European exhibition of arts & crafts, Leipzig, Herbert Bayer (1927)
Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.So there are shadows on our liberated society, doubts that creep in around the edges, moments when scolds and moralists and even popes almost seem to have a point. Which helps explain, perhaps, the strange, self-contradictory defensiveness that greets the Catholic Church’s persistent refusal to simply bless every new development and call it progress. (Nobody cares what the pope thinks — and I demand that he think exactly as I do!)
Russian movie posters, via Brendan Koerner on Twitter
For decades the prospect of a pope from outside Europe has both excited and alarmed observers of the Roman Catholic Church. As the number of Catholics has grown steadily in the Global South, the continuing domination of the church by European prelates has seemed ever more unjust. By 2030 nearly 80 percent of the world’s Catholics will live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, and Africa will be home to more Catholics than Europe itself. Is such a church to be headed forever by those from Western Europe, a region rapidly succumbing to secularism?The shift was going to come, and when it did, no country was better suited to provide the pathbreaker than Argentina. Finally we see a pope who can claim to speak for Latin America and the non-European world. For Catholics of the Global South, the symbolic move is decisive and probably marks the start of an indefinite sequence of non-European popes.
A daring thought: Might Benedict XVI earn his place in the encyclopedias chiefly as the last European pope?
Me, if I have a really good meal, al fresco, say, followed by an espresso and an eau de vie and someone offers me a cigarette? I’m going to have it. I love a cigarette. What a pleasure with, say, a grappa overlooking the harbor of Portofino on my 49th birthday. Damn, that was a good cigarette. But I have no intention of addicting myself again, because that will give me the lung cancer and emphysema that killed my dad. I’d sooner eat straight sugar than drink a regular Coke, but am I going to forgo duck confit and bacon so that I can eke out 90 years? Are you kidding me? Shoot me now.I’m sorry, I just get so goddam sick of studies and data telling me how to live, reading about this or that new diet that’s going to take pounds off my body and add countless Sound of Music years to my life. My hunch is that people don’t actually want to live longer—I think people want to be happier, to be more at ease with who they are, to feel glad when they wake up rather than dreadful, to feel good at the end of the day instead of crummy. The South Beach diet is not going to do this for you. Show me the data on how to be happy and I’ll listen. That’s what people are after and they can’t get their fingers on it. It’s not in a damned diet book, that’s for sure. It’s more likely in a pot of minestrone simmering on the stove.
U B U W E B has a couple PDF scans of 1921 books by the amazing George Grosz.
Let me propose the following neo-Stoical attitude to the problem, which will no doubt ease the psychic pain of the next OMG-my-data-has-gone-from-a-“free”-service! controversy. If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.
A reader of Williams’s biography is likely to come to the conclusion that he was rather creepy. His “romantic theology” – which understands erotic love not so much as a path or ladder to the love of God but as a form of the love of God – encouraged him to flirtations, at the very least, with young women (Williams was married and had a son). He seems to have had the same sado-masochistic tendencies as the young Jack Lewis, though without ever escaping them. His fascination with the occult exceeded what most Christians think of as appropriate bounds. Yet few who knew him saw him in this light. Lewis adored him, finding him chivalrous, generous, even selfless, as well as a major thinker and a brilliant (though often too obscure) writer. “I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams,’” he once wrote in a letter to his friend, “and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame.” T. S. Eliot wrote, “I think he was a man of unusual genius, and I regard his work as important.” The poet W. H. Auden, who worked with Williams on a collection of poetry he edited for Oxford University Press, had perhaps a stronger response still, though he never knew Williams as well as the others. Many years after first meeting Williams, he would recall that interview in surprising terms, and mark it as one of the events that led him to embrace the Christian faith:For the first time in my life, [I] felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity… . I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man – we never discussed anything but literary business – I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving. (I later discovered that he had had a similar effect on many other people.)Yet in all this praise there remains – and all the praisers are well aware of this – an element of the inexplicable. How could a conversation about “literary business” generate such an aura of “personal sanctity”? Likewise, Eliot, after having affirmed the value of Williams’s work, goes on to say, “it has an importance of a kind not easy to explain.” And Lewis has to agree with a colleague – probably Tolkien – who says that Williams was “one in whom, after years of friendship, there remained something elusive and incalculable.” Williams simply made an exceptionally powerful impression on almost all who knew him, and his work similarly affects people, though in more variable ways: for some, like me, his books, especially his novels, are disturbing. (Tolkien, though he liked Williams personally very much, found his writing “wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous.”) I find that I do not trust Williams; though almost all who knew him trusted him implicitly.
A passage on the eminently weird Charles Williams from my biography of C. S. Lewis. Prompted by this brief reflection on Williams by Caleb Crain.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxfW2q_D0RY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
This is adorable beyond words, but I have a special affection and respect for the introvert on the far right who turns his back on the whole farcical procedure.