Action and adventure

Dirda has reappeared at The Washington Post with "What are the best adventure novels?" including a list of books that he would choose:

What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By “adventure” I don’t mean “exciting” — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker’s dozen:

• 
  Homer, The Odyssey
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• H. Rider Haggard, She
• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
• John Buchan, Greenmantle
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood
• P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

I haven't read The Odyssey since it was assigned in school. I never got into Haggard or Burroughs, except for a couple of the Tarzan books when I was in grade school. I know nothing about Bengtsson. But I do know the rest, and many are among my favorite reads.

Dirda goes on to consider some of the post-WWII titles he might choose as great adventure novels, and again, it's a list that includes many I've read with pleasure. Most of the rest of the essay is about another author unfamiliar to me, Lionel Davidson, and particularly his The Rose of Tibet.

I am very much looking forward to the book Michael Dirda is working on, an "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain."

Michael Dirda, "What are the best adventure novels? Let’s add a hidden gem to the list," The Washington Post, July 30, 2025.

"Oppressed and evil oppressors"

A few excerpts from "Why the Revolution Never Ends":

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaiming that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead. History did not end, it just had taken a brief nap.

Refurbishing the old ideology was easy. It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” ....

Robert Conquest wisely observed that Marxism captivates not in spite of its mass killings but because of them. That is why it attracted far more enthusiastic American followers during Stalin’s great terror than in the less brutal reigns of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, when admiration shifted to the even more murderous Mao. .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Why the Revolution Never Ends," The Free Press, July 24, 2025.

In the time we are given

Tolkien delivered "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" in 1936, before he began writing the Middle-earth books. This is from "Monsters and the Long Defeat" about that lecture:

.... The need to defend “man’s precarious fortress” would never cease; crisis would emerge yet again, and then again, exhaustingly, until the end of the age. Tolkien had no patience for defeatism, but he knew at the same time that the dragon-fight to which any of us, the descendants of Adam, are summoned, will not be the last. And if it is branded the “dragon-fight to end dragons,” the vendors of that narrative will consign many hopeful young persons to the bleak fate of having failed. We cannot hope to root out Evil from the soil of the cosmos entirely. All we can do is confront its promulgation so far as we are able to in our weakness. This is the responsibility entrusted to human beings in the time they are given. If we neglect this, we will discover, each and every time, that the cost of our crusades is unbearably high. ....

The history of our species isn’t one of onward and upward progress: it is one of chaos and desperate rearguard actions, punctuated by all too short gasps of peace. We try to hold the dark but it’s never a single, concentrated line of defense holding across time, united by the same allegiances or the same threats. It is fragmented clumps of contention putting themselves in the way of the dark’s machinations, and the fact that they are often overwhelmed by it is no discrediting of the effort.

And it is the eschaton that is the final retroactive judgment that will unveil everything’s hidden significance and the obscured connections they bear to one another. Then the seemingly isolated, disparate string of defeats will be revealed to be episodes in the long campaign against the darkness, from a cup of cold water to rescuing a persecutor to a doomed last stand. The Beowulf-poet illuminated Tolkien’s instinct to see eschatological reversal as a source of hopeful activity. We, their unpromising descendants, can likewise contend for the present with the hope that the eschaton will vindicate and resurrect its good within its upheaval, but without triumphalism or presumption. Instead, we can adhere to Beckett’s like-hearted maxim, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This is our doom and our challenge: to fight the long defeat, the only fight in which there is real integrity due to its small aims and its recognition of human frailty. We may be summoned to many fights, to end this wrong or that evil, but the end of the evils and afflictions that characterize our existence will always asymptotically evade our reach. But if we would not be monsters, then we must strive all the same and leave their ultimate defeat to God. (more)

Ian Olson, "Monsters and the Long Defeat," Mere Orthodoxy, July 24, 2025.

"What the fairy tale provides..."

From "The Seven Most Popular G.K. Chesterton Quotes He Never Said":

“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, 

but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

What he actually wrote:

.... Fairy tales...are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. .... ("The Red Angel," Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

The Seven Most Popular G.K. Chesterton Quotes He Never Said

"Footprints on the sands of time"

In its weekly "Things Worth Remembering" essay, The Free Press publishes "Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!" quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life.” From the end of that essay:

“A Psalm of Life” is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and for others. A reassurance that we matter. A reassurance that although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others. (more)

Ryan Holiday, "Things Worth Remembering: ‘Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!’," The Free Press, July 13, 2025.

