Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics. They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located–they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country. They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another–a girl I had known in graduate school–a...
To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
Condemned to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
If any of Trump’s supporters thought they were voting to restore they old American Republic, this is a time for bitter repentance. If they merely hoped they would get someone to play the man, they still have reason to hope that on balance they did the right thing.
Although the revolution did not take place all at once, the Christian doctrine of “one flesh” influenced virtually every aspect of marriage. Celibacy remained the highest ideal in the Middle Ages, but marriage was an institution created by God for the procreation of the human race, though the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake was condemned even in marriage.
Early specialization has eliminated the common culture that could produce a D’ Arcy Thompson or an Anthony Powell or a Douglas Young, and we are left with an intellectual life dominated by trained savages who can do their job, understand (perhaps) some little corner of the universe (and, in the case, of cosmologists, that corner is very tiny, indeed!), but they cannot integrate what they have learned into a larger picture. Read popular books by scientists, and whenever they step outside their field of specialization, they either fall back on the platitudes of the Durants or, what is worse, rely...
The folly of opinions–and the people who have them. This is a revised version of the original essay that was published in somewhat truncated form in September, 2006.
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
Ave Maria! maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden’s prayer!
Thou canst hear though from the wild,
Thou canst save amid despair.
