Paris 1929, in color. Via @ellouis on Twitter.
We were woken by bright sunlight, needling through the cracks in the bamboo wall, and the sound of children’s voices. I pushed open the door of our hut, and gasped at the sheer beauty of our surroundings. After all the trauma of the previous night, we’d landed in paradise. There, just a few metres away, was a crescent of silver sand lapped by the crystal water of the lake. A couple of palm trees waved lazy branches against the sun.And, as in paradise, there were angels: a gaggle of ragged smiling children had gathered at our door, chattering excitedly. As I stepped out into the sunshine, they fell silent for a moment, then burst into a chorus: “Good afternoon. Good morning. How are you? Do you speak English? What is your name? Manchester United! Give me money!”
I smiled back and chatted for a while. Gradually more and more children arrived. There must have been at least 20 of them, staring curiously as I tried to wash and clean my teeth (the electric toothbrush drew squeals of delight) and following me to the hut that served as washroom and toilet.
“Please, that’s enough. Go away now,” I pleaded.
“Gowayno,” they echoed, smiling angelically.
I retreated into our hut and closed the door, hoping they would go away. They didn’t. Little hands pattered on the walls, and little voices outside persisted: “Do you speak English? What is your name? My name is David Beckham. Merry Christmas!”
Sometimes even angels can get a bit irritating.
So what we have created in the past twenty years is a theological anomaly which has insidiously been made to seem normal: a whole cadre of priests - a third of our priesthood now - who are supposedly intrinsically disabled from exercising the charisms of spiritual unity and authority historically associated with the episcopate. It is here that the main theological scandal still lies: the implicit creation and normalization of second-class priesthood. The terrible danger is that this may now be extended into second-class episcopacy….Twenty years ago our Church voted to ordain women. We have arrived at the point when all the indications are that the current theological anomaly of priests who cannot by definition be bishops has become an unacceptable skandalon to the Church’s life. This is not because of a capitulation to secular feminism; it is, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, because of a commitment to the historic nature of Christian ordained ministry and in particular to the distinctive theological principles of Anglicanism.
While I am fully committed to the attempt to find courteously-ordered arrangements for those who currently disagree, I am completely opposed to the introduction of new incoherences into the theological picture. It is truth that is at stake. And while truth can be two-eyed, it cannot be two-faced.
Martian dunes. Supposedly. Not sure what this looks like.
Growing up, assimilating the wisdom of the past, is in great part learning how to organize the sensorium productively for intellectual purposes. Man’s sensory perceptions are abundant and overwhelming. He cannot attend to them all at once. In great part a given culture teaches him one or another way of productive specialization. It brings him to organize his sensorium by attending to some types of perception more than others, by making an issue of certain ones while relatively neglecting other ones. The sensorium is a fascinating focus for cultural studies. Given sufficient knowledge of the sensorium exploited within a specific culture, one could probably define the culture as a whole in virtually all its aspects.
Main concourse of the old Penn Station in 1962
From A Telegraph story on how rubbish from Everest is being turned into art. The caption reads, “Edmund Hillary, Mount Everest, Nepal.” Probably it’s just me, but it sure looks like there are two people in that photo.
The waiting room of New York’s old Penn Station, demolished in 1964.
In 1924 the English writer Rebecca West, traveling by train across America, wrote, “It is, you see, so exquisitely irresponsible from the very beginning. One packs one’s trunks, in no particular hurry; it will do if they are ready an hour before starting. One gives them to the hotel porter, who in return presents one with checks. Never does one think of them again till one gives the checks to the express company at the station where one ends one’s journey, and it delivers them at one’s hotel. This, you will allow, is different from England where one has to keep watch on one’s luggage as on a sick child. Thus disembarrassed, one goes nonchalantly to the train which, should one be in New York, starts from a cathedral. Europeans to whom I have said that the Americans are geniuses in architecture would be angry with me for having understated the case if I could show them the Pennsylvania station in New York. We in Europe have tried to treat the railway station in the grand manner. England made its great comic efforts in the cruet-stand Gothic of St. Pancras and the monumental mason’s nightmare of Euston, and then gave up the attempt and relapsed into the formless chaos of Victoria and Waterloo. Germany kept up the struggle longer, but to no good. Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, vast as it is, is only remarkable because it produces, as one could not have believed that masonry could, the effect of obesity. One longs to advise it to give up bread and potatoes. But here, in New York, is a marvel of noble stone arching over an infinity of pearly light, with a certain ultimate beauty in its proportions which gives a solemnity to all that happens beneath. The crowds hurrying between the booking offices and the platform look dwarfed, yet for all that, more and not less significant, as processions of worshipers do in great churches. For some things—and those great and admirable things—one must go to America.”
I might note that train travel in this country isn’t quite so elegant these days. And the current Penn Station….
Jess Nevins on pulp science fiction in Nazi Germany
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now – not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground – would be to throw down our weapons, and the betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.