Introducing: Dr. Thursday

Dear Readers of the ACS Blog,
Due to some circumstances, one bad one which is health related, and if you send any prayers up for me, I would appreciate them; and one good one, which is that I am in the process of trying to write a book, I am going to temporarily put Dr. Thursday in charge here.

Dr. Thursday is a great friend of mine, an avid and intelligent, if not brilliant, Chestertonian; who has been involved in the ACS for longer than I have and who has helped me tremendously with every Chestertonian project I've ever attempted; he will be a sure guide, probably taking this blog to new depths and with other spins and interests, should keep things here quite interesting.

I may still post if something is important. Or you may find me in the comment box.

And since Dr. Thursday has already received his Summer Movie Issue (and I haven't), he might have things to say about that even now.

So, please give a warm welcome to.............Dr. Thursday! (clap, clap, clap....)

Report from Dr. Thursday

I just checked my e-mail and saw I had this report from Dr. Thursday for the part of the conference I missed:

There are lots of great used books for sale. Very interesting stuff here.

On Thursday night:

1. Dale gave the opening talk on Thursday and GKC - how vital his work is today, even more than when he first wrote.

2. Then GKC himself spoke - (Chuck Chalberg in disguise, who does GKC on the EWTN show) - using The New Jerusalem he told of Islam, of his trip to the Holy Land, and a number of timely comments about this important topic.

Then we sang Happy Birthday to Dale and had cake.

This morning:

1. a talk by this lunatic computer scientist - there were all kinds of technical difficulties - "Science, you see, is NOT infallible!" he told us, quoting GKC. But most of his talk seemed to be about dragons and long words and The Phantom Tollbooth.

2. Due to circumstances, I missed some of this talk, about GKC and jogging past lamp-posts, and how the light from the street lamp gives a clue to GKC's view of reality.

Time is flying, and I must go. Thanks for your prayers...

--Dr. Thursday

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

Another excellent post from Dr. Thursday, thanks so much for his Thursday work here.

Vice Squad

I am busy at present, and was unable to formulate an interesting commentary on another book in our serious of "Books GKC Read" which are available from Dover Publications. Don't worry there are plenty more to consider. But for today, since I have just seen an interesting post linking to a Chesterton quote about cigars, I thought you might enjoy this fragment of GKC, and also the story behind the story...

--Dr. Thursday

...numberless Americans smoke numberless cigars. But there does exist an extraordinary idea that ethics are involved in some way, and many who smoke really disapprove of smoking. I remember once receiving two American interviewers on the same afternoon; there was a box of cigars in front of me, and I offered one to each in turn. Their reaction (as they would probably call it) was very curious to watch. The first journalist stiffened suddenly and silently, and declined in a very cold voice. He could not have conveyed more plainly that I had attempted to corrupt an honourable man with a foul and infamous indulgence, as if I were the Old Man of the Mountain offering him the hashish that would turn him into an assassin. The second reaction was even more remarkable. The second journalist first looked doubtful; then looked sly; then seemed to glance about him nervously, as if wondering whether we were alone; and then said, with a sort of crestfallen and covert smile: "Well, Mr. Chesterton, I'm afraid I have the habit."

As I also have the habit, and have never been able to imagine how it could be connected with morality or immorality, I confess that I plunged with him deeply into an immoral life. In the course of our conversation I found he was otherwise perfectly sane, he was quite intelligent about economics or architecture, but his moral sense seemed to have entirely disappeared. He really thought it was rather wicked to smoke. He had no "standard of abstract right and wrong": in him it was not merely moribund, it was apparently dead.

The culture that is concerned here derives indirectly rather from New England than from Old America. It really does not seem to understand what is meant by a standard of right and wrong. It has a vague sentimental notion that certain habits were not suitable to the old log-cabin or the old home-town. It has a vague utilitarian notion that certain habits are not directly useful in the new amalgamated stores or the new financial gambling-hell. A man does not chop wood for the log-hut by smoking; and a man does not make dividends for the Big Boss by smoking; and therefore a smoke has a smell as of something sinful. Of what the great theologians and moral philosophers have meant by a sin, these people have no more idea than a child drinking milk has of a great toxicologist analysing poisons. It may be to the credit of their virtue to be thus vague about vice. The man who is silly enough to say, when offered a cigarette: "I have no vices," may not always deserve the rapier-thrust of the reply given by the Italian Cardinal: "It is not a vice, or doubtless you would have it." But at least a Cardinal knows it is not a vice; which assists the clarity of his mind. But the lack of clear standards among those who vaguely think of it as a vice may yet be the beginning of much peril and oppression.

[GKC ILN Feb 5 1927, CW34:250-252]

Now: Who is this Cardinal? Ah...

In The Master Diplomat subtitled "from the life of Leo XIII" by Rev. Robert Quardt (Alba House, 1964), page 105, is this:

For a time an artist was working in the Vatican who was an accomplished painter, but otherwise a rather irresponsible fellow. Leo knew this, but while he was watching the man at work one day, he became so enthused over hes capability that he wanted to reward him. This was done by offering him a sniff of snuff, which however, was declined by the artist with the very rude remark: "Holy Father, I really am not a victim of this vice." To this gauche remark Leo instantaneously retorted: "If this were a vice, you would have had it a long time ago."

G. K. Chesterton - A Superlative Engineer

I am late, but at least I write after lunch - and I shall post so as to leave our Roman Traveller's great posting atop mine. I am glad she is home safely! What a great adventure. Now she can write a book: What I Saw In Roma. Hee hee.

Again, I take the dragon by the horns, or perhaps I ought to say by the violas, a far more hazardous instrument. (Musicians tell me there are far more jokes about the viola than about any other instrument.) I know how grave a risk I run in my constant harping (viola-ing?) on the greatness of our Uncle Gilbert K. Chesterton as a scientist. I shall dig myself a hole seven times deeper by claiming GKC to be a superlative engineer as well. And some former co-workers, perhaps former fellow students, shall write me nasty e-mails, wanting to see his blueprints, his bridges, his engines, his valves or his ATM NICs, his GUIs and APIs, his flowcharts or his circuit diagrams... (I remember Lucy berating Schroder about how Beethoven never had his picture on a bubble-gum card: "Chesterton doesn't have a unit of measure named after him, does he? How can you say he was a great engineer if he doesn't have a unit of measure named after him?" Hee hee. Though there is a unit called the gilbert, the unit of magentomotive force, equivalent to 10 over 4 pi ampere-turns. Oh yes.) And I shall receive irate phone calls: "Name one IC he worked on, one satellite he helped launch, a bridge he built..."

He has done more, far more. His engineering is of a kind which is far harder than those simple tasks. Remember, he wrote "The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind." [GKC The Defendant 75]

Yesterday, I heard someone mention the hilarious word "agile" in the context of engineering - and of course I thought of GKC. I had no idea what the word meant in that context - but I thought of one of the three recordings of GKC, where admitted to being a journalist, but emphatically denied that he was a "pressman":

A pressman means a very different sort of person from me. One glance at me would show that I had never crashed through a skylight in order to interview a celebrity - that I had never slid through a door that was almost shut in my face by somebody who wanted to keep me out of his bedroom - that I had never performed any of those things that are the glory of journalism...
[Address to the Canadian Literary Society, 1933, recorded by the BBC. Quoted in The Chesterton Review 69 (XXII#4, Nov 1996)

Clearly GKC was not "agile". But in the engineering context, it means something or other - it almost sounded like it was about actually getting work done rather than talking about the idea of getting work done. I may have misunderstood, but it apparently means one does work instead of sitting around talking about it, or writing lots of papers about how a meeting might be held to decide to write a paper on how the work might be done if someone else did it, or something. (Whew.) I am not sure about these sorts of techniques, because when I do my work, I don't have a term like "agile" to describe it, and I do it the Chestertonian way anyhow.

