Voltaire brought up to date

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Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged

In the days of my youth, before I turned my mind to higher things, I read most of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. In one of its five volumes (I know) there is a minor character called Bowerick Wowbagger, also referred to as Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.   As a result of an accident with a  particle accelerator and a pair of rubber bands, he had become immortal and in consequence found that time began to hang too heavy on his hands. To drive off ennui, he conceives a hobby to occupy himself:

He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order

I had long forgotten Wowbagger and his dream, but they came back to my mind not long after the start of the present pontificate. It is true that the part about alphabetical order is missing but apart from that the similarity is striking.  Pope Francis made impressive progress this week in the project of insulting everyone in the universe when he attacked both Americans (“it is an honour to be criticised by them”) and Cardinal Mueller (“he is like a child”).  Pedants might complain that it is cheating to insult a continent at a time, but I think it shows a breadth of vision which can only be admired.

 

 

Various opinions on marital compatibility

As we prepare ourselves for the surprises the ‘Holy Spirit’ may have in store for us during this Year of Mercy, I thought a survey of various opinions on marital compatibility might be called for…

ARISTOTLE

From the Politics Book 7

Since the legislator should begin by considering how the frames of the children whom he is rearing may be as good as possible, his first care will be about marriage- at what age should his citizens marry, and who are fit to marry? In legislating on this subject he ought to consider the persons and the length of their life, that their procreative life may terminate at the same period, and that they may not differ in their bodily powers, as will be the case if the man is still able to beget children while the woman is unable to bear them, or the woman able to bear while the man is unable to beget, for from these causes arise quarrels and differences between married persons. Secondly, he must consider the time at which the children will succeed to their parents; there ought not to be too great an interval of age, for then the parents will be too old to derive any pleasure from their affection, or to be of any use to them. Nor ought they to be too nearly of an age; to youthful marriages there are many objections- the children will be wanting in respect to the parents, who will seem to be their contemporaries, and disputes will arise in the management of the household. Thirdly, and this is the point from which we digressed, the legislator must mold to his will the frames of newly-born children. Almost all these objects may be secured by attention to one point. Since the time of generation is commonly limited within the age of seventy years in the case of a man, and of fifty in the case of a woman, the commencement of the union should conform to these periods. The union of male and female when too young is bad for the procreation of children; in all other animals the offspring of the young are small and in-developed, and with a tendency to produce female children, and therefore also in man, as is proved by the fact that in those cities in which men and women are accustomed to marry young, the people are small and weak; in childbirth also younger women suffer more, and more of them die; some persons say that this was the meaning of the response once given to the Troezenians- the oracle really meant that many died because they married too young; it had nothing to do with the ingathering of the harvest. It also conduces to temperance not to marry too soon; for women who marry early are apt to be wanton; and in men too the bodily frame is stunted if they marry while the seed is growing (for there is a time when the growth of the seed, also, ceases, or continues to but a slight extent). Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide. Further, the children, if their birth takes place soon, as may reasonably be expected, will succeed in the beginning of their prime, when the fathers are already in the decline of life, and have nearly reached their term of three-score years and ten.

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SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

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J. R. R. TOLKIEN

From a letter to Michael Tolkien 6-8 March 1941

A man’s dealings with women can be purely physical (they cannot really, of course: but I mean he can refuse to take other things into account, to the great damage of his soul (and body) and theirs); or ‘friendly’; or he can be a ‘lover’ (engaging and blending all his affections and powers of mind and body in a complex emotion powerfully coloured and energized by ‘sex’). This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been ‘going to the bad’ all down the ages. The various social forms shift, and each new mode has its special dangers: but the ‘hard spirit of concupiscence’ has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell. We will leave aside the ‘immoral’ results. These you desire not to be dragged into. To renunciation you have no call. ‘Friendship’ then? In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman. The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones. This ‘friendship’ has often been tried: one side or the other nearly always fails. Later in life when sex cools down, it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can only rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it. The other partner will let him (or her) down, almost certainly, by ‘falling in love’. But a young man does not really (as a rule) want ‘friendship’, even if he says he does. There are plenty of young men (as a rule). He wants love: innocent, and yet irresponsible perhaps. Allas! Allas! that ever love was sinne! as Chaucer says. Then if he is a Christian and is aware that there is such a thing as sin, he wants to know what to do about it.

