"Art is the meaningful rearrangement of physical stimuli." - John Boyt

Comment, please. 

Saturday, June 3

Biltmore Estate.  The largest private residence in the country, which probably means in this hemisphere.  Completed by George Vanderbilt in 1895.  No concise description is possible.  But if you've never been, you should go, if only to see what American "aristocracy" looked like, in the days when it still had the money to back up its title.  I guess it mostly looked European-- though there are significant differences, namely in the presence of the most modern innovations (electricity, for one) and, I suspect, in the manner of treating the servants.  The place--rather, the few corners of the 8,000 acres that are open to the public--is beautiful in its own right, but it's also fascinating as a study in Tocquevillian aristocratic vs. democratic principles.  Especially now, since in order to pay for the upkeep (or else to avoid the bitter cries of "conspicuous consumption," or maybe because they're just nice people--take your pick) the family has opened large portions of the house to the public, and a number of the outbuildings as well.  In brief: them greatest emblem of the American aristocracy is now become a tourist attraction, where the hoi polloi can flock to glory in the greatness that American democracy made possible (and has since made practically impossible).  The irony is ever-present.

But the house is still perfectly magnificent, and the bass pond with its dam and waterfall are still as quiet and picturesque as ever, and the cattle grazing on the hills carry on much as their ancestors did a century ago, though the dairy has since been converted into a winery.  The Deer Park stables have been transformed into one of the best fifteen-dollar buffets known to man, but most of the food still comes from the estate grounds.  The hothouse still provides orchids daily for gracing the mansion's tables and Winter Garden solarium.  The library still holds Vanderbilt's original collection, in numerous languages, which he apparently read most of, at a rate of several books a week--titles like A Glimpse of the Italian Court and Ionian Sculpture and the simply titled series L'Art (in one massive picture-filled volume per annum).  The tapestries lining the hall still speak of 16th-century medievalism.

The tapestries.  I spent about fifteen minutes, this time, studying the tapestries in the grand hall leading to the library.  They are three of a set of seven, called the "Triumph of the Virtues"; these are "The Triumph of Prudence," "The Triumph of Faith," and "The Triumph of Charity."  [One not present, "The Triumph of Fortitude," is explicated here.]  Dutch, 1538, unless I've forgotten.  And the longer I looked at them, the more I was convinced that I know far, far too little about everything.  The Biblical images I mostly recognized; even Judith and Judas Maccabeus, who figured prominently.  (It helped that most of the characters had their Latinate--or maybe Flemish--names stitched into a hem or collar somewhere.)  But who is Cadmus, and why is he slaying a multi-headed dragon?  What does Prometheus or Titus have to do with Prudence, or Judith with Charity?  Why did the Medievals associate the four Evangelists with the Four Beasts--lion, man, bull, and eagle, respectively?  But some of the connections happened.  Abraham turned up twice: first in "Faith," leading Isaac up the hill with the fire-pot; then again in "Charity"--this time his sword being stayed by the descending angel.  "Faith" is divided in two halves, signified by the Old and New Testaments personified on pillars, the one dragging behind him the weight of the Stone Tables, blindfolded and carrying a broken standard; the other is upright, crowned, and confidently holding up what was probably the Blessed Sacrament.  On the left, heaven is opening to receive Elijah in the chariot of fire; on the right, to reveal the conquering Christ, martial on his white horse.  On the left are Judith and Judas and Daniel and the ark of Noah; on the right are the saints and martyrs.  In the center is the empty and glorious Cross, borne up by the Beasts who gaze out of the cloth, back at the beholder, eyes firm and challenging.  "Charity" depicts Love, triumphant on her horse, trampling down the brutal Roman emperors, with throngs in her train.  Next to her sits the Eagle who is the Apostle of Love.  In the lower left corner is a man, common and nameless, whose feet are being washed by a woman named Elizabeth, and attired like a queen.

