Advent Day 10 -- At the Checkout Line

[Darwin guest posting for MrsDarwin.]

I had a tightly scheduled evening. I left work a little early, because the team that works for me was invited to come to the house for a team Christmas party at six. I needed to pick up a couple of quick things at the store (chips, ice, etc.) and then hurry home to cook some of the food and help with the final cleaning. With a dozen items in my cart, I scanned the checkout lines. Each had one person. I picked one of the "fifteen items or less" express checkout line and got in it.

Almost immediately it became clear I'd chosen poorly, at least in terms of getting out quickly. The lady in front of me was trying to pay on her Ohio food assistance card, but the system was saying that she still owed twelve dollars and change. Neither she nor the checker could figure out which of her items it was that was causing the trouble.

After having rushed around the store to pick things up, being stuck in line was the last thing I wanted. I knew that MrsDarwin and the kids were stuck with the frustrating last minute cleaning, and I wanted to get my food on the stove. I just got my bonus for the year. Twelve dollars was nothing to me. Minutes, on the other hand, mattered. I wanted to get out. I wanted to say, "Look, can I just pick up her tab?" Then we could both just go. I wouldn't mind the extra twelve bucks, and we could all go. But I'd read my share of articles over the last year about the humiliation of having to use "food stamp" cards at the store. I didn't want to embarrass her by offering to pay. So I waited and focused on looking cheerful.

"I'm really sorry," she said to me, looking upset and harassed. "I didn't put anything in the cart that I don't normally get. I don't know why it's taking so long. But this stuff is crazy."

"No problem," I said. "I don't mind."

We waited. The checker was going through the receipt one item at a time. Then she called over a manager, and the manager (an efficient looking woman probably ten years younger than both me and the checker) took the list and went to check it against some list of her own.

I got a text from MrsDarwin asking me to pick up cleaning spray. "Do you mind if I run get something?" I asked the checker. "I'll just be a minute."

"Oh sure," the said the checker.

"Take your time," said the woman ahead of me. "We're not going anywhere."

I grabbed the cleaning spray and came back. The woman was still there, worrying about her total, looking through the bags for what might have caused the problem (she'd clearly taken more than fifteen items through the express check) and looking embarrassed. I put my cleaning spray on the checkout counter.

"Look," I said. "It's Christmas. I'd really like to help out. Would you mind if I picked up your tab?"

She looked shocked. "Pay for my stuff?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's Christmas. I'd like to help out."

I could see the emotions working in her face, but it wasn't anger such as I had feared. It was a sort of startled gratitude. "Are you sure?" she asked. "This has never happened to me. No one has ever picked up my tab. Even when I had boyfriend they never paid for my stuff. Are you sure?"

The checker turned to me to double check. "Yeah, are you sure?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's not a problem. It's just twelve bucks. Here." I handed a twenty over to the checker and she started to make change.

"No one has ever done this for me," repeated the woman. "Thank you. I feel like I'm going to cry. This makes my week. Thank you. Bless you."

I knew that I just wanted to get out of line. I knew that this was barely even a sacrifice for me. I knew that the main reason I hadn't offered five minutes ago was that I was afraid of offending her.

"You're welcome. I'm glad to help. Really. It's no problem."

She kept telling me how grateful she was, and first she started to leave without her keys and wallet, then started to leave without her bags that were still on the checkout counter.

"I'm not thinking, you've just done that much to me," she said, loading her last bags into the cart. "Thank you so much."

She went off to the customer service counter to try to find out why her card hadn't covered it all.

The checker started running my items. "Thank you for helping her," she said. "I've never seen anyone do that."

I shrugged. "Glad to help out."

Seriously people, I just wanted to get through the line. But there was something unexpected happening here. I hadn't set out to make people grateful -- if anything I'd just been hoping to get out quickly without making them mad. From the discussions of food stamps that I'd read online this year, I was expecting to get yelled at for my presumption. But here I'd made someone's day. It's not a small thing to have someone telling you that you're the first one who's picked up her tab for her. What had started as a minor favor so I could get out had become something important because it was important to her.

Just as I was about to leave, the manager came back and said that she couldn't figure out why the system was trying to charge the woman twelve dollars. "Just charge it to the customer service cost center," she said.

"This guy picked up her tab for her," said the cashier.

"Wow. Okay, well, I guess it's fine then," said the manager, and rushed off to deal with the next thing.

I took my things and drove home. I was getting out, not as quickly as I'd hoped, but fast enough. However, what was in my mind was the way the woman had said that this had made her day, that no one had ever paid for her before. I don't know if that's true or not. Sometimes it seems like everyone has a game. But somehow what had seemed like a very minor thing to me had become a major part of someone else's day. That reaction had made it a part of mine.

Advent, Day 9

I have five minutes to write something if I still want to write today, and I have nothing to say. Not nothing at all, mind you -- I have plenty of topics I'm chewing on, ideas I'm percolating for a bit, and that I want to write about thoughtfully. But I don't have anything that's a quick, five-minute (three-minute now) toss-off post, and I'm okay with that. Maybe if there were less five-minute toss-off posts, intellectual discourse would revive a bit. I know there was plenty of bombast published back before you could drop your opinion on the whole world via the internet (I'm doing lots of reading about Revolutionary-era history, including the crazy political broadsides), but when you had to sharpen a quill and find the ink, at least you had to take a few moments to gather your thoughts so you didn't waste your paper.

Time's up.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 15-3

This took longer than I thought, in part because it ran longer than I thought: a little over seven thousand words, which makes it almost double the average length of an installment. However, I'm pretty proud of how this turned out. I hope you enjoy it.

This concludes Chapter 15. The next installment will be up within a week (this time for sure!). We'll be returning to Jozef for Chapter 16.

Chateau Ducloux, France. October 28th, 1914. The Perreau house on the Rue des Ragons was unchanged by the three months of occupation. Behind the wrought iron vines and flowers of the decorative fence, the gardens rose as pristine and manicured as when Philomene had come in July to seek permission to host her fete there.

With war had come a near paralysis of the town’s economy. Trucks and wagons no longer pulled up in front of the Mertens shop each morning to make deliveries of merchandise to stock the shelves, nor did Louis Mertens’s customers have reliable means of income to pay for his wares. And of course, Henri was no longer earning the fees of his accounting work. Thus Philomene had no longer been able to pay Madame Ragot and Emilie for the hours they spent cooking, cleaning, and watching the children, and for the first time in her married life she was confronted with the full weight of her household’s labor.

As in so many things, the Perreaus inhabited another level of society. They did not employ help by the hour. On the household register posted on the grey stone wall of the house, above the ornamented brass plate which held the button for the electric doorbell, were listed not just Madame Perreau and her son Justin, now the German-appointed mayor, but also the gardener, the cook, and two maids, all residents of the house. If the invasion had reduced the Perreau household income by cutting them off from the Paris stock exchange and the interest payments on government bonds, the house remained the home of its workers as well as its masters and all had, so far, dealt with the deprivations of occupation together.

“Madame Perreau is still in the breakfast room, but she will see you there,” the elderly maid told Philomene, after leaving her for some time to contemplate the entry hall.

The breakfast room was a sunny, east-facing room opening onto the careful order of the rose garden. The roses bushes were bare of blooms and leaves now. Among the geometric order of the gravel paths, the twisted fingers of bare canes already pruned back for the winter pointed at the grey autumn sky, the barren order a fitting vision of the town as it waited to weather a cold season whose length was not yet known.

Madame Perreau was wearing her usual black silk dress, a pair of gold-rimmed pince nez perched upon her nose, sitting at the table with a portable writing desk before her. A silver coffee pot sat next to her, and it was not until Philomene inhaled its fragrant scent that she realized how much she had missed the pot of morning coffee.

She took the seat towards which Madame Perreau waved her and waited until the older woman signed her letter with a flourish and blotted it carefully.

“So, Madame Fournier, to what do I owe this honor?”

It was with a slight effort that Philomene turned her eyes from the coffee pot, where she had rested her jealous gaze while waiting for Madame Perreau to speak, and focused them instead on the face of her host. Putting aside hopes that she would be offered a cup, she organized her thoughts.


