Dashed Off XXVIII

 Our time experiences push us toward thinking about things they do not show us.

We are not merely symbol-makers but symbol-finders.

To be able to ask for the name of something requires an already vast familiarity with classification.

As far back as we can trace consistent tool-making we can trace the history of the ability to classify. (The consistency is essential here.)

To give an example one must do more than can be found in only the giving of the example.

To learn the meaning of a word is to learn the seed-crystal of infinite possible uses of the word.

Learning a new language may change the way one gardens and thereby change one's garden.

"In speculation as well as in gossip, we have some natural inclination towards the more surprising version of a story." Mary Midgley

Those meats tend to be favored in barbecue that are rich in fats and also have a strong distinctive taste that can bear an overlay of smokiness. (Hence the prevalence of cow and pig.)

Boo and hooray derive from our evaluations and do not ground them; in saying them we express an evaluation already made.

A divorce of philosophy and poetry causes problems for moral motivation.

We always learn languages by playing games.

There once was a critic of Thomism
who said, This is nothing but Rome-ism!
Though I never know why
the thing will not die
and it eats up my own view, Coxcomb-ism.

Great poets can survive having manifestos, but it always ruins lesser poets.

What we value structures what we regard as dangerous.

Humean psychology as what it would be like to live in a dream: wandering in images of experience held loosely together by the lingering associations from how they were associated in experience, nothing of substance, nothing of causation except custom and anticipation of imagination, appearance of reality maintained by coherences and constancies and the momentum and mistake of the mind

To have and apply a concept of reality or the real world, we must contrast things with dream, fiction, hallucination, etc. To make this comparison, however, there must be something that it is to be, there must be something 'true in a dream', 'true in fiction', etc.; otherwise there would be nothing allowing the comparison and contrast.

qualia as a crude way of talking about 'way of being true in experience', a substet of 'way of being true'

signs as interfaces between ways of being true -- e.g., testimony of what is true in one's experience

dream as natural version of Rimbaud's derangement of senses

Physicists work with both 'truth in a model' and 'truth in the physical world', and the relations between these need more elucidation.

Wittgensteinianism is just a preculiar form of seeking clear and distinctinct ideas by using a method doubt.

that which cannot be merely true in a model

transcendental arguments as movements from one truth domain to a more fundamental truth domain

Reasoning on the basis of testimony requires that there be a fact of the matter about whether a person is honest or lying, and that this fact not be a matter of appearances or reputation only.

Many of the features of fiction are also found in other domains in which we have nonsystematic evidence about something to which we lack direct access.

Reading up on the Zimbabwean Hyperinflation Crisis is like seeing a tornado lift a mountain and drop it on an overflowing dam; it is an economic disaster that begins to approach something like sublimity.

Some kinds of etiquette are higher and more sacred than any artificial protocol.

Follow back any social construction and you hit something natural that makes the features of that social construction possible and salient.

Even very intelligent and social beasts don't place the weight on suffering in their actions and responses that human beings do. Humans often don't experience suffering (their own or others) as just bad but as wrong, what ought not to be, as a defect in the way things are. We are, as far as we can tell, the only animals that do this consistently and certainly the only ones that keep doing it when only remembering or imagining it.

Companonionable silence is itself a sort of conversation.

household as grex, as group, as society

There are many moral obligations to which we have to learn to be committed.

an allegorical reading of Deuteronomy 20:19-20: When engaged in religious or apologetic argument, do not attack the good things in your opponent's position, because your dispute is not against what they get right, but instead distinguish out the things that are not valuable in this way, and by demolishing them build your own position against theirs, until you have achieved the point.

We inquire by creating domains of truth to compare with other domains of truth.

sufficient reason as involving three things: adequacy, reason, and Box (the mode under which adequacy and reason are linked for sufficient reason)

We learn about ourselves by defeating ourselves.

Parliaments increased prosperity by aligning legislative interests with protection of property rights and expansion of tax capacity.

Every society requires, if it is to survive, small bits of shareable beauty.

Because of the unity of virtues, you can in principle start with any virtue and develop an account of all the virtues, and such developments from different starting points will converge (although not always in straightforward ways). But not all virtues are equally valuable as the starting seed for virtue ethics. The best are those that are themselves inherently architectonic (like prudence or justice) or pedagogical (like filial piety or respect).

We uplift ourselves with poetry, stabilize ourselves with ritual, and for the culmination express ourselves with art.

In virtue the heart goes upward.

Inferior authority cannot rid itself of trying to appear authoritative.

Authority is what maintains what emerges from the ways of things.

