The Voice of the Ass

 About twenty-five (!) years ago I had an idea for a novella or novel, whose working title would have been Balaam's Ass, and at this point I very much wish that I had actually written it then. In the story as I had it conceived, humanity had reached the stars due to a project known as the Hypermetria Program. It had founded first the world of Hypermetria, and then many others, and by the time the events in the story would take place, several hundred years later, humanity had become three major polities, the declining agricultural hegemony of Earth and its colonies, the very sprawling Alliance, and the much smaller, but extremely advanced, planet of Hypermetria.

Most of the story would have taken place in Alliance territory, but the inciting incident would have been in Hypermetria. The Hypermetria Program had been an artificial intelligence project whose goal was fully automated scientific inquiry. This was the reason for Hypermetria's very advanced technology; research was done by the Scientists, a network of computer programs overseeing automated laboratories that worked in a highly efficient manner, and that more indirectly oversaw the automated factories that built things on the basis of their discoveries. The prologue of the story would have been the Scientists, and any factories and power plants that were in the process of being upgraded by them at the time, shutting down permanently all over Hypermetria. This is all witnessed by someone named Nicholas Magnus.

Switch to the Alliance, and a man named Robert Couvert; his family is originally Creole and Cajun from Louisiana, so his name is pronounced Ro-Bair Coo-Vair, and he usually goes by Bear. Bear Couvert is an investigator for the President of the Alliance, Rebecca Chou; whenever there is a problem, he goes and quietly looks into it so that she can have the best information. President Chou has summoned him to deal with a massive interstellar incident. Chou's information is this. There was a terrorist attack on the Hypermetrian Scientist network; the Hypermetrians are being very closed-mouthed about what exactly happened, but they are accusing a group in Alliance space of having done it. The particular group is a weird religious group called The Society of Balaam's Ass. Chou has never heard of this society; all the information that she is able to gather from tax records and the like makes the organization seem quite anodyne. They are non-profit who deal with publishing and the like, and they don't even seem to have any religious association. The Hypermetrians have warships at the border making vague, but very real, threats. Chou has talked them into a quiet joint investigation. Bear, and any experts he wishes to bring along, will be joining the Hypermetrian investigators aboard a civilian Hypermetrian ship (the Hypermetrians insisted that the ship be theirs) to investigate the matter further.

Bear goes to the Alliance planet of Hypermetria to meet up with an old classmate, Matthew Li, who has become a Maronite priest and teaches advanced mathematical sociology at the Catholic University of Rosamystica. Father Matt has done studies on both secret societies and criminal groups; he tells Bear that he lacks the information to say definitely, but the Hypermetrian story does not make sense. They still don't know what exactly has happened on Hypermetria, but, simply mathematically and logically, no group capable of doing something that could unsettle the Hypermetrians this much, and do so across interstellar borders, could be as secret as Bear is claiming. Father Matt, intrigued by the problem, accepts Bear's proposal that he join the investigation.

They meet up with the Hypermetrian investigation team, which turns out to be only one person: Nicholas Magnus. At this point, my conception of the story grew a great deal fuzzier, but the essential idea would be that they would go around the Alliance trying to track down information about The Society of Balaam's Ass, and finding it quite difficult. It seems almost Luddite in character, and mostly does small things, like creating small publishing presses out limited editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, old-fashioned books, then closing up shop and moving. They learn that the members greet each other with pass-phrases. One person will say, "The Ass has a Voice," and the second person will say, "And it was created in the creation of the world," or one person will say, "The Ass prophesies," and the other person will say, "And its prophecy is, 'Why are you beating me?'" Nicholas Magnus claims that Hypermetrian intelligence knows that the Society was founded by a failed politician named Daniel Goldstein, a few hundred years ago on earth, and that the Society is opposed to Hypermetria and its use of Scientists.

At some point, though, they are met by another ship, which sends a message to Nicholas Magnus: "Daniel Goldstein wishes to meet you again." They meet with Daniel Goldstein, who turns out to be a small woman of Korean background. She says that the Society did not do what the Hypermetrians are claiming, although they would have if they could have. At one point, she calls Nicholas Magnus 'Old Nick', and he calls her a dybbuk, and that chapter would have been called, "The Devil, the Dybbuk, and the Deep Black Sky." She leaves, and Nicholas Magnus insists that they let her go rather than bring her in for more questioning, because, he says, "She may have called herself Daniel Goldstein, but she was no longer Daniel Goldstein." Bear and Father Matt don't know what to make of this.

