Murdering Rastari, Part II

This is a redraft of an old short story draft from 2007. Part I

"Hullo, hullo, hullo, hullo" Rastari said in that gratingly loud voice of his. He looked quite as ugly and ordinary as he always did, almost as if he had never fallen from the top of the First International Bank building at all. "I can't remember what we did, but it must have been one wild night!"

"What happened to you?" I asked, trying to keep calm.

"I already told you," he said, laughing. I noticed with some pleasure that he winced as he did so. "I can't remember anything about last night. Partial amnesia, or something like that. But whatever happened, I broke two ribs and my arm, cracked my collarbone, and bruised my side pretty badly."

I tried to assimilate this. "How could you possibly have only broken your ribs and your arm?"

"Only broken my ribs and arm?" Rastari said, laughing (and wincing) again. "What were we doing, if you expected me to be more banged up than this?"

"No," I said, "I meant, what could you have done to break your ribs and your arm, given that we didn't do anything. We were just strolling around, and you wandered off, and nobody saw you for hours. Max and I were worried."

Rastari looked at me doubtfully a moment. "Max?"

"Yes," I said impatiently, "Max. You and I were with Max last night."

The doubtful look became a surprised look. "Who is Max?"

I felt myself on the verge of a rant, but then I remembered the comment about partial amnesia, and just changed the subject. We engaged in some idle chitchat about football and chess and amnesia, with Rastari shouting or laughing that odious, unbearable, fingernails-on-chalkboard laugh every few minutes. In my head, however, I was thinking about Max, whom I'd be meeting for lunch the next day. We were going to have to do some more planning if the world was ever to be rid of that morally detrimental state of affairs called Danny Rastari.

"He didn't remember me at all?" Max asked when I met up with him at our favorite cafe and told him about the encounter in the hospital.

"Not in the least. But he says that a lot of things are fuzzy. Look on the bright side, though: he doesn't remember what we did to him."

"Perhaps," Max said, but I could see he was bothered by it. He was never one to let anything keep him down, though, and in a moment he said, "Well, it means that we can start over again. No harm, no foul."

"Maybe," I said. "But won't we just be pushing it? After all, we pushed him off a bank building once; it seems a little too deliberate to do it again. And what if he survived again?"

"There's no way he could survive again," Max said. "It had to have been a fluke the first time."

"Still, I don't like the idea of trying to kill someone twice; that makes it seem a little too much like murder. It makes us too involved."

"We are aleady involved. We pushed him off the bank building."

"Yes, but we were just helping gravity rid the world of a morally bad state of affairs. Gravity, as it turned out, was incompetent at its job. Unfortunately. Even if it weren't murder to keep pushing someone off a bank building, it's sloppy. We need a better plan."

"He's been talking about hunting recently," Max said.

"Yes!" I replied, snapping my fingers and startling the people at the next table. "Max, you're a genius. Hunting makes accidents easy. It should be easy enough to find something that will accidentally kill him."

"That wasn't really what I had in mind," said Max. "We had better keep it simple. That's what was nice about the bank building plan in the first place. Let's just take him out to your hunting cabin as soon as he gets well. Convalescent recreation, or something. And then we can poison him."

"No, no, no," I replied. "Have you forgotten the whole point? We don't want to murder him. We just want him to die."

"I understand that. But, really, is it murder when someone is poisoned to death? After all, we won't be the ones killing him. He'll just die because his body shuts down in response to a particular chemical compound."

"I suppose so," I said, frowning down at my plate a moment. Then I brightened. "And because we'll be out in the middle of nowhere, we can actually try to get help without fear that he'll be saved. That's great! One thing I never liked about the bank building was the worry about being responsible for his death through negligence if he didn't die on contact. But since we can try to get help, we won't be responsible for his death at all!"

"If you say so," said Max. "I think we should just keep our minds on the goal. Let's just focus on poisoning him."

