>Burnham's Celestial Handbook</i> 5] Did you know that of the seven so-called "Liberal" Arts, there are four (or five) which are properly in the technical or scientific realm, and not in the non-science side? Oh yes. All four of the Quadrivium are about numbers in one sense or another: this is nothing new, but has been understood in this sense as far back as the twelfth century - for example, see the <i>Didascalicon</I> of Hugh of St. Victor:<blockquote>Now, multitude which stands in itself is the concern of arithmetic, while that which stands in relation to another multitude is the concern of music. Geometry holds forth knowledge of immobile magnitude, while astronomy claims knowledge of the mobile. <br />[<i>The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor</I> translated and annotated by Jerome Taylor; Book 2 chapter 6]</blockquote>Or, to put it as computer scientists do, in the form of a tree (which is sometimes called an "outline"):<br /><blockquote>a. The discrete<blockquote> 1) the absolute = Arithmetic<br />2) the relative = Music</blockquote>b. The continued<br /><blockquote>1) the stable = Geometry<br />2) the moving = Astronomy</blockquote></blockquote><br />[Above from <I>The World of Mathematics</I> 85]<br /><br />We know a bit more about mathematics now, and might adjust this tree and add to it significantly, but it is a good start, and does indeed suggest that there is a lot more to the intellectual life than a stream of dull plot-schemes, or the dates kings died on, or philosophical dreams (or nightmares) aimed at dethroning God... hee hee! The fact that the typical philosopher is not set on understanding Reality but on dethroning God is stated in Chesterton's grand epigram about modern thought: "With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it." [GKC <i>Orthodoxy</I> CW1:237] However! I have digressed, since it is quite tiresome to continue to read the whine of the liberal arts crowd here on the INTERNET. I wonder where they think computers come from! Plants, maybe. Ahem. The point here is not to make a digression on liberal arts - or even on liberal sciences - but to suggest an important truth about numbers - and about time.<br /><br />In order to help reveal more of this, I have to go back to something I mentioned previously, and about which I <a href="http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/11/prayer-and-wonder-or-mistake-about.html">recounted an interesting story</a> almost a year ago: the fact that computers cannot add. Perhaps I here need to stress an even more surprising truth, and one which will distress the public educrats who read this blogg: the fact that computers do not use numbers. Yes, computer do not deal with numbers at all. What they deal with is something else - and the closest I can come to describing it without formalisms is to say, like I did previously, that they deal with things which have properties like railroad cars, that can be manipulated. (The Latin here is rather exaggerated; we do not use our hands (Latin <i>manus</i>) to <i>manipulate</i> railroad cars unless they are toy railroad cars!) But yes, those things which we call BYTES are arranged, and linked together and "manipulated" - they are physical in a way that no number is physical. <br /><br />Remember how (long ago) we learned about counting? We had three sheep or three cherries or three toy engines... we found out the mystery that this "three" thing was like "red" or "soft": it did not depend on the things, but on the three-ness of those things. There has been much written about this mystery of number - but it is not a mystery. It is caused by some refusing to learn the first Learning, which is why the Greeks called it "Mathematics" = "That Which is Learned". Again, Chesterton says it far better than I can:<blockquote>It is as easy to be logical about things that do not exist as about things that do exist. If twice three is six, it is certain that three men with two legs each will have six legs between them. And if twice three is six, it is equally certain that three men with two heads each will have six heads between them. That there never were three men with two heads each does not invalidate the logic in the least. It makes the deduction impossible, but it does not make it illogical. Twice three is still six, whether you reckon it in pigs or in flaming dragons, whether you reckon it in cottages or in castles-in-the-air.<br />[GKC ILN Nov 11 1905 CW27:59]</blockquote>However, we are not concerned today with these things that do not exist, with flaming dragons or with castles-in-the-air, but with something far more mysterious: the LAST NUMBER.<br /><br />Yes. (Oh boy, exciting!) Now, you will laugh about this, since you probably think it is a joke. It's not a joke. You may have followed Milo through <i>The Phantom Tollbooth</I> and asked the Mathemagician about the Biggest number, or the Longest number - and he has sent you up the infinite staircase, or out along the infinite line - both of which take you to the same place. But that is another sort of thing. (People worry about infinity, and get confused; they must have been absent that day, or haven't gotten that far in their coursework. Oh well; another time for that.) But I do not mean THAT sort of Last Number.<br /><br />If you have owned a car long enough - or have bought a used one which someone else has owned long enough - you will know what I am talking about. There comes a point when the odometer "goes back to all zeros" - suddenly you have a New Car again. (hee hee) It sounds very Christian, let's see: "unless your car turn and be built again, it shall by no means..." Ahem. But we know that the car is not new. It is still the same old car. But the odometer says something astoundingly small!<br /><br />Yes. But there is a better example, and one which we are even more familiar with, and will tell my point far better. It is called the Clock. <br /><br />Now we all know how to add - or we think we do until we go to balance our checkbooks, though that usually means subtraction - and usually we are pretty good at adding. And I am sure that if I gave you a number, you feel fairly certain that you would be able to add two to that number and give me the correct answer. Let's try a little quiz:<br /><br />I ask and... you answer:<br /><br />Five plus two is... Seven.<br />Seven plus two is... Nine.<br />Nine plus two is... Eleven.<br />Eleven plus two is... Thirteen.<br /><br />Good. Now, let's just try it with some other words put alongside, shall we? And we'll see what happens.<br /><br />It's eleven o'clock in the morning now - let's meet in two hours - will you be free?<br /><br />And you respond: At one this afternoon? Yes, I'm free.<br /><br />Ah ha! But you just added two to eleven and got one!<br /><br />Is that oops or sure? Well, well. What is going on? <br /><br />It's the same as the car odometer - and the same as the computer. The clock provides us with just one "wheel" and when it runs out, we start over. We do as Chesterton says God tells the sun: "Do It Again." The repetition after noon is our homage, not (oddly enough) to the non-Copernican terms of Sunrise and Sunset, which is the way the Romans named the hours, but to the far more mysterious zenith and nadir of the globe, to midnight and noon.<br /><br />In the computer, there is something rather like an odometer - there is a fixed number of places, sort of like those little dials of digits, and when they fill up, it starts over again at zero. However, because the computer's "numbers" (which are NOT numbers) represent values using a base-two scheme, the Last Number of a computer isn't all nines. That was the Great Media Fear some ten years ago, remember? They called it <a href=""http://francesblogg.blogspot.com/2006/04/on-010203-040506-eetook-returns.html">Eetook, or Y2K</a> - the comet which was supposed to hit on New Year's of 2000 (or maybe 2001 depending on when you believe the millennium began, hee hee) No; in a thirty-two bit computer, which is what most personal and business machines are these days, the Last Number looks like this in our common tongue:<blockquote>4,294,967,295</blockquote>or if you prefer it in words:<blockquote>four billion, two hundred ninety-four million, nine hundred sixty-seven thousand, two hundred ninety-five.</blockquote>It's the last number, because after it comes zero again. (Remember, as I said, the things in the computer are NOT numbers, but that is another topic for another day. Huh? Are you looking at a computer? Do you see numbers here? I didn't think so. Hee hee!)<br /><br />It's not all that hard. Look at the clock. After 12 comes 1. Yeah, our "12" on the clock ought to be "zero" - and on computers, midnight is called "00:00". If your clock or watch is digital, you may (as I do) have it set to use the 24-hour clock, sometimes called military time, in which case the Last Number looks like "23:59" or "23:59:59". <br /><br />I had to hunt a good bit to find whether GKC ever played with this puzzle, and I am not sure he didn't. But he has a lovely joke about time:<blockquote>Mr. Birrell ... remarked that all the children appeared to be consumed with a desire to ask him the time. He appeared mystified as to why they asked him the time. I am unable to answer with accuracy (although I have studied the phenomenon many hundred times) beyond being quite certain that it was not because they wanted to know. A careful examination of the conduct of Battersea Park children shows quite clearly that the mention of no hour of the day (however sensational) makes any difference at all to their dignified and dilatory behaviour. Children live in an almost entirely timeless world (in which they resemble the Deity of Thomas Aquinas), and most of us who can remember our childhood can remember a certain sense of spaciousness in the hours, a sense that might be called a kind of happy emptiness. ... And I think very few children (certainly not the countless hordes that lie in wait for Mr. Birrell and me in Battersea Park) take any particular interest at all in the time of day. If you followed the disgraceful example of Policeman Peter Forth, and answered them "A quarter past thirteen," I think the information would be received with a refined indifference.<br />[GKC ILN May 5 1906 CW:178-9]</blockquote>Perhaps all my lengthy discussion of the Last Number will also be received with a "refined indifference" - but it has some relevance. There is a last number assigned to each of us also... As a true priest and teacher, Father Jaki often reminded people of the Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. In thinking of the waning of the year, we may do well to ponder the coming Harvest - our Lord actually mentioned such a thing - and consider how our odometer is counting off the seconds and minutes and hours. How are we using our time and our lives? Is it fruitful? But it is also important to remember that while the northern hemisphere begins autumn, the southern hemisphere begins spring. This is NOT a matter of dualism. This is not a suggestion that we believe, as the pagans, in the Cycle or "Great Year" - this topic is examined in all its bitter barrenness in Jaki's <i>Science and Creation</i>. We are Christian: we believe in the Strict Linearity of Time. This absolute linearity of Christian history is also found in Chesterton's <i>The Everlasting Man</I>: "It declares that <i>really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times</i>, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. [CW2:398-9, emphasis added] You cannot have a middle of a circle... or to put it another way, no circle can have its center on its edge.