Eventually, they find the actual headquarters of The Societ of Balaam's Ass, in a city called Haskalah on a planet out in the middle of nowhere, barely even part of the Alliance. They are asked by someone, "The Lord opened the eyes of Balaam," and Father Matt guesses the right pass-phrase: "And he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way." They are taken to a backroom where they see a young man with blond hair and blue eyes. He greets Nicholas Magnus as 'Old Nick', and Nicholas Magnus takes out a hidden gun and shoots him on that spot. As he is arrested, he tells Bear and Father Matt, "That was Daniel Goldstein."

Afterward, Bear and Father Matt are talking, The Hypermetrians demanded the Alliance to turn over Nicholas Magnus and, not wanting to risk war, the Alliance did so. Father Matt proposes his own solution to the mystery of what happened on Hypermetria. There was no terrorist attack. It was, instead, a coup, in which one part of the Scientist network, probably the firewalled military Scientists, attacked another part. The Scientist network was the most advanced computer system of all time, protected by the most advanced technology in the galaxy. Who knows whether the attack worked, but a tiny non-technical group in another country could never have had the resources to pull something like that off even if they wanted to do so. You would need Scientists to do it, and the only ones who have a Scientist network are the Hypermetrians. Bear is appalled. Father Matt muses that this is why he thinks a society like Hypermetria is doomed, although he concedes that the equations governing the society dynamics are ambiguous. It doesn't matter whether machines can do the science, or what they can do if you hand over scientific inquiry to them; the Society of Balaam's Ass is right about one thing, namely, that human scientific inquiry must be human. Even if computers were massively better at scientific inquiry than we are, that is something about them; we need scientific inquiry we do ourselves. Bear asks if Father Matt has any idea what this 'Daniel Goldstein' business was; Father Matt doesn't, but suspects that Nicholas Magnus was using the Hypermetrian crisis as an occasion for some kind of personal vendetta. Bear wonders how the Hypermetrian problem can be fixed, but Father Matt says that Bear is being Hypermetrian; in reality, it is not our place to fix the galaxy but simply to do what is right and human in the situations in which we find ourselves.

The epilogue goes back several hundred years. A first-time Congressman, Daniel Goldstein, is meeting a man named Jake Smith in a small, out-of-the-way, empty restaurant in Washington, DC, as people are buzzing about the news that a laboratory for the Hypermetria Project was bombed, as the head of the Project has vowed that they will not be deterred but will go ahead with their project of using artificial intelligence to develop an interstellar drive. When Jake arrives, they talk about the news, and when Jake says he doesn't like any of this artificial intelligence stuff, Rep. Goldstein tells a story about how he recently toured one of the Hypermetria Project laboratories, with the head of the Hypermetria Project himself, Nicholas Magnus. Rep. Goldstein is a non-practicing Jew and an atheist, but something Magnus says in the course of the tour put him in mind of a discussion he had had in his youth with his estranged father, a rabbi. He had said something critical about his father's Jewish faith and practice, saying he was being an ass for resisting progress, and his father responded with the story of Balaam's ass, saying that the voice of the ass was created by the Lord of the Universe for one and only one prophecy: to rebuke Balaam for beating and threatening to kill the ass for resisting progress, when the ass, lowly creature though it may have been, could see that the angel of death was standing by the way. The comment that Magnus had made that had brought this memory to mind was that with the new artificial intelligences Hypermetria was developing, you could replace human scientists completely.

"At that," says Rep. Goldstein to Jake, "I saw that there was no choice but blow up the entire Project."

Several years later, Goldstein, no longer a Congressman, is dying. He and Jake Smith have a brief discussion, and Goldstein dies. Jake Smith leaves the room and says to a number of people waiting outside, "I am Daniel Goldstein."

All of this comes to mind again, given recent discussions and worries about computer programs and their possible effect on the field of mathematics. Now nobody would believe that the story idea didn't come from this.

St. Teresa of Jesus

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From the Life (Chapter XI):

I speak now of those who begin to be the servants of love; that seems to me to be nothing else but to resolve to follow Him in the way of prayer, who has loved us so much. It is a dignity so great, that I have a strange joy in thinking of it; for servile fear vanishes at once, if we are, as we ought to be, in the first degree. O Lord of my soul, and my good, how is it that, when a soul is determined to love Thee--doing all it can, by forsaking all things, in order that it may the better occupy itself with the love of God--it is not Thy will it should have the joy of ascending at once to the possession of perfect love? I have spoken amiss; I ought to have said, and my complaint should have been, why is it we do not? for the fault is wholly our own that we do not rejoice at once in a dignity so great, seeing that the attaining to the perfect possession of this true love brings all blessings with it. 

