Category: Architecture

Wednesday, 2/21/22

Welcome to Winter. We’re really in for it from at least the Great Lakes to the Great Plains.

Culture

To see ourselves as others see us

I ask Oizumi why he is so drawn to this country. “I like to go places where there are people with a real history. In Korea, that same tribe, that same culture has been there for a very long time.” “Well,” I say, “Europe has a long history too.” “No way! That place is frightening.” “Frightening?” “Yes. I went to Italy, Spain, Milan, Florence, and all the buildings were made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. Now, how did they make that? That would take a tremendous amount of energy. In those days there were no bulldozers. Everything was done by hand. A place with that many stone buildings would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that I thought, Wow, Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days.

Andy Couterier, The Abundance of Less.

That kind of serendipitous blind-siding is why I try to keep from reading in a rut.

Solidarity — in peace as in war

When rationing ended in Britain in 1954, there were those who felt that something important had been lost. At one point, the Labour Party had argued for indefinite rationing. The commonality of shared suffering, it seemed, was a stronger bond than the commonality of shared prosperity. Interesting that.

No one was nostalgic for the war itself. The fighting, bombing and the certainty of death and injury were gladly left behind. But the common bond of a common effort remained a lively part of a generation’s memory. The stories only ended when they were laid to rest. The nostalgia, I think, was for the commonality, an experience that banished loneliness and gave meaning to even the smallest actions. The prosperity that followed was hollow. For what purpose do we now shop?

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Serving God or Truth, Beauty and Goodness

[A] look back at the archives of this newsletter in 2022 reminds me how much knowledge, both intellectual and spiritual, I gained from reading Iain McGilchrist, Hartmut Rosa, and so many others. The evil in the world can sometimes feel overwhelming, but there are so many good people trying to serve God, or at least serve Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and pouring our their hearts and minds in that labor.

Rod Dreher, Lift Up Your Head to Receive the Light.

I like that: good people trying to serve God, or at least serve Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. That rings so true to me!

To Rod’s list, I’d add Andrew Sullivan (with one big gay marriage caveat), Bari Weiss (ditto, though she writes about it only rarely), Jesse Singal, Damon Linker and Freddie DeBoer, only one of them a Christian. I’ve benefitted from reading all of them, though a few seem to have started repeating themselves or churning out Substack posts without much real enthusiasm or fresh insight. That’s a hazard of writing to deadline for a living, it seems.

A word about Rod. I first encountered him decades ago (it only feels like decades) around 2010 in his book Crunchy Cons, and began following his doings. I’ve read each of his books since then, even the ones that made me cringe or scratch my head. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted with him briefly there.

But I’ve stopped reading what he writes for American Conservative magazine; there, he makes bank on stirring up “conservative” contempt for progressive oddballs and attention-grabbing extreme gender nonconformists. I wish he’d quit. I don’t listen to his podcast (I even forgot it existed). And at the moment, I doubt that I’ll buy his newest book, because I fear he’s bitten off more (re-enchanting the imagination) than he can communicate. I only read his “Diary” on Substack.

2022 saw the end of his marriage, after (he now reveals) ten years of bad family turmoil. If you don’t follow him, I’d not particularly recommend that you start just now, as he tends still to obsess about that, as divorced people, with a keen sense of personal failure, tend to do.

But I also would caution against reading what anyone else writes about his divorce because there are apparently people making bank on sheer speculation, Rod and his wife having agreed not to discuss the details of what led to divorce beyond that neither was involved in extramarital relations. (Pro Tip: If you want to break into internet virality, try attaching yourself to someone further up the food chain and spreading slanderous rumors about them.) I’m enough of a sinner to have injected my imagination into their marriage and developed a little narrative of my own about how things went wrong and who was to blame, but thank God I’ve had the decency not to share it, and I try not to return to such speculation even privately.

In short, Rod’s a very flawed, and presently quite broken, person with a gift for writing. But I’ve followed him so long that I consider him a friend. In fact, we’re kin not only because he’s also Orthodox, but because we’re both flawed (DUH!). You need not do likewise, but don’t try to get me to criticize him harshly and in general.

Pro David Frenchism

As long as I’ve resorted to writing about people I read, let me touch on an emerging favorite: David French (he to whom the lesser-known Sohrab Ahmari attached himself, thus achieving virality). It’s a heck of an honor to be the illiberal right’s poster boy for classical liberalism — the guy they’d have tarred and feathered and “rode out of town on a rail” 150 years ago.

Counterfactuals always are dangerous, but I suspect I’d be a lot friendlier to post-liberalism/illiberalism today had I not kept on reading French (who writes in the same vein as David Bahnsen, below).