<br /><br />There is A LAST NUMBER to the Cosmos, and it WILL end. (The mystery of "end" is also something we shall consider another day, since it also makes people itch, like "infinity".) But the fact that we humans CAN add (unlike machines) suggests something infinite at work. In fact, we do have something infinite, and it is the very fact (among others) that we CAN imagine adding correctly, regardless of how huge a number, that we are distinguished from machines. And if you think about this a little more, you will begin to see into both "infinity" and "end"... but let it go for today.<br /><br />A good friend of mine, a brilliant engineer, once put it into a satirical "poem" (I think that is what he called it). I don't have his precise phrase to quote but it was something like "intelligent rivers perform addition." That is the whole point. A computer cannot add, or rather it adds only in the way in which a river adds its water to the ocean.<br /><br />But there is a greater point to be made, and I bring in the term "poem" intentionally, so that I can conclude with a Chesterton quote:<blockquote>In one of his poems, he says that abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing - these ideas, and twenty more, are all actually concentrated in the word "pontifical." In Francis Thompson's poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.<br />[GKC ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:603-4]</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-108003722025646642010-09-21T08:36:00.004-05:002010-09-21T09:03:20.277-05:00Tuesday's bit of Latin: omniBUSNot that I have loads of spare time, but since things seem to be a little too quiet these days on the INTERNET I thought I ought to start something. Ahem. I mean start another posting series. Also, since the word has actually made it down to even our diocesan paper that the CORRECTED form of the words for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is scheduled to begin use in Advent of 2011 - you know, sort of like a software upgrade: (Hee hee: "The Vatican today announced the release of "Mass 2.1" Ahem!) Even though this version is English and not Latin, I thought we ought to consider a little about Chesterton and Latin. <br /><br />To start with, let's see one of my favourite bits of Latin in GKC - one of those lovely places where an ending for the ablative plural has become a common word in English. Oh yes, very funny, but true.... But read it for yourself:<blockquote><br />The word "omnibus" is a very noble word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived from an ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very authoritative thunders: <i>quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus</i>. It is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy. A man might very consistently build a temple for all the tribes of men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design, and then call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not in democracy, <br />but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as democratic to call an omnibus a 'bus as it would be to call a democrat a rat.<br />[GKC ILN Jan 13 1917 CW31:22-3]</blockquote>GKC is quoting what is known as the "Vincentian Canon" (or rule) phrased by St. Vincent of Lérins (+ ca 440) "That must be regarded as true which is believed EVERYWHERE (<i>ubique</I>), ALWAYS (<i>semper</I>), BY ALL (<i>omnibus</I>)". [See e.g. Attwater, <i>A Catholic Dictionary</I>]<br /><br />One curious note relating to this is something I picked up in my explorations of molecular biology - there is an important enzyme called "ubiquitin" which might be roughly nicknamed "the everywhere stuff"... There are some other "ubi" compounds too, but you can hunt for them yourselves.<br /><br />Perhaps someday, someone somewhere will take up the question of whether the tech term "SCSI-bus" is a dative or ablative plural, and then discuss the root of this very odd noun and give the rest of its paradigm. (Hee hee.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-56775934795421839432010-09-16T11:29:00.002-05:002010-09-16T11:36:49.089-05:00Palin again: rRNA beyond the pale, or the suppressed pun?In this, my final posting of the summer, I will get political. Hee hee. Yes, in a rare foray into the maelstrom of the popular news, I reach in for a piece of verbal excitement, much as our Uncle Gilbert did - and behold I am rescued by a name and a word from the newspaper!<br /><br />Yes, I was pondering what I would write about for some time, in fact. There's lots of computing to talk about, and lots of science, and lots and lots of Chesterton to apply - he is, after all, a great bridge-builder, if not quite as the ancient Romans used the word <i>pontifex</i>, or the ancient Hebrews spoke of the order of Melchizedek... and I am not the engineer he was, but I try. I thought about starting a series of "Chesterton-related" books - but could hardly get past <i>The Phantom Tollbooth</I> and <i>The Miracle of the Bells</i> and <i>The Haunted Bookshop</i>... Or, if I had more guts-and-gumption, something on the INTERNET or even on the hilarious 14th century "Tweetbook" phrase <i>gaudent moderni brevitate</i>. The character limit is so silly, it feels Aztec (or is it Mayan) with their 260-day horoscope calendar - but I am far too busy to write such studies just now. Thinking of the INTERNET and the nearly complete collection of GKC's writings now available "for free" (as people say) made me apply a standard method of inversion, one of those rare "problem-solving" techniques which escape the moderns who delight in brevity like those who are employed in education: that is, I could consider some questions which the usual "search tools" cannot solve, even if there really was such a collection available - like, what Latin did GKC use. I explored that some time ago, and had a list somewhere... and something made me wonder what... Ah but I must not anticipate my pun. I wondered about GKC's use of a certain form of word, and was about to ask that question of AMBER (since I am the one who does the work, not my computer) But it seemed too dull as a topic - a verbal firework, indeed, but a fizzle. I had almost decided on starting a little "education" series on heraldry, since I have those five coats-of-arms from my Saga hanging on my laser printer for inspiration, and I had recalled from memory my little cheat-sheet I handed out at the seminar I gave some years ago at the Chesterton Conference. It would be fun, talking about the colors, such curious words: Or, argent, gules, azure, vert, sable - and the Law, and the Ordinaries, the fess, the pale...<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhig5dR5hLPD1GTArCIm1LVgXnGWpPrZ52qAfn0tQyXVVZGg0wgd0DBw52J2JGQhDqfBunc5hW283HpBW-VCwtEtH2owXfR129UOgQCLx5tHGZf2YfAUBdBX622qgPrJcsFc26Y/s1600/pale.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 125px; height: 151px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhig5dR5hLPD1GTArCIm1LVgXnGWpPrZ52qAfn0tQyXVVZGg0wgd0DBw52J2JGQhDqfBunc5hW283HpBW-VCwtEtH2owXfR129UOgQCLx5tHGZf2YfAUBdBX622qgPrJcsFc26Y/s320/pale.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517549711460890386" /></a><br />(For example, this arms is blazoned: Vert, a pale Or.)<br /><br />Then I stopped. Pale. Verbal fireworks. Oh my. GKC's use of... Well, what is a "pale"? In heraldry, this is a vertical band or stripe. It comes from the Latin <i>palus</i> = a stake, related to <i>pango</I> = I drive in, fasten. It comes up in the odd, almost antique sounding phrase "beyond the pale" which really means nothing more than "outside the fence". Chesterton uses "paling" (fence) over 30 times; we heard it used recently in his <i>The Ball and the Cross</i> where a staurophobe saw the cross repeated. And then, I noted the prefix in this word "paling" was the same five letters (though not of the same derivation) as the prefix in another famous word - the word which had been on my mind as one worth researching in AMBER: the word <i>palindrome</i>.<br /><br />We know that <i>drome</i> comes from the Greek "run" - a hippodrome is a place for horse-races. But what is this prefix PALIN?<br /><br />Ah, you say, and laugh, with smug running down your face. Doc, Doc! This is some political column! BORING.<br /><br />No it is not. I know who Sarah Palin is, and have my own opinions; they are irrelevant for my purpose today. You will find neither encomium nor obloquy here. (If you don't understand me, you had better go buy a dictionary. You'll need it when you go to read Chesterton; he uses them too.)<br /><br />But let us consider words. The Greek <i>palin</i> means "again" or "once more". It comes up in several very curious English words:<br />palimpsest = "scraped again"<br />palingenesis = "born again"<br />palindrome = "run again"<br />palinode = "sung again"<br />But since you have your dictionary out already you can consider the others as you wish. (To my knowledge GKC only uses one, and that only once; guess which.) For now let's just look at "palindrome" - or rather at palindromes.<br /><br />You know them. Words like "noon" and "radar". Sentences like "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." That one is perhaps the best known and most famous. They come up in other languages, too: one need not study very much Latin before one trips over that famous irregular verb <i>esse</I> - or <i>illi</i> or <i>ibi</i> or <i>non</I> or <i>ecce</i>. In a book called <i>Mother Tongue</I> [page 227] I found mention of two from the classical tongues:<blockquote><i>Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin</i></blockquote><br />Which the Greeks wrote on fountains: "Wash the sin as well as the face". And the Romans had this witty saying:<blockquote><i>In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni</i></blockquote>If Bilbo and Gollum had been trading Latin riddles, the challenge "We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire" would be answered by "moths" (or <i>tinea</I>).<br /><br />Now, of what earthly good are palindromes? Or are they just a silliness, a toy of the tongue, or prehaps more correctly, of the printed word?<br /><br />Well... besides being a kind of rarity, and hence interesting, they happen to arise in a very curious place, where they have what I would suggest is a rather startling purpose. When I was doing my doctorate, I got to become familiar with something called prokaryotic rRNA - the ribosomal RNA of bacteria, which was being studied by some of the biologists at that School-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. Among other things, I learned a little about the "shape" of rRNA. Remember what I said in previous columns, how letters have two "hands" - a left hand and a right hand - by which they chain together to form a word. In the same way the nucleotide "bases" of rRNA have two hands, a 5-prime hand and a 3-prime hand, by which they chain together to form the molecule of rRNA. These are around 1500 bases long, and have various amazing details which would take far too long to describe... maybe some other time. But one of the additional things about these "bases" are that they have a characteristic like letters - in fact, we use letters to name them: A, C, G, U. These letters, however, are unlike the written letters of language in that they have an additional property. We cannot pile a letter on top of another (Note, in Scrabble, we merely agree to let "up" mean left and "down" mean right.) These "bases" are able to BIND or link in a kind of vertical sense - yes, even while they stay in their places within the word! But they must obey a certain rule. The base called "A" may link with the base called "U". The base called "C" may link with the base called "G". And it is permitted that the base A "sit next to" a "G" base.... Anyway, this binding is called the "Watson-Crick" pairing, and one may even form palindromes according to this pairing, such as ...AAAGGGU.....ACCCUUU... <br /><br />Doc you are crazy. Why bother with all this?