“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see”

I've been looking through the archive of Michael Dirda's essays again. Here, he writes an appreciation of Lewis Carroll, especially The Hunting of the Snark:

On July 18, 1874, Carroll was out walking when a sentence suddenly popped into his head: “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” Most people would immediately wonder: What’s a Snark? What’s a Boojum? In fact, 150 years later, we’re still wondering whenever we read or reread his great nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark — which, by the way, has no established connection with the contemporary use of “snark,” meaning mockingly sarcastic.

At this time, Carroll was already quite familiar with bizarre creatures bearing strange names. Hadn’t he previously imagined the Jabberwock — “the jaws that bite, the claws that catch” — as well as the Jubjub bird and the frumious Bandersnatch? Those fearsome beasts first appeared in the heroic ballad “Jabberwocky,” part of Through the Looking-Glass, which also includes that other favorite of versified nonsense, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

The time has come,” the Walrus said,

To talk of many things;

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —

Of cabbages — and kings

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.

In “Jabberwocky” — a frequent choice for grade-school recitation — an intrepid young champion, using a vorpal blade that goes snicker-snack, defeats a fearsome dragon-like creature. Its tale of derring-do grew out of four lines that, years earlier, Carroll had titled “Stanza From the Anglo-Saxon”:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

....Like any classical epic, The Hunting of the Snark starts in medias res. After sailing for many months and weeks, 10 adventurers finally land on an island that is — in the very first words of the poem — “Just the place for a Snark!” ....

Throughout these wonderfully lilting 141 stanzas one mystery or puzzle succeeds another. To begin with, we’re not precisely sure why the group is searching for a Snark. However, we do learn five ways to identify one that is “genuine,” implying that there are fake or imitation Snarks running about. A true Snark, says the Bellman, tastes crispy when cooked, gets up late in the morning, can’t take a joke, is ambitious and has a “fondness for bathing-machines/ Which it constantly carries about,/ And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes —/ A sentiment open to doubt.”

Some Snarks, we’re also told, have feathers and bite; others have whiskers and scratch. You might also occasionally encounter one that is a Boojum. This would be particularly dire for the Baker, the most agitated figure in the poem. Not only did he absent-mindedly leave his 42 boxes of luggage behind, but he is apparently called the Baker because he has somehow forgotten his actual name. Still, he vividly remembers the parting words of his uncle:

But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum! For then

You will softly and suddenly vanish away,

And never be met with again!

.... (more)

The book illustrated above is from my library. Martin Gardner also authored annotated editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in The Annotated Alice.

Michael Dirda, "What is a Snark? For Lewis Carroll, a whimsical creature we’ll never know," The Washington Post, August 22, 2024.

When will I ever learn?

Listening to Van Morrison this afternoon.

The sun was setting over Avalon The last time we stood in the west Suffering long time angels enraptured by Blake Burn out the dross innocence captured again Standing on the beach at sunset all the boats All the boats keep moving slow In the glory of the flashing light in the evenings glow When will I ever learn to live in God? When will I ever learn? He gives me everything I need and more When will I ever learn? You brought it to my attention everything that was made in God Down through centuries of great writings and paintings Everything lives in God Seen through architecture of great cathedrals Down through the history of time Is and was in the beginning and evermore shall be

When will I ever learn to live in God? When will I ever learn? He gives me everything I need and more When will I ever learn? Whatever it takes to fulfill his mission That is the way we must go But you've got to do it your own way Tear down the old, bring up the new And up on the hillside its quiet Where the shepherd is tending his sheep And over the mountains and the valleys The countryside is so green Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder You can see everything is made in God Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all When will I ever learn to live in God? When will I ever learn? He gives me everything I need and more When will I ever learn?

When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.

Drowned in noise and nonsense

I loved this, on Oliver Stone's film:

Stone’s film — one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1990s — has a grasp of history that’s about as loose as David Ferrie’s wig in a hurricane. It doesn’t merely twist New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s botched investigation; it hog-ties the truth and dumps it on Bourbon Street to get pancaked by a sousaphone section and a guy in a gator suit.