Here are sermons and exhortations woven into faded threads, speaking across ages and languages, and the more eloquent for their silence.  They are not sermons for the simple; they are not picture-books for the ignorant and illiterate.  They are icons large as the walls of a room, writ large and thick and deep and rich--written for the educated and the erudite.  Yet they are accessible enough--beautiful enough--to draw in any who have the care, or who take the time, to drink deeply of them.  They can only be fully appreciated by the learned; but they make the simple want to learn.  The mute tongues speak quietly to those who make the silence to hear them, and they say "Ask us what we mean.  Gaze upon our flat and ancient faces and learn to love what we stand for.  Learn to be as we were.  Learn by our examples Prudence, and Faith, and Charity.  Become intimate with us your ancestors, and as you look upon us, learn to love us.  Learn to love what we loved: each other; and the Virtues that we saw as persons more than as concepts; and our God Who is at the start and the center and the end of it all.  Even when you walk down this hallway, in your vast stone house to your library, know that you do not exist alone, or for yourself.  Remember that.  Remember."

Sunday, June 4

Driving.  No church.  A good deal of bad sleep, in the car.  Arrived at the timeshare condominium, unpacked, and set up.  Dinner of vegetable & ravioli soup, and buttered toast with Latvian honey and NC four-fruit jelly, finished off with chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.  Read the first several chapters of The Man Who Was Thursday, and talked to Jonathan for a while (or listened, rather).

Excessive sitting is very tiring work, and not much good on the back muscles.

Monday, June 5

Kitty Hawk.  We got up just in time for a lunch of leftover whole-wheat waffles with berries and whipped cream.  Then we spent the better part of the day at the Kitty Hawk National Memorial.  It's a different place than it was 103 years ago: the shifting dunes of the Kill Devil Hills have been fixated by grasses, and the stunted prickly pear cactus lurks in the grass, meant to keep pedestrians on the pathways between the markers and the museum buildings.  A large hump of granite marks the lift-off site, and four smaller blocks in a long line mark the landing-points of the first four powered, controlled, heavier-than-air manned flights: 12 seconds (Orville), 12 seconds (Wilbur), 15 seconds (Orville), 59 seconds (Wilbur).  A few hundred yards south, where it has since migrated, is Big Kill Devil Hill, from which the glider tests were run the previous year.  Atop it, on a star-shaped pediment, stands the bulk of wing-shaped granite that is the only National Monument to be erected in the lifetime of the one it honors.  High around the massive base, just low enough to trace with the fingers, runs the inscription: IN COMMEMORATION OF THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR BY THE BROTHERS ORVILLE AND WILBUR WRIGHT  CONCEIVED BY GENIUS ACHIEVED BY DAUNTLESS COURAGE AND RELENTLESS FAITH.  And so, indeed, it was. 

The story is too long to recount here.  Suffice to say that rarely will one find so marked an example of dogged perseverance married to actual analytical genius, and not a mere Edisonian shotgun trial-and-error method.  One problem after another they identified, analyzed, and solved, slowly evolving their Flyer through numerous iterations, progressively adding more compensations and controls: a front elevator for pitch; wing warping for roll; a movable rudder for stability, roll control, and yaw.  When the camber of the wings provided insufficient lift, they built a wind-tunnel to check the time-honored figures on lift/drag coefficients.  The figures were wrong.  When ship propellers proved inadequate, a stroke of genius led to them transforming their wing profile into the propeller blade, after giving it the appropriate twist.  When a week-long plague of clothes-piercing mosquitoes descended upon their camp, they endured.  When the sea came up the duneless shore and flooded the floor of their hut, they moved their beds to the rafters.  When the chill began to freeze the pools on the sand into ice, they stayed.  When Sunday, December 16th, dawned bright and clear with perfect winds--they rested.  When Monday, December 17th, was frozen and cold with fitful winds again--they flew.  Mankind left the ground.  Sixty-six years later, he was on the moon.

The place is changed.  The brothers might not even recognize it now.  But something of their spirit remains, in moments and corners: in the tall monument to the indomitable will of some men to take in their lifetime one more step towards the mandate to subdue the earth; in the thrill of the park ranger's voice as he describes for the thousandth time the genius of the wing-warp mechanism, and sees the recognition of that genius spark to life for the first time in a hundred pairs of captivated eyes; in the airstrip that resides almost invisibly at the back of the field, waiting patiently for some other flyer from somewhere in the world to descend and pay his respects to his first ancestors; and in the stiff nor'-easterly winds that still, ever-changing and incessant, sweep across the sands of Kitty Hawk. 