In other words, I’m broadly (if not fully) aware of the shortcomings of classical liberalism, but I see no better alternative for life in a pluralistic reality. If we decided that pluralism was the problem and succeeded in eliminating it, especially in favor of some version of “Christian America,” that could well mean eliminating me, because the dominant Christianities in this culture are so very different from Orthodoxy.

Indeed, were it not for his classical liberalism, I’d not want to live in a Christian America with French as tsar. I’ve begun turning away from his religious musings because they just don’t “speak to me,” and it’s hard to imagine that they once would have. But on politics and the intersection of religion/philosophy and governance, he’s been a boon.

Anger

Offered without comment:

Anger is less an emotion than an armor against feeling emotions. In most cases, we would be better off acknowledging the emotions from which anger seeks to protect us.

Damon Linker, citing Matt Yglesias

Politics

Why are they whistling a new tune?

[H]ow should those of us who, for years, have repeatedly warned Republicans about Trump view those who have finally done an about-face, in some cases mimicking the very criticisms that Never Trumpers have been making since the start of the Trump era?

We ought to welcome their turnabout. This is, after all, what many of us have been urging them to do. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone should have the chance to correct those mistakes, including onetime Trump enthusiasts. Just as important, purging Trump from America’s political landscape can only happen if the Republican Party first purges him from its ranks. If people who once supported Trump are, at last, willing to cast him aside, that is all to the good.

But we shouldn’t see a moral awakening where there is none. The reason many longtime Trump supporters are deserting him is because they believe he is a loser, and an impediment to their quest for power.

Peter Wehner

Emotion blackmail as usual

Someone in the Indiana legislature is apparently planning to introduce what the press insists on calling a “Don’t Say Gay” Bill in January, when the legislature convenes.

I disclaim any knowledge of whether we have much or any problem in Indiana with age-inappropriate instruction on sexuality. And I’m aware of the argument that any instruction on sexuality in public schools usurps the role of parents. What this bill reportedly does is forbid any instruction in sexuality in K-3 and forbid any instruction that isn’t “age-appropriate” thereafter.

But what really gets to me is the all-too-predictable emotional blackmail that followed from Chris Paulsen, CEO of Indiana Youth Group:

“The damage even having the bill introduced will cause to young people is immeasurable,” Paulsen said. “We will see youth die by suicide because of this. I think it’s that dire and I’m sad that lawmakers don’t realize their actions have really bad consequences, even if the bill doesn’t pass.”

Indianapolis Star/USA TODAY NETWORK (emphasis added)

I call bullshit on the parts I emphasized.

Heckuva way to defend and uphold the Constitution

“I want to thank Judge Benitez. We have been saying all along that Texas’ anti-abortion law is outrageous. Judge Benitez just confirmed it is also unconstitutional,” Newsom said in a statement Monday. “The provision in California’s law that he struck down is a replica of what Texas did, and his explanation of why this part of SB 1327 unfairly blocks access to the courts applies equally to Texas’ SB 8.”

Politico

California Governor Gavin Newsom, thanking a federal judge for striking down a California gun law that mirrored a Texas abortion law, which gun law he supported.

Maybe I’m too literal-minded — no, make that “I’m often too literal-minded” (I have a hypotesis on what I am) — but it’s hard for me to see how Newsom’s support of a law he knew was unconstitutional isn’t a violation of his oath of office.

No option for rule by Angels

In a piece for National Review, frequent Remnant guest David Bahnsen pushes back on arguments made by First Things editor Rusty Reno against free markets and in favor of using political power to ensure virtue. “The cabal of new-right market skeptics are stuck with the age-old problem identified by the Founders, and yes, by 20th-century giants such as Friedman and Hayek: We have no option to be ruled by angels,” Bahnsen writes. “The doctrine of the Fall does not merely inform our understanding of the original sin plaguing individuals and families, but also and especially the state itself. That an individual left unchecked and free of moral enlightenment may suffer in weak discipline and low taste is both true and tragic. But that a civil magistrate granted the power Reno envisions for it represents a more potent and damaging fruit of original sin is, indeed, the testimony of history. On this point there can be no refutation. I prefer that the low-brow permeation of social-media obsession die a holy death, yet inviting the ghosts of 20th-century past to regulate consumer preferences strikes me as a ghastly trade-off.”

The Morning Dispatch

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Escape from ennui

[A]s James Baldwin put it, Americans were “afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.”

(Pankaj Mishra, America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism) That quote was new to me, though the thought was not. My “standing advice” at the end of each blog episode includes these:

The consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness. Lord Jonathon Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain.

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to. W.H. Auden, 1966.