Many criticisms of capitalism are really identifying weaknesses in democracy, but as people don't want to attack democracy, they find a scapegoat, with the result that they do not fortify democracy against its weaknesses; they have convinced themselves that if the scapegoat is destroyed, the weaknesses will vanish.

(pure being -> pure act) -> pure spirit

As actuality is the precondition for possibility, and some possibilities are necessarily so, there must be necessary being.

Ps 118:16-17 Vulg: The right hand of the Lord (the Holy Spirit) has wrought virtue (infused virtue); I shall not die but I shall live.

Amends are sometimes of greater value than punishment.

For there to be a community of nations, there must be a community of reason, structured by common rational principles and obligations.

All human beings are thrust into a discipline of service and obedience, and therefore can only come to rest in a discipline of service and obedience prior to and more fundamental than all others.

Everybody seems reasonable on the occasions that they accidentally make a reasonable argument.

If God judged man even with an imperfect but just man's standard, not many would stand.

We treat people as projecting an intentional structure and this intentional structure is part of our assessment of their actions.

"People do not suspect what does not appear to be hidden." Maurice LeBlanc, The Crystal Stopper

Every idea dropped into the sea of humanity mutates.

Reading is a discipline in structuring one's thoughts.

The 'obligation to obey the law' is not a single obligation.

All beneficiaries have a moral obligation to requite their benefactors.

To be grateful only for things requiring special effort or sacrifice is to be an ingrate. To refuse to be grateful for a benefit until it has tbeen established to have been intentional or voluntary is also to be an ingrate.

Obeying the law is not an adequate return for benefits received from civil society, much less any kind of uniquely suitable return, but where it is interpreted in a way reasonably consistent with common good, it is usually a necessary condition for some of what is necessary for a suitable and adequate return.

People are often grateful to institutions, like schools or churches or militaries.

The heart of grateful response is not attitude but active relationship. Neither goodwill nor respect nor gratitude are reducible to attitudes.

A very general sort of indebtedness, in particular and very distinctive situations, often spawns very specific debts.

Obligations of gratitude range from minor to extremely strong; it is not possible to be a grateful person and assume that this will not ever require significant sacrifice.

The stringency of gratitude obligations do not only vary with the sacrifice or effort behind the benefit, but also the extent and importance of the benefit.

Actions performed from gratitude are no more necessarily caught up in feeling grateful than actions performed from love; indeed, in both cases, adequate action often requires the action to stretch or extend farther or longer than the feeling can.

People often treat obedience to the law as part of 'giving back' to their society and often justify disobedience on the basis of society not giving them anything that would give them reason to obey.

M-T pronoun pattern: Across Eurasia , many otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with T (or close equivalent).
N-M pronoun pattern: Across the Americas (especiall the western coast), otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with N (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent).
-- The most obvious explanation is that these are relics of a common ancestry so far back there is no other known specific trace of it.
-- Another possible explanation is that this is actually due to convergence due to 'pronominal resonance' (Johannes Nichols) -- i.e., pronoun sets tend toward alliteration and rhyme, so languages tend to shift toward being more like those with more consistent alliteration (e.g., Turkish shift in first-person pronouns from B to M).
-- M-T families tend to be consistent with the Altaic hypothesis.

St. Robert and St. Hildegard

 Today is the feast of St. Roberto Bellarmino, Doctor of the Church.

Now, the reason why there are seven [sacraments] is that God customarily proceeds, in the way in which spiritual life is given, in an incorporeal manner. In as much as He considers the corporeal life: 1) it is necessary to be born; 2) to grow; 3) to be nourished; 4) 4) if a man becomes sick he receives medicine; 5) whenever one must fight, he must be armed; 6) it is necessary that there be some head that rules all men after they are born and increased; 7) that there would be some to whom the duty to propagate the human race would fall, otherwise, if others were not born to succeed the dead the human race would forthwith go out of existence.In the same way, God also constituted this arrangement in the spiritual life. 1) It is necessary for us to be born in the grace of God through Baptism; 2) Confirmation makes it so that grace will grow and be fortified; 3) the Most Holy Eucharist is given so that grace might be nourished and sustained; 4) that whenever the medicine of Penance is received, the grace lost to the soul will be recovered; 5) that when a man is at the point of death he arms itself against the infernal enemy who attacks us more at that time than in any other time, which is done with Extreme Unction; 6) that there would be someone in the Church that rules and governs us in the spiritual life, which is done by one in Orders; 7) that there would be some in the Church who look to the spiritual propagation of the human race, whereby the number of faithful could be increased in this way, which duty is carried out in the Sacrament of Matrimony. 