Someday, I think, I shall return to Kill Devil Hill.  If I can, I shall come in an airplane, and I will be at the controls.

Tuesday, June 6

Jockey's Ridge.  The largest live (meaning unvegetated and thus still mobile) sand dune in the country.  It was made into a National Park in the '70s, after a woman stood in front of a bulldozer.  Three main ridges migrate northeast and southwest, as the seasons dictate, between the outer dune ridge and the inner maritime forest.  They change in shape and size constantly, but somehow survive even the worst hurricanes.  As the years pass, however, the movements add up to a slow southwesterly crawl.  A miniature golf course has already been submerged: only the towers of the castle are now visible, and the sand that covers them sometimes spills onto the highway beyond.  The dunes are encroaching on the civilization that has encroached on them. 

Around the edges of the hills are scrubby forest and brakes of trees stunted by wind and sand: loblolly pine, wax myrtle, red oak, live oak, bayberry, black cherry, sassafras.  Underneath and around and among them lurk trumpeter vines, pale yellow five-petalled beach heather, and twining grapevines with clusters of pinhead grapes, bright green and infantile like the tiny acorns above them.  The dunes themselves are barren, save for here and there where an old fence holds up the hill underneath it, or a clump of beach-grass sinks its roots forty feet down to the water, and makes a permanent hillock of green around which the sands whip and fall, and more plants congregate.  A very few creatures--ants, and ant-lions, and tiger beetles--make their homes on the dunes themselves, and burrowed deeply down are the miniscule spadefooot toads, waiting mucous-cloaked for months or years until the heavy rains drop pools large and lasting enough to raise the next generation of tadpoles to maturity, before the dryness comes again.

The sand is chiefly quartz and feldspar, and chiefly brown, like most sand.  Some fraction of it is black magnetite, which because it is heavier drops to the backside of the sand ripples, accentuating the ridges like eyeshadow.  It also forms thin layers alternating with the quartz, visible when any wet sand has been eroded into even the most minor cliff; my pet hypothesis is that it has to do with the earth's magnetic field (like iron filings with a horseshoe magnet), but it could just as easily be due to the propensity the earth has to fall out in layers whenever it is disturbed.

Mostly the dunes are populated by humans.  Hang-gliders, kite pilots, sandboarders, and roamers.  Out of the encircling tameness, a million of them per year come to visit these few square miles of what can seem, from certain low angles, almost a scrap of the Sahara.  But mount to the top of any rise and scores of houses are visible a mile north or south, and the ocean half a mile east or west.  Civilization surrounds the fragile and chaotically stable wilderness, and the sea flanks fragile and determinedly resilient civilization.

What is this place, really?  Is it the natural, pulsing heart that breathes life into the body of civilization that surrounds it?  Is it the besieged sanctum of wildness, the last bastion of the true soil, erodable but indestructible?  Is it the unpredictable dangerousness that ought to have been rooted out, and has been left to trouble the inhabitants like a den of Canaanites?  Is it man subduing the earth by corralling and taming it, or is it man refusing to subdue the earth, by leaving it undisturbed? 

We returned, ate dinner, and then went on a quest for forks (which utensils our "fully furnished" condominium had a marked paucity of) and ice cream, which altogether took so inordinately long that under almost any but vacation circumstances we should have been put quite out of temper.  Under the present mood, it came off as simply another piece of a leisurely evening, which was completed by watching the first half of the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice.

I have also now finished Chesterton's disquisition on the problem of evil. 

Wednesday, June 7

The end of the waffles, the Kitty Hawk museum, and the island.  The latter bears mention.

It is probably safe to assume that during portions of the year, there are more houses on this island than there are inhabitants.  As we drove back--having caught the pink-disc sunset at the northern tip, off the estuary pier of the Currituck lighthouse (last to be built and left unpainted to showcase the outer layer of its million bricks), just to the south of the fenced-off wild horse preserve--we passed through and beside numberless subdivisions full of what can best be termed "inconspicuous nonconsumption."