.... Who killed Kennedy? Stone’s answer: Who didn’t? The CIA, LBJ, the Mafia, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, right-wing wackjobs, crazy Cubans (my peeps), angry Texans, oil tycoons, “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and — why not? — even the Caddyshack gopher was spotted behind the picket fence, cheeky little rascal.

Mechanically, Stone’s three-hour Gish gallop mirrors how social media influencers lobotomize their audiences: it drowns you with a barrage of noise and nonsense that you can’t possibly untangle, so you surrender — and paranoia sets in. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made about conspiracy theories because it is a conspiracy theory....

By the time you realize that there’s no way Julia Ann Mercer could have seen Jack Ruby near Dealey Plaza, you’re already sitting across from Donald Sutherland’s “X” spinning a monologue for the ages. Next, you’re knee-deep in the debunked “magic bullet” theory — which rests entirely on the fallacy that Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally were seated at the same height (they weren’t) — right before Kevin Costner, channeling Jimmy Stewart, pleads, “It’s up to you.” ....

JFK was a warning, but, instead of heeding it, we turned it into a business model. Minutes after Tuesday’s JFK files dropped, Twitter lit up like one of Ruby’s neon signs outside his strip joint: we saw Ramparts clippings sold as fresh intel, antisemitic bile disguised as “just asking questions,” and even a forged JFK memo about UFOs. .... (more)

Giancarlo Sopo, "From Camelot to Clickbait: America’s Dealey Plaza Syndrome," National Review, March 20, 2025.

Oswald did it.

My last post reminded me of this, posted eight years ago, the last time Trump had documents released related to JFK's assassination :

I taught high school history and social studies classes for thirty-five years. For almost all of those years, I taught required 9^th grade US history classes. Eventually, I got pretty good at it. Each quarter one of the units involved the production of an essay that propounded a thesis, supported the thesis with evidence properly footnoted, and a conclusion flowing from the argument. Since these were 9^th graders I supplied packets of primary and secondary sources for them to use although they were free to find other materials. Of the topics I gave them the most popular by far was the assassination of JFK. Since I used that subject year after year I became very familiar with the various conspiracy theories and the evidence (or, rather, the lack thereof) supporting them. There is really no reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the only shooter that day in Dallas. All of the alternate theories were answered long ago and it requires a genuine unwillingness to consider the evidence to believe otherwise. Peter Jennings' ABC documentary (2003) effectively dealt with all of the questions regarding a second gunman or an alternate assassin firing from somewhere other than the Schoolbook Depository. A thorough debunking of the various conspiracy theories can be found in Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993). If your understanding of the issues is based on Oliver Stone's movie, look further. Like most of his films, JFK is pretty good as a movie and pretty terrible as history.

The President has decided to release the remaining documents relating to the investigation of the assassination. As of last night, he has ordered that all those remaining should be released holding back only the names and addresses of people still living. I predict that nothing new of importance will be revealed. Was Oswald himself part of a conspiracy? People who know the most about him are doubtful that he could have worked in concert with anyone. From today's London Times:

Farris Rookstool, a former FBI analyst who spent nine years reading 500,000 pages of documents in the bureau’s Kennedy collection, said the notion that Russia controlled Oswald was seductive but flawed.

“I did the interviews with the KGB, the first FBI-authorised face-to-face meetings, and I can tell you they thought Oswald was just as crazy as we did. I don’t think they were trying to wash their hands of being involved with him but they were just being very candid. Oleg Nechiporenko [a KGB officer who also met Oswald in Mexico City] said they called him ‘the Tornado’ because he was spiralling out of control.

“If you strip Oswald down and look at him as just a human, he had antisocial personality disorders, he had a childlike understanding of world history and he didn’t take orders very well.

“When he was in Russia they did a two-year electronic surveillance on him and they finally realised the guy was an idiot. They thought this guy is obviously not an American double agent or false flag or a dangle. When they folded their operation over there they gave him 72 hours to leave the country.”

There are still people who believe Stanton had Lincoln assassinated or that Spain blew up the Maine in Havana harbor and there will always be people who think a professional assassin might have chosen an exposed position behind the wall of a public parking lot and fired over the heads of people lining a parade route.