Then I also read this today:

While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.

… None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Wal Mart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.) The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

(James Howard Kunstler)

But one of the odd blogs I find irresistible is Granola Shotgun. “Johnny” populates his blog with loads of photos and sparse commentary. Most recent:

At the end of my first year at university I was approached by an engineering student who asked if he could be my room mate next year. We didn’t know each other particularly well and didn’t have much in common, but he seemed harmless enough. I shrugged. Sure. We went our separate ways over the summer and in September he appeared at my door. After a few months of successfully sharing accommodations I asked him why he came to me when most guys in his situation would have gone in a very different direction. He explained.

The average college freshman tends to have an adolescent understanding of what a good independent life might be like. Young men are motivated by peculiar impulses and the siren song of the frat house calls. Beer. Parties. Girls. Sports cars. The prestige of hanging out with rich kids, athletes, and really popular older guys. He said that was usually a big mistake. The furniture is made of plastic milk crates. The place smells like a locker room. People eat ramen and cold day old pizza out of the box. They wear flip flops in the shower because no one has ever cleaned the bathroom. Ever. And when you bring a girl home there are a dozen bigger richer guys with fancier cars than you hovering around. You sit there trying to get your romance on with posters of naked women taped to the walls next to a collection of empty bottles. And you pay extra for all this… It’s just not a great situation.

Then he made a sweeping motion with his hand indicating our apartment. A pleasing mixture of antiques and modern pieces. Smells like lemons. When he brings a girl home I’m in the kitchen cooking brisket and home made bread. Soft lighting. Ella Fitzgerald is playing in the background. No competition. And it’s cheaper. For him, doing the unorthodox and socially uncomfortable thing was just… rational. [Yup. That sounds like an engineer’s approach to the world. Tipsy]

Back to Springfield. Steve [and Liz Shultis] took a version of the same strategy. He and his family live in a gracious four story French Second Empire mansion. The place is huge and everywhere you look there’s a level of detail and quality you can’t find in any home built today. There’s a legal apartment on the lower level that they use as a guest suite.  I looked up the address on a real estate listing site and he paid less for this house than many people spend on their cars. His family has a quality of life and a degree of financial freedom that none of his suburban piers (sic) can comprehend.

Most people load themselves up with massive amounts of debt in order to live the way they believe they’re supposed to. You wouldn’t want to put your kids in a substandard urban school with the wrong element. You wouldn’t want to buy a house that never appreciated in value. You wouldn’t want to have to explain to your friends, family, and co-workers that you live in a slum with poor black people and Puerto Ricans. And where do you park?! It’s so much “better” to soak yourself in debt to buy your way in to the thing you believe you can’t live without.

Pretty dry without the pictures, I’ll admit. But go check the original, The Springfield Strategy. That four story French Second Empire mansion is pretty amazing. Sample:

From their own blog, it appears that Steve & Liz (perhaps Steve and his ex) actually did raise children, now adults, in that urban environment, though the children are not visible or mentioned in Johnny’s story.

I don’t want to romanticize, let alone make a panacea of, a good, walkable and sociable living environment, but it appears (scroll on down the long page) that the urban dwellers of Springfield, Massachusetts may have escaped some aspects of the “bewilderingly empty way of life.”

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Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Wednesday, 8/3/16

  1. Have we lost our minds?
  2. Inviting cultural catastrophe
  3. Elevating sex to its preeminent place
  4. Two kinds of Trump voters
  5. PEG on neo-conservatism
  6. “Thou shalt erect solar panels upon thy temples”
  7. Take a brick out of Leviathan

Continue reading “Wednesday, 8/3/16” →

The deep purpose of discussion

This weekend brings And Then They Came for Me to my hometown’s Civic Youth Theater. With that evocative title, I hope I don’t need to tell you what the general topic of the play is.

But just in case, here goes the versified version:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). The subtitle of the Civic Youth Theater production is “Remembering the World of Anne Frank.”

If you still don’t get it, stop. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

Then a week later, the local Bach Chorale Singers perform the powerful Annalies, a 14-part work for soprano, chorus and small ensemble based on the Diary of Anne Frank. 

The juxtaposition was coincidental/serendipitous/providential. Seizing the moment, friends of the arts have arranged a panel discussion, open to the Public: When they came for me.

I hope to get to the Civic Theater production, and I’ll definitely be there when the Bach Chorale performs.

The panel discussion? Maybe. Out of a sense of duty. With my guard up. And a full shaker, not just a grain, of salt.

On some topics, it seems to me, discussion has hit a dead end. The more earnest the discussion, the deader the end. The Holocaust strikes me as one of those topics.