Here, at the remote end of a 100-mile long sandbar, twenty miles from the nearest bridge to the mainland, sit thousands upon thousands of houses, three deep between the road and the water, three stories high and frequently sprawling out into two or more wings, and flinging themselves up into cupolas, garrets, turrets, gables, and spiral-staircase lookouts.  Some are covered entirely in untreated wooden shingles; one or two are brick; most are painted in gay colors ranging through all the pastels right down to blazing royal blue; all are well-stocked with decks and balconies, and full of many and large windows.  They probably cost, disregarding the real estate, anywhere from $100,000 to three million apiece.  And they are mostly empty.

It was after 8:00 on our southward drive, and getting dark.  Perhaps a third of these houses had a light on anywhere inside (usually just the greatroom), and a fraction of those, of course, were merely to discourage burglars.  Most were dark.  Here at the inconvenient end of what, two generations ago, was considered a worthless strip of untillable, unminable, unforestable, swamp-rimmed, wind-bitten, mosquito-infested, and navigationally hazardous land, there now reside probably several billion dollars worth of secondary (or tertiary) homes, pools, appliances, boats, and insurance policies (and a small town every five or ten miles to support them), all waiting on the convenience of their owners, who will arrive in the summer and stay for a few weeks or months, as their fancy takes them, and then return to wherever they live and work, in order to pay for it all.  It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon.

Most of these houses are never seen by anyone but their owners and friends.  They are as private as one could hope for in any modern community.  They are opulent without being particularly ostentatious; spacious and yet cramped against their neighbors; almost quaint while yet remaining wholly up-to-date; they are somehow kept in good repair in despite of salt wind, sun, and the occasional hurricane; and they must undoubtedly positively drink money, even though most of them only get used perhaps four months out of the year. 

Inconspicuous nonconsumption.  Curious.

The Currituck lighthouse, and indeed all the lighthouses, provided an intriguing contrast.  Here, at lonely points around the shoals, the keepers and their families (yes, they apparently mostly had families) lived in near-solitude, waiting on the infrequent resupply ships, dragging forty-pound barrels of oil up eighty or several hundred steps--just enough for one night's burn--trimming the wicks, cleaning the lenses and prisms of soot every morning, and keeping the lamp burning through the vengeful nor'-easters that sank enough ships to give this place the name "Graveyard of the Atlantic." 

As we learned later at the Bodie Island light, the lighthouse network was created and funded by the ninth act of Congress.  The keepers were sworn to their duty, and were apparently very much the "who only stand and wait" sort of heroes; but heroes nonetheless.  They were content to be invisible; to provide a salvific service to people who would always appreciate the light, but never thank the men who tended it.  They held aloft the brightest lamps; but were not themselves illumined.  This, I think, is part of what it means to be humble.  The light, after all, does not belong to the keeper.

We also finished watching P&P.  Interesting contrast between it, our version and the new film.  I won't spare the time for an in-depth compare-and-contrast, but I objectively think ours may be the best of the three (though I wish we could have had Georgiana; both film versions did absolutely lovely things with her...).

Thursday, June 8

Roanoke.  The historical site, the Elizabethan Gardens, and the drama of The Lost Colony.  The weather throughout was very nicely orchestrated: warm, but not oppressively hot, and decently cloudy; rain appeared at only three occasions: first, for about thirty seconds in the Gardens--that is, just long enough to make us stop and wish for umbrellas, which was just long enough for us to take note of the curious and highly uncharacteristic cheeping the pair of cardinals was making in the small tree by the path, which led me to discover the large and hungry black snake that was coiling its way up to their nest, and to summarily remove it (with the help of a nearby plant-sign; it was rather fierce)--; second, a torrential downpour, for exactly all of the ten minutes we were in the car that afternoon, driving the "Weeping Radish" German restaurant; and third, a thoroughly innocuous sprinkling in the last few minutes of The Lost Colony. 

The Gardens were very nice, and included, in addition to the snake, a multitude of plants (all decently and properly labeled); a very recent bronze statue of Elizabeth I, cradling a bunch of bronze roses in her left arm (and an even-more-recent birds'-nest in her left hand); a wasp laying its egg in a hole in the ground, and packing the dirt in with her head; a number of old stone fountains; a very considerable live oak, dating probably back to the 1600s; an overabundant population of squirrels; a gazebo overlooking the Sound; and a friendly gardener who told us all about the Shakespearean herb garden, and gave us burdock flowers and apple mint and rue and other things to munch on. 