"Keep in mind that we aren't the ones poisoning him. It's the poison that will do that. That's important. We can't be murders; we can't kill him. We're just helping the poison do so. But what poison would do the job?"

"I know just the thing," said Max. "Leave that to me."

We were silent a moment, then I said, "But what if the poison doesn't kill him?"

"It will kill him."

"That's what we thought about falling from the top of the bank building."

"I already told you that was a fluke. But if it's any consolation, we'll have guns."

"But we can't shoot him. That would be murder."

"Look," he said with some impatience, "you were the one who pointed out that accidents happen when people hunt. Those guns are going to go off at some point or another. All we'd be doing is helping them to go off in the direction that most improves the world."

"True," I said slowly. "And, really, if you think about it, it's the trauma that kills people who are shot, not the shooter. But I still like the poison idea better. There's less ambiguity there -- more separation from the effect. Let's hope that works."

"Very well then," he replied, raising his glass. "Here's to hoping that it works."

We clinked glasses. And that was how the new plan was set: we were going to find a way to let poison rid the world of that odious Danny Rastari.

It was a beautiful plan. It's a pity that poison was as incompetent as gravity.

to be continued

Murdering Rastari, Part I

This is a redraft of an old short story draft from 2007.

I hate Danny Rastari. His very presence makes me angry. His very existence is morally loathsome. I have always prided myself on the serious pursuit of virtue, and, as Rastari was clearly a moral temptation, I engaged in some evaluation of moral risks and drew the only rational conclusion: for the sake of my own virtue, I would have to kill Danny Rastari. Very difficult, though -- how do you deliberately kill someone without murdering them? I would need help at something like that, and help came in the form of Max Sanders, another of Rastari's many enemies.

Our plan was simple. I would lure Rastari to a high place, and Max and I would push him off. It was a beautiful plan. All Max and I would be doing is assisting the order of nature; gravity, not us, would kill Rastari; gravity would be responsible for his death. So I set out to lure Rastari to the top of the First International Bank building so Max and I could push him off.

It was easy; the man is not only morally contemptible but as gullible as can be. I told him that Max and I had found a great place to view the city at night, we took him to the top, and pushed him off. Down he went. It was a beautiful happening on a beautiful night, and we spent some time watching the stars afterward, before making our way down.

We found, however, that it was not so easy to destroy a cause of morally bad states of affairs. By some strange miracle Danny Rastari did not die on hitting the ground, and when Max and I finally reached the ground floor, Rastari's body was nowhere to be found.

Max and I wandered around trying to find the body for at least an hour. But after trying, without success, to puzzle this, we decided on our next course of action. I called Danny's wife.

"Caroline, have you seen Danny?"

There was a moment's silence on the other end. "I thought he was with you."

"Well, he was," I said, "but then he...well, he sort of wandered off by himself. I thought he might have gone home."

"No," she said slowly, "he isn't here."

"Well, it's probably nothing," I said. "Who knows with Danny? I'll look for him. Text me if he comes home so we know he's okay."

I decided to continue looking for the body; Max went home to bed. A few hours later Caroline called. I called up Max, who had been sleeping and was not happy to be awake. For my part, I couldn't help but admire how calm he was. I certainly couldn't have gone to sleep after everything that had happened.

"Hmmnnhfnn," he said when he answered the phone. Or something to that effect.

"Max, I found out what happened to Danny."

"Hnenfnnhmmnf."

"Danny checked himself into the emergency room."

There was silence. Then clearly and distinctly: "How did he survive?"

"I don't know. We might be safe, though; Caroline said something about amnesia. But you can never tell with that woman." And you can't, either. What sort of crazy woman would marry Danny Rastari? "I'll have to check it in person. You just stay put, and I'll let you know what's happening."