Continue Reading

Advent, Day 8: All the Links

The Internet Confessional:

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; it has been one day since my last confession.... 

I kept that longread about Medieval sci-fi writers open in my tabs all day, knowing I would never read it.

Here is where I post all the links I've "saved to read later" on Facebook, either to shame myself into reading them, or so that you'll read them and give me the summaries.

The Restoration-Era local dialect of Tangier Island

Hamilton Is In The House

How Do Unschoolers Turn Out?

Julian Carron speaks at Notre Dame about freedom

The Art of Friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics

Create In Me A Clean Heart: the USCCB's pastoral letter on pornography

Alton Brown's Shepherd Pie recipe

The True Story of Kudzu, The Vine That Never Truly Ate The South

Advent, Birthday edition: The Nine Tailors

Emily took out the jug, but returned almost immediately. 

"Oh, if you please, ma'am, the Rector says, will you all excuse him, please, and he'll take his breakfast in the study. And oh! if you please, ma'am, poor Lady Thorpe's gone, ma'am. and if Mr. Lavender's finished, he's please to go over to the church at once and ring the passing bell." 

"Gone!" cried Mrs. Venables. "Why, what a terrible thing!" 

"Yes, ma'am. Mr. Johnson says it was dreadful sudden. The Rector hadn't hardly left her room ma'am, when it was all over, and they don't know how they're to tell Sir Henry."
Mr. Lavender pushed his chair back and quavered to his ancient feet. ' 

"In the midst of life," he said solemnly, "we are in death. Terrible true that is, to be sure. If so be as you'll kindly excuse me, ma'am, I'll be leaving you now, and thank you kindly. Good mornin' to you all. That were a fine peal as we rung, none the more for that, and now I'll be gettin' to work on old Tailor Paul again." 

He shuffled sturdily out, and within five minutes they heard the deep and melancholy voice of the bell ringing, first the six tailors for a woman and then the quick strokes which announce the age of the dead. Wimsey counted them up to thirty-seven. 

--Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors

This passage jumped out at me a few days ago when I reread The Nine Tailors. A woman, a mother with a 15-year-old daughter, dying at 37. The poor deceased was not a major character in the book -- in fact, she never appears; all she does is die -- and yet her death weighed heavily on me. This very day I'm 37, with a 13-year-old daughter. I don't feel young at all, but I'm not ready at all to be carried off by a sudden influenza. Remember your end, and you will never sin.

The bells are a reminder of morality in The Nine Tailors, and each has its name and legend:

The voice of the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul: 

Gaude, Gaudy, Domini in Laude. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. John Cole made me, John Presbyter paid me, John Evangelist aid me. From Jericho to John A-Groate there is not bell can better my note. Jubilate Deo. Nunc Dimittis, Domine. Abbot Thomas set me here and bade me ring both loud and clear. Paul is my name, honour that same. 

Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul. 

Nine Tailors Make A Man.

Nine tailors for the death of a man, and six for a woman. May we all be blessed with another year free of the toll of the bells.

Advent, Day Whatever: Eternity is Longer Than the Line at Wal-Mart

I had to go to Wal-Mart today.

Well, had is too strong a word. The girls and I suddenly felt crafty (the girls always feel crafty, and I almost never do, so they urged me to strike while the iron was hot) and so after schola practice we went to buy yarn for scarves and whatnot. So: an impulse visit for an impulse buy, and Wal-Mart is the only place that sells yarn up here. My crafty urge cannot survive a twenty-minute drive to the northern outskirts of Columbus, where the mall resides.

I do not visit Wal-Mart often enough to know the traffic patterns, but it seemed awfully clogged for a Friday afternoon. The lines for the registers stretched long, and it became clear that I was in the Wrong Line. People ahead of me kept pulling out and opting to stand at the back of longer lines -- always a bad sign. By default, we ended up next, behind a woman trying to price match a large toy and pay for it by applying for a Wal-Mart credit card. This process had already crashed one register and was now threatening to crash this one.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. De gustibus. I do not understand other people's gift-giving ethic (or "gifting", if we'd like to be on trend with the latest self-congratulatory buzzwords). The Giving Tree at church is filled with requests for toys that I would never buy my own children, and I struggle every year with the issue of what I consider a good tasteful present vs. what others want, especially if that other person is a child in need making a wishlist. I don't understand why this large toy was worth so much trouble to the woman in front of me, but it was. And I got to wondering if the yarn in my cart was really worth the trouble of standing half an hour in line in Wal-Mart. If I'd known we'd have to wait, would our impulse have seemed worth the trouble? That's why online shopping is so easy, and seductive. There's no barrier to entry. Click on Amazon, and you're done, buying treasures that other people may think are trash. Buying treasure that you yourself may think is trash after a while. Want the thing, buy the thing, no effort required.

The lady's problem never did get solved while I was there. The computer rejected various steps in the purchase every time the cashier tried it again, and finally management stepped in. As I left, the lady was still waiting somewhere else, with her big toy balanced precariously in her cart. I hope whoever receives the toy receives it as a type of the Love of which gifts are merely a small and imperfect image. The only real purpose of a gift is to reflect the Love of God, in the small and indistinct way that all our human analogies do. The only purpose of anything is to allow the Love of God to pass through it.

How that works practically is the tedious labor of sainthood. It's all very well to wax eloquent about the wonder of all creation without having to confront the seedy, dull reality of being stuck in line at Wal-Mart at the end of a tiring day near someone who reeks of second-hand smoke. There was a lot of frustration in the store as people with overflowing carts tried to calculate how much longer they were going to be stuck. There's nothing easier than taking out frustration on a cashier. They're captive. They're paid to not say rude stuff. And they're the immediate face of the company. It was hard to tell whether the cashier of my line was working well or not, whether her process kept failing because she didn't know what she was doing or because the computer was being a punk. And it didn't matter. Our life is but a breath, a drop lost in eternity. In the grand scheme of things, in the eye of God, a few minutes of my time spent in a way not entirely interesting to me is not worth striking at another person, whether in cutting words or in rolled eyes or sighs. The person is more valuable than my time. The cashier, the lady with the big obnoxious toy: they matter in the face of eternity. My time does not matter, in the face of eternity. Whether or not Wal-Mart's computer system was off or their algorithm for scheduling for cashiers was faulty doesn't matter in eternity. Jesus didn't die for my time -- indeed, it often seems that he's no respecter of earthly time. He did die for people. Those two ladies are valuable, and my children with me are valuable, and I'm valuable too, too valuable to expend myself in petty wrath. Why spend your wages on what is not food, on what fails to satisfy?

Advent, Day 4: The Wiz

I blink, and it's that time of year again: NBC's live theater broadcast is tonight! This year they're doing a show with which I'm completely unfamiliar: The Wiz.



I have a love/hate relationship with NBC's December theatricals. On the one hand, I love it that live theater is an event on TV, and that the one-time nature of the event means that people need to watch it at the moment.  On the other hand, there was some butchering going on the past two years with The Sound of Music and Peter Pan, due almost entirely to celebrity casting. This year's cast looks more promising, and from the previews, the new girl playing Dorothy can sing better than Alison Williams (Peter Pan) and act better than Carrie Underwood (The Sound of Music), so maybe NBC is trying harder to make their yearly play a better overall production.

And if nothing else, Cirque du Soleil is doing the stuntwork, and that's bound to be spectacular.

Once again, we had to buy a TV antenna so we can actually see the thing -- a ridiculous purchase for people who watch broadcast TV literally once a year. Still, it's cheaper than a theater ticket, what?

Newsflash: Men and Women are Different

There's a group started by (though certainly not entirely populated by) Catholic academic theologians interested in social justice issues that I follow, mostly out of a desire to know how "the other side" thinks. Because yes, while "social justice" should not in and of itself be a bad word, somehow many these folks seem to down the line disagree with the Church on all the usual issues.

In a discussion of abortion today, one of the members posted the following ethical dilemma:

This is an ethical question put forth by Sr. Teresa Forcades, a Spanish nun.

