A different illustration is found among the elves of Lorien, in their love of beauty and their love of nature. They are Sylvan Elves (East Elves) but the rulers they choose to obey are Eldar (West Elves). They choose to be ruled by people better than themselves, in other words, exactly as we choose to be ruled by people worse.
For, ahem, some reason, I was inspired to look up this classic 2001 essay today. So many good passages here:
“What [Tolkien] did, then, was to plant in my consciousness and yours the truth that society need not be as we see it around us.”
(via triadic)
Meanwhile standard-bearer lists like the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies or Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Poll are sorely underrepresented. None of the AFI’s top 10 American films are currently streaming on Netflix; just 14 out of the list’s 100 titles are currently available there. The pickings are even slimmer from Sight & Sound’s top 100 (or 102; they rank with ties), where just 11 movies are streaming at the moment. You’ll have to look elsewhere if you want to watch Citizen Kane or The Godfather or The Rules Of The Game or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Breathless or Seven Samurai or Vertigo or Psycho (at least Hitchcock’s version; Netflix has Van Sant’s). And if students aren’t looking elsewhere, that’s troubling.
Is Our Age Degenerate?. From the set Little Blue Books (via things)
On Twitter people mostly play nice because if you say something cutting about someone, they’re likely to know in about 15 seconds. Their front pocket is going to vibrate. Contumely alert! Tweet wars are incredibly depressing. It’s like battling by throwing one frozen pea at a time. I like Twitter. If you learn how to calibrate it, the conversation is fizzy. I don’t think the Twitter world spills over much into the critical world.What’s hurt critical discourse is that there aren’t as many book review sections. It doubles the burden on anyone reviewing for the Times. You often feel like yours may be among the only national reviews a book gets. It’s as if you’re taking its yearbook photo.
When I was an editor at the Book Review, the idea of writing for the Times would make some writers freeze up. You’d assign them a book, then you’d talk to him or her on the phone a few weeks later and they’d say, “Why did you send me this steaming pile of dog waste? This book is criminally bad.” Then the review would come in and it would be eight paragraphs of the most tedious plot summary topped by a word like “lyrical.” I was often in the position of gently reminding reviewers, “You’re not writing this for the author’s mother. You’re writing it for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of serious and inquisitive people out there who will be reading you.”
Part of a series of quotes from the book, beautifully laid out by HarperOne.
Member of Congress who are refusing to raise the debt ceiling (or raise taxes) until their ancillary demands are met are acting immorally, since they are refusing to pay they debts they themselves authorized. Hopefully, they are only bluffing and have no real intention of throwing the country into a financial crisis. But even if they are lying about their true intentions, they are threatening to act immorally if they don’t get their way. As Christians we should find such behavior unacceptable. The fact that they are representing us makes such an action intolerable….There are few policy issues on which both the Biblical principle is clear and the issue transcends the political categorization. We shouldn’t waste this opportunity for Christians on the left, right, and center to come together to tell Congress to stop this political theater.
Something I find regrettable in contemporary Christianity is the degree to which it has abandoned its own heritage, in thought and art and literature. It was at the center of learning in the West for centuries—because it deserved to be. Now there seems to be actual hostility on the part of many Christians to what, historically, was called Christian thought, as if the whole point were to get a few things right and then stand pat. I believe very strongly that this world, these billions of companions on earth that we know are God’s images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them. And as God is God of the living, that means we ought to be open to the wonderful in all generations. These are my reasons for writing about Christian figures of the past. At present there is much praying on street corners. There are many loud declarations of personal piety, which my reading of the Gospels forbids me to take at face value. The media are drawn by noise, so it is difficult to get a sense of the actual state of things in American religious culture.
Jacques Maritain, from Art and Scholasticism:
There is, as I noted earlier, a fundamental incompatibility between habitus and egalitarianism. The modern world has a horror of habitus, whatever ones they may be, and one could write a very strange History of the Progressive Expulsion of Habitus by Modern Civilization. This history would go back quite far into the past. We would see – “a fish always rots by the head first” – theologians like Scotus, then Occam, and even Suarez, ill-treat, to begin with, the most aristocratic of these strange beings, namely the gifts of the Holy Spirit – not to mention the infused moral virtues. Soon the theological virtues and sanctifying grace will be filed and planed away by Luther, then by the Cartesian theologians. Meanwhile, natural habitus have their turn; Descartes, with his passion for levelling, attacks even the genus generalissimum to which the wretches belong, and denies the real existence of qualities and accidents. The whole world at the time is agog with excitement over calculating machines; everybody dreams only of method. And Descartes conceives method as an infallible and easy means of bringing to the truth “those who have not studied” and society people. Leibniz finally invents a logic and a language whose most wonderful characteristic is that it dispenses from thinking. And then comes the taste, the charming curiosity, the spiritual acephaly of the Enlightenment.Thus method or rules, regarded as an ensemble of formulas and processes that work of themselves and serve the mind as orthopedic and mechanical armature, tend everywhere in the modern world to replace habitus, because method is for all whereas habitus are only for some. Now it cannot be admitted that access to the highest activities depend on a virtue that some possess and others do not; consequently beautiful things must be made easy.
“Sir, you must turn off all electronics.”“OK.”
“Sir, please turn off the camera.”
“Ma’am, it doesn’t turn off, and it doesn’t turn on.”
“I’m sorry sir, but all electronics must be turned off until the Captain turns on the overhead lights.”
“Ma’am, it was built in 1938. It isn’t electronic. There is no On or Off, it’s completely mechanical.”
“Sir, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to put it away.”
Leica iiib. FILM.