"Epic levels...of ignorance"

Gerard Baker on conspiracy mongers:

Sheer dumbness is part of the problem. Our culture is dominated by people with epic levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance. Mr. Rogan is unimaginably successful and doesn’t need my critical approval, so he won’t mind when I say I doubt he has read a book of real history in his life or can see the difference between the charlatans he promotes and actual historians of the Third Reich such as Richard Evans or Ian Kershaw. Nor would he or his followers understand the difference between the historiography required of a genuine authority and the kind of drivel produced by a dilettante opportunist.

The larger problem is the steady undermining of truth itself. So much contemporary ideology rests on eradicated standards of objective reality, so people can believe all kinds of impossible things. The abandonment of academic truth is partially to blame. The tendentious and dishonest nonsense that holds sway at most of our top universities and the intolerance with which its adherents exclude dissent have undermined faith in academic truth and debased the currency of scholarship so that anyone with access to a social media account can propagate his own “learning.”

The collapse of trust in almost all our sources of information—media, government, experts of all sorts—has allowed epistemic malignancy to flourish. Fifty years ago Nazi apologetics were malicious ahistorical fantasy, a thin veil for ancient bigotry, whose propagandists were rightly ostracized from serious political company. Today they’re just another interesting lie that will get you a fat paycheck on YouTube. (more)

Gerard Baker, "Antisemitism Rears Its Head on the Right, Too," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2025.

Mr. Belvedere

Clifton Webb was one of the actors I really enjoyed from the studio era. He starred in several very good films, including Laura, one of the best films noir, another noir I liked was The Dark Corner, there was a World War II thriller, The Man Who Never Was (based on the Mincemeat plot), and he starred in many others. I also enjoyed him in his Mr. Belvedere comedies. The first of that series was Sitting Pretty (1948), and then Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951), and Mister Scoutmaster (1953). Each of them can provide an undemanding, enjoyable, afternoon or evening.

Wikipedia's description of the plot of Sitting Pretty (which I intend to watch again tonight):

In the suburban Hummingbird Hill, lawyer Harry King and his wife Tacey have trouble retaining a nanny for their three young, rambunctious boys: Larry and Tony, both of whom get into frequent mischief with the family dog Henry; and baby Roddy. When the latest in a string of servants (all women) quits, Tacey advertises for a replacement and hires Lynn Belvedere sight unseen. However, she discovers that Lynn Belvedere is actually a man upon his arrival, a mysterious one with many skills and achievements – and who declares himself to detest children. Nonetheless, the Kings reluctantly agree to a trial period during which Belvedere quickly wins over the boys. However, his mysterious nature intrigues both of their parents, and Harry becomes annoyed by his condescending attitude. ....

In the meantime, we learn that Belvedere has spent the past few weeks secretly researching and writing a salacious account of the goings-on among the residents of Hummingbird Hill. In fact, the book's blurb describes it as "a screaming satire on suburban manners and morals". The published tome becomes a national bestseller, upsetting everyone in the community. ....

A literary invention?

In about 1970, a friend, then in the Army, an English major and later an English professor, sent me a letter that contained this on the gospel writers:

I do not believe in some unknown Jewish writer or writers that much greater than Shakespeare: I do not even believe in a mortal man able to write some of the lines of Christ. And most of all, I do not believe in anyone either convinced of Christ or trying to create a new religion, who could write those lines I still don't wholly understand, that render His isolation complete, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

That line in dramatic effect is greater than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Its mystery is stupefying. And no spreader of any gospel would have invented it; only a man who was there and who heard it, and who felt compelled to tell all other truths would have put it in his account of the one he believed was his savior.

More recently, from an interview with Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind:

For historians, Holland notes the crucifixion is the most unusual aspect of the four gospel accounts. Although several ancient religions include stories of the death and resurrection of gods, none of these religions would tell of their gods dying in a painful, humiliating way. Moreover, they would not have depicted their gods as subject to crucifixion which Holland describes as “paradigmatically the punishment visited on slaves.”

Even to its initial audience, Christianity was radically counter-cultural.

Furthermore, the character of Jesus is a “bizarre” and “unfathomable” mystery. Harder asked Holland to explain his own quote from Dominion: “Nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature.”

Holland notes that if Jesus is purely a literary character, he is the most remarkable literary creation of all time. To replicate Jesus, an author would have to write a character that is simultaneously human and divine. Then, the author would have to portray him in such a way that people two thousand years later in continents the author has never heard of will still believe this figure is God and man.