There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong, though as a product of Christendom (yet by no means the same as Christian ethics) the times are inimical to it. It idealizes ‘love’ — and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned ‘his divinity’ = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God’s way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. (One result is for observation of the actual to make the young man turn cynical.) To forget their desires, needs and temptations. It inculcates exaggerated notions of ‘true love’, as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose. (One result of that is to make young folk look for a ‘love’ that will keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs; and the incurably romantic go on looking even in the squalor of the divorce courts).

Women really have not much part in all this, though they may use the language of romantic love, since it is so entwined in all our idioms. The sexual impulse makes women (naturally when unspoiled more unselfish) very sympathetic and understanding, or specially desirous of being so (or seeming so), and very ready to enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to religion, of the young man they are attracted to. No intent necessarily to deceive: sheer instinct: the servient, helpmeet instinct, generously warmed by desire and young blood. Under this impulse they can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise outside their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him. But this is their natural avenue to love. Before the young woman knows where she is (and while the romantic young man, when he exists, is still sighing) she may actually ‘fall in love’. Which for her, an unspoiled natural young woman, means that she wants to become the mother of the young man’s children, even if that desire is by no means clear to her or explicit. And then things are going to happen: and they may be very painful and harmful, if things go wrong. Particularly if the young man only wanted a temporary guiding star and divinity (until he hitches his waggon to a brighter one), and was merely enjoying the flattery of sympathy nicely seasoned with a titillation of sex – all quite innocent, of course, and worlds away from ‘seduction’.

You may meet in life (as in literature¹) women who are flighty, or even plain wanton — I don’t refer to mere flirtatiousness, the sparring practice for the real combat, but to women who are too silly to take even love seriously, or are actually so depraved as to enjoy ‘conquests’, or even enjoy the giving of pain – but these are abnormalities, even though false teaching, bad upbringing, and corrupt fashions may encourage them. Much though modern conditions have changed feminine circumstances, and the detail of what is considered propriety, they have not changed natural instinct. A man has a life-work, a career, (and male friends), all of which could (and do where he has any guts) survive the shipwreck of ‘love’. A young woman, even one ‘economically independent’, as they say now (it usually really means economic subservience to male commercial employers instead of to a father or a family), begins to think of the ‘bottom drawer’ and dream of a home, almost at once. If she really falls in love, the shipwreck may really end on the rocks. Anyway women are in general much less romantic and more practical. Don’t be misled by the fact that they are more ‘sentimental’ in words – freer with ‘darling’, and all that. They do not want a guiding star. They may idealize a plain young man into a hero; but they don’t really need any such glamour either to fall in love or to remain in it. If they have any delusion it is that they can ‘reform’ men. They will take a rotter open-eyed, and even when the delusion of reforming him fails, go on loving him. They are, of course, much more realistic about the sexual relation. Unless perverted by bad contemporary fashions they do not as a rule talk ‘bawdy’; not because they are purer than men (they are not) but because they don’t find it funny. I have known those who pretended to, but it is a pretence. It may be intriguing, interesting, absorbing (even a great deal too absorbing) to them: but it is just plumb natural, a serious, obvious interest; where is the joke?

They have, of course, still to be more careful in sexual relations, for all the contraceptives. Mistakes are damaging physically and socially (and matrimonially). But they are instinctively, when uncorrupt, monogamous. Men are not. …. No good pretending. Men just ain’t, not by their animal nature. Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic, according to faith and not to the flesh. Each of us could healthily beget, in our 30 odd years of full manhood, a few hundred children, and enjoy the process. Brigham Young (I believe) was a healthy and happy man. It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.

However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that — even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it. When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only —. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the ‘choosing’ by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by ‘failure’ and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean, heart, and fidelity of will.….

My own history is so exceptional, so wrong and imprudent in nearly every point that it makes it difficult to counsel prudence. Yet hard cases make bad law; and exceptional cases are not always good guides for others. For what it is worth here is some autobiography – mainly on this occasion directed towards the points of age, and finance.

