Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Lenting


 Since I resolved to wake up earlier for Lent ("earlier" for me means 6:30, and I can feel all you school parents sighing at my ability to sleep in), we have been swept by waves of sickness washing through the children of the house. Most nights, I have slept in about two hour stretches, punctuated by coughs or someone coming in to tell me that they have chills or a sore throat, or by wakeful listening for the sounds of retching, or (last night) by the child standing by my bedside telling me that he missed the potty in the dark, and his pants and the floor were all wet. 

I have persevered, mostly. I have gotten up and said my morning prayer at 6:30, as soon as the alarm went off, except the morning I snoozed while Darwin took a shower, or this morning when a child had come in at 6:00, so I snoozed until 7:00. That's two out of the seven mornings of Lent -- not a great record, so far, but all earlier than I had been getting up. 

That's prayer, I guess. Fasting was going well, until I found myself inexplicably eating all the things. "What's wrong with me?" I asked myself in the evening, as I stuffed Saltines and chugged milk. "Why can't I stop eating?" The next morning, I started my period. I have been cycling, girl and woman, for more than three decades, and I ought to know the signs, but as St. Paul advised, I do not judge myself.

Almsgiving. My two oldest daughters are going to be traveling in two separate weeks to New Jersey to help my brother and his wife as they continue to adjust to life with baby Josh in the hospital in Philadelphia. I don't know of anything more precious to give than children, especially since this means we won't see my oldest daughter during her spring break. And, of secondary (but only just) importance, as a director, I'm giving up my Helena (my second daughter) for a week of Midsummer Night's Dream rehearsals.


Some baby Josh for your delectation

Speaking of baby Josh, an update from my sister-in-law:

Joshua has been able to maintain his own body temperature for over 48 hours now! As long as he is above 35 degrees (Celsius), the doctors remain happy to keep him off the lamp. The ideal temp is between 36.5 and 37.5. (37  C = 98.6 F). They continue to use the heat lamp for care (diaper changes and baths) so as not to make his body work harder than he needs to. But that is just precautionary.

I’m learning that with a medically complex child, there is always going to be something new to worry about though.  Nothing too concerning, but right now we are once again trying to find the right balance between diuretics and electrolytes. Joshua still likes to hold onto extra fluid which finds its way into his lungs. When they up his diuretics, his sodium and potassium levels seem to drop too low. When they take him off any diuretics, he seems to retain fluid and look a bit puffy and give us some hazy looking lung x-rays.

So we celebrate temperature and we pray for electrolytes tonight! And of course we enjoy his cuteness!


Tuesday, February 21, 2023

The (Tinny) Rings of Power

 If you want to know what homeschooling looks like, chez Darwin: for the last week my two oldest school children, ages (almost) 17 and 14, have been assigned to read through Bret Devereaux's series at A Collection of Unmigitated Pedantry on why Rings of Power was the monumental, stupendously, pompously, ahistorically awful flop that it was. (H/T to Brandon.) Along the way, there's enough military and economic history to satisfy the discriminating viewer, who sat agog and aghast at the compounding missteps and outright idiocies of the show. 

From the introduction to the series, the first of four posts: 

This week we’re going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio’s Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed. In the aftermath of that disappointment, once one looks beyond the depressingly predictable efforts to make culture war hay out of it, I found that many people understood that they were disappointed but not always why. Here I am going to suggest one reason: the failure of Rings to maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well) makes it impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules.

...When making a speculative fiction world, the author(s), can either plan out the system’s unique function or they can adopt a real world system, but they generally must do one or the other or risk sacrificing audience investment from a world that lacks consistency.

And as noted above, Middle Earth and the broader Tolkien legendarium draws its sense of consistency when it comes to the world and its societies mostly from a firm sense of rootedness in the realia of historical societies and historical literature. Tolkien has not reinvented new systems of farming, new laws of physics or new systems of social organization. In The Lord of the Rings the world’s consistency depends on its feeling of historical rootedness.

In good speculative fiction then, the creator has a choice: import recognizable, real-world systems that will feel real to an audience or build new systems and then explain their fantastical workings to the audience in a way that renders them understandable. Rings of Power does neither and in the process manages to construct a Middle Earth that is not only ‘flat’ in the sense that the the cataclysms of the Changing of the World have not yet happened and thus the Straight Road to Valinor can still be traversed, but unfortunately this Middle Earth is also flat in the sense that it is rendered dull and uninteresting by the lack of perceptible rules and consequence.

The introduction deals with problems of Scale, Sail, and Social Detail; the three follow-up posts are more specific critiques of metalworking in the world of Rings of Powerthe failures of physics and tactics in the climactic battle in the Southlands, and The Problem of Numenor.

Devereaux makes the point that the writers of the show consistently prefer concept art, clever tricks, and "gotcha!" reveals over solid and time-tested techniques like character or plot development and the accumulated wisdom of the well-documented practices and development of our own pre-industrial societies. Things like ships' sails or the transport and use of horses in battle or the social and economic structures of nomadic peoples have analogies in our world; the customs and practices they developed were not arbitrary, but based in the realities of the technologies of their age, and were often studied and improved upon by the best minds of the age. Any creative artist worth his or her salt would draw on this accumulated wisdom. The creative minds behind Rings of Power seem to want to surprise the viewer at every turn with startling twists, and they mostly succeed in that ambition because their twists are so entirely unmoored in any historical or practical consideration.

This pattern of disregarding precedent when it doesn't suit also applies the to the show's much-vaunted race-blind casting, which is notable only for the specifically modern and piecemeal way it is applied. There is no reason why there can't be racial diversity in Middle-Earth, and indeed every reason why there should be. Tolkien has developed an extensive history of the Elves, which involve three different lines of divergence and settlement, with numerous sub-branches. Why not construct whole societies based on these groups, which differ linguistically and culturally? But in the world of the writers' room, each character is an island, unconnected to parentage or any larger culture except where it suits. Subgroups -- Elves, Dwarfs, Men, Proto-hobbits -- share an arbitrary accent picked from the U.K., but no character is expected to look like he or she descended from his or her screen parents. What, indeed, has reproduction to do with sex?

This leads me to a larger weakness of the show. I think Devereaux's emphasis on not reinventing entire fields that have been the extensive study of countless generations underlines a failing of Rings of Power, and of many other modern endeavors: because the creative minds believe that certain patterns of historical human behavior in the realms of racial and sexual mores have been wrongheaded and made up out of whole cloth, they want to also throw out any other historical norm as being arbitrary. Women didn't sail? Sexist! Sails themselves? Just as reinventable!

 Like Chesterton's fence, however, one needs to be able to explain why these standards were the way they were before one jettisons them into the rather shallow abyss of the Balrog. Else, as Devereaux emphasizes:
And that is the recurring problem with the worldbuilding in Rings of Power, that the audience rapidly finds that cannot have much faith at all that the creators involved have given much thought to these questions. And each crack in the worldbuilding in turn damages the stakes of the peril and the significance of character choices because if the story itself doesn’t have to obey any real rules of cause and consequence and thus the creators can merely opt to have anything happen for any reason then there is no reason to invest in any of it at all. If there are no consistent rules to this world then nothing matters and if nothing matters…why should I care?

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Letters for Lent


 Happy Valentine's Day, you filthy animals! Please accept this sign of my regard.