"Nondenominational"

I find it annoying when local churches indulge in cute "branding." The first time I recall feeling that way was when a church that had been known by its location and denomination became the "High Point" church. It is particularly annoying when a church actually conforms to a particular doctrinal tradition but conceals the affiliation. I liked this defense of clear denomination:

Nondenominational churches are the single fastest-growing Christian affiliation in the U.S. I regularly talk to believers who tell me their church isn’t a part of any denomination. Often, that comes with a hint of smugness, as if they are the ones truly being faithful to Scripture while the rest of us are in bondage to the traditions of man. ....

No individual or church simply “believes what the Bible says.” Every one of us engages in an act of interpretation when we read Scripture. We are shaped by our fallibility and sin, and limitedness. We are also shaped by the community of people around us. We learn to read Scripture from influential pastors, seminary professors, or that guy we had in a college Bible study. They learned from others as well, and those people together form a tradition that inevitably affects how we understand the Bible.

The broad traditions within Christianity exist because there are questions that are key to our life together as Christians which we disagree about. ....

Nondenominational churches inevitably have conclusions on these topics that place them in certain theological traditions. Indeed, it is a running joke in some circles that when a church says they are nondenominational, they’re really saying they’re either Baptist or charismatic and just trying to hide it. Such churches aren’t more theologically inclusive; they’re just less clear about their convictions. They are the neighbor who always votes Republican (or Democrat) and gives to Republican causes and has Republican yard signs but insists that they’re an open-minded independent. What’s worse, by pretending they don’t have convictions and “just teach the Bible,” they encourage a kind of arrogance that assumes they and they only have opinions of equal authority with God’s Word.

I think a much healthier approach is clarity with charity. We should be clear about our convictions and the broad theological categories they land us in. I’m happy to use terms like “Reformed” or “Presbyterian” to describe my theological opinions, not because I’m celebrating some man-made tradition but because I think the Bible teaches stuff that puts me in that camp. You might disagree, and that’s fine. Being up front about our differences allows us to recognize where we are united and have friendly and clarifying debates about the jumping-off points. Transparency makes room for grace; obfuscation inhibits it. .... (more)

Eric Tonjes, "Why Denominations Are Good, Actually," Mere Orthodoxy, July 9, 2025.

"Now I lay me down to sleep..."

I have reached what I once would have considered an advanced age. From Patrick Kurp's "The Ice Growing Thinner Below Our Feet":

[W]e have reached the age at which we start accumulating deaths, celebrated and obscure, and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. ....

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) died at the impossibly young age of forty-four.... For years Stevenson had suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis or a related respiratory disease but managed to produce an enormous body of work, much of it excellent. In his essay “Aes Triplex,” Stevenson writes:

[A]fter a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.

That Stevenson quotation reminded me of this from Chesterton:

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

Patrick Kurp, "The Ice Growing Thinner Below Our Feet," Anecdotal Evidence, August 19, 2022, G.K. Chesterton, "The Meaning of Dreams," found in Lunacy and Letters, Sheed & Ward, 1958 (pdf).

Decency and kindness

At NRO, Giancarlo Sopo recommends "What to Watch on the Fourth of July." I really like this one and I think I'll watch it tonight:

The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)

Though Lynch is often drawn to the darkness beneath American life, The Straight Story stands apart as his quiet tribute to its goodness. Based on a true story, it follows elderly Alvin Straight (an extraordinary Richard Farnsworth), who, upon learning that his estranged brother is gravely ill, sets out to cross 240 miles of Midwest farmland on a lawnmower that crawls along at three miles per hour. At its heart, it’s a film about fraternal reconciliation, but what holds the story — and Alvin’s journey — together are the decent Midwesterners he meets along the way: among them a bus driver who gives him a ride, a preacher who offers him food, and a fellow WWII veteran who buys him a round. In Farnsworth’s gentle performance and the kindness of strangers lies a reminder that sometimes the grandest American odysseys unfold at a pace slow enough to watch the fields go by.

Giancarlo Sopo, "What to Watch on the Fourth of July," July 4, 2025.

"If all men are created equal, that is final"

Calvin Coolidge on the 150^th anniversary of Independence Day:

.... It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed. ….

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. ....

Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence | Teaching American History