If a man has a child who is in need of a kidney transplant and the child will die without it, should the man be *legally* required to go through surgery without his consent and donate his kidney to his child? Setting aside any moral argument, should there be a law allowing the government to override the man's autonomy and ability to make decisions about his bodily integrity? And if not, what's the difference between this man's right to make medical decisions that affect his bodily integrity and a woman's?

This isn't a particularly novel dilemma to pose. It's a sort of variation on the "famous violinist dilemma" put forward by Judith Jarvis Thompson. For whatever reason, however, the context struck me, and here's the reason: A lot of the ethical dilemmas that people pose in an attempt to morally justify abortion are attempts to reframe abortion as something other than terminating a pregnancy through direct killing of the unborn child. Almost always, the attempt is simultaneously to reframe the question in a way that could apply equally to men and women. And that, I think, is the key.

Thinking about abortion is wrapped very tightly around the idea that it is not fair for men and women to be different. One of the basic realities that modern thinking seems to have a lot of trouble with is the fact that in the course of natural reproduction a mother ends up with a child within her body for nine months, and the only way to end that situation is to actively kill the child. There quite simply is not an analogous male situation. The sexes are equal in human dignity and worth before God, but this is a fundamental difference in the sorts of moral circumstances which can occur to a man or woman. There is never a point at which a man has another human person inside his body who can only be removed through active killing.

If we're to hold that the moral obligation not to kill the innocent applies both to men and women -- and as Christians I think we must -- this means that this obligation will affect women differently from men. It's not as if men are immune to the temptation to kill. By all means other than abortion, men are responsible for far more of the intentional killing that happens in the world than women are. (And when it comes to abortion, men are often responsible for pressuring or forcing women to have abortions.) But no man will ever be faced with the situation: Either I will kill this person, or else I will have to let this person inhabit my body for a number of months, and then give birth to that person through a difficult and painful process.

This is one of the unfairnesses of life -- if by "fairness" one expects equality. Maybe that's why it's been parents who throughout history have told their children: Life isn't fair.

Now there is a flip side to this that bears thinking on. The fact that women can find themselves in a situation (motherhood) which men never will places certain obligations on them. If there is not equality-as-in-sameness between men and women in this regards, it stands to reason that there may be other areas in which there is not equality-as-in-sameness. Society has obligations to women that it does not have to men because women have obligations that men do not have.

The "male rights advocates" sometimes protest the way in which society puts men under obligations to support their children or ex-wives, asking why men and women should not be equal in this regard. One clear explanation of why men and women are not equal in certain regards is: because men don't bear children and take on the obligations which come with that. This is a topic of contention in out current society because traditional notions of family economy are in flux. A century ago, these societal obligations might mostly have been seen along the lines of supporting women who lacked husbands to care for them, making men take care of children they fathered, etc. Today, a portion of society would see the obvious obligations as being paid maternity leave, subsidized childcare, subsidized schooling, etc. And yet in some ways, when society builds those assumptions into its institutions, it makes it even harder on those families which are trying to follow the old model in which the husband works to support the family and the wife stays home to rear the children.

There are good reasons why people debate these policies, because they represent different models of how society should be organized, and I think that most people would agree that society should be flexible enough to support people wanting to follow both approaches to family economy. However, one argument that would not work is: Why should we have these policies which mostly just help women. Because again, when it comes to family and child bearing, equality-as-in-sameness is simply not how reality works.

Advent, Day 3: Confessions of a Seventh Grade Catechist: Eucatastrophe

Still teaching religion classes to sixth and seventh graders, but I'm upgrading myself to seventh-grade catechist because my small discussion group is seventh-graders. This is a recent teaching, reconstructed from memory because the other week seems like an eternity ago, and someone threw out the notes that I'd carefully saved in the most logical of spots, the top of the toaster oven.

***

Anyone know what a catastrophe is? A disaster. A terrible thing that happens suddenly, right. Something awful and destructive. 

Has anyone ever had a family member die? You don't have to raise your hand. This person you loved is gone, and you can't see them or talk to them or spend time with them anymore. It seems like the end of the world. Death is a catastrophe.

Imagine how the disciples felt when Jesus died. For three years they'd followed him and listened to him and lived with him. They believed that he was the Messiah, that he was going to lead Israel to great things. They'd built their lives around his promises. They'd seen his miracles and listened to his teaching. They'd seen him enter Jerusalem with the crowds shouting praises. 

Then Jesus is arrested. He's tortured. Remember how we talked about the whips the Romans used? They tied bits of bone or razor sharp stones onto the ends of the thongs, so that the whip sliced skin off of Jesus's back. They pounded a crown of thorns onto his head. Who knows how you die by crucifixion? Yes, by suffocation. Your ribcage is pulled up, and you can't get a breath unless you push up on the nail in your feet. That's why Jesus's words on the cross are so important. He has to support his whole body ON A NAIL THROUGH HIS FEET to get enough breath to gasp out a few words. Read them sometime.

So now he's dead, this man the apostles hoped would set Israel free, would set them free. He said he was God, but they saw him die on the cross like a criminal. Their hopes were shattered, and now they're afraid that they too might be arrested. Their hearts are broken. This is a catastrophe, the end of everything.

And then strange things happen. Some women come running in, saying they've been to the tomb, and the huge stone that should have been closing it off has been rolled away. And the tomb is empty. And they've seen Jesus, and he's not dead. And then, when the apostles are confused and shaky and filled with wild, conflicting thoughts, Jesus walks into the room through the locked door and says, "Peace be with you." Their friend, the one they'd seen die an excruciating death, whom they were mourning because they'd never see him again, shows up grinning at them and says, "Look, you think I'm a ghost? Give me something to eat."

Suddenly, everything that was wrong has been turned upside-down. At the darkest hour, suddenly good has triumphed in the most stunning, unexpected way, and it's better than they ever could have dreamed. This is a eucatastrophe. "Eu" comes from the Greek. It means "good".  Euphoria. Euphony -- that means a good sound. Yep, Eucharist! The Resurrection is a eucatastrophe. It restores everything.

The early Christians told and retold each other about this eucatastrophe. It was handed down as Tradition by the Church, and written about by many different writers, and eventually some of these accounts were codified into Scripture by the Church. The Church proclaims the Resurrection over and over again, every Sunday, every day. It is the turning point in history, and the Church commemorates it until Jesus comes again. It guards the deposit of faith Christ gave us, and it celebrates the Resurrection not just in the words of Scripture, but in action, through the Mass. And that's what Jesus told us to do! We preserve and pass on the greatest news the world has ever heard.

But why is the Resurrection good news for everyone and not just for Jesus's friends in the first century? For one thing, it proves that Jesus is who he said he is: God. Plenty of people were raised from the dead throughout the Bible, but someone else always performed the miracle. No one raised Jesus from the dead; he raised himself. He brought himself back to life, through his own power. Only God can do that.

And because Jesus raises himself, he defeats death. He frees us from bondage to sin. Sin leads to death. The first sin brought death into the world. And sin in bondage. St. Paul says, "Why do I do what I hate?" Sin traps us, and it pulls us toward death. The Resurrection shatters the power of death. We're all going to die, but now we know that death isn't the end for us. Now death is a beginning, our transition from this life into eternity with God. This life is short. What is 80 years compared to forever and ever, amen? And when Jesus offers us eternal life, it's not so attractive to risk eternity for 80 years -- or less! -- of sin.

The Resurrection also means Jesus is always present with us. His glorified body is not bound by time or space. He passes through locked doors, he can be recognized or not as he prefers, he can turn up when and where he wants to, and he wears the marks of shame and death as if they were precious jewelry. And he eats, too! And he makes himself present to us now in the Eucharist, and we eat, too. We consume him, and he is part of us, inside us, as we are part of him, inside him, as members of his body. The Resurrection means that now every single one of our actions can have eternal significance, because death doesn't limit love. The smallest thing we do from love -- not love the feeling, but love as an action, an act of the will -- leads us to God, because God is love and every time we love, we are participating in the life of God. We cannot love without God. What's St. Therese's Little Way? Even the tiniest things done for love of God matter. Her example was picking up a pin, but we don't have tons of those laying around these days. But there are plenty of small things we can do. Obeying your mom the first time, without rolling your eyes. Not making that rude comment. Smiling instead of snapping back. Being gentle with someone who is annoying you. Little things, right? But little things done in love are magnified by the power of the Resurrection, and they change the world. And love is a eucatastrophe.

