The Riotous Wet Leaves with Music Ring

The World Was Waiting for the Thunder's Birth
by Maurice Baring 

The world was waiting for the thunder’s birth,
To-day, and cloud was piled on sullen cloud:
Then strong, and straight, and clean, and cool, and loud
The rain came down, and drenched the stifling earth.
The heavy clouds have lifted and rolled by;
The riotous wet leaves with music ring,
And now the nightingale begins to sing,
And tender as a rose-leaf is the sky. 

I wonder if some day this stifling care
That weighs upon my heart will fall in showers?
I wonder if the hot and heavy hours
Will roll away and leave such limpid air,
And if my soul will riot in the rain,
And sing as gladly as that bird again?

Fortnightly Book, June 29

 I'm running a little behind on this, due to travel.

813 was Maurice Leblanc's attempt to put Arsene Lupin to rest. It failed, and the next Lupin book, which is also the next fortnightly book, is The Crystal Stopper, which was serialized in Le Journal in 1912. Two of Lupin's associates are arrested and in danger of being executed; one of them is innocent, and Lupin puts his wits to plumbing the depths of the mystery in order to find the evidence to save him, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems.

Pretty much every source that talks about this book also talks about how the book was inspired by the Panama Canal Scandals. The Panama Canal Company was a French company that, as its name suggests, was hired to construct a canal in Panama. The company found that, despite the project being for a shorter canal than the Suez Canal, the tropical climate was a massive impediment. Something like 22000 workers died trying to build the canal, largely due to malaria and yellow fever. The tropical rainy season also created severe engineering problems for which there was not always an obvious solution, and in fact, established clearly that the original design would need to be modified. In 1889, the company went bankrupt, and a court ordered it to be liquidated, a process that ended up being slow and complicated, and a financial disaster for a large number of people. In 1892, while this process was still going on, accusations were made that the company had been bribing politicians in an attempt to cover up the company's difficulties. Literally hundreds of legislators were accused, and a parliamentary inquiry discovered that over a hundred may have been involved, although the evidence in many of the cases was not sufficient for conviction. The scandal contributed to the downfall of the Clemenceau government, and, because some of the few people who were actually convicted were Jewish, greatly intensified the rising surge of French antisemitism. It also convinced many that the Third Republic was too corrupt to be viable. As to the Panama Canal Company itself, a New Panama Canal Company was formed in order to find a buyer for the assets; the United States government bought them, and, based on what the Panama Canal Company had learned, was able actually to complete the Panama Canal. I don't know what relevance any of this will have to the story, but we will see.

Maurice Leblanc, 813

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Mr. Kesselbach stopped short on the threshold of the sitting-room, took his secretary's arm and, in an anxious voice, whispered:

"Chapman, someone has been here again." (p. 1)

Summary: Arsene Lupin, the greatest thief in France and perhaps the world, does not kill -- clever in a thousand ways, he does not need to do so in order to steal. But when he robs the diamond magnate Rudolf Kesselbach, Kesselbach turns up dead, with all the evidence pointing to Lupin. This sends Lupin on a hunt to uncover who has framed him, but he soon finds himself in a fight for his life as his opponent turns out to be an extraordinarily clever serial killer who has an uncanny knack for being a step ahead. At the same time, Lupin strives to maintain his current plan -- to steal much of Europe -- and prevent it from collapsing into ruin due to the machinations of his unknown and unusually dangerous foe, and to save Dolores Kesselbach, the wife of the late Rudolf Kesselbach, from sharing the same fate as her husband. Unfortunately for him, even Lupin cannot successful juggle all three aims at once. Something will give.

This was an extraordinarily good story. It was not as fun as Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes; this is deliberately darker. It was at least as well plotted as the prior book, The Hollow Needle. In the earlier works of the series, we have seen Lupin being a mischievous joker; in The Hollow Needle, we saw him both ruthless and harried. But here, for the first time, we find Lupin anxious and afraid. More people than Mr. Kesselbach will be dead by the end of it, and Lupin eventually finds himself in a situation in which, for the first time, he kills someone. Lupin himself, in fact, has more than one 'death' in this book. Many of the characters -- the cunning chief of detectives, Lenormand, or the scheming Prince Sernine, are quite interesting in their own right, and add new dimensions to our understanding of Lupin, who comes across as more of a person-in-the-round here. This story was intended to end Lupin; Leblanc is perhaps less abrupt about it than Doyle was with Holmes, but there is an air of finality and fatality hovering around everything in the tale. Of course, we know that Lupin will return, because the reading public would no more let him die than it had let Holmes die, but as an attempt to bring his story to an end, this is a very solid one.

Favorite Passage:

He lit the young man's cigarette and his own and, at once, in a few words uttered in a hard voice, explained himself:

"You, the late Gérard Baupré, were weary of life, ill, penniless, hopeless....Would you like to be well, rich, and powerful?"