I fell in love with your mother at the approximate age of 18. Quite genuinely, as has been shown – though of course defects of character and temperament have caused me often to fall below the ideal with which I started. Your mother was older than I, and not a Catholic. Altogether unfortunate, as viewed by a guardian. And it was in a sense very unfortunate; and in a way very bad for me. These things are absorbing and nervously exhausting. I was a clever boy in the throes of work for (a very necessary) Oxford scholarship. The combined tensions nearly produced a bad breakdown. I muffed my exams and though (as years afterwards my H[ead] M[aster] told me) I ought to have got a good scholarship, I only landed by the skin of my teeth an exhibition of £60 at Exeter: just enough with a school leaving scholarship] of the same amount to come up on (assisted by my dear old guardian). Of course there was a credit side, not so easily seen by the guardian. I was clever, but not industrious or single-minded; a large pan of my failure was due simply to not working (at least not at classics) not because I was in love, but because I was studying something else: Gothic and what not. Having the romantic upbringing I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. Naturally rather a physical coward, I passed from a despised rabbit on a house second-team to school colours in two seasons. All that sort of thing. However, trouble arose: and I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation, and ‘dropping’ the love-affair until I was 21. I don’t regret my decision, though it was very hard on my lover. But that was not my fault. She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else. For very nearly threeyears I did not see or write to my lover. It was extremely hard, painful and bitter, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at College. But I don’t think anything else would have justified marriage on the basis of a boy’s affair; and probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence. On the night of my 21st birthday I wrote again to your mother – Jan. 3, 1913. On Jan. 8th I went back to her, and became engaged, and informed an astonished family. I picked up my socks and did a spot of work (too late to save Hon. Mods. from disaster) – and then war broke out the next year, while I still had a year to go at college. In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in, especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage. No degree: no money: fiancée. I endured the obloquy, and hints becoming outspoken from relatives, stayed up, and produced a First in Finals in 1915. Bolted into the army: July 1915. I found the situation intolerable and married on March 22, 1916. May found me crossing the Channel (I still have the verse I wrote on the occasion!) for the carnage of the Somme.

Think of your mother! Yet I do not now for a moment feel that she was doing more than she should have been asked to do – not that that detracts from the credit of it. I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p. a. (£20 – 40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern). She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now. I sold out, and spent to pay the nursing-home, the last of my few South African shares, ‘my patrimony’.

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. …. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

 

Dr Johnson on the Division and Methods of the Sciences

Do you regret that your education was not conducted according to strict scholastic principles? Be consoled by the wisdom of Dr Johnson:

On Tuesday, July 26th, I found Mr Johnson alone. We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. JOHNSON: ‘Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time, your breach is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both (from ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’, chapter VI).

 

“A place where there is no mercy….” Bond investigates the St Gallen Group?

 

On a more cheerful note…

Some triviality to distract from the dire times:

If you have put your beer into the freezer to chill it and stupidly left it for too long, what do you do? You will normally get quite an impressive frozen beer volcano, but this worked for me (yes, yes, it is alcohol-free beer, but stilll…)

Actually, it is not that cheerful after all, is it?

P.S.: Gah! WordPress is sporting a rainbow banner today! Can’t remove it while typing this. Will probably need some eye-bleach, Or was there some whiskey left somewhere?

 

Since you need cheering up

here is Max Beerbohm’s parody of Belloc’s prose style, particularly as found in The Path to Rome. Belloc liked it so much that he had it framed and hung it on his wall.

 

 

Eerie

Just a disclaimer: I got to this quiz through a link of a link of a link (of a link of a link?) of this blog; through a Catholic Mommy Blog, anyway (and I forget which, sorry).

The original poster claimed it got her secret dreams alright, i.e. Astronaut.

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Great, I thought, I’d also like to get ‘Astronaut’.

With this in mind, I ticked the boxes, and got:

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I do not know if to cry or to laugh.

At least the actor perfectly represents my secret ambition: that of becoming a Nice Dragon.