Of far more significance, liturgically speaking, is the upcoming season of Lent, for which we are all no doubt prepared. For the past several years, I've started pre-gaming my Lent, so to speak, by practicing some penances in advance -- fasting, adding in some prayer, turning down spot pleasures. I thought this was some odd inclination of my own, only to find out that there used to be an entire liturgical period, Septuagesima, devoted to this very practice of winding down for Lent. (I had seen the word Septuagesima before, being knocked around in the circles of people who complain a lot about things liturgical, so perhaps I'm at fault for not paying enough attention before now to what it referred.) 

This is the story of my spiritual life: an inclination, a conviction that seems unusual or against the grain, only to discover that scholars and sages through the centuries have pondered this very thing, only it never was covered in my religious education or in the circles I moved in. I nearly wept reading Hans Urs Von Balthazar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? This idea, which I had been tracking through my reading of the Bible, carefully noting down all verses that seemed to point to the idea that once all evil had been consumed as by fire, what was good, being of God himself, could not be lost and must indeed come back to Him and be joined to Him, was not a strange borderline heretical notion of my own, but one that had been openly debated through the ages. Our faith was far bigger, far more expansive and strange and wonderful than the dry, open-and-shut Baltimore Catechism Q&A would have one believe.

Indeed, it was about this time that I finally acted on an inclination that had been gaining force for years, and rid my house of the Baltimore Catechism, the Tan Children's Bible, that awful book of saint stories with the garish paintings of sickly virgins and purple Africans gratefully accepting baptism from a handsome priest, so popular as a First Communion gift (you know the one I mean), and indeed any children's book that accepted as a description of holiness that "he practiced the strictest chastity and had a devotion to our Blessed Mother". What does that even mean? What does that look like in practice? How can this pat pious depiction of dead-eyed saints have any truck with the immensity of joy and suffering to be found in Jesus, the growing understanding of Christian maturity that so much of what we know we do and can not know?

What have they to do with Love?

***

All this is to say that it's time for Lenten Letters. Should you like to receive a letter from me during Lent, please send your name and address to darwincatholic @ gmail.com, and I will do my best to write to everyone during Lent itself (though some years it's stretched out to Pentecost). I just write about whatever is on my mind at the moment, rather like the blog itself, so I suppose it's less of a correspondence and more of a "Have the fun of opening an envelope and getting what you get". I can't promise this year to use the nice paper and the fancy pen, but there will be a stamp and a flap to slit and an enclosure to withdraw that is not a bill or appeal or a summons. And many days, that itself is enough to make one smile.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Sonnet: Octave and Sestet

I said I would read the last chapter of Gaudy Night, and so I did; then I went back and began at chapter one, and so until I wrapped the final chapter again in its proper position. Lord Peter may be a damn sight too sensitive, and Harriet Vane too stubbornly, willfully blind, but then, without conflict, whence plot?

One element, not of plot but of theme, is that in Oxford Harriet finds her creative voice again, welling up in the severe scholarly beauty of the stone city. She writes the octave of a sonnet about the university as a fixed point in a whirling world, and puts it aside, unable to find a turn for the sestet. (The sestet, in the Petrarchan sonnet, turns the octave, or challenges it, or answers a question posed.) Later, while flipping through her notebook after she's lent it to Peter to study her case-notes, she finds he's finished the sonnet, using the sestet to turn the peaceful fixed center of the octave into the love-driven whirl of a top. This infuriates Harriet (not least because Peter's lines are better than her own), but it also intrigues her into giving Peter a long-overdue reassessment.

I myself had some quiet hours today, our broken washing machine causing me to spend several hours running loads of laundry at my mother-in-law's new house around the block, empty until she moves out in the spring. And I, like Harriet Vane, had a first line pushing up a small green shoot. And so, after I'd finished my blocking for the next rehearsal, as the last load tumbled about the dryer, I took up my pad (mostly used, like Harriet's, for the business at hand), and turned some lines, of which these are the final form.


God saw that it was good, and so you are,
And so your eyes have taught my eyes to see,
Your tongue my tongue to taste, heart's library 
As richened by close reading, your memoir;
As longing for your light, my double-star,
My soul entwined with yours, nor wanting free,
Now two, now one, now like the One-in-Three,
Love's unity begets love's avatar.
But still the veil this veiléd flesh and mind 
Conceals, nor ever fully rent in twain
Until at last we know as we are known;
Until within that blessed Thought we find
The Father of our friendship; so attain
Our dim loves' one true dawn, all space o'erthrown.



Friday, February 10, 2023

Darwiniana

 Sometimes I wonder, "Why don't I write, when I have so many ideas I want to chew on and hash through and meditate on? Why is it so difficult to dedicate the time to distill some of these musings into coherent lines so that you, my friends, can also think about these things with me?" -- which is, for me, the purpose of writing.

And then I consider my afternoon yesterday, in which, confidently prepped for my evening blocking rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream at 7:00, I went to church at 4:00 to drop off my boys at Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, then dropped my 12yo daughter off at Confirmation class and started teaching the 7th grade Bible Study, at 4:30, and how five minutes into class I received a call from my 5yo's teacher, saying he'd thrown up, and how I had to call Darwin with all my students agog, and how, in a first in my experience, when I stabbed at his number from my contacts, Siri (which I never use) had slipped in a suggested number from some message that was one digit off from his phone number, and so I had an awkward conversation with a wrong number -- that I dialed from contacts! With my students agog! And then I had a full hour and a half between the end of classes (because the boys got out of their class half an hour early, although it was just the one boy now), so I made dinner while Darwin ran to the store (after bathing the cheerful, vomit-crusted boy), and we arranged which older child would babysit the boy because everyone else was called in some capacity to rehearsal, or had to be at the theater for production meetings. And how, when I got home from rehearsal at 9:15 (because I ended rehearsal right on time at 9:00! but had to talk to various people and then shut up the theater), the boys were up late on the computer because everyone was too dragged out to put them right to bed, and there was a bit of fuss, and then I came into the kitchen to talk to Darwin and was followed by three older children, who all spoke to me at the same time, each chattering cheerfully about whatever was on his or her mind (and wholly unconnected to anything their siblings were saying), to which I needed to attend and make individual reply. And how, at 11:00, I sat in bed with my laptop, thinking about writing, and determined not to scroll down social media or pick up Gaudy Night which I suddenly had the strong urge to re-read, so instead I fell asleep reading a scholarly article I dearly wanted to finish and talk about. 

So the main reason I have time to write at this moment is because I called a sick day, ignoring the constant murmur of episode after episode of Lost Cities of the Andes or Mysteries of the Dead Sea or whatever documentary series my 9yo is binging.

And these are all good things, important things because they are so small and so make up the very foundation that everything else is built upon. We are in no crisis right now (except for the slight underlying dread that the other shoe is going to drop with the one child out of the three younger ones who hasn't thrown up this week), and all the many projects that we have in hand are moving forward, if glacially at times. 

The most immediate of these projects is A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I'm directing and Darwin is tech directing. We are in blocking rehearsals (which I love), which require me to do a lot of time-consuming preparation (which I love). We perform March 30-April 2. That's eight weeks away -- not so far away.