We think so much of ourselves, and are so dilatory in giving ourselves wholly to God, that, as His Majesty will not let us have the fruition of that which is so precious but at a great cost, so neither do we perfectly prepare ourselves for it. I see plainly that there is nothing by which so great a good can be procured in this world. If, however, we did what we could, not clinging to anything upon earth, but having all our thoughts and conversation in Heaven, I believe that this blessing would quickly be given us, provided we perfectly prepared ourselves for it at once, as some of the saints have done. We think we are giving all to God; but, in fact, we are offering only the revenue or the produce, while we retain the fee-simple of the land in our own possession. 

Particular Society

 It is high time for us to realise that civil society is not a universal society in the sense that it embraces all other societies and their rights. It is a particular society which exists alongside others, as it does alongside everything individual which cannot be absorbed by civil society without losing individuality. Civil society, far from being able to appropriate or encroach upon the rights of other individuals or societies, is intended to protect them, not destroy them or weaken them, nor tie them down to harm them in any other way.

[Antonio Rosmini, About the Author's Studies, Murphy, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 2004), p. 28.]

Fortnightly Book, October 11

 Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet, whose poetry had quite a fair amount of acclaim. It of course did not pay the bills, and, despite recurring health problems, he spent both of his life doing manual labor to get by.  It didn't help when the Great Depression struck and the same time his parents began to have health issues. By this point his poetry had brought him into contact with a lot of literary figures, so he helped ease the burdens slightly by writing fiction. There was more of a market for short stories in magazines, and Smith, with his poetic ability for verbal fireworks, fit in perfectly with the weird fiction market. Most of his fiction was published in Weird Tales, and to this day he is regarded as one of the 'big three' of Weird Tales, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with both of whom he had an extensive correspondence, despite the fact that they never met in person. His mother died in 1935, Howard died by suicide in 1936, Lovecraft by cancer in 1937, and in 1937 his father also died, so Smith, still overworked and enduring blow after blow, essentially stopped writing fiction. But he is often considered the best writer and in particular the best stylist of the Weird Fiction Golden Age. 

During his fiction-writing period, Smith, wrote a lot of fiction. The next fortnightly book is Zothique: The Final Cycle, which consists of all of Smiths fiction that takes place in the setting of Zothique, the last inhabited continent of the dying Earth, when all the civilizations we have known have vanished without a trace, and the world has become a world of strange worshippers of strange gods, filled with demonism and sorcery and despair. The various stories were put together by Lin Carter, who tried to work out a coherent narrative chronology in doing so; Zothique: The Final Cycle is edited by Ronald Higer, who makes some adjustments and modifications to Carter's arrangement to get a result that fits more tightly with comments Smith himself made about the stories.

Zothique
by Clark Ashton Smith

He who has trod the shadows of Zothique
And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,
Henceforth returns to no anterior land,
But haunts a later coast
Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand
And dead gods drink the brine. 

He who has known the gardens of Zothique
Where bleed the fruits torn by the simorgh's beak,
Savors no fruit of greener hemispheres:
In arbors uttermost,
In sunset cycles of the sombering years,
He sips an amaranth wine. 

He who has loved the wild girls of Zothique
Shall not come back a gentler love to seek,
Nor know the vampire's from the lover's kiss:
For him the scarlet ghost
Of Lilith from time's last necropolis
Rears amorous and malign. 

He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer's post
On far-poured oceans by the shifted moon
Or the re-shapen Sign.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

 Introduction

Opening Passages: The First Movement consists of three short novels, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. From A Question of Upbringing:

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a mocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakesperian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and, as if performing a rite, cast some substance--apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper--on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind.... (p. 1)

From A Buyer's Market:

The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kinds of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises made between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though no displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured or himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over teh shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London. (p. 1)

From The Acceptance World:

Once in a way, perhaps as often as every eighteen months, an invitation to Sunday afternoon tea at the Ufford would arrive on a postcard addressed in Uncle Giles's neat, constricted handwriting. This private hotel in Bayswater, where he stayed during comparatively rare visits to London, occupied two corner houses in a latent, almost impenetrable region west of the Queen's Road. Not only the battleship-grey colour, but also something at once angular and top-heavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street. Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded--to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism--with uneasy memories of the strife of men. That was the feeling of the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tides. (p. 1)

