The Hope of Austin Farrer

 I would no longer attempt, with the psalmist, ‘to set God before my face’.  I would see him as the underlying cause of my thinking, especially of those thoughts in which I tried to think of him.  I would dare to hope that sometimes my thought would become diaphanous, so that there should be some perception of the divine cause shining through the created effect, as a deep pool, settling into a clear tranquility, permits us to see the spring in the bottom of it from which its waters rise.

(from ‘The Glass of Vision’ by Austin Farrer)

Under Gemini: A Memoir by Mary Britton Miller (aka Isabel Bolton - 1883 - 1975)

 I read a lot and there is the danger of dulling by surfeit the critical faculty.  There are too many bad books reading over my shoulder sliming with cliche the  the work in hand .  One thing that causes me to put down a book immediately is the use of the continuous present.  To the block Hilary Mantel.  It seems to me a cheap attempt at immediacy and if the preterite won’t give your story force; it’s a weakling.

And then I was reading ‘Under Gemini, a Memoir’ by Mary Britton Miller and I realised that the continuous present in the first chapter was not producing the throw reflex.   Why?  Respondit Bergson by ouija:

This is not the Continuous Present it is the Durational Present.  These events frame a soul and make a world: now.   Miller is a very great writer and does not continue this device which is not a device past the opening.  First in ordinary time she tells us what she is going to tell us.

"There is a legend that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed. Our nurse, Mathilda, unable to tell which twin was which, called upon our mother to decide. She replaced the ribbons, saying I was Mary and the other child was Grace. Let us assume that she was right, for I was christened Mary and my twin was christened Grace; and so, awarding her the honor of having entered this world five minutes before I did, I will attempt to recapture the memories of our life together on this earth.”

Then she tells us:

“There is a room darkened against the light and on the couch a gentleman with a dark moustache is lying fast asleep. He snores. Behind the couch I kneel and kneeling with me is my other self. Identical excitement, terror, fearful joy invades us. We wait. I watch my duplicate arise and I am rising with her. There is a moment for decision and then a swift resolve—a dreadful sharing of the consequences that will follow the awful act we contemplate; and then, excitement urging us, we spit directly in our father’s upturned face. He rises. We flee while panic overtakes us and then a sudden darkness, the waters of continuing experience engulf our father and his wrath. We have no further memory of him whatever.”

In the same way their memory of mother is cut off.  The sudden night that overwhelms them is due to the death by cholera of both parents.  All at once the life of the five children in the family becomes the care of a maternal uncle and his organising wife Aunt Anna.  They now live with their grandmother and a carer which they are instructed to call Aunt Julia.  Apart from a ceremonial visit on Sundays to Aunt Anna’s they are left alone to express themselves by mighty acts of domestic delinquency.

Aunt Anna is no downtrodden and subdued Victorian lady:

"The spectacle of our Aunt Anna affected us quite differently. Whatever charm and geniality she might have had was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed. Her clothes fitted her tightly; they were handsome and well brushed, not glamourous at all but with their own special elegance. She did not approve of charm; she listened rather disapprovingly to Uncle Jim and always asked practical questions, saying, "My dear Jim, I don't agree. This should not be done. I don't approve." She said, "You must" and "You must not" with emphasis.”

The sweet sadness of the denouement of this memoir comes across the century.  Now my problem is, what am I going to read after this elevation into contact with a real genius whose obscurity was self sought?  I think more of her and then taper off with Elizabeth Bowen.  Maybe Mrs. Gaskell first then Bowen.  That’s what I’ll do.

American Classic.

He's Sinking Fast Dr. Jill

 This is a repost and it gives me the opportunity to correct the assumption by the teaching staff of the 'Michael Smurfit Business School' that an insistence on 'Dr' when you're talking to me' is an American thing.  

Dr. Gary Santry, his full style and title.

Dr. Santry lately made a professor at the Michael Smurfit Business School in U.C.Dublin and having received an award for outstanding service from the college was to the astonishment of all discovered to be entirely bogus and with faked credentials from American schools.
Dr. Santry I presume
He was an excellent teacher and his colleagues reported only one oddity about him. He insisted on being referred to as Dr. Sanrty which they went along with considering it an eccentric American practice. In Ireland in informal professional settings like the Senior Common Room this is not done. Only medical doctors are given the title Dr. by the general public. There was a minister of health in the government who had a Phd. In Agricultural Science and used the Dr. title promiscuously. Amusing considering that the faculty was known as Bog Science. That was Dr. Michael Woods who was fully qualified to give a kiss of life to a sod of turf.

English Literature is replete with figures who never went to College or had modest degrees. I find  honorary degrees demeaning unless you actually are allowed to teach at university. Santry was an excellent teacher in an institution dedicated to instruction in the arcana of Business. They should they have given him an honorary degree and let him at it.

Christmas Menu and Lullaby

((Svengali - Et maintenant dors, ma mignonne!  Et maintenant dormir, mon cher!))

Before the First World War an editorial in the Skibbereen Eagle (West Cork) began - The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on the Tsar.  I have my eye on President Trump for the moment and foresee the Biden Xmas dinner. (excuse the bog French)

Turkey a la Orange avec les petites ballotines farci

Aperitif: Ruby Porto

Pommes de Terre ‘big guy’ / Jus Burismo surtout

Desert: Freeman souffle Y’all.

The Biden trot looks like a donkey evading a halter but of one thing we may be sure - he did not mastermind this farce.   Maybe no one did.  Maybe the materials were left lying around and right thinking people did the right thing.   If it had occurred in the Ukraine there would be talk of sending an observer there to oversee the elections in future.  Hunter, there’s a job for you.