Darwin and I spent a weekend away from the family at the preserved Victorian house of a 19th century industrialist that he found listed on Vrbo. It was a revelatory, refreshing weekend of delight, which functioned as a writers' retreat once we decompressed enough to get used to people not talking to us all the time. And on the second day, I started revising Stillwater. I wrote and wrote, surrounded by beautiful woodwork, with no one but Darwin in my immediate vicinity. And now I've sent the first half of the manuscript to a copy editor, and am plugging away resolutely at my own edits for second half, and have spoken to my cover designer, with an eye to having the thing published in time for Christmas this year.

I do want to tell you all about this marvelous house, and show you the pictures I took so that everyone can understand how the rooms flowed together and where the back corridors were, because I know that your eyes will not glaze over like my children's did as I explained each of the 60 photos. But here, a photo of tilework to whet your appetite. Ignore the wallpaper and that one modern patch, and contemplate the original toilet that flushes when you pull up on that that lever under the tank. 



Friends, I could have looked at the vintage towel bar and toilet paper holder all day long. Bliss.

(But MrsDarwin, you say, you have umpteen boxes of subway tile stacked in your daughters' bedroom, waiting to for the gutted upstairs bathroom to be put into a state to receive them. Hush, I say. Hush.)

I shall go, and contemplate what I will feed a houseful of delicate appetites on a Friday in Ordinary Time when we've only done the Aldi's run and not the Kroger shopping, and find my cleaning cloth so that I can degrease my kitchen, and vacuum the dining room table (best cleaning hack ever -- try it yourself), and then I might sit down with a cup of tea and sigh over the last chapter of Gaudy Night. And then I'll start in on next's week blocking. Those young lovers in the forest aren't going to choreograph their own thematic slapstick.

Thursday, February 02, 2023

Update on Joshua

Many of you have been praying for Joshua, and for that, many many thanks. Here's the latest update from my sister-in-law. She has been at CHOP with Joshua this week, while my brother is at home with the three older ones, with an assist from my mom. Joshua will likely be in the hospital for quite some time, so the family is learning how to manage this very complex care situation.
UPDATE:
Joshua is 1 month old today!!! (Yesterday was his official due date). He has lost most of the fluid and inflammation from being on the ECMO and the doctor’s think we can now observe and measure his “true” size! Joshua is 19.5 inches and 8.2 pounds. He has long legs, big feet and the longest fingers!
Joshua has had his IV and PIC line removed. This makes it much easier to change his diaper, do PT exercises, and give him snuggles! He is receiving breast milk through a feeding tube and no longer needs any supplemental nutrition. This is a big step because it means he is finally regulating his blood sugar better. He continues to rely completely on the ventilator to take breaths but has been able to maintain his oxygen saturation with minimal support. His oxygen levels frequently drop when he is agitated (he doesn’t like diaper changes or being repositioned), but we are learning what his body needs to keep his oxygen steady.
They did an ultrasound of his brain a few days ago and the impact of the brain bleed remains stable. This means that little has changed either good or bad. It could take months for his little body to reabsorb all the blood. In the meantime, the bleed has caused significant compression on the ventricles of the brain. They are watching for cerebro spinal fluid that may build up. Though, there is significantly less swelling on the brain this week.
The doctors keep saying ”we are waiting for Joshua to show us what he can do.” The doctors need to follow Joshua’s lead. But it is still believed that the damage to the brain is significant and permanent. The brain stem was most affected by the bleed (the amount of fluid caused the whole brain to shift out of place). He has yet to open his eyes and his pupils are not dilating. The doctors say it is unlikely that he will ever be able to breathe on his own because the part of the brain that communicates with the lungs is not functioning. He also has not shown any gag reflex which means he cannot protect his airway. He will likely be a candidate for a tracheostomy, but the earliest he would be stable enough for that is probably at 3 months old. We will meet with the airway response team in the coming weeks to learn more about this option.
The doctors cannot give us any clear picture of what the future will hold. He may start to develop new pathways in his brain and we may see more potential for what Joshua will be capable of doing. However, it is likely that he will not regain any additional brain function and will continue to need all the supports he is currently on.
Whether Joshua shows small signs of improvement or none at all, we are grateful that he is here with us now and responding to some stimuli (mostly in his feet and legs). We will continue to care for him and meet his needs as they are currently presented. We are learning what it looks like to care for a medically complex child with severe brain damage. But we also know that the doctors do not have the final word on Joshua’s life. We continue to entrust sweet Joshua to the Lord and pray for his healing. We will enjoy all the snuggles we can get and we will love and care for Joshua just as he is - all the while hoping (but not expecting) that we will see “happy surprises” as we move forward!


Joshua currently has a relic of Servant of God Emil Kapaun near his cradle, and a friend is sending a relic of Bl. Julia Greeley. So pick your favorite contender for canonization, and please join us in praying for this sweet boy.


 

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Some Fiction Writing - The Great War: Chapter 8-1

 Friends, it has been a longer time than I like to contemplate, but this trilogy remains one of the major priorities of my artistic life.  So when my wife and I managed to take a two day getaway for my birthday over last weekend, which served as a sort of mini writers' retreat, I gratefully took the time to finish this chapter.  I hope you enjoy it.  It will certainly not be so long before I post another.

In Chapter 8 we return to Jozef, and we meet a cavalry regiment of the Polish Legion.  They're a historically fascinating group, whose founder, Joseph Pilsudski became the father of independent Poland.  But I'll let the chapter introduce them to you properly.


Klimontów, Galicia.  June 28nd, 1915.  It was a distance of less than thirty kilometers from Sandomierz where Jozef’s regiment was stationed -- his former regiment as the orders in his uniform pocket made clear -- to Klimontów where the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the Polish Legion was recovering from a recent engagement.  There was no military train available, and Jozef was humiliatingly unable to make the journey on horseback because his mount belonged to the Uhlan regiment.  So with his orders in hand and his cavalry spurs jingled on his boots, he was required to stand in line behind two old women carrying chickens in wicker baskets, show his orders to the ticket-master at the Sandomierz train station, and receive a second class ticket (the local train offered no first class) on the slow train to his destination.

The one second class carriage was comfortingly empty; his two companions were a middle aged businessman in a bowler hat, who spent the entire time reading a newspaper printed indecipherably in Slovene, and an elderly Jewish woman dressed all in black who snored softly despite the hardness of the leather-upholstered seats.  

Even with the frequent stops of a local train, within two hours the train pulled into Klimontów and Jozef stepped out onto the railway platform.  The town was small, consisting of little more than a single square with shop fronts and houses surrounding a fountain.  A little beyond, loomed bronze domes of St. Jozefa.  

The men of the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the Legion might not outnumber the town’s residents, but they were certainly prominent.  As soon as he stepped into the street Jozef saw men in field grey uniforms like his own, but with the distinctive, square-topped czapka helmet of the Polish Uhlans.  Some sat at cafe tables or lounged outside shops, others walked singly or in groups.  All had the casual aire of men on leave.  There was no immediately obvious center of activity, no headquarters building marked out by the runners and orderlies hurrying in and out of it.  

Nor did anyone immediately approach Jozef as someone out of place, even though his Austrian Uhlan’s helmet, set him apart as clearly from another regiment.  After hesitating and looking about for several moments, Jozef approached a group of three men seated outside a cafe.  The jumble of beer and wine glasses told that they had been at the table for some time.  One had taken off his uniform tunic and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt against the heat of the day, as he sat talking with his companions and rapidly dealing out hands of some solitaire card game on the table before him.  

“Where can I find the regimental headquarters?” Jozef asked, counting on the leutnant stars on his collar tabs to make clear his right to ask a peremptory question of these men whose plain collars marked them as rank and file troopers.