It would take an unbelievably gifted author to accomplish the task if it were possible at all. And yet, four different authors managed to do so. Although Holland does not undertake to prove the historicity of the gospel story, he argues that categorizing Jesus’s parables and gospel stories as mere fiction does not solve the riddle. Either the gospel authors channel a historical Jesus or there is profound mystery in how such an uncanny story could have been written, gained prominence, and remained influential two thousand years later.

Furthermore, Holland credits the idea of human dignity itself to the imago dei found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The very idea and gut instinct that all humans have inherent dignity is theological, he claims. Thus, he names humanism as a Christian heresy that removes God while still privileging humanity with a dignity that all others should respect. .... (more)

Davison Drumm, "Historian Tom Holland on Christianity and a World Transformed," Juicy Ecumenism, March 12, 2025.

Misplaced loyalty

Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court but her decisions haven't always pleased him or his sycophants. Most of Kevin Williamson's "The Souls of Serfs and Subjects" is about distinguishing between the role of citizen and that of a subject. In the course of his argument C.S. Lewis is quoted more than once:

C.S. Lewis argued that every particular sinful disposition is related to “some good impulse of which it is the excess or perversion.” The appetite for justice becomes wrath, the desire to achieve material prosperity becomes avarice or envy, the normal sexual drive becomes an abnormal one, the impulse toward achievement or excellence becomes pride, the mother of sins. This was very close to the view of St. Augustine and of Aristotle before him. Wealth, health, love—all good when pursued in the right way toward the right ends in a well-ordered life, but all invitations to catastrophe to the disordered soul. Even friendship has its perils, in Lewis’ view: “Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.” ....

Loyalty is a two-edged sword, because the virtue is necessarily conditional: Loyalty to whom or to what? To what degree? To the exclusion of which other virtues? St. Peter, after getting off to a rough start (three times!) was a loyalist to the end—but, then, so was Eva Braun. ....

Lewis was not what we would call a libertarian, but there was a streak of libertarianism in him:

To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death — these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

And here we are.

Lewis identified courage as the lynchpin of the virtues: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” ....

Kevin D. Williamson, "The Souls of Serfs and Subjects," The Dispatch, March 10, 2025.

Foolish controversy

I discovered Kevin DeYoung some years ago, and since then I have always found him to be worth reading. Here, addressing fellow pastors, he argues that "We Are Not Political Pundits." He isn't contending that pastors don't have a right to their political opinions, but that, usually, the pulpit isn't the appropriate place to express them.

Political punditry is a legitimate calling. It’s just not the pastor’s calling. The man who comments constantly on the things “everyone is talking about” is almost assuredly not talking about the things the Bible is most interested in talking about. That word “constant” is important. It takes wisdom to know when jumping in the fray might be necessary, but we don’t need pastors looking like a poor man’s version of the Daily Wire or the New York Times.

Pastors are not called to comment on everything, nor are we equipped to comment on everything. Brothers, we must not plunge ourselves into subjects on which we do not have the right, nor the expertise, to speak as ministers of the gospel. Before you send out your instant analysis on the controversy du jour, ask yourself: Can I say what I’m about to say by virtue of my training as a minister or by my hard-won expertise in some related area? Yes, Christ is Lord over all. Yes, there is not one square inch in all creation over which Christ does not cry out, “This is mine!” But fellow pastor, you and I are not qualified to speak on all of those square inches over which Christ reigns.

I confess it boggles my mind to see ministry friends and acquaintances—both to the “left” of me and to the “right” of me—who are spending their time, their energy, and their authority by offering hot takes on everything under the sun and by descending into social media food fights that bear a striking resemblance to the “irreverent babble” that leads people into more and more ungodliness (2 Tim. 2:16). Brothers, we must steadfastly avoid foolish, ignorant controversies (2 Tim. 2:23) It is not acquiescence to the spirit of the age that demands that “the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome” (2 Tim. 2:24), it is the command of Holy Scripture.