<br /><br />Yeah, well, that's what some biologists seemed to think too. They fuss about evolution and linked mutations and stuff like that. But you see there's something else going on. As Chesterton liked to say, it's too big to be seen. [See "The Three Tools of Death" in <i>The Innocence of Father Brown</I>] And perhaps you won't see it. It's not easy to guess unless you've been reading along with us.<br /><br />Normally, there are lots and lots of things we SEE but we do not OBSERVE. There are many of these, in our spoken language, and even more in our printed language. I have said several times how ancient Latin and Greek did not use something so simple and common - something we use constantly, something which if I left it out you would GO INSANE, even if you weren't reading my writing. Take a look:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2371/884/1600/Of2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2371/884/320/Of2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />It's the very simple character called the SPACE - ASCII 20 hex, if you want the technical term. They strung their letters and words together without spaces - ah, how much more advanced we are. (And now, since "the moderns rejoice in brevity" perhaps our twitbooks will ban that character, hee hee.) But without trying to get technical, the space plays an important part, even if it is no more than making something readable. <br /><br />So too, perhaps, the Watson-Crick palindrome plays a part. It may be suggested that these things play a role akin to the spaces - or, perhaps to make the argument a bit stronger, akin to the indentations in poetry. Now, I happen to know (since I read Chesterton) that not all indentation implies a rhyme scheme - for example I propose his poem that doesn't rhyme. You may wonder if I have completely lost my marbles, maybe got infected by those prokaryotes in the lab? Chesterton wrote a poem that doesn't rhyme? <br /><br />Oh yes... It's one of my favorites, too. I wonder if it's been reprinted. Ah well, I'll leave that to you for homework. Hee hee.<br /><br />But, as odd as it sounds, due to this matter of what the biologists call "linked mutations" - that is, when one base on <i>one side</I> of the palindrome changes, it is almost guaranteed that the corresponding one on the <i>other side</i> will also change, and to the exactly proper matching base. It appears that these palindromes form "helices" which hold the rRNA molecule in its proper shape... so in some sense, it is <i>irrelevant</I> what the bases "spell" as long as there are just enough to keep the two parts aligned and stuck together - and the rest of the thing at its proper shape. In the same way, we don't mind TOO much if there is a little MORE spacing between words, or a little less - this is the trick typographers use to make that elegant right-justified margin which is the trademark of tradition, and so repelling in this age of the "all-powerful" modern computer. Ahem. Yeah, that was being sarcastic: remember they cannot even add correctly! Oh my.<br /><br />I have just one more little item to add - maybe I should say one word. Hee hee. Perhaps it was lurking in my mind, as it was over a week ago when I saw the article, and I laughed, since no one wanted to mention Dodgson in the context. Maybe it was too striking - or maybe I just happen to read the right books - like Chesterton, who (thank God) read Dodgson, even if he was a math professor. (How many of you lit'ry folk read books by math professors? Or even blogg-postings by computer scientists? Oh, very good. Welcome to our family, sit down and make yourself comfortable, but be sure to fasten your safety harness it gets bumpy.) <br /><br />What word? you ask.<br /><br />Apparently there was some discussion centering on something which the newspaper spelled "REFUDIATE" - which it seems was used by someone named Palin. Palin again? Yes, indeed.<br /><br />And this word - which is not really a word at all, but a sort of verbal glitch - made people laugh. I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue or a typographical error, and it hardly matters. One of Chesterton's most profound scientific statements is based on a typographical error which I expect he encountered many times: <blockquote>...the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic" into the word "comic." It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.<br />[GKC ILN June 9 1906 CW27:206]</blockquote>It's too bad more astronomers and physicists have not encoutnered this typograpical error - maybe like me they do their own typesetting and proofreading, hee hee. Now this laughter is a good thing, as we know, even if, as GKC speculates in the last sentence of <i>Orthodoxy</I>, that Christ hid His own laughter from us. I could spend a whole column on this - and no doubt will, though I prefer to handle it in my fiction, as you may already know. Ahem.<br /><br />In that important reference work called <i>The Phantom Tollbooth</i>, Milo defeated the demon called the "Senses Taker" with laughter. Harry Potter tells Frank and George to work on their joke-shop, since: "I could do with a few laughs. We could all deal with a few laughs. I've got a feeling we're going to need them more than usual before long." [JKR <i>Goblet of Fire</I> HP 4:733; see note below] In other words, laughter may be important in the impending battle. And of course we can all recite Chesterton's most famous quote about angels being able to take themselves lightly - which is about the importance of laughter. (No wonder he would think it correct to say "<i>I'm</i> what's wrong with the world"!) <br /><br />But more than being simply a joke, this word "refudiate" happens to be an example of an important method of word-formation: a method which was practiced by one of the Great Authors of Literature, the mathematician named C. L. Dodgson. Perhaps you do not know Dodgson, or only know him under his logon screen ID or whatever the twitbook thing is called, hee hee. But since Chesterton happened to write about it, I will give you the references. It's grand:<blockquote>In my pure and ardent youth I had a proposal that the names of husband and wife should be not hyphened but telescoped. They could be made into portmanteau words, as Lewis Carroll made "Slithy" out of "Writhing" and "Slimy." In that case my imaginary married couple would not be called Ponderbury-Ballymulligan; they would be called simply Ponderbulligan or Banderpulgury. This would be more convenient for telegrams, if not for shipwrecks. One can see how swiftly and smoothly it would fit itself to most marriages of society.<br />[GKC ILN Apr 29 1911 CW29:78]<br /><br />Now, Lewis Carroll was a very Victorian Victorian. But he did identically the same thing; only he happened to know that it was funny, and therefore he did it for fun. He invented what he called "portmanteau words," with the sense of two words telescoped into one. Thus he explained that "brillig" is a combination of "brilliant" and "grilling"; or that "slithy" is a portmanteau of "lithe" and "slimy." This particular instance happens to illustrate what I mean when I say that I am not a mere partisan. The author of "Alice in Wonderland" is not an ideal being whom I revere, or hold up to be revered. In some respects he was much too Victorian a Victorian. On some matters he really was much too solemn. But he was not solemn about portmanteau words...<br />[GKC ILN Sept 12 1931 CW35:589-90]<br /><br />I am almost certain that many moderns suffer from what may be called the disease of the suppressed pun. I mean that, in men who ould disdain to make anything so vulgar as a joke out of a verbal coincidence, there is a subconscious movement of the mind to meet the sound of the word. Thus those who would denounce creeds (a Latin word for anything that anybody believes) are seldom or never, you will notice, moved to describe them by any milder name; they must have a word that sounds like a portmanteau of "crank" and "crabbed" and "greed." They cannot really let themselves go in reviling doctrine. It must be in reviling dogma. They would never sink so low as to make a positive pun about it...<br />[GKC <i>The Well and the Shallows</I> CW3:347]</blockquote>Ah, wonderful! Let us all strive to refudiate the grave and the glum by taking ourselves lightly. For homework, try to make up your own portmanteau word. Get it into the media somehow - at least post a comment with its derivation, meaning, and use in a sentence. Special bonus points to anyone who contrives one in Latin or Greek.<br /><br />P.S. If you dislike my quoting Harry Potter, recall that Aquinas quotes pagans - even St. Paul quotes pagans, Benedict XVI quotes Nietzche, and Chesterton quotes Shaw. We need to continually recall the friendship of GBS and GKC, always recalling that Chesterton could write about his foes in this way:<blockquote>I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.<br />[GKC <i>Heretics</i> CW1:46]</blockquote>I may be quite wrong too - but I hope to be honest, and I trust we shall remain friends. We need only look to Uncle Gilbert as a reminder.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-77315385520031347602010-09-11T08:35:00.002-05:002010-09-11T09:05:50.779-05:00Violence on the PlanesYeah, I almost choked at Holy Mass today when I heard that in the readings - and something about the destruction of the buildings in the north. The gospel (about the cure of the centurion's servant) was most reassuring, however - just as He did at Cana, our Lord can perform miracles-at-a-distance, and we surely need His power to heal and to restore us. We must recall that profound insight of Newman: "[Jesus] has, if I may so speak, the incomprehensible power of even making Himself weak" - an idea sketched for us in GKC's gorgeous Christmas card: "...the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle." [GKC TEM CW2:301] This is something neither His enemies nor ours can tolerate - and something which is their defeat: "The cross cannot be defeated - for it is Defeat." [GKC <i>The Ball and the Cross</i>]<br /><br />This day, a day when we failed to be vigilant, recalls John Philpot Curran's famous epigram on vigilance:<blockquote>The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.</blockquote>and GKC's comment upon it:<blockquote>...which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin...<br />[GKC <i>The Thing</i> CW3:312]</blockquote>The term "vigilance" reminds me of WATCHER, the monitoring tool which watched all our other machines and programs. It reminds me of how nearly every one of the 48 television monitors, each showing a different cable TV channel, were all showing the same thing. I also think of how I quoted Chesterton as we watched the big screens in our Control Room - the screens which showed not WATCHER, but something more terrifying, but NOT surprising - and how, soon after, I changed WATCHER to display the American flag:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjfD83cSaaL5msi1KnTTM8rztV7R466sG7ma5kFMcvVj0v80Przq9O67cuMzaOMs8Tc-D-hpbiB511MYMWuCC76gN_10O5a1-KsuArW3omGWfkLQsjXRTvIAD52EbVNJQSyv1BQ/s1600-h/watch2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjfD83cSaaL5msi1KnTTM8rztV7R466sG7ma5kFMcvVj0v80Przq9O67cuMzaOMs8Tc-D-hpbiB511MYMWuCC76gN_10O5a1-KsuArW3omGWfkLQsjXRTvIAD52EbVNJQSyv1BQ/s320/watch2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5244816725196147682" /></a><br /><br />And if you'd like more detail, click <a href="http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2007/09/dr-thursdays-thursday-post.html">here</a> for an account of how it happened. It's phrased in a fictional style, but it's a good approximation. And yes, I really did quote GKC...