Advent, Day 2: Links

Is there an easier way to get a post up than to share a few links? Yes, actually, because links involve going down a lot of rabbit holes and getting distracted, and the painters are going to be here any minute (but that's fodder for another day's post).

1. A new translation of the Iliad is turning heads: 

Caroline Alexander read one of the more modern translations, by Richmond Lattimore, at age 14. “I read a book a day [of the epic’s 24] after school, before swim practice, and was just utterly enthralled,” she said. This week, her translation of “The Iliad” is being published, and it’s already attracting attention among influential academics. Glen W. Bowersock, professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study, wrote in a blurb: “In my judgment, this new translation is far superior to the familiar and admired work of Lattimore, [Robert] Fitzgerald and [Robert] Fagles.” In an email interview, Prof. Bowersock said he is already recommending the Alexander translation. Ecco, the HarperCollins imprint publishing the Alexander translation, clearly has big ambitions for the book, signaled by its initial print run of 30,000 copies—a robust number for a literary classic more than 2,000 years old.
...“I know this sounds arrogant,” Ms. Alexander said, but she couldn’t imagine taking on the project “unless you believed you could do a better job.” She spent five years on her translation. Her goal is for her version to become the “translation of record.”
Ms. Alexander has a doctorate in classics from Columbia University and is the author of best sellers on an Antarctic expedition of Ernest Shackleton and on the mutiny on the Bounty. Classical scholars believe that her translation is the first published in English by a woman.

From the interview with Ms. Alexander:

Is there a passage that is particularly vexing for translators?
I know of no single work that has more world-class, hands-down, great scenes than “The Iliad”: the parting of Andromache and Hector, the Embassy to Achilles, the death of Patroclus, the entirety of Book 22 leading to the death of Hector, the meeting between Achilles and Priam—these passages are not great because over the centuries they have become iconographic, but because they still bring writers to their knees in admiration. So these were the passages that presented the greatest challenges for me. The temptation is to rev up the language, reach for the weightier word, pour in the emotion in order to live up to the Greek. I worked hard for restraint, and my mantra was “trust Homer, trust Homer.” I knew that if I could find the simple English word for his simple Greek, work for cadence—spoken cadence, not the cadence of “high” poetry—it would work. The most difficult passage, I think, was the parting of Hector and Andromache, because the scene is so tender, so different in tone from most of the epic, and I knew it could be easily bruised; so I doubled my efforts for restraint. 

Is there a passage that you always look at to see how others have handled?
I looked less as I went in deeper. At the beginning I was very careful to make sure I wasn’t going off the rails; these comparisons were best seen as security checks, perhaps. By Book 6, I was operating by informed instinct, and felt pretty confident; thus I began to enjoy the comparisons. The times I was most diligent about looking at other versions was when I felt I had really nailed a passage. 

What did you think of the casting of Brad Pitt as Achilles?
I didn’t watch the whole film. But I did see his first big kill in the opening 10 minutes. A stunning bit of stunt-work, very athletic and adroit, and totally un-Achillean. It implied that Achilles’ greatness as a warrior lay in his skill. Having just finished working on a documentary about tigers, I would venture that confronting Achilles would be more like coming face-to-face with a tiger than with a tricky swordsman.

2.

As part of our Hamilton mania right now, I was delighted to find Alexander Hamilton: the Outsiderby Jean Fritz, who has written so many wonderful Revolutionary War books for children. The engravings at the head of each chapter are charming and add a lot of period flair to the book, and the story itself flows along at a captivating pace -- so crucial for biographies, which (my) children are apt to discard if they aren't immediately interesting. Fritz glosses almost too lightly over the Reynolds affair but does convey why it was so destructive to Hamilton's career without going into detail.

3.



Speaking of Hamilton, you may recall that a few weeks ago I linked to an interview with the stage manager of the Broadway show. Here he is again, calling the light cues as the company performs The Ten Duel Commandments, a first act number in Hamilton et. al. describe the etiquette of duels as his friend John Laurens prepares to duel Gen. Charles Lee over Lee's insults to George Washington.

Then listen to the original here:

    

Advent, Day 1

Each weekday, I read the daily Mass readings with the kids. This has been our formal study of religion for the past two years -- no Faith and Life, no Baltimore Catechism, etc. We read the scriptures and discuss them and read a meditation on them, and then we practice praying. Everyone has to be quiet and sitting respectfully, and for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds we sit in silence and pray.

I call it "practice" because no one becomes good at anything without practicing. We practice handwriting, we practice saying the alphabet, we practice reading. Some things, like speaking, we practice without thinking much about it at all; some things, like math (at our house, anyway), we practice with much angst and volume. And prayer has to be practiced too -- I can't expect the kids to leave the house at 18 and have much of a prayer life if they've never practiced having a prayer life, and I can't expect them to develop the ability to pray without beginning in this small way. It's good for me, too, to practice praying as opposed to simply turning my thoughts toward God during the day, just as I although I can play piano well enough, I'd be a lot better at it if I consistently practiced every day.

I've let slip a lot of activities over the course of this school year, in an effort to maintain order education-wise. Writing is one of those things that's slipped, and I'm out of practice, such that although I have all these ideas bumping around in my head, the thought of sitting down and putting them into words becomes easier and easier to push away. Well, time to practice in small bites. I'm going to write a post a day for Advent, no matter how short. Already I'm failing -- as I typed the last sentence, the clock rolled over to midnight, and it's already the second day of Advent. It's okay. Time to pick myself up and start over again.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 15-2

I hope everyone is having a good Thanksgiving weekend. This installment was a lot of fun to write. Every so often a scene which starts off as a way to cover a plot point takes off on its own and becomes a character piece, and Pascal's scene did there here and became the centerpiece of the installment.

I'll be working to get the next installment (finishing Chapter 15) up as quickly as possible. It'll be up no later than this coming Friday, but hopefully sooner.

Chateau Ducloux, France. October 27th, 1914. Not every return to normality was welcome. During the second week of October, the local newspaper, The Lantern, had returned to publication. The typeface and masthead were the same. Eugene Thorel remained the publisher, setting type for its four sheets each afternoon in the workshop which adjoined his house. But the power of the press was closely supervised and this new Lantern shed only the light of German might. Each edition was read throughout the town, yet hated.

Any scrap of news was desperately desired, but this was news filtered through the German command. There was no news of the French army units, active duty and reserve, in which the town’s men served. There was no list of the honorable fallen for families to read with trepidation.

This day’s lead was typical of the last two weeks: “German Army Solidifies Gains Around Langemarck”

In desperate fighting along the Yser river, fresh German units beat the demoralized British and French troops into a defensive position around the nearly-surrounded city of Ypres. Casualties were heavy among the disorganized and demoralized Entente powers as they tried and failed to halt the valiant soldiers of the Imperial German Army.

The paragraphs stretched on but provided little additional news, other than the presence of the city names which indicated that the fighting now stretched all the way to the Belgian coast in Flanders.

“I shouldn’t read it,” said Grandpere in disgust, crumpling the paper. “If we had defeated them, they wouldn’t tell us. The first we’d know is when the shells started to fall on the town again and the Boche began to pull out.”

Philomene smiled at her father. “But you read it every morning.”

“Yes. Yes, I can’t help it.” He smoothed the paper out and began to read again. “Perhaps they’ll give something away. Perhaps what they don’t talk about will give me some clue as to what’s really going on.” He scanned down the page, muttering commentary at times.