Huh?

As Chesterton told us, "I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done." [GKC Heretics Cw1:46] Yes. In order to write the tens of thousands of lines of code that I have to write - a far more tedious and boring job than writing Thursday posts - I must sit in a chair and think for long periods, and pray, and apply various formal tools commonly in use for 700 years or so... it is lots of fun once I am done. Indeed, like John Dickson Carr's chunky Sir Henry Merrivale, known familiarly as H.M. or the Old Man, who solved mysteries by "sittin' and thinkin'," and like GKC, I am the precise inverse of an agile engineer, but I almost never sit around wishing for someone else to do the job. That's why I have a computer, after all, and I work very hard to be sure it does its fair share. But this posting is not about me, my work, or "agile" of any kind. It's about engineering, as hard as it will be for you to believe, and how one needs to know about that field in order to study our next excerpt from Orthodoxy.

(( click here when you feel agile... ))


You may recall that in recent Thursday postings I have made various hints and comments about words like "evolution" and "design". It would sicken most people to learn that there really are biologists - yes, even medical researchers pretending to work on "cures" for cancer - who believe that "software" can only occur in the way they believe "life" occurs - by random chance. Yes. Given enough time, the "internet" will "evolve" almost any imaginable piece of "software". Utterly insane. Just as we find countless examples of toasters and word processors in the Devonian strata, or jet engines, or - ah, I have it! DNA sequencing machines and microscopes - layered with other evolutionary "failures" like someone's cable TV spot distribution software. (Hee hee. Who could Dr. Thursday mean?) Yes, certainly! There is no designer, no master-mind Author of Things who sits and thinks and then enacts his plan. (Does Dr. Thursday mean "God" here? No.) It's all random, and wa always there... just as the ever-evolving supercomputers shall soon find the entire text of "Orthodoxy", "Jurassic Park", "Contact" and "King Lear" within the decimal expansion for pi divided by the square root of 2008. It will be formatted in HTML and all ready for posting. Yes, yes.

No. Not at all. (Dr. Thursday was being bitterly sarcastic, wasn't he? Oh my, yes; he tries; it's sad because it's all too real.) We may not be scientists, or engineers, or philosophers, but we know the difference between something designed and something accidental, which is what they mean by random chance, because we are not utterly insane. Most of the time when we do things, we use thirteenth century metaphysics, even those of us who are not engineers, because we have common sense, the first tool of all engineering - which means we hope to get things done. We work by a plan, by a design - that is, towards a purpose - a goal or end.

And so we must hear GKC say it, for yet another time, spelling out the concept again, in order that we may not walk away thinking the opposite:

This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the key would fit the smallest doors. Our main point is here, that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. One can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer noses. But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses? I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed": we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face. But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation to each other. Proportion cannot be a drift: it is either an accident or a design. So with the ideal of human morality and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians. It is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands off things: not to drive horses; not to pick flowers. We may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing. The ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still, nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incommoding a microbe. To so crude a consummation as that we might perhaps unconsciously drift. But do we want so crude a consummation? Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the opposite or Nietzschean line of development - superman crushing superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed up for fun. But do we want the universe smashed up for fun? Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery? If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy. So our attitude to the giant of the world must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt: it must be one particular proportion of the two - which is exactly right. We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. We must also have enough disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion, spit at the stars. Yet these two things (if we are to be good or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one particular combination. The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
[CW1:317-8]

We have a curious quote here, and you may be wondering what GKC is quoting: "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed" This is from Job 38:11, which has "waves" where GKC writes "point".

But Doctor - again you tug on my lab coat - I thought you say he was an engineer? It sounds like he's being a lit'ry man, a fairy-tale writer, like that awesome Tolkien.

Excuse me. What - I beg you to tell me - is the difference? Both are matters of design, of attention to detail, of sheer stunning art, and slowly thought-out, careful yet powerful use of natural resources:

From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgment.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:378-9, emphasis added]

Yes. And so do all engineering projects.

I know this is hard to take. It cannot be any harder for a cable TV company to swallow that their software development owes so much to a fat English journalist and the writings of some Popes. But it happens to be true, and it demonstrates that Chesterton had an excellent engineering acumen, even though he was mostly considered to be a "lit'ry man".

As usual, GKC now reviews our advance, before taking another step:

This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress. First, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite. It must not (if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure; it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation. I am not concerned at this moment to deny that some such good culmination may be, by the constitution of things, reserved for the human race. I only point out that if this composite happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness. If the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning up of the world. But if the beatification of the world is not a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist. And here again my contemplation was cloven by the ancient voice which said, "I could have told you all this a long time ago. If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other. An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness or a peak of perfect height. But only a personal God can possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour to the many coloured coat of Joseph."

Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact answer that I required. I had said, "The ideal must be fixed," and the Church had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything else." I said secondly, "It must be artistically combined, like a picture"; and the Church answered, "Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it."
[CW1:319]

We should recall that "Joseph's many-coloured coat" is from Genesis 37:4, and the "righteousness and peace kiss" is from Psalm 84:11 (85:10).

You will note here again the words of good engineering practice which might be out of Roebling's notes on the design of the Brooklyn bridge: "it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation".

Or do you think that bridge evolved too? How quaint. I expect random chance will reply. Eventually. If you know automata theory, you've seen it before; it's all in A^*, called A-star, the set of all strings of finite length over a given alphabet. Unlike the monkeys with typewriters, A^* actually does contain Orthodoxy, "King Lear" and the rest - and even this posting - and any and every comment you can make. Really. It makes you wonder what really "evolves". As Dogbert once told Dilbert the engineer, commenting on his exceedingly poor poetry, "Three monkeys. Ten minutes."

Frank Petta

Frank died yesterday afternoon, March 3rd, at 4:15 PM. May his soul rest in peace.

And now, something from Dr. Thursday.

In Memoriam Frank Petta.
by a recipient of his generosity.

Frank sent me photocopies of the GKC "Our Note-Book" essays from the
last five years of the Illustrated London News, and my mother
read them to me so I could type them into AMBER, as they are in such
poor shape they cannot be scanned.

Thanks, Frank. Please pray for us. Ask my mom about the fun we had doing
them.

--Dr. Thursday, sometimes called the AMBER Collector.

More Petta Wine, Please
by Dr. Thursday

The Midwest[1] gang of G. K. Chesterton,
Who G.K. read, drink beer, and bacon fry,
Who ponder paradox which some still stun,
Have met to thank God rightly[2], mugs to ply
Though we now miss our friend, a G.K. guy,
Who cheered them too, with jokes preserved in brine
And friendship rich; but they heave a sigh:
If only we could get more Petta wine.

This man, Frank Petta, totes no wedding gun[3]
He found (I don't know how or when or why)
An Illustrated London News full run
And reaped the columns written on the fly
So by the Grim Recycler they won't die.
Ignatius pressed the word lodes of Frank's mine,
Then the Midwest drank; still for more they spy:
If only we could get more Petta wine.

Now Frank for eighteen years shared that same sun
Which through old England's fogs did strive to pry
And light Top Meadow where was sown the fun
In essays kept by Frank's observant eye.
At Midwest meetings he is never shy:
Frank, who with a friend[4], still does reap the vine,
So that the G.K. meetings don't go dry:
If only we could get more Petta wine.

