For services rendered

In a long-hoped-for and scandalously delayed move, English author and gentleman Terry Pratchett has at last been knighted.  The officially stated reason for this honour is his “services to literature.”

Sir Terry, 60, best known for his hugely popular Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, has sold more than 55 million books worldwide.

He said: “There are times when phrases such as ‘totally astonished’ just don’t do the job.

“I am of course delighted and honoured and, needless to say, flabbergasted.”

Services to literature are one thing, but I suspect there may be something else at play in this decision:

Last year Sir Terry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and has since campaigned to raise awareness of the condition.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “I would like to congratulate Terry on this fantastic and well-deserved achievement.

“Terry is not only a successful author and well-loved public figure; he is also playing a key role in fighting the misunderstanding and stigma surrounding dementia.”

Indeed he is, and those suffering dementia need all the help they can get in England these days.  Sir Terry’s efforts in this field have been wonderful indeed, both in terms of bringing his considerable largesse and fan following to the assistance of groups like the Alzheimers Research Trust, and through his frequent writings on his condition and its increasingly unhappy features.

Anyway, given the sometimes tense manner in which monarchy as a concept figures in his books and general philosophy, I’d imagine this particular honour has been all sorts of conflicted for Sir Terry.  It is a mark of the genial good humour for which he is so well known that he has accepted it in as warm a manner as he has.  Indeed, such is his character that one could not imagine him responding in any other way.

Socrates

Written at my brother’s suggestion.

When they pass the mason, and hear him speak -
Between the ringing din of hammer falls
And chink of chisel driven hard in stone -
On subjects fit to hear for any Greek,
They shout at once such loud, sustainèd calls
As oft are heard by wise men: “Write it down!
Put stylus to papyrus; court renown!”
He smiles and shakes his head; his fists are balls
Of beaten flesh, more fit for driving awls.
Still coveting his words, a scribe they seek,
But find the sage too restless to sit still.
“They’ll have my words, but not like this,” he frowns,
And, looking to the market, wild and loud,
Strides out to write his wisdom on the crowd.

New from Ignatius

The fine gentlemen at Ignatius Press have revealed a list of the upcoming Spring 2009 releases, and there looks to be some excellent stuff on the horizion.  Some highlights:

• The Dividing of Christendom by Christopher Dawson
• Handbook of Catholic Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli
• Romano Guardini: Reform from the Source by Hans Urs von Balthasar

I’m particularly pleased to see the new Guardini text, for it was that gentleman who first managed to get me over some of my Mary-based objections to Catholicism, if I recall it all correctly.

My only complaint about the list is that it appears to lack anything in the way of new entries in their Ignatius Critical Editions series, which is a noble venture.

Encounters – Carlos Rivera

I took the bus home the other day, just before Christmas. It was a miserable sort of evening, both cold and blustery, and I was laden down with bags and a cheap cup of tea. The bus was more or less full, but an older gentleman cleared his own parcels off of the seat next to him so I could sit down.

The bus covered several blocks very slowly, and not without some suspense; another bus on the same route had broken down on the hill leading uptown earlier that day, and there were some on the bus who, having had to put up with that once already, did not fancy the prospect of doing it again. It did not seem unlikely, either; the roads were terrible, and the driver, though over-cautious, seemed at times to be having difficulties.

The man sitting next to me prodded me on the shoulder. “Reserves?” he asked, his voice thickly accented. I looked at him without comprehension and he poked the shoulder again, this time rubbing the material of the jacket between his fingers. It was an old army jacket (distantly visible in the picture attached to this post) picked up at a surplus store in London, chosen more on account of it being cheap and sturdy and loaded with pockets than for any intention to pass as a military man, but in this time of war against the savages intent on reconquering Afghanistan it would seem that the public awareness of such things has increased, somewhat, and the question did not seem unreasonable.

Anyway; no, I said, I was not a reservist. I was just cheap. He smiled and said that he understood this very well, being thrifty himself. He added that he did not often see reservists around, or soldiers of any kind, for it was not like in his own country. This was revealed to be Portugal, and he announced that he had been in the navy himself. He had been forced to, in fact; everyone his age was, for a brief period, though they need not necessarily have been in the navy. He hadn’t seen action during his period of service, he said, though he had taken part in a number of nerve-wracking war games over the course of the four years he wore the uniform. That all seemed very fitting, I replied, given Portugal’s long and storied naval history and the supremacy in their field of figures like Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama. I remarked further that I had greatly enjoyed Camoens’ Lusiads, and he replied, “ah, thank you” with as much gratification as if he had written them personally.

But his service was ages ago, he continued; he was born just a few miles from Lisbon in 1940, and as a result his earliest memories were of a world at war. I asked him what this had been like, and he replied that it really wasn’t so very awful, though he was candid in admitting that this was likely because of Portugal’s studied non-involvement in the war (or so he described it). He took great pride in placing his country alongside Switzerland in this regard; I did not have the heart to ask questions about whether or not we could look upon the so-called Swiss neutrality with as much sunshine as we might once have done. Still, he insisted that Portugal had been quite firm in resisting the fascist tendencies of her less robust neighbour, and that he had been glad at the time, though young, to hear of the end met by Mussolini and his gang in Italy.