By rights, they should have come immediately to attention before even answering his question.  They did not do this.  One of the men inclined his head to the card player, as if to defer the question to him.  The other fixed Jozef with a commanding  eye and asked, “Which is it?  Is Kandinsky a genius or an enemy of the beautiful?”

“Who?” asked Jozef.

“Oh, God!” cried the other trooper. 

“I didn’t address the question of theology,” replied the first, turning on his companion.  “Nor do I admit that it has any bearing on artistic expression.”

“The artistic sense is an expression of culture,” replied the second.  “And culture is the expression of the people, and the organizing principle of the people is politics.  Yet over politics stands the ultimate purpose of the people, and that is theology.  So to the extent that art is cultural, it is political, and the end of the political is God.”

“You are drunk in the presence of an officer, and that is political,” replied the first trooper.  “Sir,” he added, addressing himself to Jozef, “If you’re seeking headquarters the leutnant can help you.”  He indicated the man in his shirt sleeves.  

The card player ignored Jozef for a moment more as he rapidly laid down cards to complete the formation he had been creating.  Then he slapped down a two of acorns with a triumphant “Aha!” and scooped up the entire deck of cards into a pile which he tapped neatly into place.

“Yes?” the card player asked.  “Can I help you?”

“You are an officer, sir?” Jozef asked, with a formality that hinted skepticism.  

The card player shrugged into his tunic and began buttoning it up, making his leutnant’s stars visible in the process.

“Leutnant Zelewski,” he replied, rising to his feet.  “And whom do I have the pleasure to meet, sir?”

“Leutnant von Revay, 7th Imperial Royal Uhlans.  I have orders to report to Oberst Gorski.”

“Well, I’d better escort you to headquarters then.  Come on.”  

He started down the cobbled street and Jozef fell into step next to him.  The leutnant’s walk was casual, without the rigid posture most career officers had taken on through long training, and to sit drinking, his tunic off, with common troopers at a cafe would be unimaginable in a normal regiment, no matter how hot the day.  

“What do you make of the tone of our regiment?” Leutnant Zelewski asked.

Jozef hesitated.  The question alone suggested rather too much insight into the silent judgment he had rendered upon the regiment.

“One thing you’ll find,” Zelewski continued, “is that the backgrounds of our troopers are a little more wide ranging than the standard cut.  Dudek, for instance, is a professor of political philosophy, while Bak, as perhaps you could tell, writes artistic criticism.”

“And you?” asked Jozef, wondering if all the Polish Legionnaires came from such academic backgrounds.

“Bank robber,” replied Zelewski.  He let the phrase drop with conscious showmanship, and after pausing for reaction added, “And essayist.  Political agitator.”



Continue reading...

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Harm Reduction is not a Caliber

Nicholas Kristof takes a swing at offering less politically divisive suggestions to reduce gun deaths in the US in a feature-length opinion piece at the New York Times.  (Link is a "gift link" so you should be able to read it even without a subscription.) I do not think that he succeeds in avoiding the tired old political mistakes on this issue, but I'd like to assume he is in good faith and make some suggestions.

Kristof's theme is "harm mitigation". He has some thoughts about making it harder to buy guns (licenses, etc.) which I think are a bad idea but will not address here, but I do think there's a point worth keeping in mind from this section: As he notes some people are more likely to misuse guns than others. 72 million Americans own guns. In 2020 there were 45,222 gun deaths (of which more than half were suicides). This means that if each death was caused by a different person (no multiple killing incidents) 0.06% of gun owners were involved in a gun death in 2020.  Out of every ten thousand gun owners, less than six contributed to gun deaths in 2020. So we're dealing with a small percentage of problems among a very large number of law abiding people.

However, he then tried to do some harm mitigation on types of guns. It is a common trope of "reasonable" gun control proposals to argue that some guns are much more dangerous than others, and we only need to ban the dangerous ones. He says:

One advantage of the harm reduction model is that done right, it avoids stigmatizing people as gun nuts and makes firearms less a part of a culture war.

I’m writing this essay on the Oregon farm where I grew up. As I write this, my 12-gauge shotgun is a few feet away, and my .22 rifle is in the next room. (Both are safely stored.)

These are the kinds of firearms that Americans traditionally kept at home, for hunting, plinking or target practice, and the risks are manageable. Rifles are known to have been used in 364 homicides in 2019, and shotguns in 200 homicides. Both were less common homicide weapons than knives and other cutting objects (1,476 homicides) or even hands and feet (600 homicides).

In contrast to a traditional hunting weapon, here’s an AR-15-style rifle. The military versions of these weapons were designed for troops so that they can efficiently kill many people in a short time, and they can be equipped with large magazines that are rapidly swapped out. They fire a bullet each time the trigger is depressed.

 It’s sometimes said that the civilian versions, like the AR-15, are fundamentally different because they don’t have a selector for automatic fire. But troops rarely use automatic fire on military versions of these weapons because they then become inaccurate and burn through ammunition too quickly.

In one respect, the civilian version can be more lethal. American troops are not normally allowed to fire at the enemy with hollow-point bullets, which cause horrific injuries, because these might violate the laws of war. But any civilian can walk into a gun store and buy hollow-point bullets for an AR-15; several mass shootings have involved hollow-point rounds.

Now here’s what in some sense is the most lethal weapon of all: a 9-millimeter handgun. It and other semiautomatic pistols have the advantage of being easily concealable and so are more convenient for criminals than assault rifles are. In addition, there has been a big push toward carrying handguns, concealed or openly — and that, of course, means that increasingly a handgun is readily available when someone is frightened or furious.

...

Given the difference in impact between long guns and handguns, it may also make sense as a harm reduction measure to advise homeowners to trade in their Glocks for shotguns. As vice president in 2013, Joe Biden encouraged homeowners to rely for self-defense on a shotgun rather than an assault weapon, and he said he had advised his wife to respond to an intruder in an old-fashioned way: “Put that double-barreled shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.” He was denounced on left and right, but he had a point: We would be far better off if nervous families sought protection from a shotgun rather than from an assault rifle or 9-millimeter handgun.

He also illustrates this point with a graphic showing how often different calibers of gun are recovered from crime scenes:


Okay, let's note a couple problems with this "harm reduction" approach:

1) He references Biden's infamous "fire two blasts outside the house" advice as a "common sense" approach instead of having people own handguns or "assault rifles". Yet when you look at his graphic on how often guns of different types are recovered from crime scenes, the .22 rifle and 12 gauge shotgun which Kristof says he owns himself (and cites as normal types of guns to own) are both recovered from crime scenes much more often than .223 caliber rifles -- the normal caliber for rifles of the infamous AR-15 type. If harm reduction means avoiding types of gun which are often used in crime, then why does he advocate people get shotguns, the single most frequently used type of long gun in crime?  

2) Kristoff also takes a swipe at the 9mm handgun, describing it as "most lethal weapon of all". Is it, though? This assumes that the problem is that some types of gun are inherently more lethal than others. But there's nothing terrifying about the 9mm handgun as compared to other types. Indeed, the .40cal (second most frequently found on crime scenes) fires a larger bullet with a larger load of powder, thus delivering more foot-pounds of force: 275ft/lbs for 9mm, 441 ft/lbs for .40 S&W


Source: Hornady Handbook of Cartridge Reloading

Why are 9mm handguns found so often on crime scenes? They're simply the most common handguns. They are used by most police departments and by the US military. And they are the single most commonly sold caliber of handgun. 