[St. Robert Bellarmine, Doctrina Christiana: The Timeless Catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine, Grant, tr. Mediatrix Press (pp. 153-154).]

****

It is also the feast of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Doctor of the Church.

For as good works follow upon a good will, in the same way, because they exist within the knowledge of God, the virtues bend toward the knowledge of God and lead humankind equally to all justice and to the rightness of heaven. For all of the virtues run swiftly alongside the salvation of humankind, although they may not all appear equally in any individual human being. For God's judgment both terrifies humans and examines them, and no human deed remains unscrutinized by God's judgment, for the just judgment of God adjudicates all things justly. Prudence, moreover, unleashes its powers upon humans with providence, so that, as they prudently cast aside the lust of the world, they might embrace chastity. Patience, meanwhile, touches them with gentleness, patiently to endure too the temptations of the flesh; for in both the male and the female sex, the ardor of carnal desire must be stilled by these virtues without any neglectful delay. For this reason, none of the faithful should regard these virtues dismissively, lest the virtues leave them parched in aridity or choked by lustful desires. Rather, they should imitate them with good works, so that the virtues might preserve them in all holiness. 

[St. Hildegard of Bingen, The Book of Divine Works, Campbell, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2018) pp. 76-77.]

Third Heaven

 II Enoch 8:1-9:1 

And those men took me thence, and led me up on to the third heaven, and placed me there; and I looked downwards, and saw the produce of these places, such as has never been known for goodness. And I saw all the sweet-flowering trees and beheld their fruits, which were sweet-smelling, and all the foods borne by them bubbling with fragrant exhalation. And in the midst of the trees that of life, in that place whereon the Lord rests, when he goes up into paradise; and this tree is of ineffable goodness and fragrance, and adorned more than every existing thing; and on all sides it is in form gold-looking and vermilion and fire-like and covers all, and it has produce from all fruits. Its root is in the garden at the earth’s end. And paradise is between corruptibility and incorruptibility. And two springs come out which send forth honey and milk, and their springs send forth oil and wine, and they separate into four parts, and go round with quiet course, and go down into the Paradise of Eden, between corruptibility and incorruptibility. And thence they go forth along the earth, and have a revolution to their circle even as other elements. And here there is no unfruitful tree, and every place is blessed. And there are three hundred angels very bright, who keep the garden, and with incessant sweet singing and never-silent voices serve the Lord throughout all days and hours. 

 And I said: How very sweet is this place, and those men said to me: This place, O Enoch, is prepared for the righteous, who endure all manner of offence from those that exasperate their souls, who avert their eyes from iniquity, and make righteous judgment, and give bread to the hungering, and cover the naked with clothing, and raise up the fallen, and help injured orphans, and who walk without fault before the face of the Lord, and serve him alone, and for them is prepared this place for eternal inheritance.

 Apocalypse of Moses 37 

And God saith to him: 'Adam, what hast thou done? If thou hadst kept my commandment, there would now be no rejoicing among those who are bringing thee down to this place. Yet, I tell thee that I will turn their joy to grief and thy grief will I turn to joy, and I will transform thee to thy former glory? and set thee on the throne of thy deceiver. But he shall be cast into this place to see thee sitting above him, then he shall be condemned and they that heard him, and he shall be grieved sore when he seeth thee sitting on his honourable throne.' 

And he stayed there three hours, lying down, and thereafter the Father of all, sitting on his holy throne stretched out his hand, and took Adam and handed him over to the archangel Michael saying: 'Lift him up into Paradise unto the third Heaven, and leave him there until that fearful day of my reckoning, which I will make in the world.'  Then Michael took Adam and left him where God told him. 

But after all this, the archangel asked concerning the laying out of the remains. And God commanded that all the angels should assemble in His presence, each in his order, and all the angels assembled, some having censers in their hands, and others trumpets. And lo ! the Lord of Hosts came on and four winds drew Him and cherubim mounted on the winds and the angels from heaven escorting Him and they came on the earth, where was the body of Adam. And they came to paradise and all the leaves of paradise were stirred so that all men begotten of Adam slept from the fragrance save Seth alone, because he was born according to the appointment of God. Then Adam's body lay there in paradise on the earth and Seth grieved exceedingly over him. 

Then God spake to the archangel(s) Michael, (Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael): 'Go away to Paradise in the third heaven, and strew linen clothes and cover the body of Adam and bring oil of the oil of fragrance and pour it over him.' And they acted thus, did the three great angels, and they prepared him for burial.