And that was how I ended up in a hospital room, face to face with Danny Rastari, the horrible person I had just pushed off the bank building. He was infuriatingly cheerful.

to be continued

The Stoic's Grander Portion

Stoic and Hedonist
by Archibald Lampman

The cup of knowledge emptied to its lees,
Soft dreamers in a perfumed atmosphere,
Ye turn, and from your luminous reveries
Follow with curious eyes and biting sneer
Yon grave-eyed men, to whom alone are sweet
Strength and self-rule, who move with stately tread,
And reck not if the earth beneath your feet
With bitter herb or blossoming rose be spread.
Ye smile and frown, and yet for all your art,
Supple and shining as the ringed snake,
And all your knowledge, all your grace of heart,
Is there not one thing missing from your make
The thing that is life's acme, and its key
The stoic's grander portion Dignity.

Music on My Mind

Elastinen, featuring Johanna Kurkela, "Oota Mua". 'Oota mua' means 'wait for me'.

Infinite Desires

Ever stirring in the depths of the heart is the desire for Well-being, for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—the aspiration after some, thing more blessed, true, beautiful, and good than can be realized here below. This is that longing after something absolute and sufficient—the immensum, infinitumque—which is so often breathed forth with passionate earnestness in the pages of the thoughtful men of every age of the world. With nothing finite can this longing after blessedness be quenched; restless and unsatisfied, we turn from every good which this world, which this life, can yield. We aspire; we seek; we gain the objects in which we hoped to find full repose and contentment; but ever with their possession we fail to find that perfect rest of heart. This world and all that it contains cannot fully bless the human soul. There never was a human being who found in the world a happiness fully corresponding to his desires, a well-being answering to his ideal; and in the nature of the human soul it never can be found. Ever at the end of the longest search, of the widest experience of what this world can give, has burst forth the yearning cry: Who will show us any good? a cry that must be ever one of hopeless yearning until we raise our minds to God, the Absolute Substance and Source of Truth and Beauty, of Goodness and Blessedness. Then we cry with hopeful faith :— Lord, lift thou up upon us the light of thy countenance. Admit the being of a God who implanted these infinite desires in the human heart, and then we may find a ground of hope.

William Whewell, "The Moral Argument for the Existence of God", On the Foundations of Morals, (pp. 147-148). The quotation is from Psalm 4:6 (KJV). Whewell goes on to add the yearning for the permanence of this blessedness (i.e., immortality).

This is the fourth of the four strands of Whewell's moral argument. I have given representative passages for the other three, dependence, gratitude, and conscience, already. Each of the four is an inductive argument in Whewell's sense of the term -- given phenomena for explanation, we 'superinduce' a concept on them to explain them. The reason for doing a multi-strand argument is (arguably) that one of Whewell's marks of progress in inquiry is consilience -- that is, the 'jumping together' of different kinds of phenomena under one explanation. Progress in knowledge, in Whewell's philosophy of science, consists in great measure in rising up to more and more architectonic concepts that unify more and more of the phenomena we experience and conceptualize. Each strand merely suggests; but the fact that one explanation can harmonize the various strands makes it inductively strong (again, in Whewell's sense of induction). This is probably why he also treats the moral argument as something that goes with physical arguments: just as this explanation harmonizes and accounts for physical nature, so too it harmonizes and accounts for the sentiments, dictates, and desires of our moral nature. The moral argument is not made to stand alone, but as a major element in a larger cumulative argument.

It's notable that the gratitude and the conscience strands clearly trace back to Kant, although since Whewell has a somewhat different epistemology and metaphysics than Kant, we should perhaps not overassimilate the two. Whewell's conception of conscience also owes more to Butler than it does to Kant. I suspect that the dependence argument has roots in German Romanticism; Schleiermacher's On Religion is a genuine possibility, in terms of arguments that clearly do appeal to a sentiment of dependence in this context and that Whewell stands a chance of having known either directly or indirectly. I do not, however, know of any evidence that clinches that matter.