The reason .40cal handguns rank so high also probably has to do with availability: a number of police forces (and even the FBI) used to use the more powerful .40S&W round. They later switched to the 9mm, which is lighter (and thus easier to carry) and which has lower recoil (and thus more accurate follow-up shots.)  The result is that used gun dealers often have a fair number of "police surplus" handguns in .40 S&W available cheap. That affordable availability is probably why .40cal is the second most common caliber of handgun found on crime scenes.

So whether one is contemplating gun regulations or what sort of gun to own, looking at the statistics of the type of guns used in crime is not a useful move. Nor does doing so accurately even lead to eschewing AR-15s for 12-gauge shotguns or .22 rifles. The frequency with which different types of guns show up in crime scenes is not a function of how inherently dangerous the caliber is, but rather of how available and useful guns of that type are to the less than 0.1% of gun owners who want to commit crimes. 

Owning a 9mm handgun is not going to make you more likely to commit a crime. Being a criminal is going to make you more likely to commit a crime. If you're going to buy a gun, buy the type of gun which is useful to you.  If the use that you seek is perforating paper targets and being prepared to protect your home if necessary, a 9mm handgun or a .223 AR-15 rifle may well be the right choice. These are, after all, the guns with which our law enformcement officers are most often armed, and their task is pretty similar to that of a citizen seeking to protect his or her home. If we truly seek crime mitigation, we should seek to prevent criminals from getting hold of guns, not avoid owning the same calibers of guns which criminals and suicidal people happen to get their hands on.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

When A Marriage is not a Marriage

 Fr. James Martin was out doing Fr. James Martin things again yesterday, responding to a Catholic League piece which described civil same sex marriage as a "legal fiction" with the statement "Pete Buttigieg is married."


As a good friend noted, the ensuing tempest is predictable and boring. Having scandalized many orthodox Catholics, if pressed theologically Fr. Martin will announce, "Oh, I only meant civilly married.  I of course agree with the Church's teaching on marriage." And so the dance of Fr. Martin pretending he doesn't disagree with Catholic teaching will continue. It's not just that some notable people in power seem to approve of Fr. Martin's antics, it's also that he has a strong Jesuit sense of how to make it clear to everyone what he really thinks while also maintaining the plausible deniability of never definitively saying something in clear contradiction of Church teaching.

However, in a society in which the Church's understanding of marriage is increasingly alien, it's perhaps worth taking a moment to consider the various senses in which Fr. Martin's statement could be taken, and the senses in which it is true or false from a Catholic point of view.

1) In civil law, Buttigieg is married to another man, Chasten, and they are entitled to the legal benefits that are associated with civil marriage. A Catholic dealing with this kind of situation in the legal realm would reasonably treat the civil marriage as existing.

2) Socially, in the mainstream culture, same sex marriage is seen as a thing that exists, and so it would be normal in social discourse to refer to someone's same sex spouse as a "husband" or "wife". I think it's reasonable for a Catholic to accede to this social convention even while disagreeing theologically. In a sense it's not different from referring to an oft-divorced man's fifth wife as "your wife" even while recognizing that marriage cannot in fact be validly dissolved and replaced in the manner which our civil law allows. The difference, of course, is that that relationship at least "looks like" a natural marriage in the sense that the Church would recognize it, while a same sex marriage does not. I think this is a distinction worth recognizing, but I don't necessarily think it would be a problem for a Catholic to refer to a same sex spouse as a "husband" or "wife" in social discourse.

3) A same sex marriage cannot exist as a 'natural marriage'. Natural marriage is the Church's term for a marriage between a man and woman who are not baptized, but nonetheless enter into a relationship which has the qualities which the Church would recognize as belonging to marriage: they intend to be faithful to each other, they intend to welcome any children they might have, they are not already married to someone else, they are one man and one woman, etc. Natural marriage is not a legal or social convention, it is a real, existing marriage which the Church must recognize but is simply not sacramental because it does not take place between baptized people.

4) If two people who are validly able to marry (not married already, opposite sexes, intend to be faithful, intend to welcome children, etc) and who are baptized Christians get married, those people are recognized by the Church as having entered into a valid sacramental marriage. Pete Buttigieg is an Episcopalian and thus one assumes someone who has been baptized. If he had married someone with whom the Church sees it as possible to enter into marriage (a woman) he would have been recognized as entering into a sacramental marriage. 

There is an additional complication in terms of contracting a sacramental marriage if one of the parties is a baptized Catholic, but they do not marry in a valid Catholic ceremony. Church canon law requires that Catholics marry before the Church, and if someone baptized Catholic does not follow this rule, the Church does not see them as validly married. So if two Episcopalians get married in a civil ceremony, the Catholic Church would see them as sacramentally married, but if two Catholics did, the Church would not see them as sacramentally married. This stands to get a bit confusing, and it doesn't come into play here since the whole question in this case is whether a two men could be considered married in the first place.

So in looking at Fr. Martin's statement: It is not in and of itself wrong for Fr. Martin to refer to Pete Buttigieg's husband, if he was doing so in sense 1) or sense 2). If, for instance, Fr. Martin was at a social occasion and met Chasten Buttigieg, he might say, "Ah, hello, I was a fan of your husband's presidential run," without denying the Church's teaching on marriage.

However, it seems pretty clear that in posting, as a priest of the Catholic Church, and in argument with an article which sought to make the distinction between civil marriage and actual marriage as recognized by the Church, the unmodified phrase "Pete Buttigieg is married", Fr Martin is sowing confusion about Catholic teaching (and making clear how he wants it to change). But, of course, it can't change. And that Fr. Martin doesn't seem to recognize that is one of the basic senses in which he does not think with the Church.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Inflation at the Grocery Store

 I contributed to a Twitter thread the other day on the subject of grocery price inflation, and several hours later received a direct message from a reporter working on a story about the same topic, who asked if I would be willing to answer a few questions about our grocery spending. 

I'm always game to talk prices, since pricing is what I do professionally, and I discovered that our credit card company has much improved in their automatic categorization of purchases, so to check my subjective impressions I downloaded two years worth of our spending data and looked at how our weekly grocery spending has changed since inflation increased about a year ago.

The overall results surprised me. I was correct in thinking that we average a but under $400/wk in groceries, but it turns out this has been pretty consistent for the last two years. Over the last five years our average weekly grocery spending has increased only $14 from $345 to $359.  That's just a 4% increase, significantly less than inflation.


I'd included spending on eating out and gas on the theory that we might be balancing greater grocery spending by cutting other weekly spending, but those dont' seem to have changed much either.

So despite costs going up across the board, we seem to have been pretty successful in not actually paying more for groceries ourselves.

One explanation for this is that I now do more price shopping between stores. Back in early 2021 I was doing almost 70% of our shopping at Kroger.  By the end of 2022 that had fallen to less than 50%, and the share of our spending at Aldi (which generally has lower prices) had shifted from about 15% to over 30%.