And frankly, most pastors have nothing particularly unique or insightful to say about politics. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "Brothers, We Are Not Political Pundits," Clearly Reformed

Sound prejudice

From one of Russell Kirk's newspaper columns, collected in Confessions of a Bohemian Tory (1963):

"Prejudice" means pre-judgment: that is, decisions we reach speedily without having to weigh much evidence. So whether our prejudices are sound or unsound depends upon the source of our deep-rooted beliefs and preferences.

Of course, one may cherish foolish prejudices against the shade of another man's skin or the color of his hair or the character of his religion. But also it is true, as Edmund Burke wrote, that by a wise prejudice a man's virtue becomes his habit.

Thus people of healthy inclinations and decent moral training nourish a prejudice against murder. When we hear that homicide has been committed, we react against it from our prejudices—and rightly so. We don't ask whether the murdered man was a good sort, or whether the murderer had pleasant manners, or whether (supposing you and I should feel like giving somebody his quietus) we might be able to get away with the act undetected. ....

On the contrary, we simply obey the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," if you and I are normal. On learning of a murder, we resolve that whatever the particular circumstances, murder is evil; and we resolve that justice must be done. A sound prejudice, acquired early in life, informs us that murder is forbidden, and ought not to be tolerated out of sentimentality.

Similarly, we are able to maintain a decent civil social order because most of us act on wise prejudices against theft and cruelty and fraud. We don't have to be forever hesitating and trying to reason about the loss or gain possibly involved in cheating or beating our neighbor. If we are good, most of us are good from moral habits. We don't have to perform a kind of moral calculus every time we are compelled to make a moral decision.

We deliberately instill desirable prejudices early in life by spanking little boys, for instance, if they persist in kicking other little boys in the shins. Prudent parents rightfully bring up their children prejudiced against shop-lifting, window-smashing and dog-tormenting. They don't teach their offspring to inquire, "Would anybody see me hurt that puppy?" or "Would it be more fun than danger to turn the hose on Sally?"

Let me add that healthy-minded parents also endeavor to keep their children free from false prejudices. It is a matter of early discrimination. But to be reared altogether without prejudice is to be brought up irresolute and essentially immoral. It is not mistaken to be prejudiced against cheats and liars, fanatics and demagogues.

Russell Kirk, "Prejudices," Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, Fleet, New York, 1963, p. 238.

Some good reading

Standard EBooks continues to add to its library of beautifully formatted, downloadable, out-of-copyright, and thus free eBooks. This month, I noticed R. Austin Freeman's The D’Arblay Mystery, the ninth in their Doctor Thorndyke series. I've posted about the Dr. Thorndyke books several times before. Another is a book I haven't read since childhood, The Swiss Family Robinson.

Johann David Wyss was inspired by Robinson Crusoe but wanted a story his own children could learn from. Thus the novel’s various adventures are really lessons on topics as varied as farming, cooperation, animal husbandry, and frugality. The novel became a favorite of the castaway genre....

But my favorite discovery this month is the first book in which Albert Campion appears, Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).

George Abbershaw has been invited to a party at the gloomy old English mansion of a friend, along with a few people he knows, a few he doesn’t, and one he is sweet on. A suspicious death means George has to determine who can be trusted and who can’t, including a bespectacled young man named Albert Campion who seems to have shown up at the party uninvited. When things take a decided turn for the worse, George and the rest of the guests have to band together in an effort to extricate themselves from an increasingly perilous situation.

Although only a supporting player here, Albert Campion would be the protagonist of another sixteen novels and over twenty short stories, contributing to Margery Allingham being considered one of the four “Queens of Crime,” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Standard EBooks seems to intend to publish more of the Campion books as they become available.

Standard EBooks

A sense of sin

W.H. Auden observed that many mystery fans "have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy." That largely describes me. Apart from mysteries, my only interest in fantasy has been Lewis and Tolkien. I do like some authors of historical fiction.

