"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Opening sentence of George Orwell's "1984."

 50 opening sentences from English fiction.

Who is John Galt?



This may be a timely movie, but "Atlas Shrugged" was a long and very silly book.  The characters are deliberately written in no more than one dimension so that there would be no confusion about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.  Rand's obsession in this regard took her to the extent of giving the good guys nice names and the bad guys ugly names. The last 100 or so pages of the 3,000 or so pages consists of a long, long speech by the mysterious John Galt that lays out every jot and tittle of Rand's political/social/sexual/monetary/crazy-whacko narcissism-as-greatest-good theories.

Nonetheless, if you like that kind of thing, then that's the kind of thing that will get you blood boiling and your imagination fired with ideas of "going John Galt" and moving to Patagonia with your fellow "movers of the world" as part of an intellectual boycott of the parasites.

The trailer looks good.

Why Modern Culture Sucks.

This review of "The Spiritual History of English" prompted me to make an impulse purchase of the book for my Kindle.

The author, Andrew Thornton-Norris, bases his argument on T.S Eliot’s premise that saw the “culture of a people as an incarnation of its religion”. According to this line of thought, if belief, unified and grounded in the Christian tradition, is undermined and diluted, then so is our literature.


In its place, Thornton-Norris argues, we have a literature that is the result of liberalism in politics – that advances the self-determination of the individual – and relativism in belief. This secular religion, which has also come, the author argues, to dominate all the arts, is hostile to the moral objective truth presented by Christianity, a faith rejected by the liberal intelligentsia because it “attempts to establish a hierarchy [of artistic values] which is elitist, patriarchal, or otherwise an affront to the dignity of free-thinking or feeling individuals”.

However, Thornton-Norris claims that this Christian tradition has, in previous ages, prevented art or the individual from becoming a religion in themselves and which has therefore kept literature free from the “corrupting” taint of subjective art that reflects only the ego of its creator.

He describes modern literature as follows: “Now almost every word that is written is a manifesto, a statement, a theology or anti-theology, rather than an unselfconscious work of art, a contribution to the tradition or communal enterprise, as it was in the Latin Classical tradition.”

The villains show up in the 16th Century:

Then came the Reformation, and with it the theology of Luther and Calvin, espousing the supremacy of the individual conscience and of rationalism, especially with the rise of Puritanism. The result – the rise of the novel, with its “Protestant” emphasis on the thought and feelings of the individual, occupying an egocentric universe split off from Catholic concepts of art contributing to a communal, collective enterprise.

And:

And so the author concludes that literature in England died with “our faith and its culture of tradition and continuity”. He therefore commends his book as “a manifesto for the revival of literature in England – orthodox ecclesiastical Christianity is the precondition for this revival, as our historic literary tradition depends upon it – and its cultural incarnation in the Latin Classical Tradition”.


Thornton-Norris, himself a poet, has put his theory into practice. In the course of writing this book he converted to Roman Catholicism.

His hypothesis is bold and sweeping. Some will no doubt think that it shackles English literature into a narrow thematic framework. As they read this book they may delight in citing the literary exceptions to disprove his rule.

You think you were good in English back in High School...

....then how come you can't understand Caedmon's Hymn recited in Old English?



Via Mark Shea.

Reading Middlemarch

Lisa Schiffren at NRO asks "whether books are dead?", which really translates into the question of whether we have the patience any longer to give ourselves up to the hours of real solitude, as opposed to virtual conversation, that it takes to read real literature. She writes:

As a matter of fact, after several failed attempts, two of which may have occurred before the advent of the Internet — which was, therefore not to blame, I have finally read, in full, George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch. To be sure, it required extraordinary measures, including turning off my computer on weekends, sitting in computer-free places indoors and out, foregoing nightly TV talk fests for a while, and neglecting facebook entirely. To be honest, it also helped that I persuaded my book club to make it the September book — giving us much of the summer, and creating both peer pressure and a deadline. That I missed nothing important, and actually recreated the formerly familiar, almost-zen state of submerging oneself in an author's created world for hours at a time, has made it hard to go back to newish bad habits.