Frank, the earth spins on, the years go by,
God says "again"[5] the rising sun does shine;
Your fruitful vines have spread - they reach the sky...
If only we could get more Petta wine.

__________________
notes:

1. This poem was originally written for Frank's birthday in a time
before the ACS. In the interest of history I have not altered this term.
Then again the ACS meetings are still in the Midwest, so it really did
not need to be altered anyway.
2. See OrthodoxyCW1:268: "We should thank God for beer and
Burgundy by not drinking too much of them."
3. See Autobiography CW16:43 "I stopped on the way [to his
wedding] to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver
with cartridges in another."
4. Ann Stull, whom he married after a LONG courtship.
5. See Orthodoxy CW1:263-4: "It is possible that God says every
morning, 'Do it again' to the sun."
Here is Frank at the very first Chesterton Society meeting, 27 years ago. He's towards the front with an orange shirt. Ann is second from the left, sort of across from Frank. He attended every single one of them for 26 years. We'll miss him this year.

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

Thursday during the Great Novena

I am very busy just now, but even if I had time, I hesitate
to approach the profound harmonies which would link GKC's work with the
Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit... it will demand a greater discipline
and a purer holiness and a simpler and clearer mind than I have, sinful
as I am. But I will dare make a selection for our meditation today. It
is in very great resonance with the "Fairy Tale" essay by our beloved
J.R.R.Tolkien, and of course with many other writings of GKC like
Manalive. And I would especially mention that superlative
discussion on the "literary style" of Jesus and His bridge-building
fulfillment of the "granting of a real romance", discussed in the second
half of The Everlasting Man.

Please read it slowly, and think carefully, and deeply, while pondering
the story near the beginning of the "Acts of the Apostles" where the
great wind came, not to Beacon Hill, but to the upper room where the
Apostles where in prayer with Mary...

--Dr. Thursday.

For every mood there is an appropriate impossibility - a decent and
tactful impossibility - fitted to the frame of mind. Every train of
thought may end in an ecstasy, and all roads lead to Elfland. But few
now walk far enough along the street of Dickens to find the place where
the cockney villas grow so comic that they become poetical. People do
not know how far mere good spirits will go. For instance, we never think
(as the old folk-lore did) of good spirits reaching to the spiritual
world. We see this in the complete absence from modern, popular
supernaturalism of the old popular mirth. We hear plenty to-day of the
wisdom of the spiritual world; but we do not hear, as our fathers did,
of the folly of the spiritual world, of the tricks of the gods, and the
jokes of the patron saints. Our popular tales tell us of a man who is so
wise that he touches the supernatural, like Dr. Nikola; but they never
tell us (like the popular tales of the past) of a man who was so silly
that he touched the supernatural, like Bottom the Weaver. We do not
understand the dark and transcendental sympathy between fairies and
fools. We understand a devout occultism, an evil occultism, a tragic
occultism, but a farcical occultism is beyond us. Yet a farcical
occultism is the very essence of "The Midsummer Night's Dream." It is
also the right and credible essence of "The Christmas Carol." Whether we
understand it depends upon whether we can understand that exhilaration
is not a physical accident, but a mystical fact; that exhilaration can
be infinite, like sorrow; that a joke can be so big that it breaks the
roof of the stars. By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become
godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.

[GKC, Charles Dickens CW15:49-50]

.....Come Holy Ghost, renew in us Your seven-fold gifts...

Thursday--Holy Thursday--Dr. Thursday

You may have wondered how I was going to handle this post, since I had already treated the five Sorrowful Mysteries. But today, Holy Thursday, the Fifth Luminous Mystery shold be contemplated. Yes, there must be those horrid last few notes to end one part of the Mysterious Suite (a descending pedal solo, played on a 32' flue, perhaps) as Judas leaves, signifying "It was night".

But just as there are other ways and others days in which we shall ponder this mystery - I mean the post-Pentecost feast of Corpus Christi, and September's Exaltation of the Cross - just so there must also be another theme to our suite, something old and exalted, solemn and homely, but also new...
Read more.
Yes, as the Good Steward who brings forth old and new, or St. Augustine's "Beauty": for today, on Spring's first Full Moon, on this feast day of the Old Covenant, the One Who commanded Moses now gives a new command: "this is the New Covenant, in My Blood..."

Here again is the Sacrifice and Holy Meal, and the Blood which liberates, but now the Priest is also the Victim.

Our Uncle Gilbert speaks of this great mystery with a large amount of care:

On an occasion when Holy Communion was brought to Frances at home he said, "I am a simple man and I am afraid when God comes to my house." [Ward, Return To Chesterton 293]

Something so amazing would clearly bring forth whole books from his prolific pen, but he knows that these words are the Division which Jesus brought. [see Lk 12:51] For when He told the Jews in six different ways how they would be obliged to eat His flesh and drink His blood, "many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him." [Jn 6:67] Here is one example, from his essays on Catholicism:

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room. [GKC The Thing CW3:180]

But in his fiction he is far more bold:

"I want you to hate me! " cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."
"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air of one telling children about an elephant. "Why, I touched His body only this morning."
"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. "Oh, I will say anything that can madden you!"
"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little.
"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.
She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eat it?" she said. [GKC, The Ball and the Cross]

Of all the fiction of GKC, somehow that book seems the most appropriate for today. True, the famous picnic on the roof in Manalive has some resonance... and the grand theater as Lucian Gregory comes before the Council of the Seven Days...

But tomorrow is the paradoxical "feast day" of the Cross, and we must "enter into" that symbol, as much as Bastian Balthazar Bux enters into "Auryn" in The Never-Ending Story. For us, the Eucharist makes this possible: we enter into, and partake of, Calvary - which means the Cross.

I heard somewhere how the U.S. Army changed the boot-soles for those going to the Near East, as the old form of treads would leave the ground marked with signs of the cross. One wonders about such a view - is the ASCII character 00101011 (which looks like this: "+") likewise forbidden? Are draftsmen forbidden T-squares? Are geometers prevented from using angles measuring pi over 2? Are no picket fences permitted? Is star-gazing shunned when Cygnus (the "Northern Cross") is in the sky?

But Chesterton has a whole chapter exploring, and answering, this riddle. Here is just a sample:

[Professor Lucifer said] "What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away with the thing! [see Jn 19:15] The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms."

"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity. "But we like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen. That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational." [GKC, The Ball and the Cross]

Indeed, we DO like contradictions in terms. Such is the whole story of the Incarnation:

...in this case [of Bethlehem] it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. [Cf Jn 13:2-15] ... For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in the Cradle. [GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:313-4

Let us give Madeline, the heroine of The Ball and the Cross, the last word today, for her words give an almost Thomistic summary of today's Mystery:

"...the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God. ...if you are really sorry it is all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his own hands."

Dr. Thursday

Secrets (Dr. Thursday's Thursday post)

Dr. Thursday has been involved in a fraternity since his college days, and has a very interesting article for us today. Thanks, Dr. T.

Why Secrets?

I am quite busy getting ready for the voyage to ChesterCon07 - if you are travelling to it from anywhere on the route that leads west from Pennsylvania please let Nancy know - in any case I hope to see you there.

We are now after Pentecost, though the Paschal season still has its effect - there's still Trinity and Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart. Even more than at Christmas, the Church is like a little kid, just wants to keep celebrating. And so we anticipate the "Inn at the End of the World" where we won't have to worry about time, or wearing out, or getting bored - or old - or any of that. We'll have a new heavens and a new earth, and the Good Wine... Meanwhile, we are still here, and like Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth, facing the demons of ignorance. People make up silly lines about "peace" - but they've forgotten what Gandalf said: "It only takes one to have a war" (I quote from memory.) Thank God we have our dear Uncle Gilbert to help us with the weapon of his mighty pen.