 And God said: 'Let the body of Abel also be brought.' And they brought other linen clothes and prepared his (body) also. For he was unburied since the day when Cain his brother slew him; for wicked Cain took great pains to conceal (him) but could not, for the earth would not receive him for the body sprang up from the earth and a voice went out of the earth saying: 'I will not receive a companion body, till the earth which was taken and fashioned in me cometh to me.' At that time, the angels took it and placed it on a rock, till Adam his father was buried. And both were buried, according to the commandment of God, in the spot where God found the dust, and He caused the place to be dug for two. 

And God sent seven angels to paradise and they brought many fragrant spices and placed them in the earth, and they took the two bodies and placed them in the spot which they had digged and builded. And God called and said, 'Adam, Adam.' And the body answered from the earth and said: 'Here am I, Lord.' And God saith to him: 'I told thee (that) earth thou art and to earth shalt thou return. Again I promise to thee the Resurrection; I will raise thee up in the Resurrection with every man who is of thy seed.' 

II Corinthians 12:2-4 

I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this person (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows) was caught up into Paradise and heard ineffable things, which no one may utter.

The Road of Further Advance

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: 

 Do not block the way of inquiry. 

Although it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and to consider the economics of research, yet there is no positive sin against logic in trying any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged. On the other hand, to set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one unpardonable offence in reasoning, as it is also the one to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themselves the most addicted.

[C. S. Peirce, "The First Rule of Reason"] 

Fire Serpent and Water Mountain III

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Chapter Three: The Road Up the Mountain in The City of the Gods

Tera had not quite yet learned to temper her expectations. She had expected marvelous sights beyond the ken of Vilim, but the road the wagon slowly but steadily went along was not fundamentally different from any mountain road. The road itself was well made, certainly, but it functioned like any road, and it looked like any road. Along the road grew red clover, yellow and white yarrow, and pinkish-purple thyme, different subspecies but very obviously in the same species as the similar flowers that grew along the roads up to and down from the Hall of the Fire Serpent. The elder trees did seem older and more robust than the similar trees back home, but that was all. The stones by the road were stones still, the dust was dust still. The only major difference was the sky. Davir and Mizur were lands famous for snow and rain, respectively, but the sky here was open and clear and startlingly blue.

The land was gently hilly, although it became slowly steeper as they went. Up and around the road turned, curving this way and curving that way, and for a while it followed a small creek. In terms of size it was not impressive, but the creek was cheerfully oblivious to this and went charmingly along its pre-set path. But it was here that Tera first saw a difference. A creek is not merely a flowing of water but of possibilities, and, just as the gods were more rounded in possibilities than Vilim, so too this creek was more rounded, less possibility-flat, than other creeks she had seen. It was subtle, but also startling. It was only an ordinary creek and yet was an ordinary creek in The City of the Gods, and so many Davnan interacting with it in subtle ways all along its path made possibilities far beyond the reach of the creek itself draw near, and become nearly, not quite but nearly, available to it, as if this ordinary creek needed only a tiny little divine push to do something no other creek could.

The flowers were too transient and small to be much affected by the presence of so many gods in one area; the stones and the sky were too enduring and vast. But the creek was at something like the balance point, a constant and yet transient thing, small yet extensive, and the result was that it popped out from everything else. It was as if you saw a painting with trees and stones and a little waterfall, but when you drew nearer, you could see that the trees and stones were painted, yes, but the waterfall was a real waterfall coming out of the painting.

"That," said Uncle Llew, "is Nanmonyd Creek, which is practically a member of our family. Our father used to take your mother and I to pan for gold in it, although that the place was much farther down. In early spring it rushes and leaps, but it gets quite lazy in the summer and autumn. It never quite dries up, and never quite freezes, though. It is also unusual in going the wrong way. Almost all the waters in these mountains go out to Great Lake, and thence eventually to the Western Bay, or else through Abernant Lake and out in a northeasternly direction to North Sea, but this little creek, as if it had a mind of its own, happens to fall down in the opposite direction, south toward the Eglur River, which comes out of an entirely different mountain range. "

Eventually they came to a forking path. "That path," he said, "if you follow it long enough, will eventually fork again, with one path curving a long way around to Great Lake Harbor and the other taking a very winding path out to North Landing on the other side of the mountains. But we are turning here and heading around and then up Mount Vanyd. Brickanbreck, our family hall almost since the Landing Days, is quite far up. Most of Vanyd and the immediately surrounding area belongs to the Embiadwe and the Muriaki." He stopped, and his face grew darker and harder to read. "And I suppose these days to some of the Wenovar, too, since Manawydan and Rhiannon are out near Abernant."