What I gained was substantial. I am prepared to conclude, in the company of a long line of readers, that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel ever written. (Of course, that matters little if our culture is giving up serious literature entirely.) The author's insights into human psychology are stunning, even 140 years later, when we are all presumably much more sophisticated about motives and thought processes. Furthermore, I forgive my younger self for not sticking with it. It is no book for a 20-year-old — or even a busy 30-year-old. Even if I had read it back then, rereading it at mid-life would yeild far greater insight. Life experience makes a real difference. I recall being too upset to by Dorothea's headstrong act of self-immolation in marrying Causabon in a state of total misapprehension of who and what he was the first time I tried. Now it seems clear enough that we all walk blind into many of our choices in life — and some of them don't work out.

Literature teaches wisdom. Reading teaches patience. Those are two very important skills to have. They are in fact the virtues that define being a mature person.

Any work of literature is better if it includes....zombies!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Paradise Lost

A class reading Milton.

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon

"This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it"

I'm listening to a podcast by Oxford professor Stuart Lee. Lee is a professor of Old English at Oxford and his lectures on Old English are really interesting and entertaining.

Lee mentioned his involvement in doing the voice work on a film based on an Anglo-Saxon poem called "the Ruin."

A quick search and here it is:




[Via Unlocked Wordhoard.]

According to Wiki:

The Ruin is an 8th century Old English poem from the Exeter Book by an unknown author. The poem's subject is ancient Roman ruins, assumed to be the ruins of Aquae Sulis at modern Bath, England, and the powerful fate (Weird or Wyrd) that has reduced a once lively community and its sturdy stone buildings to ruins.

The Ruin survives in a single book.

Another Anglo-Saxon poem is "The Wanderer," which has this passage:

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

Another Oxford Old English Professor worked this passage into one of his fantasy novels, which then was adapted for screen as the film "The Two Towers":

Where is the horse and rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow.
The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills into shadow.
How did it come to this?

No one did melancholy-obsessions with fate, or wyrd, like the Anglo-Saxons.

A brave new Brideshead Revisited

Ignatius Insights is reporting on a remake of Brideshead Revisited, which definitely loses the singular message of Evelyn Waugh.

According to Ignatius Insights:

This autumn, a film of Brideshead is released for the first time, a predictably ravishing, dreamy, aristocratic swoon of a movie, directed by Julian Jarrold. It stars Matthew Goode as Charles, Ben Whishaw as Sebastian, Hayley Atwell as Julia, Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain and Michael Gambon as her errant husband. Fans of the book who cannot wait for its release in October should check out the trailer on YouTube, where they'll find some remarkable differences from the book.

First, Sebastian and Julia appear to be conducting an incestuous relationship that becomes a ménage a trois with Charles. Second, Julia shows up, under a parasol, in the Venice scenes. Third, Lady Marchmain seems concerned only with marrying off her daughter to the cluelessly non-Catholic Rex. Fourth, there's a wildly misconceived strand of sexual intrigue, most fatuously when Lord Marchmain leans back on a sofa with one arm around a coquettish Julia and the other around a pouting Sebastian and twinkles at Charles with the words: "What a lot of temptation..." Fifth, the religious theme is hinted at only by a dropped crucifix. Sixth, Sebastian shouts: "You never wanted me – you used me to get to my sister!" (In the book, by the time Charles and Julia get it together at sea, Sebastian has vanished into alcoholism and a monastery in Morocco.)

All this is shocking for Waugh purists. The message board on the IMDb website is a-twitter with denunciations by Waugh fans. "Andrew Davies needs a reality check," reads one. "And a slap in the face like he's given to Evelyn Waugh by turning his masterpiece into a cheap romantic farce."

What an amazing commentary on the "schedule of virtues" of our decadent age. Religious belief is the "love that dares not speak its name", but incest and sodomy are shouted from the rooftops.

We are definitely part of the counter-culture.

Odd Thomas

Dean Koontz is coming out with a new Odd Thomas novel - "Odd Hours" - this Tuesday, May 20.