"I don't follow you."

"It is quite simple. Accident has placed you on my path. You are young, good-looking, a poet; you are intelligent and -- your act of despair shows it -- you have a fine sense of conduct. These are qualities which are rarely found united in one person. I value them...and I take them for my account."

"They are not for sale."

"Idiot! Who talks of buying or selling? Keep your conscience. It is too precious a jewel for me to relieve you of it."

"Then what do you ask of me?"

"Your life!" (p. 100)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, 813, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).

Doctor Unitatis

Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. What follows is Adversus Haereses, Book II, Chapter 25; St. Irenaeus is criticizing Gnostic attempts to argue for their views on the basis of esoteric meanings of "numbers, syllables, and letters" in Scripture, which Irenaeus recognizes as linked to their false view of creation:

 If any one, however, say in reply to these things, What then? Is it a meaningless and accidental thing, that the positions of names, and the election of the apostles, and the working of the Lord, and the arrangement of created things, are what they are?— we answer them: Certainly not; but with great wisdom and diligence, all things have clearly been made by God, fitted and prepared [for their special purposes]; and His word formed both things ancient and those belonging to the latest times; and men ought not to connect those things with the number thirty, but to harmonize them with what actually exists, or with right reason. Nor should they seek to prosecute inquiries respecting God by means of numbers, syllables, and letters. For this is an uncertain mode of proceeding, on account of their varied and diverse systems, and because every sort of hypothesis may at the present day be, in like manner, devised by any one; so that they can derive arguments against the truth from these very theories, inasmuch as they may be turned in many different directions. But, on the contrary, they ought to adapt the numbers themselves, and those things which have been formed, to the true theory lying before them. For system does not spring out of numbers, but numbers from a system; nor does God derive His being from things made, but things made from God. For all things originate from one and the same God.  

But since created things are various and numerous, they are indeed well fitted and adapted to the whole creation; yet, when viewed individually, are mutually opposite and inharmonious, just as the sound of the lyre, which consists of many and opposite notes, gives rise to one unbroken melody, through means of the interval which separates each one from the others. The lover of truth therefore ought not to be deceived by the interval between each note, nor should he imagine that one was due to one artist and author, and another to another, nor that one person fitted the treble, another the bass, and yet another the tenor strings; but he should hold that one and the same person [formed the whole], so as to prove the judgment, goodness, and skill exhibited in the whole work and [specimen of] wisdom. Those, too, who listen to the melody, ought to praise and extol the artist, to admire the tension of some notes, to attend to the softness of others, to catch the sound of others between both these extremes, and to consider the special character of others, so as to inquire at what each one aims, and what is the cause of their variety, never failing to apply our rule, neither giving up the [one ] artist, nor casting off faith in the one God who formed all things, nor blaspheming our Creator.

Dashed Off XV

 When we rejoice in a sunny day, the expressiveness of the day is incorporated into our expression of joy.

the social ontology of the physical world

All human beings relate to the natural world symbolically.

Love creates deontic structures, for it is inherently creative.

the better-not, the culpable, the piacular

Most beliefs grow up in the context of inquiry, within the inquiries we make and not after them.

"The best way to convince yourself that there is a world of inner experience is to explore it." Owen Barfield
"Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand; aesthetic imagination when we do."

characters acting out of character in a way that makes sense given their character

(1) What begins to exist is capable of beginning to exist.
(2) Capabilities are only intelligibly identified in terms of powers to act.
(3) The power to act must exist in something.
(4) The power to act relevant to the capability of beginning to exist cannot be that of what begins to exist.

Literally nobody makes 'beginning to exist' to depend on infinitely precise measurements of time, and we do not in our experience identify separate discrete points of time, so it is false to say (as Fantl does) that for an object to begin to exist "it need only be the case that at one time there is no such object...while at the next moment the object is present." (It's also worth asking the question, "Present to what and by what means?")

Lived experience is understood by living, not by listening: living it oneself, living with another, living sympathetically through another.

the dignitative equality of husband and wife

monotonicity as a generalization of distribution

Strategy is policy with arms.

primary ends -> prioritization of subordinate ends -> plan of means -> means of execution -> means in appropriate execution

divine order as a postulate of creative imagination

poetic intimation by conveyance of associations

poetic intimation as playing an important role in movement from notional to real assent

(1) The system of things, having an order, cannot arise from mere chance.
(2) Therefore there is or are cause or causes for the system of things.
(3) The system of things having a multiplicity of distinctions cannot arise from mere natural causes.
(4) Therefore it must arise from a cognitive cause or causes.
(5) Taken as a whole, the system of things cannot derive from any secondary cause or casues, which would be included in the system of things.
(6) Therefore the system of things is caused by primary cause.
(7) This primary cause is cognitive.