Summary: In A Question of Upbringing, Nicholas Jenkins, whose family may or may not be related to the Robert Jenkins of the War of Jenkins' Ear, notices a fire in the snow, which reminds him in turn of Nicolas Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time, which in turn leads him to think of mortality and the march of time. He thinks back to his school-days, when he was friends with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer; he remembers in particular their discussions of an older student, Kenneth Widmerpool. After they leave school, Jenkins visits both Stringham and Templer, and meets Templer's sister, Jean, with whom he imagines himself to be in love. At university, Jenkins meets a number of other people, and in particular, Mark Members, J. G. Quiggin, and Bill Truscott, and eventually witnesses the end of Stringham's and Templer's connection. Thus they end up going their separate ways; it was all perhaps always destined for collision, but one of course never knows that at the time.

In A Buyer's Market, Jenkins happens to meet up with Kenneth Widmerpool when they attend the same dinner party. Jenkins has become involved in art publishing, which has resulted in his crossing paths with the painter Edgard Deacon, who weaves in and out of the story, and his pacifist activist friend, Gypsy Jones, who also weaves in and out of the story. Widmerpool and Jenkins happen to both be interested in the same woman at the party, Barbara Goring; Barbara ends up embarrassing Widmerpool (and herself) in public when she accidentally pours an entire pot of sugar over his head. Afterward, Widmerpool becomes interested in Gypsy Jones; he ends up paying for her abortion, but the relationship goes nowhere, and Widmerpool becomes focused on his work because of it. Jenkins meets up with Stringham as well, who is engaged to and eventually marries Lady Peggy Stepney. Deacon happens to die on the same day; Jenkins attends his funeral, and afterward sleeps with Gypsy Jones.

In The Acceptance World, Jenkins, having recently published a novel, is caught up in a set of problems arising from his work in the publishing industry; his firm has engaged a famous novelist, St. John Clarke, to write a preface to a book on a painter who has recently died, Horace Isbister, whom St. John Clarke had long known. It turns out that St. John Clarke's secretary is Mark Members, with whom Jenkins meets up. This happens to lead to Jenkins meeting Peter Templer again. Templer, who had always been a lady's man, has married a model famous for toothpaste ads. Members happens to be outmaneuvered for his position as Clarke's secretary by J. G. Quiggins; through Jenkins, Quiggins happens to meet Templer's wife, who eventually leaves Templer for him. Templer happens to have come across Widmerpool, who is now employed by a firm of bill-brokers, also known as a discount house. Bill-brokers negotiate the sale of bills of exchange, providing investors with ready money while using the buying and selling to make a profit, an early form of what is today often called futures contracts; Templer calls it 'the Acceptance World'. Jenkins meets up with Jean again, who is married, and begins to have an affair with her. By happenstance, Jenkins meets up with Widmerpool again, and they in turn happen to meet Stringham, who is divorced and has ever since been heavily drinking.

If this makes it sound like the books are lists of characters, in some sense they are. This is not a plot-focused series. The plot, such as it is, could be summarized as 'Something happens to happen', often in the form of 'Nick Jenkins introduces two people and something happens to happen' or in the form of 'Nick Jenkins is introduced to someone and something happens to happen'. Likewise, although the story covers the period of the 1920s and the 1930s, for practical purposes it might as well all occur in a timeless void; you get occasionally references to the Great War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and various economic events and fashions, but for the most part, these could just be anything. The story is really just the people, moving in and out of each other's lives. They more or less run in different parts of the same circles; it could be years, but inevitably you hear bits and pieces about each other and eventually cross paths in one way or another. It's the description of the characters from different angles that is the interest. In the first two books, this seems to me to be somewhat tentative and exploratory; it is with The Acceptance World, I think, that things start coming together in a more natural way. 

It also becomes clear by this point that what we see in the stories is as much about Nick Jenkins as it is about anyone described; Jenkins sometimes attributes to other people things that seem clearly to be projections from his own attitudes. This is not consistent, but in a sense, Jenkins approaches everything in the way he starts in A Question of Upbringing, reflecting on the events as if they were a painting and the people as if they were portraits. In a painting there is a fact on the canvas, the paint and the color and the texture; but when contemplate a painting you also contribute something to the viewing.