In the last week or so I heard a simply stupid - no, simply hilarious - proposal.
To find out the proposal, continue reading.

It seems that one of those awful Greek Letter College Associations (a "fraternity") is considering the publication of its secrets. Never mind that all their history is available for public contemplation. Never mind that their "constitution" or written form of government was published back in the 1800s. They suggest that it would be "better" to tell the handful of details which they have kept to themselves since they were founded.

Now the correct term for this is "identity theft". It is the destruction of the one thing which makes such an organization be itself-and-no-other. Hence I said it's stupid.

But it's actually very hilarious, because it reveals a greater secret. It reveals that those members proposing it have not read Chesterton, and have not grasped the nature of the thing these fraternities call "secrets".

For they are secrets kept for one of the Three Great Reasons why humans keep secrets and have always kept secrets - which you can read about in ILN August 10, 1907 (CW27:523) or reprinted in All Things Considered. If you don't have the time to read it now, I can be of assistance here...

(1) Things are kept secret because EVERYONE knows about them. Like s-*-x.

(2) Things are kept secret because NOBODY has a clue about them, including the main person involved. Like why one stops for a moment on a hike and looks at a stone or a tree or a view...

But the third reason is the one which applies to fraternity, and the one which those unfortunates have overlooked.

(3) Things are kept secret for the sole purpose of revealing them at the proper time and proper conditions. Like a gift which is wrapped, or the solution of a detective novel.

It has escaped these college graduates that the "secrets" of fraternities - usually amounting to little more than three Greek words and their specific interpretation, a handshake and password - are preserved as secrets, not because they have some sinister plot, but simply because of the real fun of being able to reveal them to their new members. (No, it's not about hazing, or swallowing goldfish - you'll have to trust me on this.)

Like religions, where some people recite a creed stating their beliefs, even if they do not understand the complete character of the dogmas they are attesting, the typical fraternity member may not grasp the intricacies of their "secrets" - they leave such curiosities to the scholars, just as the man-in-the-pew leaves homoousion to the theologians... (Shh - there's a Greek word! Maybe a password?) Sure, the effect of that word is still in the public creed, but religions rarely mention that term, much less its technical lore. And the same is true for fraternities. Nobody is going to study page after page of detailed attributions to ponder the theory of a Greek word because the founders of some college club happened to like its sound. Not even college administrations have that kind of time to spend. But those members-to-be, those who are reading the mystery story, they deserve this little surprise.

Alas. The poor, deprived people who are proposing this most heinous of crimes (like the posting of solutions to Father Brown stories without a "spoiler" warning) would never post their bank accounts and PIN numbers and social security numbers. There's an awareness of the modern e-thugs, e-bandits, and e-pirates who steal identities. The same is true in this case. Let the children's gifts stay wrapped; let the children open them for whom the gifts are intended. We've got our own gifts - we ought to be thankful, even if we've kept them secret. "Your Father who sees in secret will repay you" for He "knows the secrets of the heart". [Mt 6:4, Ps43:22]

Dr. Thursday: Exclusive News

Dr. Thursday, besides being special guest here every Thursday, has his own blog. However, he has decided to give that up due to several projects and books and things that need to get done, and Blogger-Which-They-Claim-to-Be-Formerly-Beta-But-Which-Still-Acts-Beta difficulties.

However, I'm pleased to announce that he will continue to be our guest blogger on Thursdays, so you can find him here.

Happy New Year's Eve!

Dropping the ball - two kinds

A short and very curious pair of quotes, relative to tonight's activity. One from Chesterton and one from 155 years ago. Let this simple synchronization of our world's clocks not obscure the name-day of our Lord and the solemn feast of Mary's maternity.

Thanks for taking time to be Chestertonian during 2007. Let us all strive to follow our Aunt Frances and Uncle Gilbert more closely, as they lead us on to Jesus Christ, the Everlasting Man.

I shall leave you with a quote from the Paschal Vigil, a fitting prayer to mark off the boundaries of time:

Christus heri et hodie
Principium et Finis
Alpha et Omega
Ipsius sunt tempora et saecula
Ipsi gloria et imperium
per universa aeternitatis saecula.
Amen.

Christ yesterday and today,
The Beginning and the End,
The Alpha and the Omega,
His are the times and the ages,
To Him be glory and dominion
Through the universe of unending ages.
Amen.

--Dr. Thursday

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be
perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do
not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was
the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on
which you could at any moment do and which, very
often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is
that to me this did not seem unjust. ... If Cinderella says, "How
is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer,
"How is it that you are going there till twelve?"
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:260]


One of the latest applications of the electric telegraph is at once
useful and beautiful. It is a plan for distributing and correcting mean
Greenwich time in London and over the country every day at noon. Every
holiday-maker knows the ball which surmounts the Royal Observatory, and has watched with interest its descent as the clock gave the first stroke
of noon, thereby telling the sea-going men in the river the exact state
of the chronometers to which they have to trust over the pathless
waters. Such a ball has been raised on a pole on the Telegraph Office,
near Charing Cross, and at noon each day is to drop by electric action
simultaneously with that of Greenwich, and falling on a cushion at the
base of the pole, is to communicate standard time along all the
telegraphic wires of the country. At the same instant the exact period
of noon will be known at the most distant as well as the less remote
places in the country; and it is said that all the Railway Companies
have agreed to avail themselves of these means of obtaining an exact
uniformity of time.
[Our Iron Roads by Frederick S. Williams (This history of the
development and status of Britain's railroads was published in 1852.)]

Thank you Dr. Thursday, for this and all your "Thursday" posts in 2007.

A Chestertonian Epithalamium

Since Saturday is John and Sheila's wedding and Sunday is GKC's and FBC's wedding anniversary, and also the date of Jules Verne's beginning of the Journey to the Center of the Earth, perhaps I ought to ...
Ah well. I was trying to write a fuller commentary on the topic, to be entitled "Just say NO"... but decided to do it in rhyme instead.
--Dr. Thursday.

Just Say NW
(for John and Sheila, with all my love.)

Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage.
[GKC Appetite of Tyranny CW5:257]

...there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:548]

...the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of "Beauty and the Beast". Every man has to find out that his wife is cross - that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else's sanity.
[GKC The Common Man 142-3]

O Lamb Eternal, aid this wedding song!
Bring forth the star's and atom's arcane lore:
A stable nucleus of metal strong,
Mystic iron, our blood's and our earth's core.
Fused in the stellar furnace from two parts,
Which left to themselves would be repelling,
But as the Heart Aflame unites their hearts,
The strongest force of all defeats rebelling.
In ancient tongues an ending odd and rare -
Not one, not many, but precisely two -
The dual: like the duel, warring pair
Which by losing both, reveals something new.
As now you-two in matrimony go,
May God grant both the wit to just say NW.

--Dr. Thursday.
Made June 25, 2009, the antipodes of Christmas.

Notes:
1. Cf. Rev 19:9: "Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb."
3,5 Stable: iron has a very stable nucleus. Though it is formed in stars by fusion, it does not undergo fusion itself.
4. blood's core: the working component of the erythrocytes (red blood cells) is hemoglobin, which contains an iron atom in its center, which actually performs the transport of oxygen to the rest of the body. The earth has a huge iron core which by rotating generates a magnetic field, protecting us from harmful radiation.
6. repelling: bare nuclei (atoms which lack electrons) have positive charges and repel each other.
7. see Acts 4:32 "the multitude of believers had but one heart and
one soul"; cf. Litany of the Sacred Heart: "Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity, have mercy on us"; (cf. Mal 3:2-3, 4:1-2) Also see the "Canticle of the Sun" of St. Francis:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

8. The "strong nuclear" force is the strongest of the four universal forces and can unite protons which otherwise repel each other into the nucleus of an atom.
9. In grammar, "number" usually refers to "singular" or "plural", but the "dual" number exists in ancient languages such as ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Old English. The "dual" provides endings for things that come in twos. (Latin contains traces of it in the "-o" of duo and ambo.) Also note the pun on dual as an odd ending. Hee hee.
13. See the last line of GKC's Return of Don Quixote:

"I say ... iit in matrimonium."