The actual intelligible is the intellect acting.

All explanation is in terms of source, nature, or end.

"There is something in every truth which determines the proposition by excluding the opposite predicate." Kant

Every possible world implies the existence of an actual world (but not of the actual world being thus and so).

Every serious intellectual inquiry is completed in a prayer of thanksgiving.

"The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all." Auden

"...our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms." CS Lewis

We love because we exist by grace of Love.

the garden at the edge of dawn

regulative, educative, and nobilitative duties

first-nature ontology & second-nature (habitus-based) ontology

socially grounded vs socially constructed (cf. Epstein)

The firm is a byproduct of the household.

genres as socially constructed artifact-kinds that build on socially grounded features of particular artifacts

A coin buried in the ground is not functioning as money, and even whether it can depends on the broader economic system.

Signs are semi-arbitrary, not purely arbitrary.

Signs may be associated at the level of sign-vehicle, object, or interpretant.

People derive unearned benefits from every thriving social group to which they belong; joining together cooperatively so that not every benefit has to be earned is a major aspect of human sociality.

the cultivation of "the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Pet. 3:4) in the Church

the three Mysteries of the Life of Christ: private, ministerial, paschal

Love allegorizes the world in light of the beloved.

sacramental grace as imbuing us with the dignity of causality (esp. with regard to the sacramental character)

the ecclesial semiosphere

Constitutional law always implies a conception of the citizen.

time as relative mutability, probability as relative contingency

CPT symmetry: no change in laws would be required to describe the universe if, at once, all matter were instead antimatter (charge inversion), all momenta were reversed (time inversion), and all positions were reflected through an arbitrary point (parity inversion).

For an entire economic system without the introduction of new resources, value does not increase, and only remains the same under ideal conditions involving no irreversible exchanges.

Right and wrong are related to need for education; where one posits a need for education, one posits a standard of right and wrong, and where there is no such standard, there is no need for education.

Church politics is always tending (in different populations) to the complacent or the histrionic.

cold vs warm recognitions of beauty and sublimity

the intrinsic novelty of creation (its ever-newness)

Every work of fine art is simultaneously abstract, ideal, and dynamic; every kind of fine art has symbolic, classical, and romantic modes.

A thing is ugly only as contextualized by a beauty.

Some beauty presupposes ugliness; all ugliness presupposes beauty.

consilience of true, good, and beautiful

sublimity as the greatness our greatness makes experienceable

A painting does not need to be vast to express vastness, and it may represent vastness without expressing it.

Seal of All the Fathers

Today is the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, but also the memorial of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Doctor of the Church, a very fitting combination. From St. Cyril's Scholia on the Incarnation c. 17: 

They who have their faith in Christ undefiled, and approved by right votes of all men, will say that God the Word Himself out of God the Father descended into emptiness, taking servant's form and, making His own the Body which was born of the Virgin, was made as we and called Son of Man. He is indeed God according to the Spirit, yet the Same Man according to the flesh And the Divine Paul also addressed the people of the Jews saying, God Who manifoldly and in many ways of old spake to the fathers in the prophets, in these last days spake to us in the Son. And how is God the Father understood to have spoken in the last days in His Son? For He spake to them of old the Law through Him; and hence the Son Himself says that they are His Words through the most wise Moses. For He says, Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil: for I say unto you that one jot or one tittle shall not pass from the Law till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away but My words shall not pass away: there is also the Prophet's voice, I that speak am at hand. Hence when He was made in flesh, then spake to us the Father through Him, as saith blessed Paul, in the last days. But lest we should not believe that He it is Who before the ages also was Son, he added immediately, Through Whom He made the worlds too: he also mentions that He is the brightness of the glory and the Impress of the Person of the Father. 

 Man therefore was He truly made, through Whom God the Father made the worlds too; and was not (as some suppose) in a man, so as to be conceived of by us as a man who has God indwelling in him. For if they believe that these things are really so, superfluous will seem to be the blessed Evangelist John, saying, And the Word was made Flesh. For where the need of being made man? or why is God the Word said to be Incarnate, unless was made flesh means that He was made like us, and the force of the being made man declares that He was made like us, yet remained even so above us, yea also above the whole creation?

Lift Up Your Minds

 And so I say to you, if you wish to become men of might and effectiveness,--"Lift up your minds." However humble any of us may be, however ordinary and common-place in mind, our nature is prefigured after the universal; all the cardinal facts of the universe are the common heritage of humanity; all the prime ideas which pertain to the Godhead and to humanity, all the ground ideas and principles which abide in the realms of mind and spirit! 

 Alexander Crummell, "Right-Mindedness," in Civilization and Black Progress: Selected Writings of Alexander Crummell on the South, J. R. Oldfield, ed. University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville: 1995) p. 151.