The play was a true spectacle.  We took the $3 backstage tour prior to the thing... they have possibly the best backstage in the world, seeing as it directly abuts the Sound, and is complete with a fireworks pier, a visiting pod of dolphin, and a "ship" (meaning three masts and rigging on wheels) that runs in a track behind the set and is (we're told) the largest prop pretty much anywhere.  The well-equipped costume shop runs with four people, who constantly mend, repair, rebuild, and clean (chiefly with Lysol) about 10,000 pieces of costumery, some of them dating back to the fifties or so.  It's quite the operation.  About a thousand hopefuls (many of them Roanoke islanders) try out every year for 85 roles, and sometimes they wind up with some very good people (Andy Griffith, etc.).  Unfortunately, their rehearsal season is all of three weeks long, and even running 9 AM to 1 AM most days (!!!), the bottom line is, that's only long enough to get the lines and the choreography down, and not much else.  As vast and elaborate and spectacular as the thing was, the characterizations just didn't quite come through the way they needed to.  Queen Elizabeth was being played for the opening week by Lynn Redgrave, who did a superb job, but most of the actors, even the principals, fell severely short in terms of volume (consistently loud with no variation), pacing (set cadence with no variation), and general sympatheticness (which was also partly the fault of the [now heavily abridged] script).  It is the beginning of the season, and maybe they'll improve--and I do still recommend seeing it, if you're ever in Roanoke--but it just wasn't nearly as engaging as it should have been.  All of which to say: Eden Troupe, in spite of all its limitations, is fundamentally going about drama the right way.  And this is an encouraging thought.

Friday, June 9

Driving back.  We went the long way, from Kitty Hawk down to Ocracoke, nearly the end of the hundred-mile chain, and then over to the freeway by way of back roads.  More lighthouses.  Two ferries, either side of Ocracoke, the first of which was chiefly spent in a Wright-brothers-inspired study of the attendant seagulls as examples of general aerodynamic control.  They're quite amazing, actually.  Not only can they flock behind the boat in a dense swarm without colliding, not only can they pluck a piece of bread from one's fingers or a cracker from mid-air with the utmost precision, not only can they hover in mid-air, but they can do it all while maintaining the precise speed of the boat, in a headwind, and frequently without even flapping their wings.  I have seen them glide along beside us, unmoving, neither flapping to gain altitude or thrust, nor shedding altitude to gain speed--simply motionless--for twenty seconds or more at a time.  In a headwind.  I still don't know how they do it.  Maybe they catch the pseudo-thermal coming up and over the front of the boat.  Maybe they're just that efficient of flyers.  I don't know.  Call them "vermin of the skies" if you like, but I call them marvels of engineering.  And I think God calls them beautiful.

GNLD strategizing on the way back.  We also listened to a number of CDs about proper communication; very helpful, and the more so because I got to put some of it into practice at my brother's party the next evening.  The basic gist of it all is "be interested, genuinely and obviously interested, in the person you're talking to, and they'll respond."  Fancy that.  And it works.  Weird, huh?

Bed at five AM.

And that was my week.  Quite good, on the whole: semi-relaxing, semi-profitable, fun, informative, with a fair deal of good communication with the parents.  Dumped most of the Ideal Husband footage to the hard disc, so I can start on that soon.  Read a good chunk of Psalms, Proverbs, and Hebrews... and about half of Confucius' Analects.  More on that later, maybe, if I come to any useful conclusions on it.  But this is unwieldishly long already.  Maybe I'll toss some pictures in later, when I can get to them. 

Oh, and church today was pretty decent, even if it was on a movie screen and rather on the "emergent" side of things.  (I went to my brother's church for a change....)  You might want to watch the video once they’ve got it up; should be week 4 in the "Secrets of Life" series.  Just click the “experience this week's message” button.  Yeah, yeah, I know, but suppress the "postmodern-infatuation-with-"experience"-makes-me-gag reflex; it’s a good message anyhow, about responsibility and singleness and waiting and holiness and stuff.  It even had the quote from Tolkien, and I daresay some portion of the thing made everyone squirm at at least one point.  So it was good.

Dinner.