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-15039627951282689272010-09-09T10:33:00.002-05:002010-09-09T10:43:14.223-05:00Art and Technology, or, the Magic of Chiral Letters and TrainsOne of the odd lines I overheard at the Chesterton Conference was something regarding a tension or division between "art" and "technology". I laughed, since it is so <i>a-Chestertonian</i>. Note: I did not say <i>anti-Chestertonian</i>. It is not so much <i>against</i> GKC as much as "lacking" or "avoiding"; perhaps I should say <i>without</i> GKC. Do I mean this as some sort of unkind retaliation against whoever said it? Of course not. We don't go into such personal things here. Besides, it would not be quite right, as I don't have any actual statement about the matter to examine. Besides, I might as well go into a debate with Father Jaki about what he called the "Impassable Divide", which was his way of trying to examine the variety of fields of study. (He was too much of a student of Cardinal Newman to jump to the wrong conclusion about this, but more on that another time.) Rather, I just take the chance adjacency of these words - "art" and "technology"... No. I really need to say "chance <i>conflict</i>" there, though I will grab onto that "adjacency" for examination in just a little.<br /><br />But first I want to show you how Chesterton dealt with this sort of conflict. It's quite elegant, especially since his words provide a precise paradigm for us in this case. It comes up in a remarkably relevant way, where he is (as Father Jaki puts it) writing as a Seer of Science:<blockquote>The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is the Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not self evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the current notion that free thought weakens theism. It is the real world, that we see with our own eyes, that obviously unfolds a plan of things that fit into each other.<br />[GKC, <i>The Thing</i> CW3:170-1]</blockquote>We could do this as musicians when given violin parts in C and simply transpose for our E-flat and B-flat saxes. But it's funnier to me because we don't even have to do that much work! <blockquote>The general notion that art establishes a-technology is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Art is the Latin for skill. A-technology is the Greek for lack of skill. It is not self evident that lack of skill is the goal of skill.<br /></blockquote>Yes. You see, the Latin word <i>ars, artis</I> and the Greek <font face="symbol">tecnh</font> (pronounced "techE", with a long e at the end) mean the same thing - skill, human cleverness, "art" in the widest sense. The opposite to these terms is rather surprising: it is <i>natura</i> or <i>ingenium</i> in Latin, or <font face="symbol">fusiV</font> in Greek (pronounced "physis") - that is things which are <i>natural</i> in their work, and emphatically <i>not</i> human. (Incidentally, all this is from dictionaries and other references, and is not "my" opinion; if you don't like it, you'll have to take it up with them, and not me. Or perhaps you'd prefer to join me in my new university, which will deal with all these things in a just manner.) <br /><br />Now what is particularly funny about this is the real opposition (at least from the words themselves) is not between "art" and "technology" but between "technology" and "engineering"! Oh yes - engineering descends to us from <i>ingenium</I>, and really means "something you're born with". Amazing.<br /><br />But for Chestertonians - and indeed for all those who appreciate words like "catholic" (not upper-case) - we do not have a conflict; we do not face an impassable divide. We are following a well-trodden path; Newman and Chesterton and others have pointed the way to an excellent bridge. We know that God is just another Name for "truth" - even that atheist attests to this when (finding himself without God) he immediately created one as the device which detects truth! (Hee hee hee!) Just this past week I found another stunning link from Newman to Chesterton - and indeed to Duhem and Jaki. I can't give the whole essay, but I will just give the trigger sentence for you:<blockquote>Though sacred truth was delivered once for all, and scientific discoveries are progressive, yet there is a great resemblance in the respective histories of Christianity and of Science.<br />[Newman, <i>University Sketches</i> 14: "Supply and Demand: the Schoolmen"]</blockquote>Ah... does that sound familiar? Here's how Chesterton put it, in that classic debate between the Catholic MacIan and the Atheist Turnbull:<blockquote>[MacIan said:]"...there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill or down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever <i>can</i> progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church."<br /><br />"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically; "and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."<br /><br />"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable," answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks."<br />[GKC <i>The Ball and the Cross</i> chapter 8]</blockquote>I would suggest this excerpt when faced with the question, "Did Chesterton know of Pierre Duhem?" Duhem, of course, is the great French thermodynamicist and historian of science; next Tuesday marks the 94th anniversary of his death. He wrote the ten-volume <i>Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic</I> which examines in huge and meticulous detail the actual development of science during the Middle Ages. (See Jaki's <i>Science and Creation</i> chapter 10 "The Sighting of New Horizons" for details, or his biography, <i>Uneasy Genius: : The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem</i>.)<br /><br />It would be fun to go into this further - I know some people like such debates - but I want to go into something even more difficult today. Last week we talked briefly about "chirality" - the idea that the basic chemicals of life come in two forms, mirror images of each other, possessing the paradoxical sameness/differentness as the left hand and the right hand. (Though as Sheila points out, all living things use <i>only</I> the L-form.) Today I wish to tell you a little more about the mystery of right-and-left, or rather about that "adjacency" I mentioned a little earlier, and show you how it enters into another field of study. No, not chemistry, but literature.<br /><br />Oh yes. You see, I know where the bridge is - or perhaps I should say the Gate... and so I can "go in and out" (see John 10:9) It is remarkable (no, not my insight, but the truth of the thing) perhaps because it arises in such a strange and hard-to-see place that few ever spot it. It really takes a Chestertonian perspective, as we say over and over here: "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 <i>Tremendous Trifles</i> ch 1]<br /><br />That mystery arises for me in particular because I am a computer scientist, and have to deal with extremely detailed matters which very VERY few people ever touch, and most never even suspect even exist! Last November I posted the <a href="http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/11/prayer-and-wonder-or-mistake-about.html">story</a> of how I shocked an intelligent young man by showing him how a computer cannot add. (Well, speaking as a computer scientist, I <i>know</i> computers cannot add; after all, computers do not even deal with "numbers" - but people persist in thinking such silly things. Computers, however, will do what I tell them, as long as I tell them correctly, and then they do it very fast. Ahem.) Well, today I must tell you (who I am sure are also intelligent, though you may be older or younger, male or female) a little more about what computers can and cannot do... <br /><br />No. I won't. This is NOT a blogg about computers. I will use another analogy, one which I delight in, and which for me long antedates my awareness of computers. <br /><br />I live in a famous town, a town whose name appears on a very popular board game - for a number of reasons I do not care to mention it here. The name of this town happens to look like the English gerund for what one does with books - which may explain a little about me - but it is not pronounced like that gerund. I live just three blocks from the railroad (that's how the name appears on that board game) and I have known that railroad from a very early age. Perhaps you also like trains; children do tend to admire them - and we know how Chesterton admired them:<blockquote>For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter.<br />[GKC ILN July 21 1906 CW27:239]</blockquote>Here is yet another project for a wise student to pursue: GKC on trains. Ah. I must quote one other, to set up my argument correctly:<blockquote>The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!<br />[GKC <i>The Man Who Was Thursday</I> CW6:479]</blockquote>(Of course you must remember that "Bradshaw" means the book of train schedules.) Oh my, you look pale. Did I just say something evil? I <i>told</i> you this would be much more a cause of debate than my struggle over "art" and "technology". Let me say it again, in isolation, in case you missed the fighting words:<br /><br /><b>Man is a magician.</b><br /><br />Oh my oh my. <br /><br />Yes. Let us proceed with our lesson, shall we? Wands out, then, class. <br /><br />You don't have a wand? Oh yes you do... I have a bunch here on my desk. I use them a lot, even though I also use a computer. My favourite is made of a very special sort of wood, and contains a core which has a remarkable power... contained in that core are countless spells. Oh yes, let's say that NASTY word again...<br /><br />Spells.<br /><br /><br />(hee hee!) Have I made it clear yet what that wand is?<br /><br />Oh, perhaps not. (sigh) But then let's talk about what comes out of those wands. You see, as hard as it may be for you to realize, what comes out is just like those trains. While the wand is in your hand - ah - above the paper, it is like the empty track. It is nothing at all... it is a mystical expectation, it is that strange line from "Little Town of Bethlehem" about the "silent streets" filled with "hopes and fears of all the years"... or, as Chesterton told us about a writer with "writer's block":<blockquote>"He did no work lately; sometimes sat and stared at a blank sheet of paper as if he had no ideas." <br /> "Or as if he had too many," said Gabriel Gale.<br />[GKC "The Purple Jewel" in <i>The Poet and the Lunatics</I>]</blockquote>But then - ah, then, with a rush of noise like the Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost, with a blaze of fire and smoke (in the old days when they were steam-driven) comes the Engine... that first and most mystic of the mystical components of the train! Behind it, in that grand order, which is the First Rule of Heaven, comes a chain of cars, linked at their ends - and on they roll.