("He has gone into matrimony" - that is, he got married.)
14. In Old English, "wit" is the dual of the first person, and means "we two"; in Greek, NW (pronounced "NO") means the same. Also see GKC's essay called "Heroic Wit":

...we shall never understand the French until we understand that this wit of theirs is not mere wit, as we mean the word. In fact, this can be very simply seen by noticing the connotation of the word for wit in the two languages. What we call wit they call esprit - spirit. When they want to call a man witty, they call him spirituel. They actually use the same word for wit which they use for the Holy Ghost.
[GKC Lunacy and Letters 84]

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

Making a Prayer at the Cross Road

Given the curious and stimulating discussions about rock-and-roll in a previous post, I was going to write some nonsense about pipe organs (because I once built a little one in my house) or about playing bass (which I have tried, both bowed and electronic). But I shall defer that for a bit.

Instead, I ask you to go quickly to the blogg called Enchiridion and read a very rich and wonderful poem by a young Chestertonian named Sheila, whom I met at a past Conference. Also, please read, not my own witless comment, but her own sensible one. For she has latched on to a very important idea, and one on which we should spend some real thought. Hence this post. Click to read more - but please read her poem first.Here are the words I wish to consider:

My mom likes to go on about Incarnational theology, and I also like to think of Chesterton and the poetry of trains. Can we really say, in an A.D. world, that anything is unpoetic?
[From Enchiridion cited above; my emphasis]

Simply, the answer is - of course not! Everything is now poetic. We assert this truth, Sunday after Sunday, though unless we happen to know a bit of Greek, or perhaps histology, we would overlook it. For when we recite the Nicene Creed, we say "per quem omnia facta sunt" = "Through Whom [Jesus] all things were made." You see, the English word "poem" or "poet" comes from the Greek verb poieo which means "I make". The clue from the branch of medicine called histology is that the "hemopoetic" tissues are those in the bone marrow which make red blood cells.

I wish I had the time to go into a consideration of what some call the "anthropic principle" - the idea that the Universe was made with Man in mind (Man-the-species = anthropos in Greek). But it might be said (as GKC might say) how much more we might really call it the "Christic" principle: God made the Universe with Christ in mind!

But Man has also made things - and his making is also poetic. In a previous posting I hinted at some of the fantastic poetry of the Bridge... so what can "the poetry of trains" mean?
For me, there is one particular Potteresque scene which leaps to mind:

"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "...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."
[GKC, The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:478-9]

(Just in case you did not get it from the context, "Bradshaw" was the master-reference timetable for British trains.) Nor are trains the only magic we magicians have at our disposal.

Sheila mentions how her poem hangs from the highway lights - GKC also gave a splendid word-painting of such lights:

A great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a play on words. Precisely the contrary is true. It is the idea that some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words. The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose only comes in with what it is called.
[GKC, Heretics CW1:55]

Wow, read those words again, as I fear that perhaps you will not really think about this as you should:

Next time you are out driving, and you see a traffic light, be it red or green (we'll skip yellow) did you EVER consider it to be "the place where men in an agony of vigilance" have kindled the fires - be they simply electronic - with the rich colours of the sea or of blood - in order to keep other men from death!!!

No wonder we call them the CROSS roads.

It may be postulated - and may be true - that long ago, the demons hinted distortions of the truth to the ancient pagans, so as to further their twisted plots. But from very ancient times any intersection of three roads (like a T, especially at the divisions of farm-lands) was considered sacred, and shrines were erected there. That is why one of the names of the Roman goddess Diana is "Trivia" (Latin: "three ways"). But again! There is poetry, mystical poetry here, for we now know the Truth: He who said "I am the Truth" also said "I am the Way"! [Jn 14:6]

Chesterton as usual says it much better than I can:

Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation.
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:308]

No, in an A.D. world, all things are poetic - all things, water and wine, bread and oil, words and stones, cars and roads... and us too!

As GKC says "The greatest of poems is an inventory." [Orthodoxy CW1:267] and it is no wonder that the last psalm (150) is simply a list of musical instruments - all of which are organized that they may MAKE harmony - to praise God. Like this:

Cars and trucks, praise the Lord.
Highways and roads, praise the Lord.
All manner of lights and signals, praise the Lord.
Machines and computers, praise the Lord.
Ye drivers and passengers,
Ye police and fire and emergency workers,
Ye automotive mechanics and fast-food makers,
Ye scientists and engineers,
praise the Lord, give glory and eternal praise to Him.
Amen. Alleluia.

Yes, and tomorrow we'll add some more verses - until the End, when the psalm will stand complete, and then we shall all sing it together.

--Dr. Thursday

Dr. Thursday's Post

Thanks again to Dr. Thursday for this hilarious post.

Rolling the other way: all chairs - or all camels?

Last week I omitted a warning I used several times previously. I did not mention that GKC was using "evolution" as an example - a rapid, en passant kind of example. I did so because I think it was well worth stopping to see what we were able to see in the brilliant light GKC provided. We have learned something almost NO other writer in the last century has been able to attain - an approach to true Scholastic thought, applied to one of the most pesty of issues. Alas for the scientists, and alas-squared for the philosophers, if that's what they still call themselves, who have not yet read GKC, and taken his writing to heart!

Now, we resume - and we find in front of us yet another chasm, shaped quite remarkably like last week's. But where evolution makes all things the same thing (or a flux and nothing more besides), this is the opposite. This is another failure to see things as they are - but now to see no degree of similarity of any kind.

But this time, instead of provoking thought, or anger, or boredom, I think this will provoke laughter. Actually, I laughed a good bit about last week's posting, and since then as well; I read some really strong comments in Fr. Jaki's The Road of Science and the Ways to God which made evolution seem... ah well but we must go on. Please finish your drinks and let us proceed...
Click here to read on.

GKC goes from one error of modern thought to another, shining light into the dark corners...

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."
[CW1:238]

Are your chairs quite different? Hee hee. If you have read GKC's earlier book, Heretics you may perhaps recall that we've heard something like this before. But it's lots funnier:

...it is a very common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally nothing at all. If the two moralities are entirely different, why do you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, "Camels in various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings, some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have in common." The ordinary man of sense would reply, "Then what makes you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel? How do you know a camel when you see one?"
[GKC Heretics CW1:167]

Some of you may be thinking this has something to do with evolution (it does, but probably not in the way you're thinking!) But animals can be fun, as well as dangerous, again, not in the way you are probably thinking. Let GKC explain:

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
[ILN Jan 4 1908, CW28:21 - another 100 year old quote!]

Which reminds me of GKC's very hilarious view about giraffes:

When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.
[ILN Oct 21 1911 CW29:176]

Or this:

A man can coil a snake round and round inside his hat, though only a few individuals have indulged in this form of nature-study. If a man were to attempt to fold up a giraffe, or even to deal in this manner with the most compact or collapsible horse or dog, he would find that they were not sufficiently articulated animals.
[ILN July 25 1931 CW35:561]

I bother you with this nonsense because our good long-necked friend shall appear again in a little while, unless of course he has evolved into something else by then. Hee hee.