Tomorrow I'll be gone all day at Biltmore with my brother, cousin, his fiancee, and some other random people.  Biltmore is a good place.  Everyone should go at least once.  

Then Sunday my parents and I are leaving for the NC Outer Banks, for a week.  (Dan is working, Steph will be in Honduras.)  Needless to say, I'll be pretty much inaccessible, except by phone.  I may check e-mail sporadically, if possible.  Not much use in telling you all what we plan on doing (work, non-work, etc.), but I may have some interesting tidbit reports when I get back.  We'll see.

Be good.

1. X3 is overall a worthy third part to the saga, but would have been better if it (a) hadn't tried so hard to be both conclusion and set-up for sequels, and (b) had been really willing to kill off some of its leads.  There's something anticathartic about delicately killing (or "normalizing") a main character, and then saying "oh, but not really."  (What?  You didn't stay till the end of the credits?  Fine.  It'll cost you another $7 to see the rest what I'm talking about.  Serves you right.)

2. It nevertheless occurs to me that not a bad definition of "epic" is perhaps "a story big enough to accommodate one of its characters descending into death, and coming back again."  Usually it's a cheat in some way, because it's a man, and men can cheat death, but not overcome it.  In the old myths and epics, it's a god.  Gods can overcome death, at least every spring.  One can do it permanently.

3. Kingdom of Heaven is ok, at least in the director's cut version.  In spite of the vitriolic Christian ravings, it isn't actually raving Muslophilic propaganda: in fact it's trying to say good things.  It wants good things, anyhow.  But it can't distinguish Christendom from Christianity, and so it pretty much rejects the Answer out-of-hand.  For this and other reasons, it is not epic (its length notwithstanding).  It feels, in fact, like Lawrence of Arabia, only with a point.  Just not a theme, or any other unifying factor beyond its main character.

4. Not even Eastern arch-formality can pass American democratization unscathed.  I've just been to my sister's black-belt ceremony, and the schizophrenic disparity between marial-art formality and Tocquevillian democratic informality was positively mind-bending.  Allow me to sketch a portrait.

A double row of very dangerous persons stands at attention, garbed in white and belted from one end to the other in a spectrum that runs yellow to black.  In front of every third figure there rests a candle--almost the only source of illumination in the chamber, apart from the high windows letting in the diffuse gray light from the storm-smothered dusk.  At the head of the column, in the middle of the room and opposite the dark mouth of the entrance, stands the sensei, feet apart, grey-bearded, back-light silhouetted by a lamp angled upwards to transfigure the white cross behind him into a brilliant incandescence.  Also behind him, on the floor and flanking the cross, are semicircles of candles, behind which the old black belts stand; beside them are empty spaces and candles, for the new.  There is a solemnity in the darkening atmosphere, created by the stiffness and the import of the occasion, and fostered by the haunting music that provides a constant backdrop to every proceeding.  As the dozen or so who are to advance walk back up to the head of the gauntlet, pass down it, followed by the respectful bows of their comrades, kneel, receive their belt, render it up again to be tied on them by the master, then retrace their steps to the head of the column and pass down it again, this time at a new and long-striven-for rank--

--there is applause.  The occasional hoot.  Perhaps a few affirming words from the sensei in his warm Southern accent.  The recipient reaches the end of the aisle, kneels again, and blows out his candle--his ten-cent nub of candle, resting on a paper plate so as not to drip wax on the carpet of the church's gymnasium floor.  He passes up to his place and stands, surrounded by his fellows, his new candle, and the Bose CD/radio from which the music--a soundtrack to The Last Samurai or something similar--is flowing.  It all closes with soaring, almost operatic solo of "How Great Thou Art"--truncated to half a verse and the refrain, and also courtesy of the CD player, to which the assembly listens in a silence that falls somewhere between reverent and awkward.

It is a curious feeling.  The grandeur and the solemnity and the pomp and ceremony are there, present, real--but dissipated.  Whether they have been scraped down to their last bones and filled out with cut-rate trappings, or whether they have been boiled to a varnish and then washed thinly over a potluck and an exercise in self-affirmation, I can't say.  But something here is very ancient and very real, and several other things are very modern, and yet real in spite of themselves... and much of the rest is farce and play-acting.  Nobility and discipline and honor are there... but in rags.  
Does it matter?