<br /><br />But each must follow, according to that order. Not one can ever depart from the forward motion of the Engine... Once the handedness has been chosen, all the train cars, all the monomers (to use the chemistry term) must abide by the chosen direction.<br /><br />There is a mystery here. Yes, you can yap at me for pretending that there is some occult thing lurking in a common pencil - but I shall defend (as Chesterton's Gabriel Syme) that Man is a magician, and never more so as when he wields that mighty wand full of spells... er, spelling.<br /><br />The secret, of course, is that every single letter comes with two hidden and marvellous hands, and they are as distinct as our left hand from our right hand. Oh yes. Our letters are chiral. They are like the railroad cars, and they must follow the engine in proper order.<br /><br />Now you will not see them, if you pick up a Q or even an X, and examine it under a powerful magnifying lens. These hands aren't seen in that manner.<br /><br />However, if you have ever managed to see the OLD kind of printing press, where there are actual cases of type - that is, separate little chunks of metal, one for EACH letter - you will have a hint of those hands. You see, I am not talking about the SHAPE of the letters - some of which do possess some interesting symmetries. I am talking about the letters-in-themselves, in the sense that they are powerless unless they are combined into words. But when they are combined, they must abide by the rules of order. They must all stand on their "feet" and all with the "nick" facing in the same direction. (These are the technical terms applied to a single type block.) Yes, there really is a left hand of S and a right hand of H, and they join as mightily as two train cars (though usually not with quite the same crash; I've watched the making up of trains at the local train yard.) They also are like the amino acids - they only combine with the expenditure of energy, and the combination is signified by an advance along an ever-growing chain. That word "chain" is important; in computing, or rather in the branch of finite math where we study the theory of this sort of thing, we speak of "concatenation" - this comes from the Latin <i>catena</I> = chain, and refers to the act of joining two strings (two ordered collections) into one. Concatenation is reminiscent of the idea of "adding", and there are certain similarities, but there are also important differences - specifically there is NO difference, I mean there is no "subtraction"... but I must not go into this fascinating matter further today.<br /><br />The mystery I am trying to display for you is that these letters - which you are perceiving and yet paradoxically ignoring as you read my writing - these letters are just like a man with his hands spread out on either side. They are like the train cars, linking together at their ends. (You do NOT stack train cars one on top of the other, or side against side; those are not trains but wrecks.) Even when you play Scrabble or work a cross-word puzzle, you MUST abide by this rule: you will always truly link "left hand to right hand" even though you arrange the physical letters in a vertical sense. <br /><br />Yes, you can say that palindromes (words like "noon" or "radar") work both ways - they are ambidextrous, if you insist. But such are rare. You can also put your switch engine at the rear of the train and push it along - I've seen that done, but it is also rare.<br /><br />What is the point of all this? The point is my poor attempt at shining light on something you may have not ever noticed: that there exists in each letter two little "connectors" - a right hand and a left hand, just like the amino and the carboxyl groups in an amino acid (which build proteins), or like the 5-prime and the 3-prime hydroxyls in nucleotides (which build DNA or RNA), or like the two couplers at the ends of a freight car (which build a train). Those "hands" are bound, not to the letter in its graphical form, but to the letter-as-it-is. "S" has a certain shape, and as a Scrabble tile it may fit above or below, left or right; but as an idea it can be enigne, car, or caboose: it may <b>S</b>tart a word or come in the mid<b>S</b>t, or at the end of other letter<b>S</b> - and in each case it always keeps its right hand distinguished from its left. It is in this binding that the mystery and the power of WORD occurs: the distinction which keeps "GOD" from running into "DOG" or into "GDO" (short for "grid dip oscillator" a tool used by radio engineers) or keeps "LIVE" and "EVIL" apart.<br /><br />It is not for nothing that the wizards of fantasy speak of the power of a spell. We know what power there is in a spell. Remember that next time you pick up your pencil or pen - or when you see a train go by.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-55169617279547117122010-09-02T12:59:00.007-05:002010-09-03T09:18:50.188-05:002b or not 2bWow. I just spotted an amazing comment made on one of my earlier postings, to wit, the one on <a href="http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2010/08/positive-and-negative-triangles.html">positive and negative triangles</a>. Here it is:<blockquote><b>Sheila</b> writes: Ooh, I actually knew about the "handed" isomers of amino acids -- Dr. Marshner brought them up in our apologetics class! Only one isomer (I forget if it is the left- or right-handed version) works in the human body -- making the chances of proteins forming randomly in the primordial sludge even LESS statistically likely. <br />posted August 31 2010</blockquote>What a triumph - there is a theology professor SOMEWHERE who KNOWS about isomers of amino acids!<br /><br />Here, for example, is a rendition of the amino acid called alanine. Again, remember, there are two versions - here is one <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ3l-mRlVC7in4aTJWLNUSr8hn4WRUTU41NVCv9A6wksWt09F8zGmQsGw5TKnrbpby2i09qmVuIKb9kNiZdcUfG8aqiEq9xXpviLaWj7nl_CSM1n6TEUmID72YVj0WDSszPWp9/s1600/t4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ3l-mRlVC7in4aTJWLNUSr8hn4WRUTU41NVCv9A6wksWt09F8zGmQsGw5TKnrbpby2i09qmVuIKb9kNiZdcUfG8aqiEq9xXpviLaWj7nl_CSM1n6TEUmID72YVj0WDSszPWp9/s320/t4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512380077482098386" /></a>and here is its mirror...<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0wSgtub7TnJu13iEo3ak2spadGRWx-KLat0QEaOY-jwmYnDXxgqpIEwdCyJaEjqFrxkA4s-YTQEeHeknC6gUB-C6ubaAfVvCGOW6jmjE9T5X5sspAAJo36yaNnkPy4BFxXrsS/s1600/t4m.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0wSgtub7TnJu13iEo3ak2spadGRWx-KLat0QEaOY-jwmYnDXxgqpIEwdCyJaEjqFrxkA4s-YTQEeHeknC6gUB-C6ubaAfVvCGOW6jmjE9T5X5sspAAJo36yaNnkPy4BFxXrsS/s320/t4m.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512691276764420546" /></a><br /><br />This is excellent... and quite exciting. It may mean there are some philosophers who will have a clue about life and the real world. It is all very well to make odd and unattributed claims (as curiously humorous as they are) about papal encyclicals - but the truth of amino acids will stand no matter how many "philosophers" write journal articles against them or against their study. Perhaps, in this decadent time, there are some who do not believe in such things, as there are some who do not believe in the motions of the earth, or in the multiplicity of the chemical elements. I have no time for such silliness; I have real work to do. And real poetry to write. Indeed! I was able to hear Dr. Marshner at the recent conference, and I can readily imagine how he brought this important chemical fact to bear upon the moral and philosophical topics at hand. Such grand work gives us an excellent and most hopeful vision of greater things to come. And the mystery is far deeper, as we shall consider today.<br /><br />Since carbon has four bonds, oriented along the vertices of a tetrahedron, there peers out from this common chemical the Sign of the Cross - yes, to the despair of iconoclasts and - er - a certain tribe of staurophobes. <br /><br />Since this geometric truth is a bit difficult to describe, I will give you some pictures. But - er - since they are two dimensional, you will still have to exert your intellects, though not quite so much as if I only used words. <br /><br />In the first, we see a tetrahedron - that is, a four-sided thing, sort of like a pyramid, except in pyramids the bottoms are square, and here the bottom is triangular. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTQ-0xREVA5YaRTbiX3vD5HHCDbELuayut-UxbgyVedruwpRtHyxFV5NZJPmyO0uabKpBVWVMqlNuZQvCVpqeiTBlpHQ5kl5434zb5BBMuvT9Ncg0iCB8hyXY_r2_PRN8ZDMhV/s1600/t1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTQ-0xREVA5YaRTbiX3vD5HHCDbELuayut-UxbgyVedruwpRtHyxFV5NZJPmyO0uabKpBVWVMqlNuZQvCVpqeiTBlpHQ5kl5434zb5BBMuvT9Ncg0iCB8hyXY_r2_PRN8ZDMhV/s320/t1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512378237268140738" /></a><br />All four sides are triangles. You can make one yourself, it's fun. Just cut out four equilateral triangles - that is, where all the edges are the same length - and then tape their edges together. Even easier, just print this picture and then cut it out - DON'T cut into the diagram, just around the outside - then FOLD on the lines, and tape it up, and you will have yourself a nice little tetrahedron.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG68wcGZFC2pQcYccx4zPcKdBCKMr0ROOQ84VMbwXb0AVgeiX52A3jxSCUHIa3GO1_iXw3v6YHYDc9p9Sq-mZ4F-XyzFK2ZSH7TLPuTgb5GOzCSS8gkSmf-IDwYnfODWLdmCLF/s1600/tetra.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 318px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG68wcGZFC2pQcYccx4zPcKdBCKMr0ROOQ84VMbwXb0AVgeiX52A3jxSCUHIa3GO1_iXw3v6YHYDc9p9Sq-mZ4F-XyzFK2ZSH7TLPuTgb5GOzCSS8gkSmf-IDwYnfODWLdmCLF/s320/tetra.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512379465457496018" /></a><br /><br />Now for the intellectual part. Imagine a little ball floating in its middle - you got it? <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBrZ-eP1cr4wk4LMmFlEBBbSQtOh2BG5KAbaRlvD0BjA3Ngphs8VpqzSo_XFpGMDIRidKfDu5mW72gRAhEi1J7vrfWaYjvVPDrmVHBp174zxJ2GpKL8ee7lOZm8gmHUgsyfuVl/s1600/t2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBrZ-eP1cr4wk4LMmFlEBBbSQtOh2BG5KAbaRlvD0BjA3Ngphs8VpqzSo_XFpGMDIRidKfDu5mW72gRAhEi1J7vrfWaYjvVPDrmVHBp174zxJ2GpKL8ee7lOZm8gmHUgsyfuVl/s320/t2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512378611701979106" /></a><br />Good. Let's make it blue, just because I like blue. (Actually, in the usual color scheme it ought to be black, but you already saw that in the diagram of alanine.) <br /><br />Next, imagine four lines reaching out from the ball to the four CORNERS of the tetrahedron. (Or look at the picture.)<br /><br />All right. Now for the tricky part. Instead of looking at it from the SIDE of the tetrahedron, try looking at it from the EDGE:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ5fq_3VupikOLvPuYLNMrC5AJosMf2oGl-3-uFQssDEQmsTZ8QboYrFjg_BFUw4xxM7C727pTNG23xEiH2oFi98AgdmgPUrqbLlJj9KxdZyiUvQpcSt_RFuz_abD9HB44Uv3-/s1600/t3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 289px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ5fq_3VupikOLvPuYLNMrC5AJosMf2oGl-3-uFQssDEQmsTZ8QboYrFjg_BFUw4xxM7C727pTNG23xEiH2oFi98AgdmgPUrqbLlJj9KxdZyiUvQpcSt_RFuz_abD9HB44Uv3-/s320/t3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512379010415501682" /></a><br />Ah.... THERE IS THE CROSS.