"O taste and see..."

Psalm 34:8 (KJV)

"From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil..."

From the "Great Litany" in the Book of Common Prayer:

O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, one God,
Have mercy upon us.

Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses of our forefathers;
neither reward us according to our sins. Spare us, good Lord, spare Thy people,
whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy most precious blood, and by Thy mercy preserve us, for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.

From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil;
and from everlasting damnation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy;
from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all inordinate and sinful affections;
and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism;
from hardness of heart, and contempt of Thy Word and Commandment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood;
from plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us.

From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder;
and from dying suddenly and unprepared,
Good Lord, deliver us.

By the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation; by Thy holy Nativity and submission to the Law;
by Thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

By Thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by Thy Cross and Passion;
by Thy precious Death and Burial; by Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension;
and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost,
Good Lord, deliver us.

In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our prosperity;
in the hour of death, and in the Day of Judgment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

"Guard us waking, guard us sleeping..."

God, that madest Earth and Heaven,        Darkness and light! Who the day for toil hast given, For rest the night! May Thine angel guards defend us, Slumber sweet Thy mercy send us; Holy dreams and hopes attend us, This livelong night!

Guard us waking, guard us sleeping, And when we die, May we in Thy mighty keeping All peaceful lie; When the last dread call shall wake us, Do not Thou, our God, forsake us, But to reign in glory take us With Thee on high.

Never forget

This was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. 

Toxic masculinity

Lou Aguilar has thrown away his Gillette products (so have I) and misses the kind of masculinity represented in Westerns: "Come Back, Shane — and Matt Dillon, Ringo Kid, and Magnificent Seven":

.... In the first classic Western, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne’s Ringo Kid is the only man who treats prostitute Claire Trevor as a lady, shaming others into doing the same. In Ford’s next Western gem, My Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) realizes Doc Holliday’s genteel ex-girlfriend, Clementine, is more vital to pacifying Tombstone than his gun. Shane and his farmer employer’s wife, Marion, never act on their growing mutual attraction, out of respect for her role of wife and mother. An older John Wayne as Sheriff John Chance in Rio Bravo (1959) gets repeatedly flummoxed by Angie Dickinson’s sexual candidness. The Magnificent Seven risk their lives, and ultimate lose four, defending a dirt poor Mexican farm village. One of the seven, Charles Bronson, delivers the greatest speech about fatherhood in all of cinema, lecturing a group of hero-worshiping young boys.

“Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun. Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility. For you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do this because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery.” .... (more)

Come Back, Shane — and Matt Dillon, Ringo Kid, and Magnificent 7The American Spectator

We will survive

Thirty years ago James McPherson's single volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, was published. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History. It is not only good history; it is a very enjoyable read. From a recent interview with James McPherson:

HM: A phrase that is frequently tossed about today is that “we have never been more divided than we are now.” As one of the nation’s most prominent Civil War historians, do you feel that statement is overused? Or are there some parallels in today’s climate to the Civil War era that should give Americans cause for alarm?

McPherson: There may be some parallels, but clearly the country was more divided in the late 1850s and first half of the 1860s than it is now. I do not think we are heading toward a civil war. The issues today are very divisive, and people are impassioned about them, but I do not think we are in as bad shape now as we were 160 years ago.

I would even say that the country was probably more divided, and the potential consequences or the potential dangers to the future of the United States may have been even greater in the 1890s and the 1930s than they are now. The labor violence, the divisive rhetoric, and the rise of the Populists of the 1890s are examples much greater than anything we are experiencing today. In the 1930s, people were really talking about the possibility of following Germany, Italy, and other countries toward fascism, while others advocated following the Soviet Union toward some form of communism. I would say there are several eras in the past that experienced far more divisiveness than we are going through right now, even as bad as things may appear. The use of the phrase bothers me some, so I lecture them about it. I say, “you know, if you really understood what happened in previous eras, you might not be so upset about what is going on right now. We survived those dangerous times, and I think we will survive these times too, because these times are maybe less dangerous than then.”