 

Some while ago, inspired by this post of Orwell’s Picnic, I invested a considerable amount of money in a box set of Star Trek – The Original Series, and never looked back. A minor irritant, however, was that I could only receive the delivery of the DVDs in person, showing my ID, because they were age-restricted (cue the hassle of making an appointment with the delivery service, getting up in the early morning on Saturday, and the embarrassment of signing for age-restricted DVD  packed in discrete brown envelope…)

This week I watched the one (!) episode out of 79 that earned the whole lot an ‘age 16 rating’ in Germany (nothing but definite p**n gets anything worse here, according to my –  admittedly extremely limited – knowledge).

It is this:

Patterns of Force. The Enterprise is looking for a historian who was sent to observe a primitive civilization, and who, as it turns out, was so appalled by the Ekosians’ local squabbling that, non-interference directive or not, he decided to do something about it, though, to put it mildly, not with the best historical judgement.

Not to get me wrong: the episode may be in rather bad taste and has a number of glaring faults. One is the fact that most of the characters believe the National Socialist state was an efficient, though psychotic and evil, one, which is of course utterly wrong (Albeit, apparently, an opinion that was held at the time in the States [add Star Trek fandom source I am too lazy to look up here]). Another one is that if the generally kind and good historian (Gill, I think) just wants to copy what is good (?) about the Nazis, why does he import symbology, troop types and the like wholesale?

Still, from there on, it is pretty much ‘Some anvils have to be dropped‘. The Space Nazis are probably the most unalloyedly evil evil guys in the whole of TOS. First thing we see is them battering an apparently harmless civilian in way as brutal as not otherwise shown in TOS normally. The absolutely pacifist ethnic group to be eliminated (from a neighbouring planet with the best of intentions and behaving nobly throughout) come from the planet Zeon, and have names such as Abrom, Isak and Davod. The Space Nazis, leaving dying people in the street and mocking them, plus preparing wholesale annihilation of the Zeons both on their own and the Zeons’ home planet, are also rather foolish: easily taken in by the valiant resistance double agents, and enthusiastic about the meaningless aggressive catchphrases Gill, now a mindless drugged puppethead of an evil Second in Command, spouts out. Probably the least attractive evil guys in TOS, IMHO.

So what we get is Kirk and Spock, after escaping from their prison cells, running around in SS uniforms to save the day by deceit, the morbid fascination about watching them doing this lying in the utter opposition of what they and these uniforms stand for. O.K., there is the rather blue-eyed ending assuming that Gill dead and the whole madness unmasked, everyone will be reasonable again (but then again, that was about the hope of the Stauffenberg assassination attempt, and oh if it just would have worked!).

The fact that the episode was not shown in German television until decades after the original airings, and then late at night (if ‘in rather bad taste’ was a criterion, what about ‘The Empath‘?), should elucidate to non-Germans the depth of the German National Trauma, that allows none but the most chest-beating reference to 1933-45, no fun made about that period, nor any light entertainment, be it ever so obvious about who the really, really bad baddies are. Just so that you think before you make you next Nazi/Hitler joke while we are listening.

 

A sort of shoe post

Long-time readers having stated their dissatisfaction  about the increasing seriousness of this blog and the preponderance of hardline doctrinal posts, coupled with the absence of shoe-post and the like – and given that even an unnamed male person did express some concern about the increased ‘blokishness’ of Laodicea – it seems I must try and rectify this to some extent in the future.

So here my first attempt:

Given it is Lent, some of us may – as a side effect – be living more healthily than during the rest of the year. Probably female are more likely than male Catholics to have given up chocolate, sweets and the like, and may be suffering from scruples about their side thought that, in addition to being a good and pious thing to do, this will result in them loosing weight, and thus be partly motivated by vanity. The good news: As I have just heard (as a scientist I should check if there is actually empirical evidence for this, but I am lazy, so I won’t) if you are eating lots of unhealthy, sugary and fatty things for a while, your body becomes unable to absorb all the nutrients of the more healthy stuff you eat. As a consequence, as soon as you cut out these unhealthy things, you may well gain, instead of loose, weight. Which makes your fasting really a spiritual, not a self-seeking thing.

From another perspective, the message would seem to be that the more unhealthy the food you eat, the more you can eat of it. So at the end of Lent…