In a good essay about the appeal of murder mysteries, Alan Jacobs reflects on his enjoyment of such television series as Inspector Morse and its sequel Lewis. He writes "These shows are, it’s often said, old people’s television: Inspector Morse was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, and I’d be surprised if Her Majesty didn’t keep up with the later developments," and he "wonder[s] whether the detective story as a genre is made for people with more than a few years behind them." Jacobs:

...W.H. Auden, in a famous essay about detective fiction, speculated that the fundamental logic of such fiction involves the portrayal of an apparent Eden that is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored—but not the original order since the dead cannot be brought back to life. “Murder is unique” among crimes, Auden says, “in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness.” This is a kind of legal fiction, this substitution of the society itself for one who can no longer seek, or benefit from, justice: in a broken world, things can never be what they were. But partial restoration is better than none, and hope for it is a reasonable aspiration, one claimed by those who have known what the poet James Wright calls “The change of tone, the human hope gone gray.” The satisfactions of the murder mystery are real but somewhat grim, in ways that perhaps best suit the no-longer-young. They are anything but utopian.

In the murder mystery, society does not simply stand in for the victim, it undergoes its own development, for if the story begins in a seemingly orderly and peaceful world, the operative word in that description is “seemingly.” Its initial state is, Auden says, one of “false innocence,” and a murder does not bring evil into society but rather reveals the evil that is already there. The human tendency to take complacent pleasure in a fictional innocence is something that can best be seen in a small and mostly closed society, which is why so many classic detective novels are set in places like English country houses or long-distance railways or isolated villages....

In Auden’s essay on detective fiction he muses on the curious fact that many of its fans have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy—and he speculates that the mystery offers something unique: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin.” ....

And so we’re left with a world in which justice is hoped for but never fully achieved, in which sin and crime can be exposed and punished but never, never quite, paid for—at least not by us. Hard lessons, but ones we all learn if we live long enough. .... (more)

Murder in Paradise | The American Conservative

"Without being downcast or defeated..."

I've been a frequent visitor to a website called Mere Orthodoxy for some time. Mere Orthodoxy is also a magazine. I subscribed recently and received my first copy today. I am already pleased with my decision.

From "About Mere Orthodoxy":

We are a small group of Christians who since 2005 have been defending word count and nuance on the Internet while working out what our faith looks like in public.

Whether it is arts, movies, literature, politics, sexuality, or any other crevice of the human experience, we believe that the Gospel has something to say about it and that "something" really can be good news.

We take our cues from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, two of the most thoughtful, perceptive Christians of the twentieth century. One of them wrote Mere Christianity and the other wrote Orthodoxy, and we like those books so much we stapled their names together and took it as our own.

Their thoughtfulness wasn't abstract: it was rooted in the challenges and struggles that England was facing in their time, and their mission was to demonstrate how a classically minded, creedally centered orthodox Christianity was an attractive and persuasive alternative to the ideologies of their day.

And they did their work with words, with essays, poems, and stories.

Here's what we hope you will discover in our writing:

We are scripturally rooted and creedally informed. We know that it's not enough to simply say the Apostle's Creed and that the further we get from it, the more we'll disagree on the particulars of how Christianity should play out in public. But we also think that getting to the Apostle's Creed is a pretty good start for most Christians in our era, so that's where we'll put our baseline. ....

On the first page inside the front cover T.S. Eliot is quoted:

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

The first article immediately caught my attention: "We Are All George Smiley Now."

Mere Orthodoxy magazine.

J. Leland Skaggs

 Dad was born in Shiloh, New Jersey, on February 27, 1912.

Alec Guinness’s George Smiley

Alec Guinness is one of my favorite actors. Not the Alec Guinness of Star Wars, particularly, but the Guinness of the Ealing comedies, or the films he made with David Lean, and especially his role as George Smiley in the television series based on the le Carré books. I revisit those at least once a year. I like the BBC version far better than the 2011 film with Gary Oldman. From someone who, apparently, hadn't seen the 1979 version before:

The thing about spy shows is you can’t do anything else while you’re watching; to miss a micro-expression is to miss the plot. Such is the case with 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries based on the le Carré book of the same name, which I recently watched in full. As in the case in real-life espionage, the series features very little in the way of action. Only one episode features gunfire; occasionally, a man jogs. It was, sincerely, riveting. ....

...Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, a dour, droll cuckold and high-ranking intelligence officer whose devotion to England is only superseded by his commitment to social propriety. Smiley, recently and unjustly fired from his position as second in command of the Circus—the nickname for the cadre of top officers within the UK’s intelligence services—is tasked with ferreting out a mole leaking British secrets to the Soviets. It’s believed that the mole is one of the remaining members of the Circus, so Smiley and his few allies can’t let anyone know what they’re up to. (Rather, being professional spies, they can’t let anyone know even more than usual.) For his part, Smiley has to pretend to still be in forced retirement. Not the easiest way to go about an extremely high-stakes mission set at the height of the Cold War.

Even bearing these constraints in mind, Smiley sets about his mission with extreme delicacy. You could be forgiven for mistaking the setting of Tinker Tailor as an alternate-reality London where any act of rudeness sets off the offender’s exploding ankle monitor and blasts their component atoms into the mesosphere. Most of Smiley’s conversations with his various sources and suspects are comprised of intimation, allusion, and tactical civility. ....

Throughout this process Guinness’s Smiley never raises his voice; not once does he rise from his seat. By weaponizing formality, he’s obviated the need for blunter instruments. Why steal secrets when you can ask politely? (more)

 Calvin Kasulke, "Tinker Tailor Soldier... Shifgrethor," CrimeReads, Feb 24, 2025.

"As in a dream"

Jake Meador, in an email to subscribers of Mere Orthodoxy:

.... It is not a question of knowing what is right. It is a question, rather, of one’s commitment to the right.

This is something Peter Jackson never understood about Tolkien, incidentally, and is perhaps the single biggest problem with the Lord of the Rings movies, much as I do love those films. Jackson seems to only understand one sort of moral dilemma: Will I choose the good or the bad? Tolkien understood that one, of course; it’s central to how he treats Boromir and Denethor.

But the question that really seems to have most preoccupied Tolkien was something more like “can a person persist in the good, past the point of all hope and even unto death?” That is the problem Aragorn, Faramir, and Theoden all confront in different ways and, of course, is also near the heart of Frodo and Sam’s journey. ....

[Meador is reminded] of the opening sentence in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a text that Lewis knew well and praised in his scholarly work. Hooker, writing at a time when the fate of the Church of England was unclear and when it was far from certain that his particular flavor of Anglicanism would endure, opened his great masterwork with this line:

Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavor which would have upheld the same.

In other words, Hooker wrote, if for no other reason than simply for this: That those who came after him would know that he and his colleagues had not allowed what they believed to be true and right to pass away “as in a dream.” ....

What Lewis and Tolkien both force their readers to do, in different ways, is ask themselves “if you are called to a cause that is both just and hopeless, what will you do?” Neither of them want us to desire hopelessness, obviously. That can be an easy thing to do for people of a certain turn of mind. It is a vice I am sometimes prone to myself.

The point is, rather, that one should have an answer to that question because once you’ve answered it something has been decided. Obviously the good can and often do triumph. Tolkien and Lewis both wrote many morally admirable characters who win great victories. But I suspect both would also say that the ability of a character to remain good amidst their glory is a consequence of their resolve to hold to the good even in defeat. If you persist in what is right in the face of defeat, then you love the good more than you love temporal success, which is precisely the thing that allows you to handle success with maturity and wisdom when it comes.

Jake Meador in a Mere Orthodoxy email.

As if fresh

From a review of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves:

Fridges are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten lettuce into the compost, because we outsourced our worries about preserving food to that chilly box in the corner of the kitchen.

Not all countries are entirely reliant on refrigeration. In the stalls of the souks in Marrakech, fridges seem to be used only for Coca-Cola and water, while everything from haunches of meat to giant pyramids of olives is sold at room temperature. There is a sense of urgency about the selling of food. ....

In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home. ....

There is nothing new about trying to delay the rotting of food: salting and smoking, drying and fermenting are among the oldest food preparation techniques. There is evidence of dried meat (jerky avant la lettre) from as long ago as 12,000 BCE in the Middle East; salted fish goes back to the Sumerians; fruit was preserved in honey by the Greeks. But modern refrigeration aims to preserve food not in a transformed state – like a plum compared with a prune or milk with cheese – but as if harvest-fresh. ....

...[F]ridges both prevent food waste and contribute to it. Before the cold chain existed, it was normal to lose at least a third of all fruits and vegetables because they perished en route from the field to the eater. Now, a similar percentage of fresh food is wasted, but by eaters in our own homes. .... (more)

Bee Wilson, "Artificial Cryosphere," London Review of Books, Feb. 20, 2025.