He was quiet and stormy-looking and thoughtful for a while after that, as they slowly went around and up Mount Vanyd. The trees became more evergreen and more ancient-looking as the road slowly became steeper. On one side of the road, the mountain went rockily upward; on the other side, it went plummeting downward. Uncle Llew's mood slowly improved and he eventually began making occasional comments, pointing out places where he had climbed the rockface or that various minor family events had happened. The scenery was lovely, but very much what you would expect. Here, however, the road itself seemed more than a road should be. In some manner that was difficult to pin down, it became far more obviously a road made by gods than the road had hitherto been. Even to Tera's un-Enrolled eyes, unassisted by Oracle, this road had clearly had its possibilities shaped by Davnan hands. Yet it also did not seem artificial in the way even the artifacts of the gods usually did. It had not had its possibilities shoved into a particular direction, but shaped, cultivated, as if it had been a living thing and had been trained to one specific future, its future, a future in which it could only endure and never fail, in which no weather or normal action could ever make it stop being a road. It was not a road, really; it was The Road, the thing that could not but be road.

Tera fumblingly tried to explain what she saw, in these and other words, to Llew. He nodded slowly, with a smile, "That is good. Not everyone can see it quite so well. This road is one of the oldest roads in The City, built in the early days of First Landing. According to family history, it was handbuilt by Cumor Nine-Mury Forest Deer, one of your answers. It has never needed repair. Even Davnan roads get buried by dust over centuries, but the dust just blows off this one. It is always safe and always clear. They could build them in those days." 

This reflection, when spoken out loud, seemed suddenly to make Llew moody again, and he said nothing more for a while, until he pointed out something like a spire of rock down below, rising above the trees. "That rock is The Face. They say that this side of it, despite being an entirely natural formation, used to look exactly like a Davnan face. It was said to be a sign that we belong here, although a sign from what or from whom no one would ever say. When I was a boy, though, it was starting to look rather shabby, and there was talk of shifting its possibilities back to the way it had been said to be. That turned into a big argument over whether it was an appropriate use of the Vault of The City. It was still going on when I left, but as you can see, it does not look like any kind of face at all now. Nothing was done and it has just been weathering for almost a thousand years, wearing down and wearing away." Moody again.

Tera could appreciate that coming back to his old haunts might have this effect, so she simply endured it and tried to enjoy the scene, the piney air, the picturesque ruggedness of the rocks.

It was starting to get warm, though, and she was starting to wish they were already there, when they came to a place where The Road went on around the mountain, but a path moved off and more directly up it. At the crossroads great, almost flat, slanted rock heaved up.

"Ah," said Uncle Llew, suddenly casting off his moodiness and exchanging it for delight. "The Starwatching Rock! Still almost exactly as it was. This is the beginning of the family estate. And I'll give the Embiadwe credit for having the sense and taste to recognize that the Starwatching Rock was one of the things on the estate that needed to be preserved properly. "

From this, Tera expected the house to be soon in sight, but in fact this just began a long, slow zigzagging up a switchback trail on an increasingly steep slope. It was perhaps half an hour before any buildings at all came into sight -- various sheds and servant's course. One particularly beautiful circular building Llew pointed out as the 'Brickanbreck Platform'. Only on the path turning at the Platform did the actual hall come into view.

Brickanbreck was built directly into a sheer cliff face across a deep chasm from the Platform, across which one long glittering arc of a bridge spanned. A short distance to the left side of the bridge was a small waterfall pouring slowly out of a long, thin crack in the rock and then falling in glittering drops and streams to the distant floor below. A short distance to the right was a tower graceful arching out and upward from the cliff wall. The bridge leaped out to a large ledge, about twice the length of a man's height deep and about three times that wide, right before a doorway in the wall. The doors were very wide and tall, and in their ancient wood, glittering like rubies and topazes, was inset the glyph of the Fire Serpent.

They went across the bridge, and as Llew's foot stepped on it, the doors opened, and they went inside, wagon and all. The great arch of the doorway was quite deep, almost a short tunnel, and then there was another set of great doors that swung open into the welcoming hall, which was a large room several times the size of that at Fire Serpent Hall.  Great tapestries with Llew's emblem-name were hung at one end. As he helped Tera down from the wagon, Vilim servants entered the hall, and Llew set them to collecting the baggage before sending the wagon away.

"We should have something to eat," said Llew, and one of the servants showed them to the high table in the large dining hall, where they were served slices of chicken simmered in clarified butter from a sideboard, which Tera thought was quite good for Vilim food, and a tea of hibiscus and chamomile. Llew took one drink of the latter and made a face, but Tera thought it quite refreshing. All in all, it was the best Vilim meal she had ever tasted, and she noted that, despite the face, Uncle Llew drank two large cups of the tea. After the meal, Llew went down to the workshops to see their condition, and Tera was free to explore the place.