An Interview with James McPherson: Thirty Years After the Publication of Battle Cry of Freedom - Public Discourse

Vanity

I have never had a Twitter account but have followed others there often enough to agree with Barton Swaim here (via Alan Jacobs):

The in­stan­ta­neous aware­ness of so much folly is not, I now think, healthy for the hu­man mind. Spend­ing time on Twit­ter be­came, for me, a deeply de­mor­al­iz­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. Of­ten, espe­cially when some con­tro­versy of na­tional im­por­tance pro­voked large num­bers of users into tweet­ing their opin­ions about it, I would come away from Twit­ter ex­as­perated al­most to the point of mad­ness.

I thought of a verse from the 94^th Psalm: “The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are van­ity.” Af­ter an hour or so of watch­ing hu­man­i­ty’s stu­pidi­ties scroll across my screen, I felt I had peeked into some dread­ful abyss into which only God can safely look. It was not for me to know the thoughts of man.

Kevin Williamson:

Twitter is not the driving force that has disfigured our hysterically dysfunctional political discourse. Twitter is only a technological instrument that helps people to act in accordance with their worst and lowest motives, quickly, frictionless, and, often, anonymously.

Facebook can be pretty bad, too.

“the instantaneous awareness of so much folly” – Snakes and Ladders

Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time: #96

Another great one: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. From Otto Penzler at CrimeReads:

Basil Rathbone—an accomplished stage actor, especially in Shakespearean roles—played Holmes for the first time in this film, which was the first (after dozens of screen versions of Holmesian adventures) to be set in the Victorian Era. Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce as his Watson, went on to play Holmes in thirteen more full-length films, as well as 275 radio broadcasts and on the stage. ....

An ancient legend has it that a gigantic phantasmagoric hound prowls the Great Grimpen Mire, on which Baskerville Hall is located. Young Sir Henry has recently arrived from Canada to assume possession of the Baskerville estate after the mysterious death of his uncle. Dr. Mortimer, the physician of the Baskerville family, has come to Sherlock Holmes’s rooms at Baker Street because he is afraid that Sir Henry will meet a similar end. When attempts on Henry’s life are made in London, Holmes and Watson head to Dartmoor to prevent another death. ....

Arguably the greatest mystery novel ever written, The Hound of the Baskervilles is also one of the most familiar, and it is a measure of its greatness that the film bears watching even if the viewer knows the murderer.

Extremely faithful to the book on which it is based and notable for introducing Rathbone and Bruce to the world as the definitive Holmes and Watson, the film has a superb cast, with such infamous screen villains as Lionel Atwill and John Carradine providing nice red herrings. .... (more)

Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time: #96 | CrimeReads

The enemy is us

Karen Swallow Prior is an English professor at Liberty University. A few weeks ago I saw her on C-SPAN presenting and answering questions about her recent book, On Reading Well. Today there is a very interesting New Yorker profile:

.... Prior believes that one legacy of the Church’s history of sexism is that women tend to receive less formal theological education than men, which forces them to seek answers on their own. “They’re often being discipled by the blogosphere and by the latest, greatest celebrity,” Prior told me. This leaves them vulnerable to people who distort scripture to serve their own ends. Prior was dismayed by the success of Girl, Wash Your Face, a Christian mega-best-seller that intersperses self-help advice with Biblical verses, which has sold more than a million copies since February. “There’s a whole genre of Christian self-help books that emphasize a Christianity that’s more informed by the American Dream and therapy than the Bible,” she told me. She didn’t like to see her religion commercialized in this way. The distortion is especially harmful when scripture is distorted for political ends. Some conservative Christian men have gone so far as to argue that, according to the second book of Timothy, which grants men “Biblical headship” over women, female police officers have no authority.