5. Asking "where is the line?" in regard to one of the moral/Biblical "gray areas" is not only the wrong way to go about discerning the right action, but is indeed in many cases a species of legalism.  The Pharisees draw the line very carefully as far to the conservative side as they can, so that they can very precisely put the hoi polloi--the "sinners"--on the wrong side of it; the conscience-tethered would-be wantons draw the line very carefully as far to the liberal side as they can, so that they can get as close to wickedness as possible without actually falling in.  Both camps have different reasons for their minute and exacting definition of the thin bright line, but they are both concerned primarily with the line.  With the rules.  With the Law.  Not with grace, for grace is for those who transgress the Line; and we are so clever about defining the line that it is impossible for us ever to transgress it.  Thus Christ condemns the Pharisees who say "corban" and tithe of their mint, and Paul condemns those who say "all things are permissible" and eat meat with no consideration for their brothers.

6. Rest is made necessary and possible by diligence in work.  Indolence on the Sabbath does not result in rest, but in restlessness.

7. Some of my laundry from last week is still missing.  But the hamsters live in the laundry room, so there's at least a good reason to go looking for it.

Luke 16:10 (NASB) - "He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much."

This is a highly literal translation, wholly unlike the NIV's botching, which reduces it "whoever can be trusted" and "whoever is dishonest."  The distinction is not between degrees of trustworthiness, but between faithfulness and unrighteousness.  

It's a bit of a jump, but I think there's probably a connection to all these verses, as well:

Matthew 13:31-32 - "He presented another parable to them, saying, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds; but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.'"

Matthew 17:19-20 - "Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, 'Why could we not cast it out?'  And He said to them, 'Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, "Move from here to there," and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you.'"

Mark 9:24 - "And Jesus said to him, '"If you can"!  All things are possible to him who believes.'  Immediately the boy's father cried out and began saying, 'I do believe; help my unbelief.'"

Luke 17:5 - "And the apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith!'  And the Lord said, 'If you had faith like a mustard seed....'"

Faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains; but it does not follow that it is meant to remain small.  Faithfulness practiced is faithfulness growing.  Unrighteousness practiced is unrighteousness growing.  Unbelief is, I think, a kind of unrighteousness (for we are commanded to have faith).  To increase one's faith is to see one's unbelief diminish; and it is probably fair to say that unrighteousness decreases at a similar and concurrent rate, when we truly walk by faith, "and do not fulfill the lusts of the flesh."  

So: be faithful in the little things, my brothers, my sisters.  Allow the Lord to increase your faith.  Allow Him to do the impossible.

I have just (just) finished Timothy Zahn's latest masterpiece, Night Train to Rigel.  With the exception of the dedication ("For Pastor Rick House--who has helped me keep on the rails"), it is one of the more non-overtly Christian pieces of science fiction I have ever read.  Last time (The Green and the Gray) Zahn was exploring marriage.  This time he's dealing with Christian irony.

Needless to say, Perrine and Oxford both inadequately define irony.  For a kicking-off point, here are their best efforts:

Perrine:
Irony of situation—a situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem appropriate.
Irony—a situation, or a use of language, involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy.

OED:
2. fig. A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things. (In F. ironie du sort.)
[2.] spec. in Theatr. (freq. as dramatic or tragic irony), the incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy.

The etymology is the Greek eirōneia, "dissimulation, ignorance purposely affected"--a Socratic technique.  Though used for a different purpose, the Greek "dramatic irony" (which, tellingly, is equivalent to "tragic irony") is much the same thing: the actor feigns ignorance of the bitter truth so that the tragedy may come home the more forcefully.  The character expects something good, when the actor knows that what will actually come can only be bad.  Hence the poignant disjunct between hopeful expectation and bitter consummation; the irony is built on the lack of fulfillment.  It is incongruity.  It is the wicked and miserable ending, "a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things."  What is hoped for is missed by a hair, or dashed to pieces at the last second.  It is as if the tender epithamalion were to end with a sudden revelation of unfaithfulness, and instant divorce.  That is the nonChristian irony: when expectation is vain, because Fate is cruel. 