It was all quite strange. Everything was well lit, although in most rooms there were no windows, and she usually could not tell the source of the light. Brickanbreck was also much more labyrinthine than the Hall of the Fire Serpent, and there were many rooms that could only be reached through a long succession of other rooms. There was a small room near the welcoming hall in which a great clock mechanism one wall ticked away the time. She found a large room full of shelves, which she assumed was intended to be a library, but none of the shelves had any books of any kind on them. She did find, in one corner of the library, a nook with cabinets with glass-like doors, which clearly contained scrolls and loose parchments of some kind. The possibilities available to the cabinets were very strange, and Tera did not fully understand them. She supposed that the cabinets had been designed to preserve what was inside them. Perhaps also they were designed to prevent theft, because the cabinets were simply impossible to open. Usually physical shiftings like this could be overcome by physical means, if you applied enough power or force, but that required a path of available possibilities. The possibilities of being opened or broken had been so far removed from these cabinets that Tera could not, however much she strained, see where they had gone, much less how to make them available again. 

Off the library there was a small room that Tera assumed was supposed to be a study of some kind, but it was empty except for a large, very stylized painting on one wall of a very Llew-like person with a smile that was almost mischievous. A small symbol on the signet ring on his hand turned out to be the emblem-name 'Forest Deer', so this was probably be the Cumor Nine-Mury who had built The Road.

What she had never really been prepared for was the sheer vastness of the place. Tera had lived all her life in large buildings, first the palace in Davir and then Fire Serpent Hall in Mizur, but both of those places seemed small and cozy compared to Brickanbreck. She went through room after room, some furnished but most empty, upstairs several levels and downstairs even more, and nothing ever seemed to come to an end. She was not afraid being lost. As a goddess, doorways were to her not merely doorways but possibilities of reaching other places, possibilities that she, unlike the Vilim, could directly read, if she tried. Yet here too there was something strange, because not all of the possibilities of the doorways were stable. This was another puzzle that Tera could not figure out. She would look at a doorway once and see that she could get back to the library from it, but then look at the same doorway again and see that there was no way through that doorway to get to the library. Perhaps that could be done by completely sealing doors, but the only person in all of Brickanbreck who could have done that was Uncle Llew, away down in the workshops. She also could not imagine what possible reason he would have for randomly sealing and unsealing doors. The only other solution she could think up was even more unimaginable, namely, that the rooms of Brickanbreck occasionally changed which other rooms they adjoined.

Eventually she tired all of this exploration and began to make her way to her bedroom for a late afternoon nap. On some level below -- with a disconcerting strangeness similar to that which infected the doorways, a room would seem in one direction to be one level below another and in the opposite direction seem to be two levels below it -- she discovered with interest a large, long room, filled with looms, and sewing equipment of various kinds, some of which she had never even seen before.

Growing up as Goddess-Princess of Davir, Tera had been taught the basics of many textile arts, since that was one of the things Princesses of Davir were expected to do, and she had always made her own clothes, since if she had not, she would have had to wear the sorts of things Vilim make. Their clothes were never quite right. But whoever had stocked this room knew the crafts and arts of cloth to a degree so far beyond Tera's own knowledge that it was practically wizardry.

She explored the weaving room for a while, and then went up to her bedroom. It was about the same size as her bedroom back home, but much more nicely furnished. It had no windows, but one of the doors connected to the tower she had seen from the outside. It had several excellent windows from which she could look across the chasm and down the mountain. It was later than she had thought, as the the light across the trees was that of the setting sun. She went all the way up the tower, looking out each window, with the topmost views being dizzyingly high, until eventually she reached a level she could not go beyond, since there was no further stair. There was a ladder to a door in the ceiling, but that door was sealed in exactly the same way the cabinets in the library had been.

Tera went back down and began to unpack, and she was still at it when Uncle Llew came by.

"I was thinking of going down to the Starwatching Rock to see the stars. Would you like to come?"

She did, so they went down. It was much faster going down than it had been coming back up. It was also all in the dark but, being Davnan, neither were likely to stumble. Uncle Llew did have a small orb that, when twisted, gave off a softly glowing light, but they did not need it going down. They also had soft blankets that they laid down after they had clambered up the Rock. 

They laid back, looking at the stars for a long while. It was a good night for star-viewing, clean and clear. 