When Trump was elected with some eighty per cent of white evangelical support, including that of many evangelical women, despite his history of alleged sexual violence, Prior saw it as a call to address the problems within the evangelical community. “We recognized that the real problem wasn’t Trump,” she told me. “It was the need to clean our own house.” Last month, along with twenty female leaders from different denominational traditions—including Baptist, Messianic Jewish, and Anglican—Prior launched the Pelican Project, an effort to provide orthodox women with scriptural guidance. The group plans to serve as a resource for evangelical women, and for pastors looking for help in educating their female parishioners. .... (more)

The Pelikan Project has a web presence.

Conservative Evangelicals Attempt to Disentangle Their Faith from Trumpism | The New Yorker

Torrent

Still my favorite N.C. Wyeth illustration, from the Scribner edition of Stevenson's Kidnapped:

The Torrent in the Valley of Glencoe

More on old stories

My recent blog post about reading old stories reminded me of an earlier book by Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, reviewed here by Thomas Howard. In the review Howard summarizes four of the "ten ways" and then Esolen's responses. One paragraph relevant to the theme:

The old, unedited fairy tales and folk tales, which opened out onto a totally unregulated domain, patently dangerous for a child’s emotional health, simply won’t do. We can’t have the wolf gobbling up granny, or Cinderella’s sisters having their eyes pecked out by helpful little birds. All too gruesome—the modern theory being that the child must never be asked to cope with the gruesome. I must confess that I myself might wish to tax Esolen on this point—amiably, to be sure. But his point is that those old tales, at times gruesome, roused a child’s imagination. They saw life in all of its peremptory starkness. They never applauded the gruesome. Furthermore, the figures that showed up in those stories were patently good or evil. Esolen remarks here, “It has been a great victory for the crushers of imagination to label such figures ‘stereotypes,’ and add a sneer to it, as if people who used them in their stories were not very imaginative.” Current educational theories, with the moral vision that suffuses them, suppose that at all costs everything must be nuanced. Since there are no eternal fixities anyway, we can never presume to judge people—whether thieves or cruel stepmothers. Esolen’s rejoinder here is that in the realm of faerie we do, in fact, come up against intransigent figures—or better, archetypes: orcs, Dark Riders, dragons, wicked stepmothers. That’s what the genre is about. It is in other genres of literature—serious drama, or post-eighteenth-century prose fiction, say—that we undertake the nuanced psychological scrutiny of human behavior.

Of More Than Routine Interest: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child - The Imaginative Conservative

"The word of God to His people"

From a series of "Bible Guides" edited by William Barclay and F.F. Bruce:

The story of the making of the Bible is a story which enables us to see the supreme value of the books of the Bible as nothing else can or does. It enables us to see that these books did not become Scripture by the decision of any Church or any man; they became Scripture because out of them men in their sorrow found comfort, in their despair hope, in their weakness strength, in their temptations power, in their darkness light, in their uncertainty faith, and in their sin a Saviour. That is why the Bible is the word of God. When the Church did make its canonical lists, it was not choosing and selecting these books; it was only affirming and attesting that these already were the books on which men had stayed their hearts and fed their souls. And that is why there never can be a time when the Church or the Christian can do without this Bible which has always been the word of God to His people, and the place where men find Jesus Christ.

William Barclay, The Making of the Bible, 1961.

"One for the road"

The Telegraph Travel section provides an article about "London's 11 most notorious public execution sites," from which:

1. Smithfield

Many of the Marian Martyrs, protestants slaughtered under Queen Mary, met their demise at the Elms at Smithfield, London’s oldest execution site. St Bartholomew's Hospital features a plaque to commemorate several of them.

It was also the site of William Wallace’s execution in 1305. It happened much like in the movie, Braveheart (hung, drawn and quartered), though there is no evidence to support the blood curdling cry of “Freedom!”