Ahem. But this is getting into something quite serious. The correct philosophical term is "universals" - the idea of something (and idea such as a quality like green or tall, or a category of thing, like chair or camel) which is common to various real (existing) things... Please remember what path we are on: the Suicide of Thought - the modern crimes which are attempting to destroy, prevent and eliminate thought. Let us hear the next bit, then:

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat. It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress.
[CW1:238-9]

Pigs! Another animal, but I must stop here. No; I shall give the linking quite which unites this last thought to his previous work:

...this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[Heretics CW1:117]

Make sure you select a stable means of measurement, or you'll never know if you are rolling, unrolling, or re-rolling - or just staying in one place. It may take all your running - as the Queen told Alice - to stay in one place - but sometimes you need to do it.

--Dr. Thursday

Emphasis by the editor, who sees connections there to the current political campaign.

Thanks Due to Dr. Thursday

Thank you Dr. Thursday for so beautifully handling this blog and stimulating such great conversations while I was taking a break.

To those of you who prayed for me, thank you. God is good, and I am fine.

To those of you who love Dr. Thurday's posts, he will be posting still on Thursdays (naturally), and you can also read his own blog.

Meanwhile, as I contemplate fairy stories, I will leave you with this thought:

"I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad for
children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I can
never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest letter
saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if they
are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales, because it
frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruel to give girls
sentimental novels because it makes them cry. This kind of talk is
based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has
been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you kept
bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for
themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than
Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black
to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and
cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child,
to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in
them even when he does not like them. There is just as much
difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as
there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the
torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy
tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul."

G.K.Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles, as essay called The Red Angel

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

During the recent conference, there were break-out sessions, and I attended the Aidan Mackey talk, not knowing if he'd ever make it across the pond again. However, there was another talk that hour on Heraldry, given by Dr. Peter Floriani, and from what I heard, it was excellent. And that ties in with today's post. And now, Dr. Thursday.

I have heard (from people who have reason to know) that the seminar on heraldry at the recent Chesterton Conference proved to be of interest to those who attended. The topic of heraldry may seem a bit unusual for the typical Americans to express such an interest - but then that's just because it sounds ancient. As if someone were to say something crazy, "Hey, let's write software for a cable TV company, and put Latin quotes on the main screen!" Or for a mother to say to her daughters, "Today, let's have a picnic lunch on the floor in the playroom!" But then we're so very, very, very Chestertonian. (And I hope you are, too.)

Anyway, since I happened to be at that seminar, I can tell you that heraldry is actually very well known in America - though perhaps not by that name. There are those two yellow upside-down U shapes one sees at the side of the road - it makes one thing of clowns eating hamburgers. There is that little curvy check-mark seen on all kinds of clothing, which means one has paid money to a sneaker company in approval of their efforts. And so on. There are also what we might call the "inverse" forms, where people who know nothing of the laws of heraldry have broken them, and so have made their attempt at communication futile: like white trucks with yellow lettering. Or, even worse, a certain state license plate is a pale color, upon which the license numbers are printed in white - hence they are nearly unreadable, even from close-up.

But what is heraldry? Why does it matter to Chestertonians?Click here to discover more about heraldry.Heraldry is simply the art and the science of symbol, but particularly serving as an identifier of a person, and of a family. The "coat of arms" which is simply a decorated form of the old shield of a knight, told everyone - even those who could not read - who that person was, just as surely as the yellow U's or curvy check-marks indicate ... uh ... what they indicate. Remember, advertising is just a form of communication, and its first principle is identification. (See Romans 10:14-15 for a Biblical justification for advertising!)

Speaking as a computer scientist, the real delight in heraldry is that it comes with a very elegant and technical way of describing those decorations: what the heralds call the "blazon" - that is, the "code" which specifies the colors and shapes and arrangements of the design:

"A blazon, like a chemical formula, means one thing, and one thing only, hence, every heraldic artist can make a correct drawing from it..."
[Julian Franklyn, Heraldry, 41]

But what does heraldry have to do with Chesterton?

It would be possible to cite many illustrations from Chesterton's work about heraldry. He relates one of the most dramatic, and intricate, pieces of history in his book on Chaucer:

The fashionable world, as we should put it, was divided into enthusiastic factions over a quarrel which had arisen about the legitimacy of a coat of arms, which then seemed almost as thrilling as the legitimacy of a child or a last will and testament. 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 'azure a bend or' 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. The trial was conducted with all the voluminous detail and seething excitement of a Society divorce case; reams and rolls of it, for all I know, remain, in the records of the heraldic office, for anybody to read if he likes; though I have my doubts even about garter King-at-Arms. But somewhere in that pile of records there is one little paragraph, for which alone, perhaps, the world would now turn them over at all. It merely states that among a long list of witnesses, one 'Geoffrey Chaucer, gentleman, armed twenty-seven years', had testified that he saw the Golden Bend displayed before Scrope's tent in the battlefield of France; and that long afterwards, he had stopped some people in the streets of London and pointed to the same escutcheon displayed as a tavern sign; whereon they had told him that it was not the coat of Scrope but of Grosvenor. This, he said, was the first time he had ever heard tell of the Grosvenors. Such small flashes of fact are so provocative, that I can almost fancy he smiled as he said the last words.
[GKC, Chaucer CW18:214-5]

But this is America, you say. Fine. Let's see what we can find there...

There is one of the United States called "Maryland", which has a very nice flag: red, white, yellow, and black - all kind of shredded into a curious pattern. But it is nothing more than a very elegant statement about a man and his family: a man named Cecilius Calvert, who became Lord Baltimore. His father's father had a coat of arms which is blazoned:

Paly of six, Or and sable; a bend counterchanged.

This means six stripes alternating yellow (gold) and black, with a diagonal stripe cutting through them which reverses the colors of the underlying stripes. And his father's mother, who was named Crossland, had a coat of arms which is blazoned:

Quarterly argent and gules a cross botonny counterchanged.

This means four squares, white above red, red above white, on which is imposed a cross with triple rounds at each end - and this cross reverses the colors of the underlying squares.

The Maryland flag is Lord Baltimore's which is blazoned: Quarterly Calvert and Crossland. Just so you don't struggle, here is what it looks like:
So now you know. And, if you would like more information, there are many books which will help, but for a start you can check out Heraldry in America by Eugene Zieber, available from Dover Publications.

Found! important bit about Laws and Rules

I was in the middle of many things yesterday - I found the most exquisitely relevant quote which explains... well, you'll find out shortly. But I also found the quote I could not find when I wrote my previous Thursday posting - it was in an unexpected place - so I decided to post it now. It is worth adding to your resources, and will suggest a larger, Chestertonian approach to our topic. More on it another time.
--Dr. Thursday

It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us, and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled everyone with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning into an institution.
[GKC Manalive the beginning of Part I Chapter 3 "The Banner of Beacon"; emphasis added]

Update: As suggested by Maolsheachlann, the parallel reference of GKC on vows:

It is not the fact that young lovers have no desire to swear on the Book. They are always at it. It is not the fact that every young love is born free of traditions about binding and promising, about bonds and signatures and seals. On the contrary, lovers wallow in the wildest pedantry and precision about these matters. They do the craziest things to make their love legal and irrevocable. They tattoo each other with promises; they cut into rocks and oaks with their names and vows; they bury ridiculous things in ridiculous places to be a witness against them; they bind each other with rings, and inscribe each other in Bibles; if they are raving lunatics (which is not untenable), they are mad solely on this idea of binding and on nothing else. It is quite true that the tradition of their fathers and mothers is in favour of fidelity; but it is emphatically not true that the lovers merely follow it; they invent it anew. It is quite true that the lovers feel their love eternal, and independent of oaths; but it is emphatically not true that they do not desire to take the oaths. They have a ravening thirst to take as many oaths as possible. Now this is the paradox; this is the whole problem. It is not true, as Miss Farr would have it, that young people feel free of vows, being confident of constancy; while old people invent vows, having lost that confidence. That would be much too simple; if that were so there would be no problem at all. The startling but quite solid fact is that young people are especially fierce in making fetters and final ties at the very moment when they think them unnecessary. The time when they want the vow is exactly the time when they do not need it. That is worth thinking about.
[GKC ILN July 2 1910 CW28:556-7]

Of course we can summarise all this in a much shorter paraphrase of a famous Gospel verse, which I find I must give you in all its splendid setting so you will grasp its truth. More on all this on Thursday.
--Dr. T.