We'd also made some fairly conscious choices as prices increased:

  • We ended our canned seltzer habit, something of which we'd been buying three 12-packs a week prior to the cost of gas (and other inflation, but transportation costs are always a major part of the cost of cheap liquids)
  • We mostly stopped eating beef, shifting first to chicken and then increasingly to pork. Pork loins are the meat you can still get consistently for close to $2/lb
  • We reduced egg consumption as eggs quadrupled in price over the last few months
However, we also made a number of other minor trade offs, some of which I'd probably have to think quite a bit about, in order to keep our food spending at what seemed like a reasonable level. Even knowing that consumer behavior data usually knows that people are very good at making trade-offs without even realizing it, I'm impressed with how consistent our spending data is over the long term.


Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Josh's Song


As my brother John kept vigil by baby Josh's side the other night, having never yet held his son, he composed this song on one of the therapy guitars provided by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. John has been writing songs since he was a teenager getting in his ten thousand hours of practice on the guitar. He texted the tune and lyrics late last night to the family group chat, and this morning the kids and I turned it into a video with plenty of photos of Josh and family.

Please pray for John and Gail this week, as the doctors will be reducing Josh's sedation this week, and running tests to determine whether he has any brain activity.

Little One (Josh's song)
written and performed by John Egan

Your tender body quivers
At the slightest little touch
Your mom’s a million miles away
She misses you so much

I’ve only dreamed of holding you

I was frightened by the swelling
I was startled by your weight
The tubes and lines were everywhere
The hour was getting late

And I’ve only dreamed of holding you

Can you breathe with me
Can you feel the rushing wind
Dip your feet into sea
If you climb up to the stars
We can stare down at the sun
Little one

Your mother only held you
The moment you were born
We took a family picture
Your skin was nice and warm

The last time she was holding you

There’s an angel right beside you
Blowing sweet air in your lungs
And a quiet hovers over you
With prayers from everyone

Will I finally get to holding you

I was in a place of comfort
With no worries and no fears
But you know I’d give that all away
Just to have you here

In my arms just holding you

Can you breathe with me
Can you feel the rushing wind
Dip your feet into sea
If you climb up to the stars
We can stare down at the sun
Little one

And you breathe with me
I would let you go to heaven
You will rest in endless peace
And you’ll play among the stars
Wrap your arms around the sun
Little one

I saw your eyelids flicker
You were sleeping in your bed
Your infant toes were moving ‘round
A voice inside me said

That someday I’d be holding you
And I know someday I’ll be holding you

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Prayers for Joshua

Dear friends, let me beg your prayers for my newborn nephew Joshua George. He was born five weeks early, on Dec. 31, and due to complications from interventions after birth, he's suffered traumatic brain bleeding. My sister-in-law Gail writes:

“Update: Last night, we met with Joshua’s medical team. We did not get the news we were hoping for. Joshua’s CT scan revealed the bleeding in his brain was quite significant. An MRI shows that the pressure from the bleeding has caused his brain to shift. The damage is very severe. Right now his brain can't communicate with the rest of his body, and it's unlikely that will ever change.

There's a lot they don't know right now; they’re going to watch him the next few days to see what support he'll need. There's nothing they can do for the brain from a medical standpoint, but they will continue to support his heart and lungs with the possibility of him coming off the ventilator. He is currently relying on the ventilator to do most of the work but does continue to take some independent breaths. His heart and lungs have remained stable since coming off of ECMO. We chose to let the children visit with him last night instead of holding him. The big kids are at Ronald McDonald House with grandma and John and I will finally be able to hold our sweet Joshua in our arms this morning.”

Please pray for Joshua, and my brother John and his wife Gail, and their three older children Ben, Sam, and Hannah.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Single Income Family Demographics

 I wrote last week about the household economy and how being a single income family (where I hold down an outside job to pay the bills and MrsDarwin works full time on raising and educating the children) is something we have made a priority within our family.

Several readers on social media expressed curiosity on how common single income families are and what their place within the distribution of household incomes is, so I turned to the US Census to find out.  I found some answers in Census Table FG2 for 2021, which covers "Opposite-Sex Married Couple Family Groups, by Family Income, and Labor Force Status of Both Spouses"

The census found the US has 63 million families consisting of opposite sex married couples, of which 24 million have children under 18 living at home with them.  The 24 million families with at least one child under 18 living at home with them seemed like the relevant group for the question at hand, so I looked deeper at that data.  


Among that 24 million, 61% had both husband and wife employed, 27% had only the husband employed, 4% had only the wife employed, and 8% fell into the "other" bucket.  "Other" consisted of 1.9 million families of which 552k were families in which neither husband nor wife was in the labor force, and the other 1.4 million were families in which one or both spouses were temporarily unemployed but still in the labor force.  Since those families were in a temporary situation which might or might not persist, it seemed unfair to class them in the other three stable employment categories.

The Census also provides data about how much family income these different families have.  However, more than half the families fall in the top group: $100k/yr and above  

This makes it hard to break the households into useful groupings, but I did my best.  The overall result is: far from being a luxury lifestyle, single income families make up the majority of the lowest income group and half of the second lowest, while single income families are the least represented among families making over $100k/yr.




For single income families with only the mother working and only the father working, the distribution across income bands was pretty similar, though the families where the wife was the single income were slightly more likely to belong to the lower income bands.



Two income families were about twice as likely to be making over $100k.


It's not possible to tell from this data how these families chose their income structure, but it certainly appears to be the case that single earning marriages are not an approach followed only by the affluent.


Friday, January 06, 2023

The Household Economy

It has been a busy fall, as my two-month absence from these pages might suggest. 

Directing my first stage play in many years was a wonderful experience, but it also left me behind in several other tracks of activity. And somehow the various tracks of life have been coming to resemble a rail yard around here.

Owning a 130 year old home means committing to a constant stream of home projects, large and small, as MrsDarwin recently mentioned.  I can report that the silverware drawer whose demise she described now has a handsome replacement:


And the leveling of the floor for the Great Bathroom Remodel is near completion.  (In a testament to the ability of old houses to settle, I'm having to level a floor which has height differences of up to 1.5 inches in the joists.)



Over at ThePillar, my latest data journalism project has involved applying quantitative text analysis techniques to the documents of the Synod on Synodality. I've been working through a series of pieces using correspondence analysis to examine the documents and the apparent connections (or lack thereof) between them.  What made this tricky was that I had never actually done correspondence analysis before this, I'd only read about it. ThePillar deserves a good deal of credit for being willing to give me the time to figure out new techniques which no one is currently applying to Catholic journalism.  (There are more installments coming shortly.)  I also did a quick piece on the increasingly advanced ages of popes at election and death through history.


And, of course, I needed to deal with the end of year press work. Since I deal with pricing, I end up fairly closely involved with the process of building the company budget, and that's a time consuming thing which comes at the end of the year.

The need to keep up with these various things, and the fact that work always has to trump the others in a crunch, has had me thinking lately about the part that work plays in our family's life. 

I have several friends who are deeply interested in the idea of work being more accommodating towards family life. Their proposals often focus around the kind of policies which make it easier for a family with two working parents to integrate the demands and parenting and working: longer post partem leave for both parents, taking sick days to care for sick children, more flexibility for working at home and working flexible hours so that parents can balance watching kids and doing work, etc.

I do not deny that these approaches help families in which all parents work. And as a manager, I am certainly always conscious of giving parents flexibility to deal with family things.

And yet, we have always pursued a different approach with our family.  Rather than seeking to both have jobs which are more compatible with raising children while working, we've made it a priority to have only one working parent.

