Reading Trollope in the Rubble.

Reading Trollope (The Prime Minister) in the wee hours is the best time to savour the skilful pacing and alternation between the world of the righteous lawyer Wharton and the yeoman Fletcher and the vain world of the meretricious meddler Lady Glencora. At the same time in this dimension towns are being rubbelised. Some of those blocks will be cleaned of mortar to be reused for new builds. A survivor child will write that novel that moves between the earnest kibbutz armed socialism - marrying a settler - or having an affair with a Palestinian in Berlin - a newspaper in Tel Aviv covering the story - Scots Jew known as Rabbi Burns and Ali Baba doing stand up in Islington. You see,it’s easy.

If we only had old Israel over here

repost from 2017:  Has anything changed since then?  The Israelis are creeping up to the Amalekite option. God in smiting mode:

"Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (1 Samuel 15: 1)

However God was cross with the Israelites for sparing King Agag and some livestock:

"But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed."

Bibi has mentioned Amalek but didn't indicate what if anything might be spared.  There is a gas field off the Gaza coast, so there's that. 

If we only had old Israel over here

How far can you trust the moral sense of someone who thinks that Israel is a modern and liberal democracy? That is an obvious big lie, the whopper so big the stunned mind thinks there might be something to it. After a cup of strong tea you recover your wits and realise that this is the belief of someone who is so blinded by sectarian interests that the truth is beyond their reach. Like a man lost in a snowstorm they are moving in a circle thinking that they will eventually arrive in a place of safety. I often consider what the situation in Northern Ireland would be today if Israeli tactics as applied to Gaza had been used. Assassinations, razing of the family homes of convicted terrorists, drone bombs and the disregard for civilians that the Israelis attempt to justify. To qualify: their justifications are a function of their contempt in that they are not intended to persuade. 'You need this kind of thing, we don't care. Every now and then the grass needs cutting.' The Israelis are at the Cromwellian phase of dealing with the natives who are offered the choice of 'to Hell or to Connaught (Gaza)'.

At this point even the liberal voices in Israel itself that deplore I.D.F. and settler actions in the Occupied Territories seem to be part of the plan to convince doubters that there is a reasonable element that can be talked to and will listen to reason. Meanwhile expropriation and extirpation can go on. They really don't care.

I once bought by mistake an Israeli product. A packet of razor blades. The good news is that they were useless.

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland. 

 

 Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.

 

 It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence.

Etienne Gilson's Realism

 I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism.  He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity.  It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw.  

He writes of a Fr. Noel:

“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”

It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis.  Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it.  Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina.  

Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics.  He seems to me to have a strong argument.  I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being.  I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition.  Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real.  

 

The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many.  Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent.  More anon.