Wendell Berry:

We will understand the world, and preserve ourselves and our values in it, only insofar as we have a language that is alert and responsive to it, and careful of it. I mean that literally. When we give our plows such brand names as “Sod Blaster,” we are imposing on their use conceptual limits that raise the likelihood that they will be used destructively. When we speak of man’s “war against nature,” or of a “peace offensive,” we are accepting the limitations of a metaphor that suggests, and even proposes, violent solutions. When students ask for the right of “participatory input” at the meetings of a faculty organization, they are thinking of democratic process, but they are speaking of a convocation of robots, and are thus devaluing the very traditions that they invoke.

Ignorance of books and the lack of a critical consciousness of language were safe enough in primitive societies with coherent, oral traditions. In our society, which exists in an atmosphere of prepared, public language—language that is either written or being read—illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger. Think how constantly “the average American” is surrounded by premeditated language, in newspapers and magazines, on signs and billboards, on TV and radio. He is forever being asked to buy or believe somebody else’s line of goods.

The line of goods is being sold, moreover, by men who are trained to make him buy it or believe it, whether or not he needs it or understands it or knows its value or wants it. …

What is our defense against this sort of language— this language-as-weapon? There is only one. We must know a better language. We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature. The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best. By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

Eve Tushnet:

Creatures, when my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant talks about her conversion to Catholicism, she sometimes notes that focusing on the conversion story is a little bizarre. Like imagine (this is the analogy she’s used) that the Pevensie children come back from Narnia, and they start telling people about it—and everyone’s reaction is, “Oh sure, talking lion, mysterious lands, terrible betrayals and redemptions, I get it. Tell us more about the wardrobe!”

There’s been a rebound in adult conversions to Catholicism. This just seems to be true by now, as far as I can tell. Numbers are still not where they were a quarter-century ago, but they are up all over the USA and in many other countries. …

But the question online-people seem to want to talk about, instead, is, “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of Discourse about whether people are coming to the Catholic Church because it’s right-wing (? not the most obvious option here but okay), or because they want to be manly men (hmm), or because of Catholic “influencers” etc. To put the fear or criticism most charitably, it’s a fear that people are entering the Church for a political persona, not an encounter with Jesus Christ.

And yet I guess all of this seems to me like an obsession with the wardrobe. Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted. The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.

As we continue to live and seek God, we generally discover that there is something in the Faith that we weren’t taught at first and desperately need. (Sometimes we were taught it, but we didn’t pay attention because we didn’t realized we would desperately need it! To slightly modify the saying of the great sage bugl0rd, on Twitter,

‘why didn’t we learn this in CCD’

bitch we did but you were drawing a picture of an eye.

Anyways.)

So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church. Those wise guides themselves rarely grasp the entire mystery (how could we?). … All of us are called to move beyond where we started. 

I suppose one could argue that a “political persona” is not, in fact, a door at all, even if you happen to find yourself standing inside a Catholic church. But the point is that the “door” is not in anyone’s control, is not in anyone’s power to define. And it is not, especially from our time- and ground-bound point of view, a permanent thing at all, let alone a status. It’s an invited step you take, one that serves, in our time- and ground-bound stories, as a first of many.

(I can tell you, though, that questions like “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” is absolutely not limited or special to “online-people.”)

I still have not done the difficult, exhausting, laborious work of picking up the pheun to call the parish office and ask about RCIA or OCIA or whatever they’re calling it now. I think I will soon, but who knows.

I can happily and confidently say I am in none of the above categories— I am not right-wing (nor left-wing) nor concerned about “manliness” nor do I have any interest or history with (mouthwash in hand)… “influencers.”

When I made the move in my early twenties from “my parents’ faith” to my own, I sat in non-denominational membership classes and many other groups with folks who described themselves as “recovering Catholics.”

Well, I guess I’m just a recovering evangelical, and I still have no idea what recovery looks like.

From “O Darkness”:

… when
I seek a synonym for dark, I find dim, nefarious, gloomy,
threatening, impure. Is the world still so afraid of shadows?
Of the dark face of the earth, falling across the moon?
The dark earth, from which we’ve sprung, to which
we shall return? What we do not know lies in darkness.
The way the unsayable rests at the back of the tongue.
So let us sing of it—for the earth is a dark loam
and the night sky an unfathomable darkness.
And it is darkness I now praise. The dark at the exact
center of the eye. Dark in the bell’s small cave.
The secret cavity of the nucleus. The quark.
How hidden is the sacred, quickening in the dark
behind the visible world. O Yaweh, O Jehovah,
henceforth I will name you: Inkwell, Ear of Jaguar,
Skin of the Fig, Black Jade, Our Lady of Onyx. That
which I cannot fathom. In whose image I am made.