One positive: with years of talk of American interference in the election there may not be time to start a foreign war.  Ah General Blinken.  Cue  “Wynken, Blynken and Nod”

 

The Meaning of God

 In its bewildering way paradox can make more sense than something set down plainly.  God may give meaning to our lives without our being able to give meaning to God.   Let me entertain the vertiginous thought that the meaning of God is the method of His verification namely worship.

“Standing up, Damaris realized that interpretations nearly always are wrong; interpretations in the nature of things being peculiarly personal and limited. The act was personal but infinite, the reasoned meaning was personal and finite. Interpretation of infinity by the finite was pretty certain to be wrong. The thought threw a light on her occupation with philosophies. Philosophy to Plato, to Abelard, to St. Thomas, was an act—the love of wisdom; to her——

But all that was to come. Love or wisdom, her act awaited her. She ran lightly down the stairs.”

(from <i>The Place of the Lion</i> by Charles Williams)

The Ferriter, O'Toole & Banville Trifecta

 ‘George’  a commentor on my previous post writes:

"It sounds rather like Flann O'Brien's account, collected in Further Cuttings from the Cruiskeen Lawn of a controversy between a Father Felim O Briain and a Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington. Like most of O'Brien's work, it is most amusing. It is unfortunately too long for me to type into your comment box. But the first of the subpropositions mentioned begins"1. A person born in Ireland who is a Catholic and who possibly harbours nationalistic sentiments is a low mean stupid dog; he is superstitious and priest-ridden, is forbidden to read any worthwhile books, particularly the Bible; he gratefully lies down under all the most outrageous tyrannies, and even keeps inventing new tyrannies; he is a fool and a helot ...."O'Brien said that he would invite neither O Briain nor Sheehy-Skeffington to dinner, since "I am afraid to my life of being bored."

Who was this Father O’Brian.  He used the Irish form of his name and he was the Professor of Philosophy in University College Galway - An tAthair Felim O’Briain O.F.M. Phd, D.D. B Cl.  He is down as such in the college calender of 1941.  He died in 1956.   Owen Sheehy-Skeffington was a Senator and a liberal free-thinker humanist when that was neither profitable or popular as Myles would say.   Diarmad Ferriter the historian refers to ‘Skeff’ being expelled from the Labour party because of a row in 1943 with a priest over the nature of Socialism .  This he takes in his book (The Transformation of Ireland) to be an index of the pusillanimity of the socialists of the time.   Not mentioning the name of the priest which he must have known displays the the mean-spiritedness  of the modern liberal.  You know, just a generic priest -écrasez l'infâme.

Skeff and Fr. O’Brian could have agreed on this much anyway.  The ‘priest’ is quoted in a magazine of the time - ‘The Galway Reader’ by a Senator Burke who ran a co-operative farm in Galway.

“There is a genuine grievance among the abnormally large class of miserably underpaid workers in Eire ; before an employer should spend his profits on luxuries for himself, he should ensure that his workers can satisfy their normal needs ; bread for all, before cake for anyone, is an axiom that has many centuries of Christian tradition behind it.  “In a country such as Eire, where the national income is meagre, social justice imposes special standards of sacrifice and austerity on the upper income groups. This standard of austerity is absent in this country.”

Ferriter and Fintan O’Toole are the twin interpretive pillars of the Irish Times.  Either of them is a European level bore, quite predictable on the woes of Erin a la Banville.  The trifecta of them all on the same day and issue might break the algorithm which governs the three great waves which break on the coast of Ireland.  Only the Tuatha de Danann could save us then.

John Banville: Please Stop

 John Banville who won the Booker prize before it became a demographic award doesn’t like the ‘woke’ folk.  O.K. fine, splendid but he had to assure the potential audience for his new book; one of those written by his Benjamin Black alter ego, that he was not a troglodyte or worse - an old white man.  (It’s bad detective fiction.  I read one of them and there was a series on television.  They are not very good.)

In any case they are set in the ‘50‘s in Dublin and contain all the cliches about that era.  Archbishop McQuaid - wicked old prelate, priest ridden Ireland, mother and baby homes etc, etc.  Banville deplores them without the craw thumping of false regret which is one feature he shares with the ‘woke’.  We all of us in this new dawn are cut off from our history and on its right side which is the left side.

An article written by him in the Irish Times, he was literary editor there once, runs along that deep rutted track.  In  the comments section below someone (Patrick60) wrote a rejoinder which ‘needed to be said:

banville criticised

“Here we go again ... Ireland and the Catholic Church in the 1950s. Could we for a moment lift our eyes from Ireland's supposedly unique, priest-ridden backwardness in this period to consider what was happening in other countries? Many of our EU friends were busy fighting vicious colonial wars, involving in all cases horrific atrocities. This included France (Tunisia, Algeria), the UK (Cyprus, Kenya), the Netherlands (Indonesia late-40s) and Belgium (the Congo 1960). Racial oppression and violence were rife (egregiously so in the US and South Africa but far wider than that). Eugenics still had a strong following, nowhere more so than in Sweden which pursued enforced sterilisation for the "mentally defective" up to 1976 and required it for gender re-assignment surgery until 2012. (Yes you read that correctly.) Unmarried motherhood had the same stigma everywhere and every country had their equivalent of mother and baby homes. It was not a peculiarly Irish or Catholic thing. Nor was homosexuality viewed differently in Ireland to other countries in the 1950s. And all this is before we talk about the Eastern bloc countries for which the Irish left - including prominent elder statesmen of the left - had such a soft spot, fully aware of the nature of these regimes. Other countries seem to be able to confront their history with some measure of perspective and context. We prefer to wallow in it. The 1950s began 60 years ago. Give it a rest, John.”