Philomene half listened as she spread butter on a piece of the dark, gritty ration bread. No coffee. Black bread. How long was it since Henri has sat at this table, reading his copy of Le Temps and worrying about the unfolding crisis in the Balkans? Three months. Where was Henri now? Was he safe? Was he ever able to quietly read a paper while sipping a cup of coffee and eating a pastry, as they had done together on so many peaceful mornings?

They had bought pastries everyday then, fresh from Jeanpetit’s Patisserie. Now the patisserie made pastries almost exclusively for the German officers. They provided the white flour from their army stores; they received the small, flakey delicacies in return. For the village there was no white flour to be had.

“Can I have another piece of bread?” Pascal was standing in the doorway, his school satchel over his shoulder. It was still only a quarter after eight, but it was encouraging to see the boy so eager for his lessons.

Philomene looked at the large, dark loaf of bread, drying to estimate slices for each family member during the rest of the day. As other foods had become more scarce, the daily one kilo loaf of ration bread had become an essential part of each meal.

“You already had a thick slice this morning with butter and jam on it,” she said.

“But I’m hungry,” Pascal replied, with the trenchancy of a growing boy.

Philomene hesitated. She could always have less herself at dinner if they ran short.

“Let him have another good slice,” Grandpere said, looking up from his paper. “Don’t worry about dinner, Philomene. I have a surprise to show you later on.”

She cut the slice and Pascal bolted from the house with it as soon as he got it in his hand.

“Well?” Philomene asked.

Her father flashed a smiled but turned back to his reading. “You’ll see. Just a little something.” He turned over the paper to read the final sheet and let out a growled invocation, which was the closest he normally came to swearing.

“What?” Philomene leaned in to see what had raised his ire.

On the back page was the headline, “Notice of Requisition,” and underneath the paragraph:

By order of the town Commandant, the following materials are placed under military requisition:

100 winter thickness wool blankets
5 barrels of apples
100 kilograms of copper (cooking vessels, pipe, roofing, etc. are acceptable)
2000 6cm nails
6 draught horses

Collection will be organized by the civilian authorities. If the requisition is not fully gathered by Friday, October 30th, supply patrols will be sent out to collect directly from the population as needed.

“This is nothing but legalized robbery,” said Grandpere. “Not even that. Surely it’s against the law of nations for them to force Frenchmen to give them materials to be used to fight our fellow countrymen.”

Philomene remembered bringing meals to Madame Duval after little Baptiste had been shot by the invading soldiers. Could there be laws of nations when such things happened? Would men who shot on sight hesitate to steal?

“Perhaps in this war there are no laws.”

“Nonsense. We’re not savages. There are treaties. We have rights. And even without treaties, there are human decencies that apply at all times. They can’t steal from us. If Justin Perreau is to be worth anything as mayor, he’ll refuse to carry out these illegal demands.”

Her father showed no sign of calming, and since it was impossible to set town policy at the breakfast table, Philomene changed the subject instead. “You said you had a surprise?”

Grandpere seemed about to respond hotly, then checked himself. For a moment he sat, eyes closed, lips pressed into a line. Then he said, “You’re right of course. What does it accomplish to become angry? I’ll show you something better.”

He pushed aside the paper, got up, and left the room. When he returned a moment later he was carrying a canvas bag, which he opened to reveal potatoes, carrots and onions still dusted with the soft soil they had been grown in.

“I’d added another farmer to the back room market. He’ll send up produce once a week, and I’ll sell it out of the back room to trustworthy villagers. This is our commission for the first week. It should be plenty to give us a good dinner tonight.”

Philomene reached out to touch the smooth yellow skin of one of the potatoes. Yes, this could be simmered into a thick vegetable stew. No one would be hungry tonight.

***

As soon as Pascal reached the cobblestones of the street he set off at a run, the extra slice of bread clutched in one hand, and kept the pace up until he reached the next street, where Lucien Vazart stepped out from the shelter of a doorway to meet him.

[continue reading]

Thanksgiving Music: Prayer to Jesus

Our warmest Thanksgiving wishes to all, as we sit here waiting for our dinner to digest sufficiently to allow us to approach the four pies. The fire is lit, Inspector Clouseau is detecting onscreen, and when it comes time for making music with my brother and sister and dad, here's what we'll sing:

Word by Word

Things have been exceedingly busy here, culminating in William (almost two) being walked around in the back of a theater, shouting at his older sister singing up on stage, "Julia! Sit down!" But now the play is over, and things are slowing down a bit, and it occurs to me that maybe I should have mentioned at some point that I was in a real published book last month.

Some time ago, Sarah Reinhard asked me if I'd contribute a post to her blog series meditating on every word of the Hail Mary. My word was "our", as in "now and at the hour of our death", and I wrote it up in about ten minutes based on a brief insight I'd had while saying bedtime Hail Marys with the kids.

Recently Sarah assembled all the Hail Mary posts and edited them into a book: Word by Word: Slowing Down with the Hail Mary. The essay remains unchanged from its original form, but there it is now in a book, proof that a small spurt of effort to help out a friend can lead to your name in an Amazon preview window.

As part of a series of interviews with the contributors to the book, Sarah asked me a few questions about my essay, in which ten more minutes of effort led to another first: my very own graphic.

Tolle et lege, if you're minded to!

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 15-1

We return to Philomene, Pascal and Grandpere, living under German occupation. I'm striving mightily to pick up the pace, so expect the next installment within a week or less.

Chateau Ducloux, France. September 26th, 1914. The stench was terrible.

“How many do you have down here?” Philomene asked.

In the darkness she could hear the soft clucking of many birds, and their smell was overpowering. As her eyes began to adjust to the dim light, she could see birds moving in the shadows and occasional glimmers of birds’ eyes from the darkness.

“Four dozen,” said Hortense Chartier. “It was the most I thought I could hide when the Germans came to take their inventory. As it was, they asked why I had so few birds for such a large poultry barn, but I said that there’d been pestilence and I’d had to destroy several dozen sick birds.”

“How do they do without sunlight?”

Surely a root cellar was a terrible place to try to keep poultry. It seemed certain they would sicken. But perhaps if Madame Chartier were diligent with the cleaning they would be all right. Certainly, they would not be cold. The ground provided insulation, and the body hear of nearly fifty birds made the cellar almost uncomfortably warm.

“They do well enough,” the farmer’s wife assured. “I bring a lantern down for several hours each day at the same time in the afternoon, so that they will know how the days are passing and when to lay. Don’t mind the smell, it’s only because it’s close and warm down here. I clean the floor out every day.”

“I believe you, but it is rather close.”

Hortense led the way back up the ladder, into the shed beneath which the root cellar was dug. They closed the trapdoor and pushed the untidy pile of grain sacks, ropes and horse blankets which concealed the entrance back into place.

The farmwife wiped her hands on her apron, then exclaimed as she looked at Philomene. “Oh, your dress and your hat. I am sorry.”

She was able to help Philomene pick the stray feathers and bits of straw off the hat, but trying to brush at the dust and grime which had got on the skirts of her dress as they climbed in and out of the cellar only seemed to grind the stains further into the wool.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Philomene said, waving her away. “You told me that you needed help. What can I do?”

Hortense glanced around as if guilt inspired the fear she would be overheard. “I get three or four dozen eggs each day from them, and since the Germans don’t know about them I’m free to sell them. But I need feed for them. And--” She hesitated, lips pressed together, eyes down, ashamed of what came next. “I’ve been selling the eggs to other farms, but they have their own hidden livestock. I don’t get very much. I thought, if I could find a way to sell them in town, I could get a lot more for them. With Mathieu gone, and the Germans requisitioning my milk and the eggs from the chickens they know about, I have so little to live on. And surely people in town must be wanting fresh food.”

The thought of a reliable supply of fresh eggs was indeed a powerful temptation. During the first two weeks after the German occupation of the town, supplies had broken down. Panicked villages bought everything possible off the shelves, stocking up for the emergency of unknown duration, and German soldiers tired of their army rations had bought up the rest. Grandpere had hidden away a few cases of canned goods and other non-perishables, so there had been no danger that the family would starve, not soon at any rate, but the shelves were bare and the only fresh food was what came ripe in the kitchen garden.