Finally Llew said, "Your mother and I used to come down here all the time. When I was a boy, I would look up at the skies, and it seemed like infinite freedom. A universe of possibilities beyond imagining. I suppose it never stopped being that, but later it always seemed like looking at the stars is looking at freedom from behind prison bars. A universe of possibilities that are not available and can never be reached."

"But we came from the stars," said Tera. "That was what mother always said. We sailed the seas of the heavens from star to star to star."

"Yes," said Uncle Llew. "Our people once lived among the stars. That much of our history is known."

"And we came to this world in ships from the stars. They say we were a traveling folk until we discovered the Vilim, a sad and desperate people, and we took pity on them. We landed and became their gods and gave them the ways of the gods."

There was a palpable pause. "Did your mother tell you that?" Llew asked in a cautious tone.

"No," said Tera, "it was in one of the books you had me read. I forget which."

"Hmmm," said Uncle Llew. "Well, it is not quite right, but we did indeed land our ship at First Landing and make ourselves gods of the Vilim. There was only one, whose name was The City of the Gods, although there was a smaller survey ship attached to it that ended up at North Landing. The ship was wholly dismantled, though, as was the survey ship. The Oracle, the Engine, the Vaults, the essential elements of the Platform network -- they are all repurposed parts of the ship. We do not know how to make it again." He reached up his hand as if to grasp the stars, and closed his hand. "We sailed the heavens once, but now they are closed to us." He let his fist drop to his chest.

They lay there a long while, looking up at the stars, occasionally talking of this and that, and then, somewhere after midnight, went back up to Brickanbreck.

to be continued

Fortnightly Book, September 13

 Some friends recently gave me Anthony Powell's series of books, A Dance to the Music of Time. So the next fortnightly book will be the First Movement, which consists of three novels:

A Question of Upbringing

A Buyer's Market

The Acceptance World

The story of A Dance to the Music of Time opens in about 1921 and ends in about 1971. A Question of Upbringing (originally published in 1951) goes from about 1921 to 1924, A Buyer's Market (published in 1952) occurs around 1928, and The Acceptance World (published in 1955) is from 1931 to about 1934. Together they cover the life of Nick Jenkins and his closest friends in Britain from their school days, through university, into their early career.

The entire sequence gets its name from a painting by the seventeenth-century painters, Nicolas Poussin:

Beyond knowing that the series had some very favorable critical reception and a few very, very general things about the story, I know very little about what to expect, so we will see how it goes.

J.-K. Huysmans, The Oblate

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

For more than eighteeen months now, Durtal had been living in Val-des-Saints. Tired of Chartres, where he had provisionally settled, and plagued by desultory longings for the cloister, he'd left for the abbey of Solesmes.

Recommended to the head of the monastery by Abbé Plomb, one of the curates at Chartres who had known his reverence a number of years, Durtal had been cordially received and had stayed at the monastery on several occasions for more than a fortnight, but he always came back more ill at ease, more uncertain than before. He would meet up again joyfully with his old friends, Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper, Madame Bavoil; he would return to his lodgings with a sigh of relief, and then the same thing would happen: little by little he was seized again by memories of the conventual life at Solesmes, so utterly different from that which he'd experienced at La Trappe. (p. 23)

Summary: His imagination captured by the Benedictine work with plainchant at Solesmes, Durtal is convinced by a Benedictine monk, Dom Felletin, to try smoe time at Val-des-Saints, and settles in so well that he begins to consider becoming an oblate. The oblature is path for those who wish to participate in monastic life with the monks but who for one reason or other require a life that overlaps more with the world than a monk's life; althought, beyond that, exactly what an oblate is, or should be, is not always clear (a recurring theme in the book is discussion of various historical forms the oblature has taken). 

Val-des-Saints is not perfect. Durtal is really in many ways a city boy so this small-town provincial life occasionally grates on him. The town is also in a bit of a slow-motion crisis. As a monastic town, it's very difficult to be a parish priest -- you are always having to navigate the monastery having at least as much, and sometimes more, authority and influence than you do, which is a problem because in practice you are always having to mediate, if you can, between the abbot and the bishop. The compromise that has been temporarily accepted as Durtal settles down there is that the monastery is providing all the priestly functions for the parish, including its pastor, until the bishop can find a suitable secular priest. This however, causes tensions in another directions; a monk as parish pastor is very good at many things, but being part of the social life of the town is practically impossible. In particular, the local gentry are pushing hard to have him replaced with a priest they can invite to dinners and the like. For Durtal, however, it means an excellent context. This is especially true as he makes friends with the monks, with Mademoiselle de Garambois, a fellow oblate, and her uncle Monsieur Lampre, a crotchety curmudgeon of a bachelor who has a heart of gold, an enthusiasm for collecting illuminated prayer books, and a complaining but constant support for the Benedictines. When his friend Madame Bavoil comes to stay with him, that only makes it better.