A young woman of my acquaintance was delighted beyond all expectation a few year ago when I quipped, in response to some seemingly interminable, definitely earnest discussion in our Church, that I just wasn’t getting what the other side was getting at, and that I wondered if they might instead rhyme, dance, paint, sing or film it. Anything but more words, words, words. (Her delight was why I still vaguely remember the episode.)

Bach Chorale’s theme for this, its 51st, season is “Music and the human spirit: making the world a better place one note at a time.” Maybe that’s a little preachy, but I’ll take it.

My greatest hope for the panel discussion is that perhaps the Niemöller poem, the play and the impending choral performance, will liberate imaginations and free tongues from banality, or that the panel will at least truly focus on how the arts can so liberate (if focusing on that in prose isn’t oxymoronic).

My greatest fear for the discussion is that it will tame and domesticate the imagination again after its liberation by art.

Isn’t taming the imagination the deep purpose of most of our discussions?

* * * * *

(Yes, as a matter of fact, I do own a mirror. And I am getting tired of recidivist prose blogging — even suspicious of my motives for doing it. And the utility of it. That too. Thanks for asking. And if I polish this one more time, I’m going to puke.)

* * * * *

“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Wednesday, 7/30/14

  1. You touch our nonviolence and we blow your heads off!
  2. New Urbs
  3. Short Stories
  4. GOP to POTUS: We’ll see your passivity and raise you a compulsive interentionism
  5. UCSB Feminazi Cops a Plea
  6. A Religious Freedom Claim that Deserved to Lose
  7. The (Spiritual/Cosmic) Butterfly Effect

Continue reading “Wednesday, 7/30/14” →

The Essence of The Essence (4/21/14)

I’m unapologetically light on blogging post-Pascha. Or was that prior sentence a sort of apology?

The Essence of Conservatism is an uneven book, with lots of typos in the Kindle edition (which may be the only form in which the book exists) but it’s well worth $2.99.