Disgusted by this chaotic state of affairs, the German commandant had decided to organize the local economy. Records were taken of how many people lived in each household, and inventories were taken of all livestock and other food sources. Rather than going to market, food brought in from the outlying farms now went to the army post, where it was registered and most of it sent on to feed the occupying army. The rest was then passed on to the shopkeepers, along with instructions for how much per person each household could purchase. According to the new order, no one would starve, but they would be hungry in a very organized fashion.

Yet however appealing fresh eggs might be, how could she arrange something when Madame Chartier, used as she was to bringing goods to market, was unable to?

[continue reading]

Refugees Are Dangerous

I don't know if we are doomed to repeat history, but we certainly are doomed to constantly hear simplistic historical arguments.

Some of these have been flying around lately in regards to whether the US should allow the immigration of refugees from Syria, in the wake of the Paris attacks in which there is some evidence that one of the attackers may have entered Europe via Greece as a refugee. (I think the fears in this regard are mostly ill founded. The majority of the terrorists in the Paris attacks were French or Belgian citizens, and past experience shows that it's much easier to get a terrorist into the US on a student, tourist or business visa than to go through the arduous multi-year process of being allowed to come in as a refugee.) However, these debates don't tend to happen calmly, and so we have on the one hand people making the analogy between Syrian refugees now and the Jewish refugees that the US turned away in the later 1930s, and on the other people arguing that Jewish refugees in the 1930s were nothing like the Middle Eastern refugees today. Here's a section from that latter piece:

The first, and most obvious, difference: There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no “Jewish State” establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance. Among Syrian Muslims, there is. The vast majority of Syrian Muslims are not party to these strains of radicalism and violence, but it would be dangerous to suggest that they do not exist, or that our refugee-resettlement program need not take account of them.

On a related note, the sympathies of Syrian Muslims are more diverse than those of Nazi-era German Jews. A recent Arab Opinion Index poll of 900 Syrian refugees found that one in eight hold a “to some extent”-positive view of the Islamic State (another 4 percent said that they did not know or refused to answer). A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13 percent of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi party.

I'm certainly not here to justify turning away Jewish refugees in the 1930s, but I'm not sure that that distinction is as clear cut as the author immediately imagines. From our current vantage point (and keeping in mind the actions we took later in the war) we tend to see World War II as a war in which fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan was pitted against the civilized world. Thus the suggestion that Jewish refugees in the 1930s presented no worries to Americans because there was not some percentage of them who supported the Nazis. However, the contemporary image in the 1930s (like our own situation in the Middle East) was arguably more muddled than that. Communism and fascism were the twin evils of the age, and it wasn't immediately clear which was preferable. Some people sided with one against the other, and others took a "pox on both their houses" approach and wanted the US to remain as isolated from Europe as possible. While for obvious reasons the number of Jewish refugees who were Nazi sympathizers was just about zero, there doubtless were communist sympathizers among the Jewish refugees, and playing up fears of communism was one of the not-obviously-anti-Semitic ways that people justified wanting to keep European refugees out of the US.

Why was it not unreasonable to suspect that there were communist sympathizers among potential Jewish refugees? Well, among other things communists and fascists had been fighting it out in Europe for the last decade, in street fighting, elections, the Spanish Civil War, and starting in 1941 they would do so in WW2 as well. If the Nazis hate you and want to kill you, it might make sense to sympathize with their most obvious ideological opponents, and in the late 1930s that looked like it would be the communists. (The brief alliance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in order to divide up Poland was an ideological shock to both communist and Nazi true believers which took some time to digest, though it provided some brief clarity for conservatives who hated both, as we see with Guy Crouchback at the beginning of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy.)

And indeed, some of the major communist spies who gave US secrets to the Soviet Union during the war would prove to be Jewish-Americans (including David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.) Does this mean that Americans were right to oppose letting Jewish refugees into the US during the late 1930s? Of course not. However, at the time world politics looked a lot more complex than they do with our modern day historical hindsight. In addition to simple distaste for foreigners (of which there was doubtless some) people had actual reasons why they thought that political refugees from Europe would bring additional problems to America.

Similarly, refugees coming out of Syria are coming out of a civil war in which both the Assad regime and ISIS have inflicted horrific suffering on the civilian population. Given that at least some of them doubtless come from areas and ethnicities which have suffered much more from Assad's forces than from ISIS, it's not surprising that some of them have a "to some extent" positive view of the most famous group fighting Assad. Does that necessarily mean those holding somewhat positive views of ISIS are coming here to behead people and stage terrorist attacks? No. But it's worth understanding that being trapped in the middle of war which causes you to flee your home can end up giving you sympathies which we, from our vantage point, find very hard to forgive.

And yes, refugees and other poor immigrants are dangerous.

Why? There are two things that hold us back from misbehavior: our morals and our selfish unwillingness to lose the property and comfort that we have. Someone without property and comfort is now down one of two motivations for good behavior.

Does that mean that people who are wealthy and comfortable never support violent revolution or commit crimes? No. And we see cases of "jihad tourism" where people from comfortable families in the developed world become swept up in the idea of participating in violent jihad and eventually go off to participate. In other times and places, people from secular backgrounds would do this to fight for communism or some other ideology that seemed to give meaning to their lives.

But to have really government toppling chaos, you need not only a destructive ideology but a large number of young men who don't think they have good prospects in life otherwise. The ideology is key. Identifying that the young men fighting for communism, fascism or jihad are often poor men who have a sense of grievance doesn't mean that the ideology which defines their movement isn't key to it, even if the individual fighters may be pretty vague on the ideology itself. But if the ideology can be seen at the virus, the poor and oppressed population is the body weakened enough to succumb to that virus. Both are required to get a really good plague going.

This is why refugee populations, as long as they remain large groups of poor displaced persons, are dangerous. Losing your land, many of your belongings, and perhaps even many of your friends and family leaves you with considerably less to lose. And as such, refugee populations can make prime recruiting grounds for crime and for extremist movements.

The solution to this is not to keep people out, which just puts the problem somewhere else, but to re-root people in a new place where they can again have jobs, homes, friends and family. It's the rebuilding of a stable society which protects against the chaos which often comes with displaced populations. And that ought to be the goal of re-settling refugees: to find them new homes in which they can put down roots and become productive citizens.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 14-2

This took far longer than I expected, in part because it is fairly long, but it completes Chapter 14. Jozef enjoys a weekend of partridge shooting with his new found relatives and perhaps finds love.

I'm going to take a game try at finishing by the end of the calendar year. The total length is now 192,000 words. That leaves me another 40-50,000 to write over the next seven weeks. More to come soon! Next up, Philomene.

Veszprém, Austria-Hungary. October 6th, 1914. As Jozef rode away from his uncle’s country house, it had seemed clear that an epoch had passed in his life. Things would not be the same. He knew his mother now, in a way that he had not through all the years of living with her. And he knew himself: the son of a kept woman and an unknown father. And yet, for all that he had lost a hopeful vision of himself as an heir and nobleman, in Henrik and the baron he had a real family of a sort that he had never experienced before.

Yet the post at Veszprém and the training squadron within it went on exactly as before. Rittmeister Koell put them through riding exercises and on Wednesday night they rode out into the hills beyond the town and laid their blanket rolls beneath the stars, pickets standing watches throughout the night as if they were in danger of being attacked by enemy patrols.

One week slipped into another. The newspapers became vaguer and the rumors worse. Peter Kardos received word from home that his older brother, a leutnant in the 7th Hussars, had been wounded in Poland. Jozef received a cache of five letters from Friedrich, written throughout the latter half of August, which had somehow become tangled in the mails and arrived all at once.

Serbia was a hell hole, Friedrich told him. They had won a battle -- a skirmish really -- and driven the enemy cavalry into the hills. But even as the hussars patrolled and screened the infantry, finding no large units to fight, snipers picked off individual men. Wells were poisoned. The civilians spied for the army and killed soldiers when they could. They’d had to burn several villages to the ground and hang every Serb they could lay their hands on, man or woman, but even so the depredations continued. Now orders had come for them to entrain for Poland. The hussars hated to see the Slavs get away with their insolence, but at least the hussars would be escaping from this godforsaken country.