His most distinct memory, however, was of the war’s end. It was the strangest thing, he said; for his whole young life up until that point every good thing, from bananas to meat to chocolate, had been scarce. But the moment the war had ended all of these things suddenly appeared again immediately, as though they had just been waiting for the opportunity. He had never seen anything like the abundance that swiftly came over his homeland, and to this day he is still not entirely sure how it could all have come back so quickly. His countrymen were delirious with pleasure, but he was too often sick to his stomach (from too much chocolate) to properly join in the festivities. But the chocolate was a festivity unto itself, and he regrets nothing.

The bus had made it up the hill without incident, and his stop had been reached. We shook hands hurriedly over an exchange of names and he stepped out into the roaring darkness.

Behind the Beyond

Vernunft of The New Skeptic offers up a slightly frustrated appraisal of modernity’s response to Enlightenment-era philosophy and in so doing reminds me why I stick to novels and poetry.  For example:

When the language of philosophy got so abstruse as to be unreadable even by its devoted students, perhaps people stopped bothering with it.  One can imagine the exasperation: “If you can’t make it comprehensible, then it must be sheer obscurantism.”  Thus the natural idea that serious philosophy stopped sometime in the eighteenth century, and that anything after that is just substanceless mental masturbation.

[...]

I’m often struck by how naive the common view can be.  Imagine struggling to reconcile free will and natural mechanism without even being aware of the Third Antinomy! Imagine trying to make subjective representations correspond to objective reality in ignorance of the Copernican Revolution in epistemology!

Yes, just imagine it.

Yet many people seem to be in just this state.

I am, I fear, a founding member of that particular state.

Incidently, Behind the Beyond is the title of Stephen Leacock’s fourth collection of humour (1913), and includes a number of pleasant-if-unremarkable pieces, all of which fall cowering before the real triumph of the book, “The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins.”  A lovingly reproduced electronic version of the text – complete with the original illustrations and page numbers and all – is available here.  The chronicle of Mr. Juggins’ unfortunate life is here.

Behind the Beyond tends to get lost in the shuffle, unfortunately, having been immediately preceded by Leacock’s matchless masterpiece, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and immediately followed by the unofficial companion to that book, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), and therefore constantly elided by the leap from the one to the other.  Behind the Beyond should not be ignored if we are to observe the proper continuum of Leacock’s early humour, but it will take someone more on the ball than me to argue that effectively.  I just tried to, incidentally, in a recent paper, and I can only imagine the disgusted dismay of the professor tasked with grading it.  Oh well.  You can’t win them all.

Hogwarts Professor awarded tenure

I had meant to post a note about this sooner, but later is good too: HogwartsProfessor.com, John Granger’s excellent and thorough blog devoted to the scholarly analysis of J.K. Rowling’s enormously successful Harry Potter novels, has undergone a welcome renovation and general tidying-up.

One might have assumed that the site would drift into silence with the completion of the series in July of 2007, but if anything Prof. Granger appears to have picked up the pace.  With lots of new material concerning every possible facet of the books and their provenance, as well as two recent posts concerning other works of children’s literature (Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and the currently popular Twilight series, to be precise), it would seem that the site is one that should continue to hold great interest for those working towards a  far-reaching and Christian literary ethic.

Why is this man smiling?

BECAUSE HE’S NOT A MAN AT ALL AAAAAAAHHHHHHH

The general intellectual level of this blog is apparently in something of a freefall during this season of snow and darkness.

The God in the Cave

Sean Dailey of The Blue Boar is counting down the days until Christmas with selections from “The God in the Cave,” the first chapter of the second part of G.K. Chesterton’s general outline of religion, The Everlasting Man (see also here for a related post).  In that chapter, as in that part of the book, Chesterton meditates upon the subject of “the man called Christ,” and his conclusions are worth considering.  Thus:

If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin.  When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon.  But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother.  If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

Do check it out.  There’s more to come, no doubt, but parts one and two are already available.

The campaign begins

Not official, unfortunately, but highly compelling:

It’s a powerful piece of art that can inspire tributary art of such quality on the part of its fans.

Selling out

Continuing my perhaps ill-advised program of simply displaying the contents of my YouTube favourites folder (as though throwing open some musty wardrobe), here are the next two videos.  They come from a time in the last week or two wherein I found myself momentarily and happily distracted by the desire to find humourous nothings upon which to spend my time.

Inasmuch as I dislike having people pander to me or assail me with prospective purchases, it is nevertheless the case that the television advertisement is to visual media what the limerick is to poetry.  I cannot help but appreciate some of them for their inventiveness or, as with the two that follow, their brazen weirdness and bewildering premises.  I won’t even try to describe them.  They’re thirty seconds apiece, more or less; just watch them.