The infinite desires strand above is almost certainly rooted in Plato. Whewell will later bring out a work called The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers, which are an interesting experiment, in which he tries to make the dialogues more intelligible by mixing translation, paraphrase, and commentary in a unified way. That he put so much time into doing this is a certain indication that he rates Plato as a very important ally in his struggle with the utilitarians, just as his active work in supporting Butler does the same for Butler. The discourse on the moral argument is so early in Whewell's career, though, that it is difficult to be more precise.

Fortnightly Book, September 11

There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man can be great—he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—unless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful.

The Fortnightly Book this time around is a re-read, George Eliot's Romola. Serialized in Cornhill Magazine in 1862 and 1863, it's George Eliot's fourth novel. It's fairly long, so we'll see if I get quite through it in two weeks.

The novel opens in Florence in 1492. Lorenzo de' Medici has recently died, and Tito Melema, a Greek, comes to Renaissance Florence at the height of shipwreck. I've always thought Tito Melema one of the more interesting villains in literature, because he truly is a villain only because he does not do what is "hard and painful". In any case, Tito is introduced to a scholar Bardo, whom he comes to assist, and falls in love with and marries Bardo's daughter, Romola. Florence over the next several years will be in a state of great agitation. Girolamo Savonarola is preaching doom; the First Italian War will begin in 1494; the Florentines will overthrow the Medicis and found the Republic of Florence. And Tito Melema will always, without exception, do what it takes to navigate to the top. Romola, in the meantime, will become a supporter of Savonarola and increasingly work at cross-purposes with Tito....

Maronite Year LXXII

There can be an eighteenth Sunday of Pentecost in the Maronite year, but the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is on September 14, and it is one of the few feasts that is often transferred to the previous Sunday, so instead of the last Sunday in Pentecost Season, it will in practical terms usually end up being the first Sunday in Holy Cross Season, the last season of the liturgical year.

It might at first glance seem odd to tack on commemoration of the Cross after Pentecost, but in fact Holy Cross Season is very focused on the Cross not in the sense of Good Friday but in the sense of the victory of the Church. Thus rather than a reversion to before Pentecost in the Life of Christ, it is actually the next step after Pentecost in the history of the Church. In a sense, we are in the historical period of the exaltation of the Cross ourselves: the ever-expanding after-effects of Pentecost and Apostolic mission, as the Cross is taken to all the world.

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross itself is associated with St. Helena and Constantine, and indeed, St. Helena plays a remarkably important role in the Maronite liturgical year. According to the traditional story, St. Helena, approaching her 80s, went in 326-328 to discover Christian relics in Palestine. At one point, she had a temple of Venus (or perhaps Jupiter) torn down and excavated, and they found in a cistern the remnants of three crosses (or, to be more accurate, the cross-bars of three crosses), along with their nails. Obviously, the immediate idea was that these might be the three crosses of Calvary, but according to the story, St. Helena was somewhat more practical and skeptical than most people, and she insisted that they could only say this if it was proven that they really were -- and, of course, even if these were the three crosses, there was no way to tell by just looking at them which one had held Jesus. A woman near death was brought to the site and touched each of the three; on touching the third, she was healed. St. Helena declared that one the True Cross, and the most important church in the Holy Land, the Church of the Holy Speculchre, was built over the area where the discoveries were made.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 12:20-32

We celebrate with hymns of praise
the finding of the Cross, our light,
the sign of surest victory.
Queen Helen found it through her faith,
and faithful kings were astounded.
We boast only in the Cross of Christ,
the sign of our true salvation.
Truly, the Cross shines with great light.

Martyrs and confessors rejoice;
this is the reason for battle,
this is the route of victory.
Who bears the Cross will overcome!
It is our sure exaltation,
our completion and protection.
Through this Cross we participate
in the Father and the Spirit.

We proclaim the Cross to the world;
the world thinks it but foolishness,
but to us who are being saved,
it is the power of our God.
Its light shines over creation,
and by it the Lamb shields His Bride.
The Church bears the Cross through the world.
Truly, the Cross shines with great light!