In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.
[GKC The Thing CW3:167-8, emphasis added (allusion to Mark 2:27)]

In case you missed the real relevance here, to computing and to cable TV and to Subsidiarity, it is a few words further back. I will write it by itself, and you can think about it until Thursday.... "mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another."
--Dr. T.

Easter: Dr. Thursday

Authority: Riddles and Puns, Burglars and Police

Alleluia!!!

Ah - the Octave of Easter! It's a week of eight Sundays. (No this is NOT an allusion to The Man Who Was Thursday.) The Canadian rock group "Rush" has a song called "Time Stand Still" - but here we have just a hint of that mystic eternity as the Church suspends all other feasts for these eight days! (the Annunciation, which falls during this week in 2008, yet cannot be suppressed, shall be celebrated next Monday.) Yes, despite some curious and confused looks from the less attentive in the congregation, the careful and reverent priest will chant sed in hac potissimum die or "...on THIS EASTER DAY" in the Preface of each Holy Mass during this week.

Yes, indeed, O ye rockers! Time DOES stand still. How? Click here to find out.Truly we HAVE to celebrate during this week of Sundays, because this Son was dead and has come to life again - this Brother of ours was lost - and now He is found!!! [cf. Lk 15:24]

"Early in the morning of the first day of the week, when the Son had risen..." [cf. Mark 16:2]

Puns - did you say puns? Yes, of course - there are lots of puns to handle - one of the funniest is this thing about RISING - which occurs during the feast of Azymes, the ancient Pasch, the Time of the Unleavened - where we are the New Leaven. [1Cor 5:6-8] Leavening, for those of you who don't bake, is any agent added to dough to make it rise - to make it get lighter than it is... (And we hear our big-billed toucan friend murmur, "Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly." CW1:325) Typical leavening agents are lard or butter, baking powder, baking soda and some acid, and so on, but most of all, yeast, which is zumh = "zyme" (long E) in Greek.

An aside: if you're wondering why "zyme" sounds familiar, it's in the word "enzyme" (something found IN YEAST)... But we're not going to talk biology today, as exciting as it might be, and even though this feast is about the resurrection of the BODY...

No: instead, we'll take just a tiny glance at one paragraph from Orthodoxy, then we can resume our festival.

Here it is:

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.
[CW1:235-6]

We've had a pun or two already, and will probably have more. So... perhaps you are wondering, does GKC actually advise us to do physical harm to the officers of the law? Of course not. Perhaps you'd prefer to think of posting negative comments in a policeman's blogg, or writing editorials against the idea of Law Enforcement.... Well, again, it's not quite that either.

Let me try something. Anyone who has read many of the best "Boy's Books" - like, let's say, The Mad Scientists' Club or even The Phantom Tollbooth, or to vary the genre, the Sir Henry Merrivale mysteries by John Dickson Carr - if you HAVE read such things, you know that boys of all ages especially like to do daring tricks, and play hilarious pranks. Not real crimes of course, but pranks... Wrong, perhaps, but NOT (emphatically NOT) evil...

Such is the kind of "attack" GKC is suggesting. Pranks, I say, not crimes, things no "mature adult" would do, more out of embarrassment than out of "respect" for the Law, at the border where there's still some light to the humour even though some shadows are looming....

There is a certain rebel in so many of us, which gives rise to practical jokes, to boldness - but this is not a "Boy's Book". We are NOT talking about playing tricks in the town square! No, as usual, GKC is desperately trying to construct a metaphor about a exceedingly complex idea, and one which will bring out far more argument and debate than any merely civil power, police force, bad cops, or corrupt city governments have EVER had.

Let's just say, for discussion, that GKC really meant to "attack the police" - let us take this in its extreme sense to mean "to abolish the police utterly"... to destroy Authority.

BUT!!!!

GKC tells us how stupid it would be to reject the idea of police as if we had never heard of burglars...

There IS something real that threatens us, something dangerous in this life, something we need protection from...

GKC is about to reveal that the authority "in religion", just as the authority "in the police" or "in the Law", exists for a very good reason, and was placed there as a protection against a Very Real Threat.

And that threat is NOT what you might otherwise have guessed. But for the answer you will have to come back next week.

For now: back to the feast! It's still Easter Sunday for another three days...

--Dr. Thursday

The Errors of Mr. Chesterton

What! Can this title be real?

(It must be some sort of joke... Surely Dr. Thursday is not serious...)

Oh, but I am quite serious. I do mean to state here that there are real errors in the writings of G. K. Chesterton. And I don't merely mean merely typographical oversights.

You stammer and whine... You are horrified; you weep, you moan,you smash your keyboard. You write to Dale Ahlquist, to Father Boyd, to Father Fessio, to Dover Publications, to Aidan Mackey, to the Queen of England, to the Vatican, screaming "Denounce Dr. Thursday, crush him, destroy him! May he be erased, and may his all disk drives be overwritten with crayons! Let his words, indeed, let his very name be stricken from every pylon and obelisk..." Ahem.

Ah, but you see, as much as I delight in reading GKC, and admire his work, and struggle to study it and to teach it to others, I do not believe that GKC is Almighty God. Speaking in a vaguely generic sense, as I am a mere layman, I am probably more of a Dominican than a Franciscan - but I am at least a Franciscan in this, that I follow Jesus, and not Francis. If you misunderstand that, you'll need to re-read GKC's book on St. Francis. It means that even Francis submitted to the authority of the Pope, and did not set up a new religion - though he could have. In the same way, I follow Jesus, not Chesterton, who himself submitted to papal authority; it would be all too easy for someone to begin a sect of Chestertonism.

"But Doc" - you say - "you may feel you are lying when you assert that GKC is never wrong, but why worry? You could be serving Chesterton as no Chestertonian has ever served him before!"

Ah yes. But you forget I have read GKC.

"...you wouldn't suggest I should serve Chesterton by what I know to be a lie. I don't know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to be quite candid, I'm not sure you do. Lying may be serving Chesterton; I'm sure it's not serving God."
[cf "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

You sit and think a little - then ask: "do you mean this is some sort of exposé - you are going to enumerate all the little peccadillos and all the grave heresies committed by this wicked English journalist?"

No. At least not today. I'm not writing that sort of criticism. You really have to think again about what I do here, and why I do it. This is not that sort of column.