Here is a "trailer" for the book:



There is also a graphic novel - In Odd We Trust - coming out in June.

Rudyard Kipling

A real nice retrospective on the author at the New Criterion.

Relativism and Literature.

James V. Schall's book on the Regensburg Address has been recommended by a friend as the most concise discussion on faith and reason that he's ever read.

That recommendation makes Schall's book a "must get."

It is interesting how Benedict's speech - particularly the part about the anti-philosophical effect of a "voluntaristic" view of God - has had such a profound impact on a diversity of people I know, including Pastor van Oosten at New Covenant Community Church. A "voluntaristic" view of God makes God essentially "will" rather than "reason." The effect of adopting a voluntarisitc theology seems to be to put an end to engaging reason in the service of faith, since whatever rules we think we can discern in analyzing the world, or God, or the relationship of the two is purely arbitrary and potentially impious for putting human, rational limits on God's sovereignty.

I've noticed the same deadening of the ability or desire to engage in rational discussion with hard core Calvinists for whom God's sovereignty is the bottom line. Hard core Calvinism, in my view, is the closest that Christianity comes to Islam.

Here is a website with links to Schall's writings on political philosophy.

And here is an essay by Schall entitled "AN ATHEIST IN THE SACRISTY: WHY DOES FAITH SEEK INTELLIGENCE?"

The essay has an interesting biographical vignette - which is the source of the essay's title - about Evelyn Waugh's turn to atheism in his youth.

The essay also has this thought-provoking passage:

"Allan Bloom caused quite a scandal in recent years by suggesting that the unhappiest souls in our society are not those of the ghetto dwellers, or the dope addicts or peddlers, or even of the craftsmen, the businessman, the poet, or politician, if I might hint at the characters in Rather the unhappiest souls belong to those students in the twenty or thirty "best" universities, where they pay twenty-five thousand a year to attend and consequently assume they have entered onto the paths of worldly accomplishments and intellectual glory, only to be taught and too often themselves to believe that everything is quite relative and that there is no truth. The reason these particular souls are the "unhappiest" is the same reason Plato gave, namely, that the potential philosophers both encountered and chose a good that was less than what it is that could satisfy the being they were given. The real drama in each of our lives remains what Plato said it was: which good will we choose in a world where there really are differing goods and definite vices?
In a recent interview, Bloom was asked whether he could really fault the universities for this situation? He replied:

I do partly blame the universities. One of the reasons for students' not reading seriously is their belief that they can't learn important things from books. They believe books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of different parties. If the peaks of learning offered some shining goal in the distance, it would be very attractive to an awful lot of people—people with very diverse backgrounds. The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What's the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequence if we knew the truth?6"

I think that one of the reasons that I read so much is because, deep down, I'm looking for truth and wisdom. I actually harbor the belief that I can find truth and wisdom in the great works of great literature. Even if I fundamentally disagree with a writer, such Nietzsche, I know from experience that there will be some insight that provides a glimpse of the truth (even if it's the insight, "this is so wrong.") Hence, I find value in reading.

On the other hand, what if I thought my opinion was every bit as good as, say, Aquinas, or Plato, or Waugh, or whoever? Would I read if I thought that great literature was a con job to be deconstructed into a matrix of power?

I doubt it.

This may well be the one area that modern academics has fatally damaged the modern generation, and, with it, undermined the foundation that makes education possible.

Worth Reading - An Agnostic on Christmas.

Walking Together posts Umberto Eco's thoughts on Christmas and the poverty of the modern alternative to faith.

Read the whole thing, but there are things that caught my eye.

For example, I've always considered the execrable Da Vinci Code to be a poor man's Foucalt's Pendelum (by Eco), so I thought that this was amusing:

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

Also, the Joyce quote in this paragraph came up yesterday in a book discussion group:

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

The Joyce quote actually goes:

- Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
- I said that I had lost faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent.

There is also this:

- And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone , if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?
-I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.
- And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread. And because you fear that it may be?
- Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I fear it also.

Which ties into Eco's initial point about the superstition of the materialists.