It was on the last day of September, with these and other hints trickling in of how the war effort was going, that the eight cadets had sat down together in the cafe after morning exercises and each written letters to the commission board asking to be placed in active duty regiments for the remainder of their training.

They walked down to the post together and sent the letters off, then betook themselves to the bar to seal their efforts with alcohol. They drank toasts to each other, to the war, to the army, to the emperor. Yet when the afternoon of patriotic carousing had passed, the routine seized hold of them again and they had to form up after dinner for another night sleeping on the uncomfortable ground. However similar the rocks and lumps beneath their bedrolls might be to those felt by men on active duty, that shared discomfort did not diminish their resentment at having to spend the evening in the chill open air rather than in their lodgings. It might be noble to suffer on the field of battle for the emperor, but to do so in training for Rittmeister Koell, even as he rode back to the ample arms of Madame Deák, was not to be borne.

The mails were running slow, both the chaos of war logistics and the vastly increased load of letters moving to and from the fronts taking their toll upon them, but the cadets estimated that at the longest it would take three days for their letters to reach Vienna and as long again for replies to come back. No doubt the staff was busy, but how could youthful ardor be ignored when the need for men was so great? Surely replies would come quickly with orders assigning them to active duty units.

Jozef’s heart surged when, on the sixth day, he asked the concierge if any letters had come for him and the old man said, “Yes, one did come for you. A military courier brought it down from the castle.”

Where would he be sent? To Poland? To Serbia? He hoped desperately for Poland. Against the Russians there was a chance of real battle, cavalry against cavalry. What were the Serbs but a pack of bandits hiding in the mountains?

“Here you go.” The concierge handed him a small blue envelope, and with a disappointment that gripped his stomach like a tightening fist Jozef immediately recognized it as addressed in his uncle’s precise hand.

He was invited to spend another weekend at the country house. The pheasants were in season, and if they were to put down enough birds for the winter, another shooter would be most welcome. Besides Magda had returned with the children, and she had brought with her a younger sister and another guest. Altogether it would be a lively party, and Jozef must come and meet more of the family.

Orders for the front would have been more welcome, but after that first disappointment Jozef found it impossible not to look forward eagerly to the chance to see his uncles again and meet more of his family. When he conveyed the baron’s compliments to Rittmeister Koell it was easy enough to get permission to attend, and he passed the two days until Friday in happy anticipation despite the continued lack of response to his petition for a posting to the front.

[Continue Reading]

Why Is My Nightstand So Crowded?

It's Friday, so it's time to play another round of Why Is My Nightstand So Crowded?

Yes, it doesn't look so crowded after I took my laptop off the nightstand.

Big book stack, top to bottom:
Bible
Madame Bovary
Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings
The Way: The Essential Classic of Opus Dei's Founder
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
North and South
The Secret Garden
A wrapped birthday book, not to be opened until Dec. 5

Small book stack, top to bottom:
The Liturgy of the Hours book my Dad gave me when I went to college
A photo album from which all the photos have been removed and replaced with index cards the girls have illustrated

A book of paint cards from Farrow and Ball

A single pearl earring, the remnant of a pair

Behind the paint book:
earbuds
my nice rosary, in two pieces
a matchbox car
another pearl earring, from a different pair, now too bent to wear (I love pearl earrings and I have such bad luck with them)
a ponytail holder

This pile doesn't include the two books I'm actively reading, as opposed to storing on my nightstand:
Love and Responsibility
The Phantom of the Opera

I know it's often a conversation killer to directly ask people to play along, but I'd love to know what you're reading.

The Guinea Pig, the Profanity, and the Phantom

A few months ago, we inherited a guinea pig from neighbors who were moving. Piggy, as we call her (because that's her name), is a good sweet little animal, devoid of malice or higher thought. She has an adorable trilling squeak, which she deploys when it looks like someone is about to put a pile of timothy hay into her cage. We like her and try to keep her as happy as we can, given our ignorance of guinea pig psychology.

However, lately she's gotten talky, and has started gnawing the bars of her cage and fussing. I call it fussing, but that's probably anthropomorphizing the small thing too much. She squeaks louder and faster than normal, is what. Well, I try to take care of the lesser creatures in my charge, so I Googled "Why does my guinea pig cry?" (Yes, I capitalize my Google searches. I also capitalize in texts.) And here's what I found on the first page I consulted:

If shes kept alone shes miserable. Keeping only one guinea pig is cruel and if she is housed alone youve failed as an owner and she has a miserable life. Guinea pigs MUST have a compainion, its obvious you did no research before you got her now. Give her to a responsible guinea pig owner or get another female pig

I... I feel like a single mother asking for pregnancy advice.

***

So you still haven't listened to Hamilton. I see I'm not working hard enough.  Here, watch the 60 Minutes segments with Lin-Manuel Miranda and catch some glimpses of the show. (Can't do anything about the Viagra ads; must have to do with 60 Minutes' current demographic.) We particularly enjoyed watching the Cast Album video -- people working their magic in a recording studio is like catnip to me.

Videos of Hamilton in performance are rationed out drip by drip, but here's a clip of Aaron Burr, realizing that what he really wants is to have the sort of power that puts him in the room where Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison effect a trade that gives Jefferson and Madison the capitol in D.C. in exchange for Congressional approval for Hamilton's financial systems.



A bit of Daveed Diggs's oily Thomas Jefferson:



Almost every line of the soundtrack is quotable, and we have almost every line memorized, yea, even the kids. Everyone handles lyrics with profanity differently, but here's how it works at our house, with this music: when we can, we hit mute for the most in-your-face instance, and otherwise the understanding is that there are some bad words which I expect never to hear out of the mouths of youngsters, on pain of losing their listening privileges. Darwin and I never use profanity ourselves, both as a stylistic choice and, by now, as second nature, so the kids already know it's not acceptable to drop swear words into a conversation. They handle it like we used to do as kids singing along with the Les Mis soundtrack -- either humming over the word, or skipping it, or changing it ("spit" pretty much always works as a substitute for "shit", contextually). That's how we do it at the Darwin household, for this particular music. Your parenting mileage may vary, and that's fine.

***

On the night before Darwin came home, the big girls and I had a movie night, and I decided it was time to try another big musical: The Phantom of the Opera. Not the movie version that came out a few years ago, with barely disfigured Gerard Butler singing the Phantom with a serious Scots accent, but the staged 25th anniversary performance in Royal Albert Hall.



Phantom is a show that has its problems -- The Music Of The Night is the world's longest song, for starters -- but the singing and the acting and the production values are top of the line here, and for me that covers a multitude of sins. I cut my musical teeth on the original cast album with Sarah Brightman, but the lovely Sierra Boggess here as Christine is much stronger, and Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom has a blow-you-out-of-the-water voice. And I'm happy to report that Carlotta is most excellently done here, because I always sang Carlotta in our family singalongs. John and Will switched back and forth between the Phantom and Raoul, Elizabeth was the two managers, and Anna, naturally, was Christine. (Nathanael was too young in those days to take a part, and then I went away to college, and sigh.) My dad used to say we were more entertaining than TV.

So: indulge my nostalgia! Go watch some Phantom of the Opera, for old time's sake.

On Marriage

Friends, friends. It is Friday, and I ought to have good stuff for you, but we've had a visitor this week, and now Darwin is out of town again. So, some disjointed thoughts on marriage.

...

There's been some interesting discussion on Facebook over whether dioceses ought to structure marriage prep around the issues that the annulment questionnaire deals with. My own parents were annulled when I was 21, and I think that they would agree that having to deal with the annulment process's directed exploration of family history and past traumas before marriage might have saved everyone a great deal of suffering later on. I also know that as it was, they both married anyway with misgivings.

My canon lawyer friend, who has worked with his diocesan tribunal, takes a rather different view of the issue than the author of the annulment article. Here are his comments on it, stitched together into a sort of guest post with his permission.