In a sense, either way, this means taking some distance from the world in which so much of our value is seen as coming from working.  But the one approach involves both parents working, but doing so in a "work to live, not live to work" kind of fashion which makes more room for child rearing.  And the other involves having one parent step outside the working world entirely.  

Arguably, this means that we are even less trapped within the so called rat-race than those who are trying to pursue more flexible work schedules. But our tactics are the opposite.  Back when I started this blog, I was still working hourly, and at that time I always made sure to try to get overtime whenever I could.  Mour hours meant more dollars, and more dollars paid the bills while MrsDarwin stayed home.

I've been salaried for a long time now, but I have over the years pursued higher level work which at times requires travel or long hours because that has allowed me to take roles which pay more and thus grant our family what at this point is upper middle class affluence, even while unlike most of my coworkers we bring home one check not two (and have three times the number of kids.)

I don't have any issue with those who pursue the other strategy. But unfortunately from a policy point of view they can be somewhat opposed.  

In both cases, we want to spend less of our total family's time working on things outside the working economy.  When we cook and clean and teach the kids and reglaze the windows and re-tile the bathroom, we're doing things that we would otherwise have to pay someone a lot of money to do.  And when we write and put on theater, we're doing things which people do pay for to some degree, but which don't provide enough money to support people full time for the kind of work that we're doing.

However, our ability to have some spouse entirely outside the market economy is premised on my ability to make enough money to suppose the whole family off one paycheck.  If my job was broken into two jobs so that each person could get six months of parent leave after each child, and more vacation every year, and more flexible and shorter hours, the result would be that I wouldn't make as much money, and while perhaps now we could get by simply by living more modestly, at an early stage in our marriage that would probably have meant both of us having to work.  (And once you both work, the transition back to one income is notoriously hard.)

So I wish those who want more flexible jobs for family reasons well, but their desires are not my desires, and I hope they don't end up setting policy over me.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Descended into Hell

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, passed away today at the age of 95. 

There will be many words spoken about him in the coming days; I think Brandon treads a measured line in his assessment of Benedict's life and papacy. It's only fitting, at the death of such a prolific and gracious academic, to quote his own words. Here is a passage from Introduction to Christianity, about Christ's descent into Hell, which was a lifeline to me at a time when I was struggling:

...In truth -- one thing is certain: there exists a night into which solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone -- the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is -- hell. 

That brings us back to our starting point, the article of the Creed that speaks of the descent into hell. This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev. 20:14, for example). But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of sheol have been opened. From this angle, I think, one can understand the images -- which at first look so mythological -- of the Fathers, who speak of fetching up the dead, of the opening of the gates. The apparently mythical passage in St. Matthew's Gospel becomes comprehensible, too, the passage that says that at the death of Jesus tombs opened ant the bodies of the saints were raised (Mt. 27:52). The door of death stands open since life -- love -- has dwelt in death.

Friday, December 23, 2022

Home


Twelve years ago today, we moved into our house. The first thing we did that first night, Darwin and I and baby Diana, five months old, was buy a Christmas tree and put it up in the curtainless bay window as a greeting to the neighbors. We slept on an air mattress in the vast expanse of our empty room, the baby's fussing echoing throughout every room. The next day, as the movers were finishing up, my family brought up the older four kids for their first glimpse of the place. They ran shouting through the halls. Doors slammed. Closets were investigated. The place was so huge -- how would we ever know what was behind every door?

A few of the doors upstairs

Now I know what, and who, is behind every door. There are still a few light switches that befuddle me, and places like the attic that I don't venture into for months at a time, but I know where I am. We have a tree up today too, though it can't be seen by the neighbors today because we have the curtains drawn against today's bone-chilling wind. (I found snow driven through the casement windows behind the curtains.) We now have seven children. The oldest three have some memories of Texas; the younger four don't remember any other home. 

Jennifer the dummy feels right at home in the front hall.


This home is worth remembering. It is handsome, capricious, tactile. It has quirks that are the stuff of family legend. It has perfectly proportioned nooks, and rooms in which Choices Were Made (I'm looking at you, kitchen). It has an empty shaft where the back staircase used to be, and an asinine pantry where the basement stairs used to be. We have brick and studs where one bathroom used to be. The other four bathrooms are outfitted with the top technology of 1929. We've never used the shower in the master bathroom because it leaks. Until a month ago, our diamond pane windows were so bowed from 100 years of wear on the lead caming that we had gaps large enough to admit a breeze. 

A poor kitchen renovation from 1990 bears its ultimate bad fruit: doors falling off and drawers falling out. That's the bottom of the irreparable silverware drawer sitting on the shelf of the cabinet below.

And I love it. Our house in Texas could never look better than the day it was built; it aged uglier and uglier. This home ages with beauty. Each year it gets richer. We have, perhaps, put more wear and tear on it than any previous generation, but a home is meant to be lived in. If a house can reflect the love it shelters, ours is radiant from the attic beams to the stone foundation. We hope everyone who enters the house soaks up some of our overflowing joy.



Sunday, December 04, 2022

Mrs. Dashwood, 13

Previous

Here they were again, all crying, except, of course, Elinor. Marianne’s agony billowed from her room in wave after ear-splitting wave, the occasional shriek of “Willoughby!” rising above the inarticulate howls. Margaret too was wailing, less from compassion than from the contagious anxiety of the afternoon. Poor dear child, she’d hoped to come home from a tedious afternoon at Middletons to the reward of a new brother. What she found instead was a sister dissolved in heartbreak and Willoughby distraught, distant, and deceptive. Willoughby was gone now, perhaps forever, and the Dashwood house was rocked to its foundations. Downstairs, Elinor was white-lipped with worry. Upstairs, everything was salt water.

Willoughby’s story of a sudden commission from his old benefactress Mrs. Smith had been strange, his demeanor so alien. Everything spoke of some deception, but how could this be, from our Willoughby? From his first "Hallo!", he had been so open and frank with them. What grief it was thus to discover what ought to have given them confidence: that Willoughby had no talent for lying. Not for him the easy knack of adorning falsehood with a veneer of probability, of saying just what others wanted to hear. The clumsiness of his deception embarrassed him as much as his audience.

Surely they must hear from him soon, even though he had almost taken his oath that he could not visit, could not write, could not even acknowledge the family that had so nearly been his own. To what ungenerous impulse could this behavior be attributed? His every shared glance with Marianne bespoke an ever-deepening trust. Only in refusing to announce their engagement had Willoughby ever withheld anything from the Dashwoods, but in that, he was not alone.  If it was concealment, it was mutual; Marianne, who had never until now kept a secret from her mother, remained steadfastly silent on the subject.

Elinor, of course, doubted him. Even from her childhood, Elinor accepted only certainties; it comforted her to prepare for the worst. It was not a trait she had inherited from her mother. Why should not one believe the best of the people one loved? Willoughby must surely have his reasons, and they must do him credit. Of course the families of the neighborhood would malign him. What less could be expected from those who did not scruple to spare dear Colonel Brandon, when they knew his proven character? In the Dashwood house at least, Willoughby should be defended.

She had already been regaled with accounts of Colonel Brandon’s scandalous behavior from almost everyone present. 

“… and then the letter was handed to him by Thompson… ,” Miss Carey narrated to Mrs. Dashwood Monday over tea.

“No, he brought it in on a salver!” interjected Miss Felicity.

“And he turned positively white. I've never seen anyone look so ill, even at breakfast!”

“He was red, Amelia! I thought he was burning up with fever!”