Wallace’s head was tarred and put on display atop the southern gatehouse of London Bridge; his limbs were placed (separately) in Perth, Stirling, Berwick and Newcastle, and a quarter was sent to Aberdeen (it’s said to be entombed in the walls of St Machar's Cathedral). A memorial to the Scot can be seen today outside St Bartholomew's. In 1869 the Wallace Monument was erected near Stirling Bridge. ....

2. Tyburn

Smithfield fell from favour as an execution site in the 1400s, with Tyburn (close to the modern landmark of Marble Arch, one of central London’s busiest corners) seizing the limelight. Back then it was a mere village, but it soon became synonymous with public executions.

Prisoners would be taken there from Newgate Prison, via St Giles in the Fields and Oxford Street, with some permitted a final drink at a pub en route — the source of the phrase “one for the road”, some believe.

The dream of all condemned criminals would be an escape on the way to the gallows — or from prison — and a mad dash to the nearest church, where sanctuary might be found. ....

A stone memorial can be seen on the pavement marking the spot where the Tyburn Tree, its distinctive three-sided gallows, once stood. The design meant multiple hangings could be carried out at once, such as on June 23, 1649, when 24 prisoners were hanged simultaneously, having been conveyed there in eight carts. You can get a sense of the chaos of the crowds attending these events in Hogarth’s etching The Idle Apprentice.

Oliver Cromwell's exhumed body was, symbolically, hanged at Tyburn in 1661. ....

3. Newgate Prison

In use for more than 700 years — from 1188 to 1902 — and the site of London’s gallows after Tyburn was retired from duty in 1783. The executions took place in public — with the gallows set up on Newgate Street — until 1868.

The prison, whose former inmates include Casanova, Rob Roy, Ben Jonson, William Kidd and Daniel Defoe – was demolished in 1904. The Old Bailey occupies the main site, but head to the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate to see the old jail’s execution bell, Amen Court, which is home to a surviving wall, or The Viaduct Tavern, where five former cells of a neighbouring lock-up are visible in the basement. .... (and more)

London's 11 most notorious public execution sites - Telegraph

"I will strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand..."

A Facebook friend's post today reminded me of this:

How Firm A Foundation is my favorite hymn, especially when sung to the tune known as "Foundation" or "Protection" (pdf). It first appeared in John Rippon's A Selection of Hymns in 1787, and was well-known and often sung in 19th century America. As with any good hymn, the words are all-important — and the words of this hymn are an affirmation of confidence in God and His promises. The verses affirm that God has more than sufficiently proven His reliability to us through His Word. What more could He possibly do or say than He has already said and done? The verses are based on passages from Scripture, especially from Isaiah. If we trust in His Word, everything that may happen to us will be for our good. It concludes with a paraphrase of Hebrews 13:5-6:

"...be content with what you have, because God has said 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.' So we say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?'"

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word! What more can He say than to you He hath said, To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled? Isaiah 28:16; I Corinthians 3:11	"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply; The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine." Isaiah 43:2b; II Corinthians 2:9; Zechariah 13:9
"Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed; For I am thy God and will still give thee aid; I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand, Upheld by My gracious omnipotent hand." Isaiah 41:10	"The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose, I will not, I will not, desert to his foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I'll never, no, never, no, never forsake!" Hebrews 13:5b-6
"When through the deep waters I call thee to go, The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow; For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress." Isaiah 43:2a; Romans 8:28

The rest of the verses can be found here.