<br /><br />Those four lines represent the four single bonds of carbon. If you make several and then label them with letters, and try rotating them, you will see that there are TWO kinds, which work just like the left hand and the right hand - that is what is called "chiral" or "handed". <br /><br />Organic chemistry, then, contains its own very special hint - a kind of subtle reminder - of the Passion. It is eminently fitting; all the sciences and all the technical disciplines carry the burden, just as history and civics and literature and music... it's suggested in that very curious and disturbing comment about Christ's lament over Jerusalem:<blockquote>Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity.<br />[GKC <i>The Everlasting Man</i> CW2:339-340]</blockquote>If Chesterton can tie patriotism and poetry into the Great Story of the Crucifixion, I shall by no means refrain from tying in chemistry and three-dimensional graphics and all sorts of other matters. It may seem to be an inversion of St. Paul's restriction, "while I was among you I was determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" [see 1Cor2:2] It is rather a more extensive application of that clause from the Nicene Creed, "<i>per quem omnia facta sunt</i>" = "Through Him all things were made". If there were no rocks there could be no Calvary; if no plants, there could be no cross; if no iron, there could be no nails; if no moon, there could be no Passover to signal the proper date; if no sun, there would be nothing to announce the dire extremity of the death of God... if no humans, there would be no reason for Him to have suffered.<br /><br />Is it annoying to think of the cross always? <br /><br />Is it annoying to think of your mother and father, your spouse, your children?<br /><br />Is it annoying to think of One who loves you? Or the token of His love?<br /><br />However - we know the cross is annoying to some. You may recall that very interesting introductory chapter to <i>The Ball and the Cross</i>, the great debate between Father Michael and Professor Lucifer...<blockquote>"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this..."<br />"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.<br />"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, [vertical stakes; a picket fence] when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river."<br />Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.<br />"Is that story really true?" he asked.<br />"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world."<br />[GKC <i>The Ball and the Cross</i>]</blockquote>And so, we now see that this hated symbol stares out from the very essence of life... I once heard how a "certain country" banned a certain kind of army boot because it left tread-marks with a plus-sign... I don't know if they have also banned computer keyboards, along with ASCII code 2b, which produces that "+" character yet; I wonder if they will forbid coal, charcoal, oil, and diamonds - and end up forbidding all organic compounds - compounds containing carbon - including their own bodies. They too follow that man Father Michael describes; they too may be found in the river. It is a pity.<br /><br />Enough. Let us think more positive thoughts, then.<br /><br />You didn't catch the Hamlet pun, did you? Or did you? <br /><br />You should recall this famous line:<blockquote>If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, "To be or not to be - that is the question," then the massive medieval doctor [Aquinas] does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, "To be - that is the answer."<br />[GKC <i>St. Thomas Aquinas</i> CW2:489]</blockquote>It has fallen to computer science and the ASCII character set to link this great truth of ontology with the very Sign of the Cross. It is the sign that is opposed - but it is also the sign of reality. (The squares of imaginary numbers are negative; the squares of reals are marked with the cross, I mean a plus sign.) This universe, the only real universe, is the one which has sun and moon, rocks and trees, iron and all the rest - it has Man, and thus it has the Cross. <br /><br />P.S. I am aware that the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross comes later this month, on the 14th to be exact; but somehow this seemed to be a most fitting derivative of Sheila's comment, and I hope you will consult it again, either on the 14th, or during a future Holy Week. All things, after all, science and engineering as much as literature and history, must glorify God. And they do.<br /><br />P.S.#2: I forgot I had posted (quite some time ago) <a href="http://francesblogg.blogspot.com/2005/07/qwerty-parable.html">this poem</a> about this curious character.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-71969098163801842752010-08-31T08:03:00.000-05:002010-08-31T08:03:03.919-05:00Drinkers live longerDrinkers live longer than teetotalers, says <a href="http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/Food/drinking_alcoholic_beverages_3108100728.html">this</a> news article. I wonder why it didn't work with the Chesterton and Shaw?Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-69471823782642466652010-08-26T09:23:00.002-05:002010-08-26T09:38:28.927-05:00Looking at "Abbr." - or, the Mirror of LifeOne of the very best things one learns as one explores the vast cosmos - a trick hidden from most students, alas, and ignored by most of the modern industries - is that one can use knowledge from <i>one</i> field to make advances in <i>another</i> field. The little corner called "higher education" has tried to market this idea under the label of "interdisciplinary studies": they have "Physics for Poets", and (I presume) "Poetry for Physicists". Of course this only goes so far; there are what some call "Impassable Divides". I've seen them. I could tell you stories, but then today's column would be even more huge than it is going to be. So instead of telling you of the failures, I will tell you of the successes. As you might expect, they have to do with our Uncle Gilbert.<br /><br />Speaking as a scientist, one of the startling things I have found in Chesterton's writing is an honest admiration for true Science - Science "writ large" as Father Jaki always writes. If you wish a detailed study of this matter, consult Jaki's <i>Chesterton a Seer of Science</i>. One of the more delightful epigrams, and the one which perhaps exemplifies my point today, is this:<blockquote>The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.<br />[GKC <i>Heretics</i> CW1:113]</blockquote>If we really admire something... <br /><br />Ah well. Let me interrupt for a non-science interlude. I do NOT say <i>nonsense</i> there; please! That word "admire" comes from the Latin <i>mirari</I> = "to wonder at". In other words, we ought to have a sense of wonder at the engine. <br /><br />Earlier this week on the Duhem Society blogg I <a href="http://theduhemsociety.blogspot.com/2010/08/mystery-of-university.html">posted</a> a fascinating excerpt from a little book I am reading. (I'm still not done, it's a terrible shame to think it takes me this long to finish a book with less than 100 pages!) It was in connection with my comments about "a university" and Newman's famous book, and it was really an amazing statement:<blockquote>If there were no Catholic universities, the academic world would be the poorer for it. The reason Academe would be poorer is that it would lack an advocate of mystery.<br />[Francis J. Wade, S. J.: <i>The Aquinas Lecture 1978: The Catholic University and the Faith</i>, 4]</blockquote>It would take another book (much larger than Father Wade's) to properly handle that amazing idea. But the important thing is not that "Catholic" part, but the "mystery" part - though they are connected, and my purpose is not to argue that connection. My point is to underscore the MYSTERY.<br /><br />When we talk about "mystery" we usually understand something like one of GKC's Father Brown stories: an intellectual puzzle, phrased in a traditional form of literature, and brought to a clever and (hopefully) unexpected resolution - indeed, to a <i>surprising</I> resolution. The theological underpinnings of Christianity have long spoken of Mystery in a somehow related sense, though here there is not usually the sense of an "intellectual puzzle". In religion, "Mystery" is tied up with the term "Mystic" - meaning a person who touches or perhaps perceives a Mystery. Let us hear Chesterton who has done truly great work on elucidating this difficult matter:<blockquote>A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. ... no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is <i>always</i> comprehensible - by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. ... Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass; He sees every flea as a giant - perhaps rather as an ogre.<br />[GKC <i>William Blake</I> 4, 131-2, 155]<br /><br />Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.<br />[GKC <i>Orthodoxy</i> CW1:230, 231]</blockquote>Well, I could go on, but clearly this is another wonderful research topic. The point you see, is that one begins to realize that there is always something <i>more</I>... it is grasping that reason itself requires an initial commitment to something unreasoned (though NOT unreasonABLE) - the acceptance of some truth exterior to that proven, or provable. Again, I am NOT going into this here as much as it needs to be gone into - but I do have something to say, and I want to get to it.<br /><br />In the course of my work (Ah!) I have relied heavily upon all this, as well as upon that most practical line from <i>Heretics</I> about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the thirteenth century. One of the links provided by this mysticism was the one which gave me an elegant way of handling the daily transport of some 17,000 files to-and-from a location in the Rockies to our location somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was not my idea; it was God's; it was how He manages transport of messenger RNA within eukaryotic cells. (I got it from reading a book on biochemistry.) Another came from the famous <i>Gray's Anatomy</i>; I've written about that one in my book on Subsidiarity, which is still awaiting a publisher. But there is more to the mystery of mystery - and aptly enough, it touches on the mystery of life itself.<br /><br />But I will get there by a kind of pun - the pun in my title, represented by the symbols "abbr." As you may know, this is nothing more than the abbreviation for the word "abbreviation".<br /><br />Here, I shall delete a whole extraneous diatribe about the so-called "problem-solving skills" one continually hears about from "educators" and simply teach you another of them, one of the more powerful known to computing. It is simply "abbr." - the idea of self-reference, though we have a more formal name and call it "recursion". No, I am not going to lecture on that formalism, or teach you factorial (surprise!) or make comments about the Peano axioms and mathematical induction. Rather, I want to tell you about how it happens in life.<br /><br />Life - when we learn about it at the molecular level - consists in two very unusual things, which are really one thing. Life is a complex system of a variety of molecules - most of which are complex collections of carbon and three or four or five other elements (some call this CHONPS) - but they are busy molecules, reacting with each other, or more importantly NOT reacting with each other. That is because they are all collected within some water, and are at what we call "physiological temperature" - they are warm, and so are bumping around within that water. One would not be wrong to claim "Life's one big pool party" - if you look through that microscope GKC mentioned in connection with Blake.