Rather, let me just quote a little from a marvellous book I am reading about St. Albert, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, which may give you some insight into the matter:

[Albert] tells us that in scientific matters one could not expect to investigate everything in person, though if this were possible, it would be the ideal method of procedure. Since, however, it is out of the question, the next best thing is to base one's theories on the observations of man whom one has no reason to suspect of lying or chicanery. If, therefore, he [Albert] chose Aristotle as his guide and authority in the sciences, it was because he had reason to conclude, owing to the instances when he had tried out and tested the Greek's [Aristotle's] sayings by his [Albert's] own observations, that the Stagirite [that is, Aristotle] was faithfully reporting his own observations and those of his pupils. Hence, it is unjust to identify Albert's scientific doctrine absolutely and exclusively with what Aristotle had said. Albert put it down as a fundamental principle, which he carried out frequently in his own case, that when Aristotle's findings were in contradiction with one's bservations the only honest and sensible procedure was to hold to one's own opinion. [see below] Albert did subject Aristotle's scientific statements to scrutiny. Thus he rejects Aristotle when he says that lunar rainbows appear only every fifty years, since he himself had witnessed two in one year. This is one case only out of many where he proves his contention that even Aristotle is fallible; God alone is infallible.
[Schwertner, St. Albert the Great, 193-4]

You see? That is not only true for science, or for history, but even for literature - we must check into things. But more important is that concluding line: even Aristotle is fallible - God alone is infallible.

Actually, the delight in reading Chesterton is that he can poke so much fun at himself, even when he is wrong. There is a very famous line often quoted about this, and I will repeat it for you:

Listeners especially noted the quickness with which he picked up the "feel" of the audience and returned the ball to the questioner, leaving him often holding it in bewilderment and not knowing what to do next. A rather conceited young man made quite a speech of patronizing approval, saying that he had really quite liked the lecture but ending up, "I feel, Mr. Chesterton, that there is one important matter you have not quite covered: in the event of your having to change your original position, what tactics do you adopt?"
G.K. answered, "On such occasions I invariably commit suicide."
[Ward, Return To Chesterton 152]

From which it has been derived (by good logic) that, since GKC never committed suicide, he never changed his original position. Which is trivially refuted by his conversion in 1922.

But that is not the point. The point is not that he was "wrong" - but that he was poking fun, both at himself and at his questioner. If you wish something even funnier, check out "The Real Journalist" which was collected in A Miscellany of Men and tells of how GKC misquoted or misrepresented some poem or other, and how it snowballed into a media "feeding frenzy" and silly accusations and letter-writing. One can only imagine how the "bloggosphere" would react if it had been a posting... of course it is far too long for a "twitter", thank God! Hee hee.

But let us hear a little more of GKC about making mistakes. It may not satisfy you - in fact, it may leave me unspeakably tarred with some sort of anti-Chestertonian brush (hee hee!) but then as the Master has suffered, so also should the disciple expect to suffer. It may be my business to find and correct errors, but I do spend time considering the errors in my own writing before I bother fussing about those committed by others. (Remember that thing about digging out the wooden beam from your own eye first?) Try thinking about all this, and refrain from commenting until you have spent some time on it; you may be surprised at the result. Maybe you will actually laugh.

There is nothing that needs more fastidious care than our choice of nonsense. Sense is like daylight or daily air, and may come from any quarter or in any quantity. But nonsense is an art. Like an art, it is rarely successful, and yet entirely simple when it is successful. Like an art, it depends on the smallest word, and a misprint can spoil it. And like an art, when it is not in the service of heaven it is almost always in the service of hell. Numberless imitators of Lewis Carroll or of Edward Lear have tried to write nonsense and failed; falling back (one may hope) upon writing sense. But certainly, as the great Gilbert said, wherever there has been nonsense it has been precious nonsense. Les Précieuses Ridicules might be translated, perhaps, in two ways. No one doubts that serious artists are absurd; but it might also be maintained that absurdity is always a serious art.

I have suffered as much as any man from the public insult of the misprint. I have seen my love of books described as a love of boots. I have seen the word "cosmic" invariably printed as "comic"; and have merely reflected that the two are much the same. As to Nationalists and Rationalists, I have come to the conclusion that no human handwriting or typewriting can clearly distinguish them; and I now placidly permit them to be interchanged, though the first represents everything I love and the second everything I loathe. But there is one kind of misprint I should still find it hard to forgive. I could not pardon a blunder in the printing of "Jabberwock." I insist on absolute literalism in that really fine poem of Lear, "The Dong with the Luminous Nose." To spoil these new nonsense words would be like shooting a great musician improvising on the piano. The sounds could never be recovered again. "And as in uffish thought he stood." If the printer had printed it "affish" I doubt if the first edition would have sold. "Over the Great Gromboolian Plain." Suppose I had seen it printed "Gromhoolian." Perhaps I should never have known, as I know now, that Edward Lear was a yet greater man than Lewis Carroll.

The first principle, then, may be considered clear. Let mistakes be made in ordinary books - that is, in scientific works, established biographies, histories, and so on. Do not let us be hard on misprints when they occur merely in time-tables or atlases or works of science. In works like those of Professor Haeckel, for example, it is sometimes quite difficult to discover which are the misprints and which are the intentional assertions. But in anything. artistic, anything which avowedly strays beyond reason, there we must demand the exactitude of art. If a thing is admittedly not possible, then the next best thing it can do is to be beautiful. If a thing is nonsensical, it ought to be perfectly nonsensical.
[GKC ILN March 11 1911, CW29:51-2.
Also see ILN June 9, 1906 CW 27:206: "Whatever is cosmic is comic."]

I am ready to admit I have made many mistakes in this posting, but I do not have any intention of committing suicide. I've got too much to do just now, so "I think I shall not hang myself today." [GKC "A Ballade Of Suicide" in Collected Poems 180]

Postscript. I had to poke into the Jaki part of AMBER to find out something more about Haeckel. As GKC says, "The religion of Haeckel the biologist is more important than his biology." [ILN June 22 1912 CW29:312] But he really was even more hilarious when you hear his science:

Some monists tried of course to camouflage their materialistic exploitation of the alleged fact of spontaneous generation with a propaganda long on scientific words but very short on science. Thus Haeckel boldly informed the German Association in 1877 that once the chemical components of a cell - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur - are properly united, they "produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nursed, become man." In all this of course there was only as little of "exact" physical science as there was logic in his concluding sentence: "With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in."
[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 310]

Oh my... Hee hee!

Dr. Thursday's Post: The Sacramentality of Things

Books, Ancient and Modern

They call it "electronics" this gold boom,
The word for amber from the Greeks we get;
And keyboards now weave books upon its loom.
To Manisa of Turkey is our debt
For now their "northbound stone" is our diskette
Whereon a million letters spin and whir;
No dog-eared floppies you have seen, I bet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

Though books on disk make certain searches zoom,
They may succeed too well, to your regret,
A tenth of each book with ten words does bloom,
And paraphrase remains a constant threat,
And 'modern' scanned as 'modem' makes one fret,
This soup of letters I would rather stir
And eat - with a detective novelette.
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

No glowing AMBER words lift sleepless gloom,
Though saving scholars loads of time and sweat,
No CRTs are thrown across the room
When readers' expectations are not met,
Or leather-bound, with gold and jewels set
When with the written word one does concur.
The magnet serves, but print is foe or pet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

Oh fly caught in the web, trapped in the net,
Just scan a page which line noise cannot blur,
That touch and smell beyond all hardware yet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

--Dr. Thursday

Previously published in Something Good To Read; used with
permission from the Editor-in-Chief.

When it appeared, the following note was appended:

We know that Manisa is the new name for Magnesia, the place in Asia
Minor which gives its name to magnets. But who is "Dale"? While we know
a lot of people named Dale, none of them live in Asia Minor. Perhaps it
is one of those poetry things we don't understand. That's why we have a
staff poet. Eds.

Note from Nancy: I don't know why, but when I just read this, I got the image of St. Jerome throwing a laptop across the room...