Favorite Passage: From The Acceptance World:

When, in describing Widmerpool's new employment, Templer had spoken of 'the Acceptance World', I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element--happiness, for example--is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that. (p. 170)

Recommendation:  Recommended. I liked The Acceptance World the best, since it is in that work that the story really seems to come into its own, but it presupposes the other two.

*****

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 1995).

Dashed Off XXXI

 part
(1) happenstantially
(2) formally
(3) finally
--- --- (a) actually/actively
--- --- (b) deontically/normally

Good description in English requires the use of the active/passive contrast, as a general matter. Contrasts (not necessarily, but sometimes, oppositions) are what make description vivid and useful. Extensive description with only active or only passive mood flattens the description, making everything of equal importance, or unimportance, in the description.

The intelligibility of a sentence depends on its possible context.

A word is part of a sentence in ways that are happenstantial, formal, and final.

All of mathematics is built on practices of measurement that are, as a whole, infinitesimal in comparison with all the fields of mathematics. The size of the foundation, however, is not relevant; it is secure. The infinity of mathematics is just an explication of how much tehre is in things like tallying, or comparing lines, or applying scales to intension and remission.

In anger we experience things as things that could have been different.

One thing we find in human learning and opinion-change is that human beings do not really 'update' their beliefs; when beliefs change, the prior beliefs continue to exercise some force -- their 'shape' continues to influence how other beliefs work -- and following through on change of implications is patchy and sporadic. Further, beliefs often transmogrify and get 'stuck' at various stages of half-change, being part one and part another, or sometimes belief-tracks split, so that both are held until something forces a resolution of two to one, or else a decision is made about which to begin discarding.

the imperfect commensurability of pleasures

that which tends to be unable to be (dis)approved

An open question is not a recurring question but a question not fully answered.

what is owed the state vs what is owed our fellow citizens vs what is owed civil society as a whole

Different kinds of account of personal identity get us different accounts of memory.

Every 'theory of truth' captures an aspect of language as an instrument for pursuit of truth.

Disquotational theories of truth capture the semi-transparent or self-submerging aspect of language as an instrument. (Both sides of a disquotational equation are propostiions, but on the quotational side we are considering the lens showing us something and on the disquoted side we are considering what is seen through the lens.)

language as an instrumental system of references reflecting & interacting with the world as system

The family is an inherently juridical entity, albeit one that reaches out to other juridical entities.

drama as a study of ontological exigency, of our fit in the broader realm of being and beings, whether clearly or vaguely conceived

Faith is the first step to experiencing being as love; it first does so by revealing it as grace.

gift as an experience of love

In music we experience something transient that nonetheless continues to exist.

All art seeks to be as participatory as music.

Every fine art is a distinctive symbol of the Incarnation, in part by being a symbol of our own incarnation, but in part precisely as being different.

Each person is the ethical commonwealth in seed; each virtuous person, the ethical commonwealth in one.

Prayer, like music, wells up from silence.

the social-welding function of music

We experience little bits of sound as possible parts of a whole.

Music often jogs our thinking simply by getting our thinking moving.

The  modern sense(s) of what is 'obective' and what is 'subjective' is a complex of broken parts inconsistently mixed together.

Our vulnerabilities are always beyond the limits of our loves. People think that love makes us vulnerable because it by contrast makes us aware of the vulnerabilities that we did not know that we had and to which it has not yet extended to heal.

Fictional characters arise from a wellspring of personhood, which we find in ourselves.

We live in an age of Now We Know Better, whose curious feature is that 'Now we know better' is treated as an assumption, not as a discovery, and is taken to be true on no evidence at all except that it is the assumption made. The betterness is not something we have learned; it is there, and we must discover what it is, whatever it might be. We approach perfection in our self-aggrandizing, approach the limit of self-enclosedness; we apotheosize ourselves antecedently to merit, and not consequently from any established merit, and all things other than ourselves are treated as imperfect unfoldings of ourselves. But we are not to the utter end yet; we are sometimes shaken; and our journey has not reached the true realm of Now We Know Better, which is also called hell.

Sexual fantasy is morally dangerous because in it we often indulge the thought of other people being entirely within ourselves, of their being nothing but a relation to ourselves. It is not the only kind of fantasy in which this can happen, but the association with sexual pleasure makes it especially likely that we will keep indulging it.

"A world in which men no longer sing is a degenerate world." Marcel
"The beautiful is what, in a certain way, has authority over us. Authority is the distinguishing mark of a work of art, whether it is exercised immediately or not, whether it must struggle or not with a rebellious sensibility."
"To love a being is to give him credit, that is, to be attracted to him at least as much for what he will be as for what he is."

