Awesome vs. Creepy

There’s a cornea in Norway that’s been in continuous use for 123 years.  Not even mistyping, there:

Bernt Aune’s transplanted cornea has been in use for a record 123 years — since before the Eiffel Tower was built.

“This is the oldest eye in Norway — I don’t know if it’s the oldest in the world,” Aune, an 80-year-old Norwegian and former ambulance driver, told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. “But my vision’s not great any longer.”

He had a cornea transplanted into his right eye in 1958 from the body of an elderly man who was born in June 1885. The operation was carried out at Namsos Hospital, mid-Norway.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the oldest living organ in the world,” eye doctor Hasan Hasanain at Namsos hospital told the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang.

Good for him, I guess.

Just call me a wall in Compton…

…cause I’ve been tagged!  Brian Visaggio of Saint Superman posits the doom of the west and asks us what we might miss about it when everything collapses and we’ve regressed (advanced?) to a culture of clashing warlords driving motorcycles and whatnot.  He focuses on “the little things,” though, rather than notable absences like showers and general security and whatnot, but I shall not:

1. Digitized music – it will be better for the soul, probably, for us to be forced by necessity to make our own music again, but it is certainly the case that having immediate and unfettered access to everything ever produced (more or less) is pretty sweet.  This is not a little thing, at the present hour, or at least it is not for me.

2. Benign ills against which to rail – for all that things like mass media and no-fault divorce and the fetishization of “progress” and whatnot are awful and worthy of recrimination, they aren’t a guy coming at me with a hammer in the ruins of an abandoned grocery store.

3. The pacification and (essentially) neutralization of the cruel and the stupid by the mass media noted above.  It’s too much to hope for that they’d die out quickly.

4. The leisure that is the basis of culture.  Any dramatic change of the sort that Brian proposes will not be as simple as turning off a light; it will be more in tune with tearing the light from its fixture and grinding it to dust under one’s boot.  Even the possibility of going back will have become nearly inaccessible.

5. The loss of solitude – if I were to survive in the world being posited, I’ve no doubt that it would be necessarily with the help of many others.  I’m an academic by profession, and no athlete, but more than this I lack the sort of common sense and basic know-how that would make survival under such conditions possible.  I’d have to have people to help me and shoulder some of the burden, and I doubt that I could ever part from them if I expected to live.  I don’t know how I could tolerate that, though; while I’m neither a loner nor anti-social, there are times when I have to get away from people, immediately and completely, and the loss of the ability to do that whenever it becomes necessary is something I dare not even contemplate.

This is a somewhat belated reply to his question, but the west hasn’t collapsed just yet so it seems as though I’ve still managed to get in before the deadline or whatever.  Brian, I am sure, will not mind.

Recalled to Life

It may shock those not in my immediate social circle to learn that I am not actually dead.  I sure felt as though I ought to have been over these last couple of days, but the sickness has departed and the old fire has returned even if the cough remains.

The absence from this blog was somewhat longer than I had intended.  I discovered, to my surprise (which was in itself surprising), that being a doctoral student sometimes actually involves hard work and being busy.  It doesn’t always, to be sure, but I needed to take some time off from this to get myself into the habit of doing what needed to be done before doing things that were more idle and less productive, however entertaining.

My last seminar of the semester was presented today (while sick and under the influence of medication, but presented nevertheless), and the last grant application will be handed in on Friday.  I have much more to do after this, of course, but for the time being things will become more manageable.  I’ll also be getting my own internet connection this week, at long last, and so won’t have to schedule blogging around those rare moments in which I happen to find myself on campus with nothing else to do.

The weeks that have passed since I let it all slide have been productive, though not in terribly interesting ways.  I got a haircut; I also got a diploma conferring upon me the title of Master of Arts, a position that carries with it both priveleges and responsibilities (the diploma says so explicitly).  I had been inclined to view the diploma with the same cynical indifference afforded the BA, but in accepting it in person, and reading it, too, I am no longer inclined to do so.  It was the line about responsibilities that did it, I think; I should no longer be a part of the problem, but rather a part of the world-scourging, fire-drinking solution, broadly put.