Inevitably, there are clouds on the horizon. The bishop eventually selects a parish priest, Father Barbenton, who immediately begins a power struggle with the monastery, and, to Durtal's astonished horror, decides to do so by picking on plainchant, substituting hymns set to the music of popular showtunes. The local gentry, at first relieved finally to have a priest who can participate in their social life, but begin to be less enthusiastic when they come up against one of the perpetual problems of parish laity, the fact that all the things they want their parish church to do cost time and money. When the parish activities had been part of the work of the monastery, the monastery (which like Benedictine monasteries generally has its own income as well as donations from visitors) had diverted part of its funds to maintaining parish needs. Now that the monastery is no longer in charge of the parish, the monastery is no longer paying for parish resources, and things that were being treated by the locals as free turn out to require funds that can only come from them. It's the old story: Everybody takes for granted good things for which they don't have to pay; but when they have to pay, everybody is also sure that someone else is better positioned to pay for those good things than they are. This does not work to the favor of the monks; the monastery seems to some of the locals to be sitting on a lot of funds, and that they might need such things for the complicated work and many charitable requirements of monastic life is not the sort of thing that the locals would consider.

Far more seriously than the local tensions is the impending Law of Associations, which will strip religious institutions of a number of their protections and require of them things like lists of their members and their personal information and a complete inventory of all the property of the monastery (not always an easy thing when you are a several-centuries-old monastery). The monks and a few of the shrewder locals realize immediately what that means -- the state can only tax what it can see, and it is trying to measure how much stored wealth is available to be skimmed. Up to the very passing of the bill, the monks are hoping that it will go away. When it is passed, it is like a thunderbolt into the city. Religious institutions across France have to assess their options. For monasteries in particular, one of the problems is that the Law of Associations in effect treats bishops as the primary relevant authorities even when canon law does not. A Benedictine monastery, like that at Val-des-Saints, will no longer have its monastic independence if it stays, with the danger of continual infringements on its customs and traditions. The abbot at Val-des-Saints decides that their only real option is to move to Belgium. But what is a monastic town without a monastery? Not much. The monastery, of course, brought in tourists; it also brought in donations which, while paid to the monastery, eventually in one way or another circulated into the local community. All of that begins to dry up almost immediately.

As for Durtal, he looks around him at French Catholics, and he sees little room for hope. French Catholics are mostly supinely passive beneath the law. They will not fight for the things they are losing. Durtal had had a bit of a daydream of a thriving French Catholic community centered on a Benedictine monastery as a great center of religious art of all kinds, taking the success of the Solesmes community and expanding it to all other arts. But French Catholics are apparently willing to accept showtune-hymns and sentimentalist kitsch. Good taste is not necessary for faith or religion, but bad taste weakens the Church. And whether it is cause, effect, or correlate of this, French Catholics are also willing to accept not fighting for the things that have been built over long years. Many of the monks think the Law of Associations is a temporary thing; but Durtal is not so sure. So he returns to Paris with his books, not knowing what the future will be. His hopes are largely in shambles, although he recognizes that many others have it worse than he does in this matter. But there's nothing much to do except put one foot in front of another. Thus the book, and the whole Durtal series, ends:

'Ah, my dear Lord, give us the grace not to haggle like this; to forget ourselves once and for all; to live at last, no matter where, so long as it be far from ourselves, and close to you.' (p. 350)

Favorite Passage:

In the countryside, when a boy is sickly and unable to bear the strain of working on the land or in the vineyards, his mother says: "He's delicate, this little chap; we'll make a priest of him," and that's how Father Barbenton was entered into a seminary, then sent successively to various villages as a curate, and finally appointed as the parish priest of Val-des-Saints.

All the priests to whom Monsignor Triaurault had offered the post had declined, being well aware of the awkward position a parish priest would be in, opposite an abbot and his monastery.

Father Barbenton, however, had accepted, on the assurance that after a certain time he would be transferred to a better parish, which was highly unlikely because it was quite clear that if he succeeded in his conflict with the abbey, the bishop would be in no hurry to move him, and if the opposite was the case, he wouldn't promote him, and if he felt he'd been too compromised wouldn't hesitate to crush him. (p. 197)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended. This is in some ways both a funnier and a sadder book than the previous ones.

****

J.-K. Huysmans, The Oblate, Brendan King, tr., Dedalus (Sawtry, Cambridgeshire: 2022).