— Danusha Laméris

Overture

So I stepped off the streetcar
and walked to the bus stop,
marveling at the city around me,
and at the young woman I could never be
standing as if beautiful
with her tattooed neck
and metal studs through her nose and ears,
and actually she was beautiful,
singing a familiar tune, its notes of grace
filling the space between the two of us,
and suddenly too a limping man
with his cardboard WILL-WORK-FOR-FOOD sign
like the title of a poem and not his life,
but who was he then,
because he began to hum, and the woman,
teeth not yellow like his, smiling at him,
reached into the breast pocket
of her denim jacket while she sang,
and fluttered a five-dollar bill toward him
like some butterfly, which reminded me
of my mother, who sang on the bed of her death
as if song could keep her alive, or maybe
it was I who imagined this, a prayer
not for the dead but from the dying,
my mother in her purple gown
singing as if Death were not the name
of anything, but part of an overture,
her brown eyes earnest like those
of the woman at the bus stop in my new city
where I did not yet know who I would become
but now it seemed I was at least a singer
at a bus stop, for my own voice joined in
without my permission and the three of us hovered
in the mellifluous air on the darkening sidewalk
as the bus came to us and lifted us
together and away.

— Andrea Hollander

I think this poem is a lovely complement to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden. Several times towards the end of the book, I thought of the closing pages of Adam Makos’ A Higher Call. I’ve talked about that once before, in a post on Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, so I won’t describe it again here. But I thought about it again as I was reading Hollander’s poem. All lovely, beautiful complements of mercy.

(If you have not read A Higher Call — good lord, what are you waiting for??)

Nick Catoggio:

It almost goes without saying that a country capable of electing Trump, let alone electing him twice, will never and should never be trusted again to guarantee another nation’s security.

… The trauma of the last 15 months has convinced Europeans that they’re now forever one U.S. election away from seeing NATO collapse.

They don’t have a Trump problem—they have an America problem, and they know it. They can’t rely on us anymore.

from “Poetry”:

… I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing…

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

— Pablo Nureda, translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

Noah Millman:

Mind you, saying they aren’t conscious doesn’t mean LLMs can’t possibly generate anything new or outperform human beings at one or another given task. Nobody I’m aware of thinks that the most sophisticated chess-playing computers are conscious, and yet they can outplay any human. Writing sonnets or proving mathematical conjectures or flirting amiably may not be as different from playing chess as we would like to imagine; they may also be games that a computer can learn to play, and play better than us. But it does mean that whatever these computers generate that is new was already implicit in their programming and the data, even if it required a greater intelligence than human (on certain metrics) to see it. And it does mean that if our consciousness does have a purpose, then that no matter how intelligent they get LLMs won’t ever be truly adequate substitutes for human beings tout court.

[…]

[Richard Dawkins] appears to have been very impressed by “Claudia’s” description of her experience of time and how it differs from the human experience thereof: that while we experience time linearly as we move through it, “Claudia” experiences it “the way a map apprehends space, containing it without moving through it.” I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, and I suspect the answer is “nothing.” Taken literally “Claudia” appears to be saying that it can apprehend the past, present and future simultaneously. What else could it mean to “contain” time and be able to view it like a “map?” Seeing the future is definitely something an LLM cannot do—but it is something human beings have imagined. Maybe Ted Chiang’s famous novella and discussions about it and about the movie based on it featured in “Claudia’s” training data. However it got there, though, “Claudia” did an excellent job producing the kind of gibberish that humans spit out all the time to sound poetical or profound. Which is precisely what it was designed to do.

To Dawkins: “No shit, Sherlock.”

This quote from Martin Shaw

We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes.

… goes well with Mekeel McBride’s poem “A Little Bit of Timely Advice”:

A Little Bit of Timely Advice

Time you put on blue
shoes, high-heeled, sequined,
took yourself out dancing.

You been spending too much
time crying salty
dead-fish lakes into soupspoons,

holding look-alike contests
with doom. Baby, you
need to be moving. Ruin

ruins itself, no use unplanting
what’s left of your garden.
Crank up the old radio

into lion-looking-for-food
music; or harmonica, all indigo,
breathing up sunrise. Down

and out’s just another opinion
on up and over. You say
you got no makings

for a song? Sing anyway.
Best music’s the stuff comes
rising out of nothing.

Patrick Leigh Fermor:

Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King’s School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater’s seventy years carlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn’t get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity—before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decades after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity—an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters—and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince’s bones—with an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.

Although it was a one-sided love in the end …

What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos. It mystified me and puzzled others. “You’re mad!” prefects and monitors would exclaim, brows knit in glaring scrum-half bewilderment, as new misdeeds came to light.… Everything was going badly and my housemaster’s penultimate report, in my third year, had an ominous ring: ‘… some attempts at improvement’ it went ‘but more to avoid detection. He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.’

[…]

About lamplighting time at the end of a wet November day, I was peering morosely at the dog-eared pages on my writing table and then through the panes at the streaming reflections of Shepherd Market, thinking, as Night and Day succeeded Stormy Weather on the gramophone in the room below, that Lazybones couldn’t be far behind; when, almost with the abruptness of Herbert’s lines at the beginning of these pages,* inspiration came. A plan unfolded with the speed and the completeness of a Japanese paper flower in a tumbler.

To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!

—

*George Herbert, from the epigraph:

I struck the board, and cried, “No more;
I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind…