When you express concern about any new social or technological development, people will show up shouting “Moral panic!” But that’s not an idea, it’s a spell: they’re trying to banish bad thoughts. It’s a form of apotropaic magic, and it’s one of the chief activities on social media.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
Adam Mars-Jones: “Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys can’t match.”
A coda to my Emperor Constantine series: The Emperor Julian.
And I’ve put the whole series on one page.
From an essay I wrote four years ago recommending our attention to an idea in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:
To imagine yourself as you might have been in another place and time is to practice the dialectic of sameness and difference in a way that enhances your self-understanding, your experience of the human lifeworld, without risking damage to a neighbor. As I argue in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, one of Thomas Pynchon’s characters was right to say that “personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and reading works of the past is an excellent way to increase that bandwidth without suffering from the tensions associated with projects like John Howard Griffin’s. But to imagine yourself into another life can be a powerful application of the argument I make there, and I am tempted to argue that the writing of a Castalia-style Life would make an excellent senior project for every university student.
Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes. So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money.
Mattix points out that stories about these “banned” books usually include Amazon links for people who want to purchase them. I’ve long been annoyed by this: a library that chooses not to buy a particular book, or a school that chooses not to assign it, is not banning it — even when the book is wrongly or unwisely sidelined.
Here I complete my series on Sayers’s play The Emperor Constantine — though there will be a kind of epilogue next week on Julian the Apostate.
How Kyoto, Japan Became the World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap:
Julia Maeda, who runs a high-end travel company in Japan (she recently helped plan a honeymoon for a billionaire’s daughter), said she sometimes struggles with clients who treat a trip to Kyoto like a safari. “You want to bag the big five,” she said. “You want to see the lion and the elephant, and you want to go to the Golden Pavilion and Fushimi Inari,” as well as Arashiyama, Kiyomizu-dera, and Nijo Castle. Maeda often asks clients if they’re “strong enough” to come home from Japan and tell their friends they bagged only one or two. “A lot of people are not strong enough,” she said. “They want the selfies.”
A definition of moral and psychological strength for our time.