George Washington and a Providential God

Today is generally known as "Presidents' Day" but legally it is Washington's birthday, moved from the actual anniversary of his birth to a Monday in order to give federal employees one more three day weekend.

A while back, on another "Presidents' Day," I published the following about what can be known about George Washington's religious faith:

Mark Tooley republishes his review, "George Washington's God," "in honor of Washington’s Birthday and of Michael Novak, who died Friday, February 17, 2017." Michael Novak and his daughter, Jana Novak, were authors of Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country, published in 2006; it was written at the request of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. From Tooley's review:

.... The assumption of the last century’s scholarship that Washington was irreligious is partly his fault. Reserved and emotionally reticent, he left no extant theological treatises on his personal religious beliefs. The clues must be extracted from Washington’s ecclesial habits, his family life, his character, and the numerous references to the Almighty in his public writings and personal letters. ....

Most of Washington’s family, friends, and associates assumed he had at least conventional if not necessarily expressive Christian faith. “He took these things [religion] as he found them existing, and was constant in his observance of worship according to the received forms of the Episcopal Church in which he was brought up,” James Madison matter-of-factly observed of his fellow Virginian. ....

Washington was indeed tight-lipped about the specifics of his theology. But he was surprisingly frequent in his references to the Deity. His God was not remote or impersonal. Washington’s God, as he described Him in his public declarations and personal letters, was quite active and quite personal. This deity saved the young Washington several times from French and Indian bullets, saved Washington’s army from near destruction by the far larger British army, and saved the young republic from chaos and division. ....

Washington’s few specific references to Jesus Christ and his lack of Trinitarian language helped fuel the assumption that he was a deist. The Novaks devote a whole chapter to deism, which they explain as a rationalization of Christianity. The deist God is a creator whose world is governed by natural laws and who desires moral living by humanity, whose conduct will be judged in the afterlife.

Much of early Protestantism initially rejected Catholicism’s use of human reason, choosing instead to focus on faith alone. Deism, the Novaks suggest, allowed Protestants to incorporate the language of reason during the Enlightenment. Some deists remained Christians, while others would follow the European model of strict rationalism. Washington, as he related the many interventions of his God, clearly believed in a continuously active deity who was more than the detached “clockmaker” of strict deism. ....

The Washingtons usually attended Pohick Church near Mount Vernon and sometimes Christ Church in Alexandria. Either trip by carriage involved a couple hours of travel round trip. Washington financially supported both churches and gave considerable personal time over the decades to his work on the church vestry. Throughout his presidency he regularly attended churches in New York and Philadelphia. ....

Washington’s spiritual life within his family appears to have been conventionally orthodox. He prayed before meals, read sermons out loud to Martha, and bought devotional material for his stepchildren. When stepdaughter Patsy was dying, he prayed audibly while on his knees at her bedside. ....

.... Washington’s public utterances about God were unifying rather than divisive and were admired by Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and even Jews. He carefully wrote to their congregations, visited their places of worship, and received their delegations, commending their faith and urging their loyalty to the new republic and its promise of religious liberty to all. .... (more)

From 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence":

“Whereas it becomes us humbly to approach the throne of Almighty God, with gratitude and praise for the wonders which his goodness has wrought in conducting our fore-fathers to this western world…and above all, that he hath diffused the glorious light of the gospel, whereby, through the merits of our gracious Redeemer, we may become the heirs of his eternal glory.” — Washington’s General Orders, November 27, 1779

 George Washington's God - Juicy Ecumenism, 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence - Juicy Ecumenism

A noble lie?

Ross Douthat, author of just published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, on those who would promote belief for the wrong reason:

There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.

This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.

This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.

The right-wing believer-in-belief will often defend the most traditionalist and fundamentalist forms of faith—though he would never be caught dead sharing their literalist or supernaturalist premises—because he likes how those forms shape culture and politics. ....

We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil. ....

...[M]y new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell. .... (more)

2/17 I've changed the title of this post to more accurately suggest its subject. 

Ross Douthat, "Everyone Should Believe in God," The Free Press, Feb. 16, 2025.