<br /><br />But as you have heard before, there is a mystery to life. It is most simply phrased, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Nowadays, since we know a little more about it, we could say it a little differently, but I don't want to go into a lot of that detail now. I do hope you've heard the term "DNA" by now, since we need to talk about it next.<br /><br />The mystery isn't so much that there's a pool party. The mystery is that one pool party can give rise to another and now there are two. How this is done involves things like DNA and RNA and two marvellous engines called "polymerase" and "ribosome" (yes I am skipping all sorts of tech details here). <br /><br />But I won't skip all of the details.<br /><br />Just as I told you about "abbr." and the computer-science problem solver called "recursion" I do have to tell you this much about life. The DNA, you see, contains the exact instructions to build those two engines. Oh it seems very readily understandable that one could "copy" DNA into another DNA. Somehow. We have photocopiers, don't we? We can make a copy of a piece of paper. <br /><br />Ah, now here comes the mystery.<br /><br />Obviously if that paper is a blueprint for the photocopier, we could make another copy of the blueprint. Yeah, that's nice, but the thing is we need a copy of the photocopier itself.<br /><br />There - you see it? We have a self-reference. We have "abbr." We have recursion.<br /><br />Yes, the DNA code (they call it the "genome") contains instructions to build the polymerase and the ribosome, and all the other tools those machines require. (It also contains instructions for other things - building the heart, or the skin, or the eye - all that.) But the "common denominator" to life is this self-reference, the idea that somewhere in the 3,000,000,000 bases of DNA the instructions say "and don't forget to make a copy of these instructions".<br /><br />Now for the mystery in the other sense.<br /><br />In that other technical work I do, which some call "prayer" I often say the rosary, or what we could call the "hand-held gospel". One day I was saying the "Second Glorious Mystery" during which we consider the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. As you no doubt know, this is mentioned just at the conclusion of the Gospel of St. Luke and also in its sequel "Acts of the Apostles". Also associated with this event is the "Great Commission" given at the conclusion of St. Matthew's gospel, which I will quote:<blockquote>Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.<br />[Mt 28:19-20]</blockquote>And somehow I started thinking about DNA and life and then.... OH. Well... how very curious. In the very last <i>command</i> of our Lord, what do we find?<br /><br />"Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you"<br /><br />BUT THIS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS HE COMMANDED.<br /><br />Hence it is recursive. It is self-referential. It is like the ribosome code appearing in DNA, or like "abbr." Wow! (hee hee) In fact, this one phrase constitutes the Life of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ on earth, since it constitutes the replication process in itself. The "increase and multiply" of Genesis is here renewed, and life takes on a whole new meaning - even though it is still mysterious.<br /><br />(What does all this mean? Did "Doc" explain life (in DNA)? Did he explain the Church? Did he even explain this "recursion"? )<br /><br />Not really. I tried to show you something - put it out into view for you to look at. <br /><br />(And why did you bother mentioning the mirror? You didn't say anything about mirrors.)<br /><br />Well, that's part of the mystery - a mirror is a kind of simple symbol of recursion. Recursion is nothing by itself - a mirror shows nothing in the dark. But there is something strange - something mystical about this idea, just as there is something about recursion and the divine design of life (the biological or the kind Jesus meant when He said "I am the life").<br /><br />Ah well. Since I didn't do so well with this prose approch, I will try a poetic one, and then leave you to ponder the matter. Some years ago I wrote a poem which tries to explain about mirrors and glass - or what a friend of mine calls "the strange color of the nearby" - but perhaps that too is a mystery. Well, try it anyway. <blockquote><b>Mirror and Glass</b><br />"But glass is a very beautiful thing, like diamonds; and transparency is a sort of transcendental colour." <br />G. K. Chesterton, <i>The Poet and the Lunatics</i><br /><br />There are some colors none have seen:<br />Like ultra brown and infra green,<br /> Fluorescent black and vivid gray; <br /> All those I hope to see some day...<br />(Perhaps, because I’ve dropped some hints<br />The colorists will brew those tints!)<br /> But there are two I see quite near<br /> And on reflection it is clear<br />Neither one will ever be made<br />While the laws of light are obeyed.<br /><br />[Copyright © 1998 by Dr. Thursday. This poem appeared in <i>Something Good To Read</I> for April 29 1998 and is used by kind permission of the Editor-in-Chief.]<br /></blockquote><br />Er - having quoted myself I felt it not appropriate to end that way. So I shall give you one further bit of GKC which may help a little:<blockquote>The sublime words of St. John's Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? [1 John 4:20, also John 1:18, 6:46] If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings.<br />[GKC <i>William Blake</i> 102]</blockquote><br /><br />P.S. On re-reading this, I think it will be necessary to say some more about "mystery". But I will do that another time. If you want a thrill, however, try re-reading the scene from Easter Sunday about the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and re-think it in terms of the classical "detective fiction" you know about. It's uncanny.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-15042559138618392942010-08-24T15:35:00.000-05:002010-08-24T15:35:01.231-05:00Behold and See 5<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDos6e8nKue82Xi8prWmf5AdExO5Fo7iYhctteCXeth-wKYEwF0XtxzKyLbN6CEQ1MbJ0999V0XdITBXkEslX0Px9rnhoRMea0UgjY6Vs37-ShTEOPVDrRMBzhIxs2TkogETJs7w/s1600/BAS5-both-spread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDos6e8nKue82Xi8prWmf5AdExO5Fo7iYhctteCXeth-wKYEwF0XtxzKyLbN6CEQ1MbJ0999V0XdITBXkEslX0Px9rnhoRMea0UgjY6Vs37-ShTEOPVDrRMBzhIxs2TkogETJs7w/s320/BAS5-both-spread.jpg" /></a></div>New for homeschoolers, <a href="http://www.chcweb.com/catalog/Exclusives/WhatsNew/BeholdandSee5/product_info.html">Science for grade 5</a>, written by our own Gilbert columnist David Beresford.Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-12028586193660986392010-08-23T21:24:00.000-05:002010-08-23T21:24:38.701-05:00First Day of the 3rd Year of Chesterton Academy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRFuBuhA41sGzOjYNKE7e57WV-UrBQuUPo8xHIk5UBS1XXu7PBj5DwafAWtxPPq3M9TQn7c-3odSzwDmtMOKS8S7V4UojLqa9bnWb02NJ9ShxwO3YN7_IFzTttppkiEupDTQy34g/s1600/First+Day+2011.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRFuBuhA41sGzOjYNKE7e57WV-UrBQuUPo8xHIk5UBS1XXu7PBj5DwafAWtxPPq3M9TQn7c-3odSzwDmtMOKS8S7V4UojLqa9bnWb02NJ9ShxwO3YN7_IFzTttppkiEupDTQy34g/s320/First+Day+2011.JPG" /></a></div>These are the lucky kids who attend Chesterton Academy, a school based on ideals put forth in Chesterton's writings.<br />
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This is the third year of operation, and the school is obviously growing by leaps and bounds.<br />
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Congratulations, Chesterton Academy!Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-68381890098018488402010-08-19T11:25:00.002-05:002010-08-19T11:34:29.173-05:00To See Things As They AreAs I mentioned last week, I had to leave the Conference early when something came up at home requiring my presence on-site. What I forgot to mention then - either at the Conference or in my LENGTHY gurgling last week - was the splendid relevance to one of the truly great quotes from our centennial text, one which I delight in appending to my e-mails, and which is a constant source of irritation to Luddites:<blockquote>I have often thanked God for the telephone.<br />[GKC <i>What's Wrong With the World</I> CW4:112]</blockquote>As I have read the book, I am well aware of the context; I know, far better than most, how difficult technology can be, to use or to be burdened with. (Hee hee! Like the centurion I know what it means to be under authority [Mt 8:9]: to have my cell phone go off and summon me to assist!) Nevertheless, let us recall that it is GOOD to thank God for the telephone, just as we should thank Him for beer and Burgundy. [See <i>Orthodoxy</i> CW1:268] These are indeed human constructions, but they are made with divine gifts. Oh yes: do not make the mistake (as some environmentalists do) of thinking man-made things have nothing to do with God. Beer and telephones are made from materials of physical creation - which are God's gifts, just as wood enters into violins and ground up minerals into tubes of oil paint. But how much more should we thank Him when we recall that these things have been devised by the great gift of the human intellect, and indeed not just by a single man, but by the cumulative power of millennia, summed up and passed on. The gifts of language, of coherent speech - indeed, of coherent thought.... did WE HUMANS invent them <i>ex nihilo</I> from nothing, all by ourselves? Oh no, they were given to us, by God, if only by inspiration. Why would anyone have thought to drink water in which some wheat grains had rotted, or some long-forgotten grape juice? Perhaps it was the 99 percent desperation (hee hee) of a thirsty farmer... Ah, inspiration. But more importantly, education. Most of the time we do no more than pass such gifts on to others. Baking bread or weaving cloth, brewing beer or designing telephones - all these arise in the same fashion as art. <br /><br />Caution: do not imagine there is some distinction between art and technology. As GKC mentions about science and agnosticism in <i>The Thing</I> CW3:170, this is an error caused by not knowing Latin and Greek, since <i>techne</i> is <br />Greek for "art", a set of rules or method of doing. <br /><br />You may call it art or you may call it technology, but under either sense <i>we must be grateful</I>. It is, as we say at Holy Mass, truly right and just to give thanks to God, and a telephone no less than a sunset glorifies Him - in fact, the telephone glorifies Him more than the sunset, for human choice and human activity enters into its making, and even the work of a fallen human is worth far more than a mere stellar furnace, no matter how "artistic" (with the casual sense of "pretty"), how useful, or how large.<br /><br />I mentioned the concept of "passing on" of human abilities, and used that mystical word "education" - which is what I wish to write about today. And it relates to my introductory, since when my call came and I left the Conference, I was absent from the lecture on Newman and Chesterton - and this man, John Henry Cardinal Newman, is one whom we as Chestertonians ought to know more about.<br /><br />Perhaps someday there will be a real study made of JHN vis-à-vis GKC... I know that Father Jaki has a book and several essays on Chesterton, and at least four books and several essays on Newman, but (as far as I know) he has not set them adjacent and examined them together. Possibly the lecturer (whom I missed) did this; perhaps others have, and hopefully others will, very soon. We need it. But let us see just a little, in a kind of exploratory manner. I think some interesting things will arise.