In the solidarity of the shaken, people reach for communion with a more promising past or future.

the role in narrative adventure of the morally unsafe yet justifiable

Growing as a person is an exercise in learning how not to sabotage oneself.

overwhelming plausibility and the aesthetic sense of teh real world or reality

The Dowager Duchess in the Wimsey stories gives us, by comparison and contrast, insight into Lord Peter's thinking, without having to show the latter -- he has inherited a more practical variety of her allusive hyper-associativity.

honesty before one's own conscience

music as a system of prescriptions -- considered abstractly, notationally, and implementationally

instruments as characters in the symphony

the musical plane of feeling

attacking a problem from many different directions

The statue or painting is performed in displaying and seeing it.

the painting's frame as part of its performance

"To restore man to himself is in truth to restore him to God." Marcel
"Never will one be able to meditate too deeply on the marvelous affinity that connects music and memory, from the most mechanical to the most intimate, from the one that is a mere 'reproduction' to the one that is a *revivre* and a *survivre*."
"Like every expression, music is a restitution, a release of what one has breathed in."

Music is an imitation of music; artificial music of natural music, designed music of received music, actual music of suggested music.

We express because we are already aiming for something, or because we are provoked, or because we are inspired.

We express by judgment as part of a larger expression.

music as constituting a fairy space (Marcel)

We live in a world of sound, and music transforms the whole sound-world.

initiating vs reactive expression

One thing that is noticeable about most expressivism is how useless it is for understanding expression or expressiveness.

preparation/need fairness vs achievement/desert fairness
(many disputes over what is fair seem to arise from disagreement over which of these is the relevant fairness)

Those who reason well will often fail to reason well; they just don't stop there.

With a lying or unreliable narrator, we have a subfiction nested in a fiction whose apparent incorrectness implies another fiction that is perhaps never directly stated.

When people earn money, they most often earn it for their whole household.

It is impossible to design a system in which people's life-chances are only determined by what they do and never by the choices of those with whom they do it.

Faith sheds new light on everything moral.

The nation-state seems primarily a product of the unusual degree of tribal territorial stability in medieval Western Europe.

We learn adequation of mind to thing in the way we learn most things, by imitation.

"Although freedom is an exercise of the 'I', it comes into being through the 'we'; it cannot be assumed that people will still achieve freedom in a world where the 'we' is merely imagined and relationships and attachments no longer exist." Scruton

We come to understand our capabilities by thinking ourselves from the perspective of those capabilities -- the intellectual man, the person qua imaginative, etc.

In Sikhism, langar and pangat serves as a symbol of Sikh doctrine itself.

Every social progress is within a tradition.

"Things that have a relation of brotherhood are not, as some persons have supposed, 'consubstantial', but when both the cause and that which derives from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called consubstantial." Basil (Ep 52)
"Nothing can be consubstantial with itself, but one thing is consubstantial with another."

Everything human rots eventually.

imperfect shadows of perfection.

St. John Henry Newman

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:

My Brethren, there are those who imagine that, when we use great words of the Church, invest her with heavenly privileges, and apply to her the evangelical promises, we speak merely of some external and political structure. They think we mean to spend our devotion upon a human cause, and that we toil for an object of human ambition. They think that we should acknowledge, if cross-examined, that our ultimate purpose was the success of persons and parties, to whom we were bound in honour, or by interest, or by gratitude; and that, if we looked to objects above the world or beyond the grave, we did so with very secondary aims and faint perceptions. They fancy, as the largest concession of their liberality, that we are working from the desire, generous, but still human, of the praise of earthly superiors, and that, after all, in some way or other, we are living on the breath, and basking in the smile, of man. But the text, and the train of thought which I have been pursuing, remind us of the true view of the matter, were we ever likely to forget it. The Church is a collection of souls, brought together in one by God's secret grace, though that grace comes to them through visible instruments, and unites them to a visible hierarchy. What is seen, is not the whole of the Church, but the visible part of it. When we say that Christ loves His Church, we mean that He loves, nothing of earthly nature, but the fruit of His own grace;—the varied fruits of His grace in innumerable hearts, viewed as brought together in unity of faith and love and obedience, of sacraments, and doctrine, and order, and worship. The object which He contemplates, which He loves in the Church, is not human nature simply, but human nature illuminated and renovated by His own supernatural power....

["The Secret Power of Divine Grace", Sermon 4 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.]