soccer Saturday
I’m looking forward to the Gunners’ inevitable draw with Swansea this morning (presumably with a Giroud equalizer in extra time). I don’t know how I became an Arsenal supporter, which may help explain why I don’t know how to stop, but I often wish I could stop, given the peculiar frustrations of Arsenal fandom: no club raises hopes in order to dash them with quite the style that Arsenal manages every. single. season.
When I first started following the Premier League I decided that, since I am from Birmingham, Alabama, I should support Birmingham, England’s Aston Villa. Somehow that just didn’t stick. And looking at how things have turned out for Villa fans in the past few years, maybe being an Arsenal supporter isn’t the worst thing.
mea maxima culpa
I spent a bit of time and energy trying to convince my Catholic friends that Pope Francis’s apparent pastoral relaxation of the rules for admission to Communion in Amoris laetitia was possibly salutary and in any case not that big a deal. But I did not anticipate this. I am so, so sorry.
translation (2)
“Everything is political” = “Everything is political when people whose politics I dislike try to talk about something other than politics, but have you seen my kitty video?”
translation
“You may not have said it, but you implied it” = “I continue to insist that you believe this nasty thing even though I have no evidence in support of my insistence.”
The Tree
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1240”]
Wistman’s Wood[/caption]
In the last chapter, Fowles relates a trip to Wistman’s Wood, an ancient scrap of oak forest on Dartmoor. He finds himself struck dumb: “Fairy-like, self-involved, rich in secrets … such inturned peace, such profound harmlessness, otherness, such unusing … all words miss, I know I cannot describe it.” It’s both moving and humbling to watch so great a writer labour at the outer reaches of language. I went there myself this September, even locating what I thought might be the same “patriarchal gnome-oak” that had sheltered Fowles as he racked his brains. I sat down, too, wondering if I was feeling what he had felt. Only now do I realise my mistake. Next time, I’ll put the book away and listen for what no human voice – not even John Fowles’s – can tell me.
a thought on Endo's Silence
(a comment on this post by Adam Roberts)
… let me just offer one thought about Silence (the novel — like you, I haven’t seen the movie)…. Rodrigues had always thought of himself as a Sidney Carton kind of hero, and had in a sense prepared himself for Cartonesque acts — but not for the choices he ended up facing. The key to his character, I think, is that he had always (Endo makes this clear) believed that it’s not wrong for the poor native Christians, weak as they are, to trample the fumie, but it’s wrong for him because he is a priest of God, a missionary, one presumably equipped for every challenge. It almost doesn’t matter whether he ends up trampling on the fumie or not, because his entire self-understanding is (I’m using the word advisedly) crucified by the mere fact that he has no idea what the right thing to do is. Is that really Christ telling him to trample? If so, then Christian faithfulness is not what Rodrigues always thought it was. Is it a false Christ, an apparition of his tormented mind giving him a way out? If so, then Rodrigues is not the Christian he always thought he was. The shift at the end to third-person narration is (to borrow your term) a withdrawal, but perhaps of a different kind: perhaps a gracious and compassionate turning away from the utter destruction of this man’s whole self-image.
For what it’s worth, I always think of Rodrigues in contrast to Isabella in Measure for Measure, who is given by Angelo a very similar choice: Do this thing you believe wrong or someone you care about will die. And Isabella never for a moment hesitates: “More than our brother is our chastity.“ Rodrigues may be (indeed is, in several ways) a miserable failure, but I’d rather be Rodrigues than Isabella.
And I think the plight of these two characters sheds some light on another question you raise, though in a complicating rather than simplifying way: When you learn that the choices you make for the sake of your own soul have profound consequences for other people, does that place you in a position of power? Or rather of a particularly miserable sort of powerlessness?
Horizontorium
John Jesse Barker after a design by William Mason (active 1822–1860), Horizontorium, 1832. Lithograph.
— Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton (via John Overholt on Twitter).