  • Americans know what they can expect from the left—an endless series of upheavals aiming at utopia. But for too long the right has offered much the same thing, pursuing its own utopia through wars and nation-building abroad and the debt economy at home.
  • A mere decade after the end of the Cold War had delivered history to a neat and satisfying conclusion the 9/11 attacks occurred. Along with horror and heartbreak came humiliation. How could 19 thugs armed with nothing more than box cutters have caught the indispensable nation so completely off-guard? Many factors contributed to the United States being surprised. Prominent among them was the self-congratulatory mindset to which Washington had succumbed during the 1990s…
  • As Richard Perle and David Frum, co-authors of the agitprop classicAn End to Evil, put it, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” … Along with victory or holocaust there turned out to be a third possibility that Perle and Frum had overlooked: exhaustion resulting from our own folly and malfeasance. (Typo in original)
  • Rather than peering deep into the future, the United States is demonstrably unable to see even into next week, with major events—the Arab Spring being the most recent example—catching Washington asleep at the switch.
  • The years 1991 and 2001 are commonly treated as breakpoints, markers that inaugurate distinctive chapters of history, the first labeled “Post-Cold War,” the second “Post-9/11.” Yet there is a strong case to be made for amalgamating the two decades into a single period: call it the “era of ideological fantasy,” when U.S. self-regard and Washington’s confidence in its ability to remake the world in America’s image reached unprecedented heights.
  • Burkean conservatism has never sat easily with the conditions of American life. Whereas Europe provided conservatism with history and tradition, the United States emerged as a “nation without a past.” That overstates things, but the quest for roots, stability, continuity, and tradition has never been simple here.
  • The notion that wisdom somehow lies in the intuitive sense of the majority at any time, Babbitt wrote, “should be the most completely exploded of all fallacies.”
  • [T]he really animated core of the political lobby that supports illegal immigration—its mass base, so to speak—is composed of rich homeowners, who desperately want someone to do their dirty work and to do it cheaply.
  • The wealth of the very rich is never the product of free enterprise and the free market alone but comes by operating within and exploiting a network of government supports, such as licenses, regulations, subsidies, and contracts. It is the product of a sort of giveaway. [Yes, a conservative just said, in effect, “You didn’t build that.”]
  • The way people define themselves is different in a consumer society, with a total focus upon individual self-gratification, than it is in a producer society, with an emphasis on the social consequences and connections of one’s work. It is obviously much more difficult to politically organize masses of people if they all think of themselves as individual consumers or as expressive individualists, each freely choosing his own unique (even if vapid and banal) lifestyle, than to organize masses of people who think of themselves as members of working classes or local communities, who share in common most of the important conditions of their lives.
  • [T]he most rational thing about rationality is that it knows its own limits. When even sensible economists forget they are dealing with human beings, we should forget them.
  • Roepke’s world collapsed in August 1914. Our world collapsed in September 2008. Both, we can now see, were doomed long before they fell. Out of the ruins what shall we build? Another Tower of Babel, another building too big to fail? Perhaps, if we are wise, we might try smallness for a change.
  • Conservatism has become so weak in ideas that during the presidency of George W. Bush, the word “conservative” could be and was applied with scant objection to policies that were starkly anti-conservative. Americans witnessed “conservative” Wilsonianism, if not Jacobinism, in foreign policy and an unnecessary foreign war; record “conservative” trade and federal budget deficits; major “conservative” expansions of the power of the federal government at the expense of traditional liberties; and nonchalant “conservative” de-industrialization and dispossession of the middle class in the name of Ricardian free trade and Benthamite utilitarianism. No wonder the American people are confused and disillusioned by conservatism.
  • This is the second action the next conservatism must take: putting power in its place. Tolkien’s ring of power is power itself, which in the long run cannot be used for good.
  • [T]he next conservatism should revive the dormant conservative agrarian tradition. As the Amish demonstrate, the small family farm can be economically viable. Organic farming, conservation and restoration of the soil, farmers’ markets and “crunchy cons” should find an honored place in the next conservative agenda. Family farms are good places for children to grow up. While environmentalism is becoming an ideology, conservation and care in the use of God’s creation have long-standing conservative credentials. In turn, agriculture has always been a conservative culture. [Agenda-driven conservatism is an odd fit in this collection of essays that focuses more on disposition than agenda.]
  • Another old conservative issue the next conservatism should revive is aesthetics. America may be the richest nation in history, but that has not made it the most beautiful. Strip malls, suburban sprawl, and hollowed-out cities have created an environment few people can love. The New Urbanism offers an alternative that looks to the past to recover traditional designs for towns and cities.
  • Having spent 3,000 bloody years replacing the image with the word, should we now be untroubled that television, video games, and computer screens are replacing the word with the image?
  • Lukács was a very clever literary critic, who took part in the Communist revolution in Hungary after World War I and joined the government of Béla Kun. As a political commissar, he was responsible for purges, executions, and cultural suppression. When Kun’s government was overthrown, he fled to Vienna, returning after World War II to assist the revolutionary Communist government in purifying Hungary of dissident intellectuals. His career is one long history of crime and deception, yet he has been consistently revered as a leading left-wing thinker: the person who showed us how to apply Marxism to literary criticism and how to understand literature as a genuinely revolutionary force … Heidegger belonged to the wrong set of criminals.
  •  [T]his weakness in the statist approach of communism is replicated in some capitalist economies—notably here in the United States with the unscrupulous and often corrupt use of eminent domain.
  • The real cause of the environmental problems we face is not so much large private enterprises or the pursuit of profit or even capitalism as such. It is the habit we all have of externalizing our costs.
  • [S]uburbanization forces millions to go to work in cars everyday when they might have been walking. It requires vast acreages of the countryside to be covered with buildings and roads, destroying natural ecosystems. Yet it goes ahead because it is something that people want, and the cost can be easily externalized onto other generations or people in other parts of the world.
  • “My misgivings are not about the wretched architects,” continued Baker, “who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon the human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities. They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with the evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things.”
  • “President Reagan’s deepest soul is not Republican-conservative but New Deal-Second World War Democrat. Thus his well noted preference for citing FDR and Kennedy as noble precedents for his actions rather than Coolidge, Hoover, or even Eisenhower.
  • Among the worst aspects of the collapse of traditional conservatism is that my children will grow up in a world in which vulgar and belligerent nationalism will be presented to them as the alternative to leftism.
  • [T]his story-with-a-moral assumes American omnipotence: if any evil is committed anywhere in the world—be it the Ukrainian famine, the Rape of Nanking, or the rise of Benito Mussolini—it is only because we Americans selfishly failed to prevent it.
  • For the low church conservative, politics is teleocratic—a purpose-driven activity.
  • [Evelyn Waugh] famously greeted the removal of Randolph Churchill’s non-malignant tumor with the verdict: “It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”
  • Late in life, during the Second Vatican Council’s alleged golden dawn, Waugh received an invitation to a book launch by self-consciously “progressive” Catholics. He shot back by postcard his unforgettable RSVP: while he would not attend a social meal in the progressives’ company, “I would gladly attend an auto da fé at which your guests were incinerated.”
  • … Vatican II, concerning which [Waugh] proved incapable of accepting casuistic official bromides about how the conciliar church was just like the preconciliar church, only 100 times better.

(Favorites bolded)

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.