“And Mrs. Jennings was most importunate about the direction, but he wouldn't tell who wrote it, or what was in it.”

“And then he professed very sorry, but he must needs leave, and we should not go to Whitwell after all! What a to-do, you may be sure!”

“Willoughby thinks he wrote it himself,” murmured Marianne in Miss Carey’s private ear, “to get out of the trip.”

The Misses Carey dissolved into a fit of giggles. Elinor shot Marianne a speaking glance.

“And oh, Mrs. Dashwood,” twittered Miss Felicity, “Lady Middleton was all of a pother. She kept saying…”

“…It must have been extraordinary news to make him leave my breakfast table,” said Lady Middleton to Mrs. Dashwood on Tuesday. The young olive shoots had been left at home, in an abundance of caution lest they catch the dying remnants of Mrs. Dashwood's cold, but Lady Middleton knew what was due her husband's cousin, and made her visit as soon as she heard Mrs. Dashwood was receiving guests.

“I am sure he would never have left your table under less urgent circumstances,” said Mrs. Dashwood patiently. “Colonel Brandon is a gentleman, and would not cause your ladyship distress without good reason.”

“Colonel Brandon is a gentleman,” agreed Lady Middleton placidly. “We will go to Whitwell when he returns. I am sure he will not leave my table again.”

“Perhaps the weather will improve,” suggested Mrs. Dashwood, longing to steer the conversation anywhere else. “I know that the young ladies were quite eager to see Whitwell. It is a most elegant estate, I understand, belonging to Colonel Brandon's brother-in-law. Perhaps you know him?”

Lady Middleton was not to be drawn from her subject. “The Misses Dashwood shall go to Whitwell when Colonel Brandon returns. You will see, he will not leave my breakfast table again so suddenly.”

“…But my dear,” said Mrs. Jennings, settling in on Wednesday for a cozy gossip on the sofa, “I never knew a man such as the Colonel for keeping secrets! You already know about his natural daughter, Miss Williams. She's off at school in Bath, and so sickly, the poor dear, the Colonel is driven nearly to distraction. Speaking of sickly, his sister in Avignon (did you know he had a sister?) is ill, they say, but never can I get a word from him about her health. She is the youngest of them. I never knew the older brother, but Lady Middleton's cook told my woman that he was a bad 'un, and such company as he kept!”

It was a mercy that Mrs. Dashwood had trained her face into a rigid neutrality at the first mention of Col. Brandon, for Mrs. Jennings was not done discovering things from her servants. 

“Of course she meant no harm by it,”  the worthy woman assured Mrs. Dashwood, leaning close, “and all's well that ends well, but a word in your ear. Miss Marianne would do well to get a proposal out of her Mr. Willoughby before she sets foot again in Allingham. Mind you, I don't blame the lass -- who wouldn't want to look at such a grand place, and she to be the mistress one day! But it don't look right, and I shake my head at him, who ought to be more watchful of his own lady's interests. I know they were disappointed when Col. Brandon up and disappeared just like that, without so much as a word to any of us what was so pressing in London. He must needs walk out the door and leave the rest of us to pick our teeth, instead of picnicking. Willoughby was in a fine taking -- you might have thought the Colonel did it just to spite him. And once we'd set upon a nice drive, those two would be galloping away before anyone could catch up to them. But I had my suspicions, and sure enough if he didn't take her to Allingham, and Mrs. Smith not at home! She’s a woman to stand on propriety, so they say. It seems she's not above leaving the place away from him, or on such terms as he might wish it was left away, if he don't give satisfaction. I know we'll all be easier once the pretty business is all settled. Then our young scapegrace can show Miss Marianne all the linen and silverware her heart desires.”

The Dashwoods and their travails would soon be just one more titillating tale to be traded in the drawing rooms of the neighboring gentry, displacing Colonel Brandon’s absence. Mrs. Dashwood knew she ought to be downstairs right now with Elinor, rationally parsing the whole strange situation. She was not downstairs. She was holed up in her room, weeping almost as vehemently (though not nearly as melodramatically) as Marianne. It was a relief, in a way, to have this outlet for her emotions. For these past weeks, she had kept her tears rigidly in check. Now it was as if she had never wept before. 

It was, in its way,  the first time. A week ago – could it only be seven days? – she had watched Colonel Brandon ride away, bearing with him some vital piece of her inside. She was hollow, an emptiness that would not be filled even by Marianne and Willoughby’s increasing happiness. How hard it had been, to go about in front of the girls as if she could breathe, as if her whole being was not expanded beyond itself into one vast ache of yearning. She did not yearn only for the Colonel, although since he had kissed her hand her nerves had given her no peace. He was merely the foundation on which the whole cruel edifice of hope was constructed.

Hope, in her youth, had been a bright peaceful bauble, thrilling and hazy. How naive she had been, how innocent, to imagine it as a safe virtue! As a girl, oppressed by her mother’s ever-present plans to marry her into position and fortune, she would wrap herself in a protective web of dreams. Love mattered, of course, but love could be found anywhere. Perhaps she would marry a rakish lord with a heart of gold, perhaps reform a buccaneer and his pirate crew, perhaps entice a prosperous colonial returned to find a lass of the old country to provide him with sons. She would be seized with longing for she knew not what: something, everything. And she called this amorphous desire hope.

Her juvenile speculations, both theological and romantic, floated untethered to the weight of reality. There was nothing vague about hope. It was sickeningly clear and specific. She grieved the absence of this man, this kind, dignified man, unfailingly patient with Lady Middleton, with never a retort to dignify Willoughby’s murmured witticisms or Mrs. Jennings’s speculations. She memorized the shape of his fingertips as he turned Marianne’s piano music at Barton Park. She sighed over his flannel waistcoat and the not-quite-stout figure it warmed. Hope did not promise a delightful, impossible resolution to this desire. It simply was, a longing deep in her bones and flesh. It blinded, deafened, stunned, consumed. Hope was raising her to life again, and it was killing her.

Had she truly hoped since the moment she had realized that dearest Henry was never coming back to her? There had been glimmers of sunshine now and then, when the happiness of her daughters broke through her own gloom. Her own heart had surged up when Edward Ferrars had first made Elinor blush, only to sink again under Edward’s continued silence and Elinor’s steadfast equanimity. Marianne’s joy in anything was of course infectious, but Willoughby himself had been nothing but delight from the first moment he had risen up out of the mist with Marianne in his arms. To what had she clung, this interminable week, but the hope that Marianne and Willoughby would soon announce what everyone already knew. There was no security in a private understanding. People married for love, yes, but also for stability, for connection, for alliance. A public understanding would give Marianne the right to visit her future home, safe from the energetic malice of the gossips. Now Marianne’s hope was shattered, and her heartbreak thundered through the close cottage. 

Why should she not cry? Why should her heart not be broken? Surely one Dashwood should be allowed a painless course of love. Why could it have not been Marianne, who practiced so little moderation of her moods that the whole house must have its share of both her ecstasies and her disappointments?

She could not stay up here forever. Elinor’s downstairs stoicism was a goad to her self-possession. She steeled herself to meet cynicism with good cheer, doubt with reasoned defense. Colonel Brandon was falsely maligned, but Mrs. Dashwood knew his private agony. So it must be with Willoughby. She at least would continue to believe in his good faith, no matter Elinor’s arguments to the contrary, until time proved to all what she hoped to be – no, what must be – true.

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