First of all, [the author of the article] has a very tenuous grasp on what the tribunal process actually does.

Second, she is naive if she thinks that engaged couples will have the same views on things as divorced couples: most would view it as another hoop to jump through and write down whatever they're "supposed" to.

Third, I think it's become fairly obvious that the only marriage prep that really matters is what happens in the family.

Fourth, I would be shocked if anyone actually told her that ignorance is the common cause of nullity. That's just something people say when they don't understand the function of the will, or the function of the tribunal. I'd guess that ignorance is a ground in less that 2% of nullity cases. It suggests to me that she didn't actually do any homework before writing these ideas down.

To be clear, there is not "an annulment questionaire." Some (most) tribunals use written questionaires, but they aren't technically part of the process, and they are done in place of what the law says should be done, which is to interview the parties. The scattershot approach of the questionnaire is not consistent with the way the process is actually designed in law. Also, the questions tribunals ask are asked in marriage prep -- and the most important ones are asked in the rite of marriage itself. But people have more to say when they want an annulment. I've never met a couple who took immediate marriage prep seriously.

Here are the most pertinent canons. In the next comment, I'll offer some reflections on them:

Can. 1096 §1. For matrimonial consent to exist, the contracting parties must be at least not ignorant that marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of some sexual cooperation.

§2. This ignorance is not presumed after puberty.

Can. 1097 §1. Error concerning the person renders a marriage invalid.

§2. Error concerning a quality of the person does not render a marriage invalid even if it is the cause for the contract, unless this quality is directly and principally intended.

Can. 1098 A person contracts invalidly who enters into a marriage deceived by malice, perpetrated to obtain consent, concerning some quality of the other partner which by its very nature can gravely disturb the partnership of conjugal life.

Can. 1099 Error concerning the unity or indissolubility or sacramental dignity of marriage does not vitiate matrimonial consent provided that it does not determine the will.

Can. 1100 The knowledge or opinion of the nullity of a marriage does not necessarily exclude matrimonial consent.

Can. 1101 §1. The internal consent of the mind is presumed to conform to the words and signs used in celebrating the marriage.

In short: ignorance of the basic nature of marriage is a potential ground of nullity, but it must be positively proven -- the law of the Church presumes this knowledge in post-pubescent people, and I think, even in our society, proving its absence is a very difficult thing. And canon 1099 says that for error about indissolubility to be a ground, it must actively inform the will; i.e.; I must say to myself "I choose marriage precisely because it is not a permanent union."

With regard to indissolubility, what is often more common is a defect in the object of consent. Whatever I think of marriage intellectually, "I reserve to myself the right to end the marriage if I don't like it anymore," or "I reserve to myself the right to be unfaithful if I choose to." This is much more commonly proven, AND (this is important), I saw it as the case in many cases among people who definitely knew the Church's teaching, but chose something less, explicity or implicitly, at the time of attempted consent. No amount of teaching will help a person decide not to partially simulate his consent -- only forming people of integrity will do that.

Ignorance of a quality of the person can be a ground of nullity, but the quality must be directly and principally intended. If I say to myself "I wish to marry a Catholic, and therefore I marry Kate," and I later discover she is not a Catholic, the marriage might be invalid. But rarely can the direct and principal intention of one quality be positively proven.

The best marriage formation possible for your children will take place in your home. No short program the church can provide will overcome deficiencies there or undermine strength there. Of course we should do marriage prep. I just don't think we should do it the way she is suggesting and I don't think it's nearly as important as helping you to do your job for your children. Invalid marriages are usually a function of the will, not the intellect. Forming the will can't take place in an 8, or 12, or 52 week program very well. It has to take place over a lifetime. And I'm afraid that too much tinkering with the immediate marriage prep program will absolve the Church, at least in its own mind, from the MUCH harder task of forming families, and helping couples form children. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't think that facilitating an extra couple of discussions is going to do very much.

Also, one other thing that I think is very important is that people have a right to marry. People are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage, and Catholics are only required to observe ecclesiastical form by virtue of merely ecclesiastical law.

...

I agree with the comment that couples don't take marriage prep seriously. In our case, and in the case of everyone I've talked to (anecdotal evidence, yes), the marriage classes were seen as an obstacle to be endured, not a positive source of wisdom and Church teaching. Darwin and I, who still have never had a fight, wrote notes to each other through a Pre-Cana class in which the teachers bragged about how often they argued and gifted us with the strategies they used to curb fighting. Our premarital counseling consisted of filling in 100 bubbles on a questionnaire about how compatible we were. Answer: 100%. The priest in charge asked if we'd cheated and said he'd never had a couple score as closely as we had.

Some of that was basic. Yes, we'd talked about finances. Yes, we'd discussed our families' marital histories and religious assumptions. We liked to talk to each other, and we tried to be as honest as possible and cover every subject that might matter to our future marriage, because the strength of that marriage mattered greatly to us. We both had strong examples of marriage at home: his positive; mine negative. But we'd also both been raised strongly Catholic, and in the same moral and behavioral framework, and that contribution from our parents was more important than the example of their own marriages, possibly.

All that is aside, though. Darwin and I are the kind of couple who could have been an arranged marriage and only met on our wedding day, and we still would have been happy together. That our personalities mesh well enough that we have very few disagreements on any topic is a matter of good fortune, not our own contrivance. Perhaps that makes it easier to grow in virtue together. It did, however, put off the inevitable realization that no matter how much you love another human, no matter how perfectly matched you are, no person can possibly satisfy every need and desire of someone else. The space between one heart and another can only be bridged by God. I will tell you that I could not have understood in marriage prep that human happiness can be as perfect as it can be, and still not be enough, because at that time it seemed like enough.

What we begin to understand, darkly, as through as glass, is that marriage is a path to God. It is not a path to another person. It is a sign and a precursor of the union we will all have with God in heaven, and, in that union with God, with all creation. No amount of hard work on earth, no amount of loving another person, can create a total union that can only exist in heaven. There will be voids and suffering in every marriage. I used to think that when spouses hurt each other, it was because they were trying to be unkind, or because they were doing something wrong. That's not so. Only God can fulfill every desire for love. Even my noblest strivings cannot fill every crevice of Darwin's heart. Even his most heartfelt efforts can not bring me total happiness. And that falling short is an invitation to turn to God, to unite my lack with his completeness, and to beg his grace to perfect my finite efforts.

I often think of absent friends and pray that God would bring those friendships to fruition in Heaven. I pray that now for my marriage. I have the happiest marriage that is earthly possible. But marriage ends with death, and I want my friendship with Darwin to continue for eternity. Our earthly compatibility doesn't have much significance without the spiritual unity that draws us not to each other, but together to God.

...

I often think I would be a bad marriage prep teacher, because marriage for me, in general, is the path that is easy and the burden that is light. I am the stereotypical "good kid". Darwin and I made good choices and have seen temporal rewards from following the law. But the reason to follow that law is not because it brings temporal blessings. For some people, following God's law only seems to bring heartbreak and suffering. And yet the longest psalm is Ps. 119, a lengthy paean to the beauty and lovability of the law. It seems unbelievable that anyone could wax eloquent for 179 verses about how precious the law, of all things, is. And yet, when we love someone we burn to do something for them, to learn what they want and then do that. The law is what God asks us to do. We beg God, in love "Show me what I can do for you! Give me some way to prove my love to you!" And there it is: his law, intensely practical, seemingly aspirational. The Orthodox Jews follow a very stringent version of the law, like a lover who begs for difficult, almost impossible tasks to prove his devotion. I have not, and do not, always feel that way about God's law, but I sometimes hover now around the realization of what it means to say:

How can the young keep his way without fault?
Only by observing your words.

With all my heart I seek you;
do not let me stray from your commandments.

In my heart I treasure your promise,
that I may not sin against you.

Blessed are you, O LORD;
teach me your statutes.c

With my lips I recite
all the judgments you have spoken.

I find joy in the way of your testimonies
more than in all riches.

I will ponder your precepts
and consider your paths.

In your statutes I take delight;
I will never forget your word.

Ps. 119:9-16