<br /><br />But let us, as Chesterton often did, begin our investigation in another place. The following quote is not from either GKC or JHN, but from a mystery fiction detective novel book. In it, a wise and ornery detective is comforting and assisting a young girl who had been seduced by Bad Books...<blockquote>"...here are these three Russian crutch-walkers on the table by the bed. We'd better get rid of them now."<br />There was a whirr of leaves and then three separate thuds as Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Checkov flew out of the open window and struck the bole of an oak tree.<br />"The idea is," explained H.M. [the detective] "I want you to read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and <b>Chesterton</b> and Conan Doyle. They're dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off anybody at tellin' a story..."<br />[John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson, <i>Night at the Mocking Widow</I> 219, emphasis added]</blockquote>Oh yes!<br /><br />Now, before you get up in arms about this censorship - or the even more curious list of recommendations, let us visit something even more anger-making. I want you to be good and emotive now so that in a little while you'll have gotten it all out, and THEN you can sit back and read this again and then begin to think about things.<br /><br />So let us next visit the Index. Oh yes. The horrible intrusion of Papal Power into the literary realm! Yes, well... Just a word or two, you know. I think it is rather funny, especially since I obtained a copy of the Index for 1930 and explored the more than 500 pages of titles and authors it contains. I've bumped into many things in my travels as a computer scientist, but I would guess that over 99 percent of these forbidden titles are unknown, except to scholars, and I doubt that even they could summarize the contents of even one. What's funny for me to imagine is that these days the only thing on the New Index (as devised by the Media and Higher Education) would be papal encyclicals. (I feel the urge to misquote Chesterton here: "We do not need censorship by the Pope. We have censorship of the Pope." [cf <i>Orthodoxy</I> CW1:321]) Hee hee! <br /><br />But to return to the Index: There were very few that I had ever heard of, even as titles, though a couple were surprising, like Victor Hugo's "<i>Les misérables</i>" and Blaise Pascal's "<i>Pensées</I>". I was discussing this with another young friend at the conference, and I pointed out that the reason for the Index was NOT to stop real intellectual study, but to restrain uninformed people from following dubious or misleading arguments. I said there is a really big difference in the various forms of censorship. Specifically, no reasonable person would give a book on calculus to a first grade student! <i>But this is NOT censorship</i>. It is merely the acknowledgement that one who does not know even the basics of addition, to say nothing of algebra, cannot fathom how that long curly S-shaped integral sign stands for an infinite number of additions... (Not precisely, I know, but let us not do calculus today.)<br /><br />Ah... perhaps you begin to see what I am trying to point out?<br /><br />No? Not yet. Perhaps I wondered off too far. (Not likely... ahem!) Ah well, I am just trying to sketch something. Let's keep going - but let us go into Newman now, and maybe he will help illuminate the matter...<blockquote>Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body. Boys outgrow their shape and their strength; their limbs have to be knit together, and their constitution needs tone. Mistaking animal spirits for vigour, and over-confident in their health, ignorant what they can bear and how to manage themselves, they are immoderate and extravagant; and fall into sharp sicknesses. This is an emblem of their minds; at first they have no principles laid down within them as a foundation for the intellect to build upon; they have no discriminating convictions, and no grasp of consequences. And therefore they talk at random, if they talk much, and cannot help being flippant, or what is emphatically called "young." They are merely dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things as they are.<br />[JHN <i>The Idea of a University</I>, Preface]</blockquote>Did your "Chesterton Quote" alarm just go off? Ah, good - I thought it would. YES, now do you see why I am so thrilled? Is this not the very focus, the burning hearth, the altar of the gods of the home - or what Tolkien calls the Secret Fire of Anor? Well, maybe not, but it certainly is something remarkable. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you want to debate what "liberal education" means - or what "liberal" means, or quarrel about this view of boys. But let's just hear that critical phrase again, but set into first-person plural, and whatever tense (iussive?) this might be:<br /><br />We must begin to <b>perceive things as they are</b>.<br /><br />Where's that in Chesterton? Oh, you goose. It's just a hair's-breadth away from the THE QUOTE, better (and more accurately) known as this grand statement of Father Brown:<blockquote>"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."<br />[GKC "The Oracle of the Dog" in <i>The Incredulity of Father Brown</i>]</blockquote>And this, in a nutshell, is Newman's argument of at least two of his Discourses from his masterful <i>The Idea of a University</i>.<br /><br />So what is Doc getting at? Keeping calculus books away from little kindergardners? Chucking Russian novels out the window? Huh? Some old-fangled education scheme? What?<br /><br />At the very least, I am getting at the real relevance of Newman to our work, and to an application of Chesterton to our consideration of Newman's writing. Sure, I advocate chucking certain books out of windows - yes, even calculus, if the child is not prepared. (Not for always, you understand. But the first time your son holds a bat in his hand you don't ask a pro pitcher to show him a fast ball.) And I advocate the reading of exciting stories with distinct good and even more distinct evil - and not just for children. Let me quote Newman again:<blockquote>Our desideratum is, not the manners and habits of gentlemen; - these can be, and are, acquired in various other ways, by good society, by foreign travel, by the innate grace and dignity of the Catholic mind; - but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.<br />[JHN <i>The Idea of a University</I>, Preface]</blockquote>Ah, did your GKC quote sensor beep at you again? Check this out:<blockquote>To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think... The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought. <br />[GKC <i>The Catholic Church and Conversion</I> CW 3:106]</blockquote>But I find that GKC's mention of "connected thought" leads me right back to the very same place in Newman:<blockquote>When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. But, if consistency of view can add so much strength even to error, what may it not be expected to furnish to the dignity, the energy, and the influence of Truth!<br />[JHN <i>The Idea of a University</I>, Preface]</blockquote>There is far more on this which we must explore, but it will have to be on another occasion. If you have a copy of Newman's book, please read it - or re-read it. If not, I urge you to GET a copy. No, not just borrow it; you will want it, more and more, as time goes on. Please do continue your reading of GKC, but also make a start at Newman. If you want to really deal with what GKC "Education, or the Mistake About the Child" you will need Newman.<br /><br />And please keep this famous Chesterton line in mind:<blockquote>...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.<br />[GKC <i>Tremendous Trifles</i>]</blockquote>Don't you feel an urge to study in Chesterton's own school? Remember that this was nearly the last command of our Lord, "Go and <i>make disciples</i> of all nations". [Mt 28:19] Some translations say "go and teach"; remember that the "disciple" in Latin has the sense of "student". You may get upset if I tell you the Greek looks a lot like "mathematics", but it does. Let us beg our Lord for the grace the blind man begged:<blockquote>Lord, that I may see! [Luke 18:41]</blockquote><br /><br />P.S. I find, upon re-reading this, that I present a certain tone respecting "Catholicism" in regard to education. I don't have any brief way of decomplexifying this just now, except to claim that I could write a lengthy <i>distinguo</i> about what it means. Just as a simple caution, it is not said as a way of "dissing" or condemning those of other beliefs. Perhaps it may help if you recall that "University" and "Catholic" differ only as "Latin" and "Greek" - but even that will mislead. I will just have to let it stand as it is, and hope to address the matter more fully, at another time, in another place.<br /><br />Also: I have, as you may infer, a very special interest in this matter. You see, I am involved in the foundation of a new University, much as Newman was, and facing the same trials and difficulties. But I have at least this advantage: not only do I have Newman's own writing. I also have Chesterton's. I also hope and pray for their intercession in the effort, and the support of some brilliant young people, some of whom were in attendance at the Conference. Well, actually, perhaps I support them. We work together on such things, after all; we know there are many gifts but the same Spirit.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-43317930959179756122010-08-17T20:19:00.000-05:002010-08-17T20:19:02.770-05:00How to Explain?It is so difficult when people crucify others for misspeaking during a public speech.<br />
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If you go <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/13/okeefe-nadir-morality/">here</a>, you'll find some particularly difficult people making fun of James O'Keefe. This seems to be an afternoon's pastime for some of them, who have never misspoken themselves.<br />
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What I think James meant to say was that people in public office should be monitored, and that this was a good use of one's moral judgment: To keep watch over what those who claim to represent us do and say.<br />
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They don't know Belloc (spelled Beloch on the site). They think Mount St. Mary's invited James to speak.<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="AmChestertonSoc" data-related="veritasvisuals">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-52913944806410781882010-08-17T20:17:00.000-05:002010-08-17T20:17:26.526-05:00Just Discovered: lost commentsI was wondering what happened to the comments that usually come when one posts. Apparently Blogger took it upon itself to moderate the comments without my knowing where the comments lingered while waiting my moderation.<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="AmChestertonSoc" data-related="veritasvisuals">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19678732.post-69333293590525502542010-08-13T15:22:00.001-05:002010-08-17T20:17:49.514-05:00James O'Keefe at the Conference<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_MVt62MGmOg?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_MVt62MGmOg?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="AmChestertonSoc" data-related="veritasvisuals">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Nancy C. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169395014931291729noreply@blogger.com0