But all of that is in the future (which begins, as John Paul II wisely put it, not tomorrow, but today), and for the present I will simply rest and exult.  Today is October 28th.  It has been a good day.  I got to speak about James Hogg and his 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and I hope I do not flatter myself in believing that the things that I said were true.  Someone left a copy of Chesterton’s book on Chaucer on one of the free book shelves in the department; it, along with an inexplicable copy of the second volume of a three-part biography of Orestes Brownson, is now mine.  I left the building feeling not quite healthy, but not quite so sick, and I was gratified to discover myself in the midst of a genial blizzard upon stepping out of doors.  The snow plummets down still, and will not soon stop.  It is a glorious thing.

It was on this day in AD 312 that Constantine the Great led his army to victory at the Milvian Bridge, the Cross before his eyes and on his shield, and the emperor Maxentius went down to his death opposing him.  October is a great time for such memorials, and one might pass a perfect month of tributes in this precisely-apportioned way:

- Oct. 7 – Lepanto

- Oct. 14 – Hastings (or the Sobibor Uprising, which is pretty excellent too and less ambiguous in its merits)

- Oct. 21 – Trafalgar

- Oct. 28 – Milvian Bridge

There are many other dates of note in this month of months, but I’ll leave that for later.

In the meantime, though, I’m back.

A bolt from the heavens

Eric Scheske, departing from his usual style of saying a few choice words about a wide variety of topics, here offers up the first part of a substantial consideration of St. Therese of Lisieux, the “Little Flower,” as a necessary antidote to the soul-grinding despair of her time in much the same capacity as that served by the likes of St. Francis and St. Antony for the foul trends of theirs.

About two and a half years before she died, when the tuberculosis that would kill her was taxing her health, the convent’s prioress, Pauline (Therese’s older sister), ordered her to write her autobiography. She wrote, simply, like a half-educated school girl. She told about her youth and her years in the convent. Although she told nothing of apparent importance, The Story of a Soul came to life in its authenticity and in the details of the spiritual life she had devised for herself. When the world read her pages, it knew it had a potent new path to holiness on its hands. She called it, “the little way of spiritual childhood.” Today we simply call it the “Little Way” or the “Little Way of St. Therese.”

The Little Way is a method of living that undertakes every task—especially the smallest and least noticed—with no thought to oneself. A person traveling The Little Way anonymously addresses whatever comes up during the day, but without ever thinking about the rewards of addressing such things. This is how Clare Booth Luce explained it: “Are not the lives of almost all of us made up of little things? But for most people a dozen annoyances, bothers, anxieties, frustrations, harassments a day add up to aspirins or martinis, to ulcers or neuroses or breakdowns—even to suicide. Therese made them add up to sainthood. Stooping a dozen times a day quietly—indeed furtively—she picked up and carried the splinters of the cross that strewed her path as they strew ours. And when she gathered them all up, she had the material of a cross of no inconsiderable weight.” She did the little things in life without thinking about them—serving and praying, but never thinking about her service and prayer, and never pausing to think about her good works. Just doing.

[...]

The Little Way revolves around what George MacDonald called “the holy Present.” Her life was lived without looking backward or forward. She solely wanted to carry out God’s will as it was revealed to her from second to second. With this remarkable narrowness of temporal concerns, she intertwined a thorough self-forgetfulness that undertook the tasks of the immediate present with absolutely no self-regard. She did not step back to look at herself at all, never separated herself from the concrete reality that she found in the here and now. It is an existentialist approach because it eliminates mental concerns about oneself, the concerns that cause us to think about ourselves and the essences that define us and distinguish us from other things. In Therese’s case, these essences fell off like shackles from a freed prisoner, and she found herself totally absorbed in the heart of Jesus.

It’s excellent stuff, even by his high standards, and certainly worth your time.