Read old stories

Another wise entry at Quillette, this one by Meghan Cox Gurdon, excerpted from her The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. From "Correcting ‘Youth’s Eternal Temptation to Arrogance’—One Bedtime Story at a Time":

.... “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales,” Albert Einstein advised. I don’t know if the great theoretical physicist really made that remark, and I cannot promise that reading fairy tales to a child will tweak his IQ, but there is no doubt that these weird dramas of risk, terror, loyalty and reward agitate the blood and captivate the heart. To C.S. Lewis, time spent in what he called “fairyland” arouses in a child “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his actual reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

The reading does something else, too. It situates children in a cultural sense, equipping them to understand references to fairy tales and other classic stories that they will find all around them. When we read Hansel and Gretel or The Fisherman and His Wife or Puss in Boots, we’re at once transporting children with our voices and grounding them in foundational texts. For this reason, the time we spend reading to them can amount to a second education, one that helps children “acquire a sense of horizons,” in the phrase of linguist John McWhorter. What we give them is not schooling qua schooling, but an introduction to art and literature by means so calm and seamless that they may not notice it’s happening. ....

The more stories children hear, and the more varied and substantial those tales, the greater the confidence of their cultural ownership. They will recognize allusions that other children may miss. A girl who has heard the stories of Aesop or Jean de la Fontaine will have a clear idea of what is meant by “sour grapes” and will know why people compare the industriousness of ants and grasshoppers. A boy who’s heard a parent read The Odyssey has a more complete idea of what constitutes a “siren song” than his friend who thinks it must have something to do with an alarm going off.

The narratives of the past have helped to frame the consciousness and language of the present, and it’s a gift to children to help them recognize as much as they can. The milk of human kindness, the prick of the spindle, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the wine-dark sea: all are expressions of a vast cultural treasury.

“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud,” Russell Baker writes in his beautiful memoir, Growing Up.

Children get a wider perspective when they’re tugged out of the here and now for a little while each day. In an enchanted hour, we can read them stories of the real and imagined past. With picture-book biographies we can acquaint them with people we want them to know: Josephine Baker and Amelia Earhart, Julius Caesar and Marco Polo, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Patton and Shaka Zulu, Pocahontas, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, William Shackleton, the Savage of Aveyron, and the terrible Tudors.

With any luck, our children will come to appreciate that the people of generations past were as full of life, intelligence, wisdom, and promise as they are, and impelled by the same half-understood desires and impulses; that those departed souls were as good and bad and indifferent as people who walk the earth today. Those who came before us wrote stories and songs, built roads and bridges, invented and created and argued and fought and sacrificed for all sorts of causes. Do we not owe them a debt of gratitude? We wouldn’t be here without them. .... (more)

Correcting ‘Youth’s Eternal Temptation to Arrogance’—One Bedtime Story at a Time - Quillette

"On our side in one thing"

Peter Hitchens reviews a recent biography of Francisco Franco in "The Caudillo." It is one of those reviews from which much can be learned and perhaps the most important lesson is cautionary. Hitchens concludes:

.... Power is the opposite of love. This does not absolve Christians from fighting for, and more often against, armed power of one kind or another. But it surely means they must be very careful whom they aid, and whom they oppose. In general, the slide from civil peace to civil war begins when both sides become enemies instead of opponents, and then cease to listen to each other. It ends with the worst possible cruelty, because when brothers fight brothers, they have to strip away the very last and deepest restraints to draw the sword and strike the blow. Take the first step down that particular slope, and you will find it very hard to retreat. We should seek to exert our influence long before it comes to that. We are warned in the terrifying Epistle of James that “the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.” When we consider men such as Francisco Franco, and are tempted (as even I have been) to make excuses for them because they seem to be on our side in one thing, we make a serious mistake. Do not, if you can possibly avoid it, take that path. It leads into a long and dark valley.

The Caudillo by Peter Hitchens | Articles | First Things

Different kinds of experience

From C.S. Lewis, "Meditation in a Tool-shed," (1945):

I was standing today in the dark tool-shed. The sun was shining outside, and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool-shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences. ....

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some “ideology” (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or “debunks” the account given from inside. “All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside”, says the wiseacre, “are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.” And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, “If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.” ....

...[L]et us go back to the tool shed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing. And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”. And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you?

In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end?

The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. .... (pdf)  C.S. Lewis, "Meditation in a Tool-shed," The Coventry Evening Telegraph,  17 July 1945.