But Christian irony is not like that at all.  It is--naturally, but perhaps unexpectedly--fully the reverse.  Christian irony is not unexpected incongruity, it is unexpected congruity.  It is "synchronicity."  It is improbable rightness, hope-unlooked-for, "joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief"--but it is not grief.  It is that which is wildly, hopelessly, unthinkably unlikely, even impossible, and yet that which is also most right, and that which ultimately comes to pass, after maturing secretly in its own silent womb, drinking in the amniotic wine of gleeful expectation for untold ages, and then being suddenly birthed upon a lightless world all in a blinding instant.  No matter how much grief may be caught up in its wake, it is eternally and unquenchably joyful--for here, Death works backwards: the wake precedes the birth, and the birth precedes the wedding.

Christian irony is Sauron's power and pride bringing about his own destruction.  It is the revelation of Ernest's true filial identity.  It is the plaguey nuisance Gilbert Blythe being revealed as Anne's one true love.  It is the real heroes turning out to be the weak Hobbits--because their weakness is really humility, and their humility is their strength.  In Zahn, it is the full circle of Yandro, Hardin's aim, an unstoppered bottle of Jack Daniels, and the triumph of the chipmunks.  It is the Quadrail being both the instrument of evil and the means of its demise.  It is the freeing of Isaac when--and because--they lay themselves on the altar.  Christian irony is the Great Inversion: when that which is most backwards is that which is most fully proper and perfect.  It is life by means of death, victory through defeat, strength in weakness, eternity in time, God in man.  It is the useless, senselessly foiled thing becoming suddenly the lynchpin of everything; the dry and wasted bones reappearing as the skeleton key.  It is the miserable wreck of Sméagol becoming, against his will, the agent of final salvation.  It is the broken and discarded bit of rubble becoming the Head of the Corner.

Christian irony is not a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things."  It is a mockery of the willful and evil unfitness of things.  It is a greater fulfillment than any promise could ever convey; it is the realization of a fitness that does not merely abolish ruination, but recreates it into something even better than that which was ruined. 

Christian irony is, in short, gospel.  It is all things working together for good. 

Who would want any other story?

So, as per his request, I bought my brother Orthodoxy for Christmas.  But since we haven't yet got round to opening presents, or even in all cases (as this one) to wrapping them, I've been reading it myself.  It's no good trying to summarize, for the thing shan't improve upon abridgement (nor could I be trusted to abridge it without ending up with something considerably more lengthy than the original), so I shall simply give a few choice excerpts, without context and (if I can manage it) without comment.

"In short, oddities only strike ordinary people.  Oddities do not strike odd people.  This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.  This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever.  The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.  But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.  Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous.  You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.  The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.  The sober realistic novel of today discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world."  (p. 20)

[abridged comments (can't help myself): reference PHC culture vs. "normal" public school culture; Disney fairy tales, and superhero stories (the best ones are always about the normality of the abnormal "super," and how his abnormality impinges on his normal life); Dealing With Dragons (which requires a human protagonist in its dragonish story); and the entirety of the Novel course.]


"Now, as I explain in my introduction, I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view.  And I have described at length my vision of a maniac for this reason: that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers.  That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell [an asylum], I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning of to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one.  They all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense."  (p. 27)

[reference, among other thingss, ConLaw and the pontifications of the Supreme Court.]


"But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity.  It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity.  When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth.  There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal.  The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and the higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.
...
As we have taken the [infinite but confined] circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health.  Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out.  For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature, but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller.  But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape.  Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing.  The circle returns upon itself and is bound.  The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."  (p. 32-33)

[reference Metaphysics (substances, unity through change, and types of infinities); and the etymology of "sarcasm."]


"But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason.  Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature.  But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can ever learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.  The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but is so happens that it is a practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man doubtful of his efforts, which might make him work harder.  But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."  (p. 37)

[reference the fallacy of some Christians in lusting for humility in everything, and being humble on behalf of the Faith, and not merely their own frailty.]


And that's only in the first chapter and a half.  Needless to say, you must all go out and acquire a copy of the book at once.

Somebody ask an intelligent question or three about the Novel connection, and I'll see if I can't spiel about that for a while, after I've processed it a bit more....