Collected in God in the Dock, Walter Hooper, ed., Eerdmans, 1970.

"A fresh, unused mind"

CrimeReads is "Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time" and their choice for #102 is a Hitchcock film I re-watch often, Foreign Correspondent (1940), a great combination of suspense and humor. From CrimeReads:

At the beginning of 1939, John Jones, an American newspaper reporter, is sent to Europe under the name Huntley Haverstock. His mission is to learn more about the possibility of war, mainly by interviewing Van Meer, a Dutch diplomat who has committed to memory a key secret element in the Allied Peace Treaty. Jones meets Stephen Fisher, a member of the British upper class who is the head of a pacifist organization, and his daughter Carol, with whom Jones quietly falls in love. ....

Why Johnny Jones?:

Mr. Powers, the editor of the New York Morning Globe, is disgusted with his foreign correspondents for failing to send any hard news to the paper and decides that he wants a real reporter to go to Europe, selecting the charming if slightly dim Johnny Jones, who admits that he knows nothing about Europe or any crisis. “What Europe needs,” Powers exclaims, “is a fresh, unused mind.”

Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time: #102 | CrimeReads

Tradition and true creativity

Roger Scruton's "Counterpoint and Why It Matters" is an essay about more than music:

I recently acquired a CD of music for piano duo by Jeremy Menuhin, son of Yehudi, the great violinist and cultural icon. The CD, issued by Genuin classics, Leipzig, is entitled The Voice of Rebellion. But the rebellion is not the usual one, against the rules and strictures of an authoritarian past. For the last fifty years or so the posture of rebellion against tradition, authority, hierarchy, and knowledge has become an orthodoxy in the media and the academic world, and the anti-establishment hero has become the cliché of a new establishment. There is only one real rebellion now, and that is the rebellion against rebellion, the rebellion on behalf of order, knowledge, and tradition—to put it in essential terms, the rebellion against the Self on behalf of the Other. This is the rebellion practised by Jeremy Menuhin in the music on his engaging CD. ....

Of course, not every composer versed in counterpoint can write in the manner of Bach. Nor should they want to. Nevertheless we must recognize the centrality of counterpoint to our tradition, and its role in bringing order and logic to the polyphonic forms that have made classical music into the symbol of our civilisation and the art-form of which we Europeans should be most proud. This makes it all the more lamentable that so many of our departments of composition teach counterpoint only as an option, or don’t teach it at all. This is one more illustration of the flight from knowledge that has swept through our universities. In music, as in every art-form, there has arisen in recent times the illusion that knowledge is not necessary, that the old forms of discipline are merely obstacles to the true creative process, and that real originality means doing your own thing, free from traditional constraints. That this is nonsense is apparent to all truly creative people, who know that artistic freedom comes only when form has been mastered and internalised. But this truth clashes with the democratic prejudice that self-expression, not discipline, makes the artist, and that no one should be excluded by mere ignorance from the rewards of creative genius. .... (more)

Counterpoint and Why It Matters ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Time travel

Kevin Williamson's post at NRO led me to an interesting essay at The New York Times. Williamson introduces it:

Brian Morton, who is the director of the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Starting Out in the Evening, has a useful essay in the New York Times. In it, he considers the problem of young people who refuse to read or engage with great works of literature because they morally disapprove of the authors. .... (more)

From Brian Morton, "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!":

.... When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations. ....

.... It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.

As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around. ....

When we imagine that writers from the past are visiting our world, it subtly reinforces our complacence, our tendency to believe that the efforts at moral improvement made by earlier generations attained their climax, their fulfillment, their perfection, in us. The idea that we are the ones who are doing the time-traveling doesn’t carry the same implication.

If, whenever we open old books, we understand from the get-go that their authors have motes in their eyes regarding important ethical or political questions, it might help us understand that the same thing could be said of us today. ....

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite! - The New York Times