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The other evening, I discovered that a copy of Halloween by Jerry Seinfeld had made its way into the Port-Swiller’s household.
Basically, the book is a reworking of Seinfeld’s Halloween shtick, as seen both on his teevee show and in his autobiography Seinlanguage. Only this time, it’s accompanied by illustrations and, apparently, aimed at much younger audiences.
The reason I discovered it is because the seven year old gel demanded that I read it to her. Figuring that its appeal to her was solely due to the fact that it talked about candy, I gave in.
But as I read, I couldn’t help being struck, forcefully struck, by the cynicism and nihilism of the routine. (If you don’t know it, I won’t try to explain it all here. Suffice to say that the joke starts out about faulty and ridiculous costumes and eventually winds up with Seinfeld as an older kid basically shaking down the neighborhood for candy, without even a pretense of interest in anything else.) And I couldn’t help thinking that this was extremely inappropriate material for something holding itself out to be a children’s book. (Although, come to think of it, as funny as I think Seinfeld is, I’m also having a hard time justifying to myself the appropriateness of this kind of humor for an adult, too. Even, or perhaps especially, to those of us who say to ourselves that we are sufficiently armored in our morality that we can indulge this sort of thing a bit without suffering any harm.)
At any rate, I can’t remember being this disturbed about one the gels’ books before – this includes everything from Disney and the Berenstein Bears. It seems to me that Jerry is going to have to be disappeared.
This evening, instead of reading her a story, I found myself giving the nine year old gel an impromptu spelling bee. (Lest you think I have been taking a few too many swigs from the cup of St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method, let me assure you that it was her idea, not mine.)
After a while, stumped for a word suitable to her academic level (i.e, somewhere between ”spot” and “onomatopoeia”), I suddenly remembered one of my favorites.
“Okay,” I said, “try defenestration.”
After pronouning it to herself a couple times, the gel had a go. And I’m happy to report that aside from an “i” where she should have put an “e”, she pretty much got it right.
“Know what it means?” I asked her.
“Um, no,” she said.
Whereupon I told her.
After a split-second’s silence, suddenly the gel’s eyes blazed and she burst out laughing.
“Word of the day, then?” I asked.
“Word of the day? Word of the year!” she replied. “Word of my life! Best. Definition. Evah! I can’t wait to take it in and share it at morning meeting tomorrow!”
Whereupon she hopped out of bed, grabbed pen and paper and insisted on writing down both the word and its meaning, lest she forget.
Well, all I can do at this point is apologize in advance to the gel’s teacher. On the other hand, I surely would like to be a fly on the wall when that squib goes off in the morning.
Today is the anniversary of the birth of the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, in 1632.
I tell you truly that I know next to nothing about Spinoza’s philosophies. According to Wikipedia, he believed:
God exists only philosophically and that God was abstract and impersonal. Spinoza’s system imparted order and unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against “received authority.” As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes’s dualistic belief that body and mind are two separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single identity. He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning “that which stands beneath” rather than “matter”) that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser “entities” are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part.
Well, that’s as may be. But here’s my question: In P. G. Wodehouse, the great gentleman’s personal gentleman Jeeves makes reference more than once to his own partiality to Spinoza. (Indeed, it is Bertie’s kind-hearted but hapless attempt to buy a collection of Spinoza’s works for Jeeves that lands him in a fearful misunderstanding with Florence Cray.) In this emphasis, is Plum trying to make some kind of philosophical point? Or is he just tagging his character with a partiality to a particular intellectual fad of the day?
I strongly suspect the latter. On the other hand, Plum could be pretty egg-headed when he wanted, so I am not yet prepared to dismiss the former out of hand.
(Now that I come to think of it, many books have been written analyzing Plum’s writing, but I cannot remember coming across one examining Jeeves’ philosophical make-up. As I say, he is obviously fond of Spinoza. Marcus Aurelius, too. Perhaps there’s room for another study here. (Copyright note to potential scholars – Dibs!))
Recently on a whim (and what things don’t I do on a whim these days?) I purchased a copy of Eddie Rickenbacker’s Fighting The Flying Circus, his memoir of his service in WWI.
My copy arrived yesterday and I left it out on the kitchen counter. This morning, the eldest gel came down stairs, clapped eyes on it, and burst out in indignation, “Hey! He stole that name from Monty Python!”
I patiently explained the origin of the term to the gel, and I’m happy to say that Captain Rickenbacker has now been forgiven.
(BTW, I’ll let you know what I think of the book when I’ve read it.)
In the comments to my post below on the different assertions of G.K. Chesterton and Francis Parkman regarding Native American religious beliefs before the arrival of European Christians, regular port-swiller BNS writes:
[W]hile Parkman may be more an expert on Native American culture than Chesterton, I wonder how accepted this particular assertion of his is, or if it is disputed, and I also wonder how he reached that conclusion.
In my post, I had said that at the moment I was too lazy to look up Parkman’s assertions. Well, my friends, in an attempt to be a proper host (and a fair commentator), this evening I hunted up the quotes.
First off is Parkman’s assertion itself. It is to be found in the first chapter of his The Jesuits In North America, the second book of the first volume of his masterwork France and England in North America. I won’t quote the entire discussion of the various rites, rituals and superstitions, because it’s too much to type. Instead, I’ll simply give you Parkman’s concluding paragraph on the matter. (Warning – He is being his least Rousseauian. No Noble Savage for him! If this kind of non-p.c. language offends you, either skip it or brace yourself.):
To sum up the results of this examination, the primitive Indian was as savage in his religion as in his life. He was divided between fetish-worship and that next degree of religious development which consists of the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians, and sentimentalists.
As I say, pretty strong meat.
But what of Parkman’s sources? Well, he has something to say about that in the preface to the same volume:
The sources of information concerning the early Jesuits of New France are very copious. During a period of forty years, the Superior of the Mission sent, every summer, long and detailed reports, embodying or accompanied by the reports of his subordinates, to the Provincial of the Order at Paris, where they were annually published, in duodecimo volumes, forming the remarkable series known as the Jesuit Relations. Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal. Modest records of marvellous adventures and sacrifices, and vivid pictures of forest-life, alternate with prolix and monotonous details of the conversion of individual savages, and the praiseworthy deportment of some exemplary neophyte. With regard to the condition and character of the primitive inhabitants of North America, it is impossibleto exaggerate their value as an authority. I should add, that the closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents.
“Ah!” you will say, ”Parkman is just relying on Jesuit bias! And we all know what that means!” Well, there are two responses to this. First, Parkman himself was a staunch Protestant. Throughout his work, he gives Rome a pretty fair treatment, but on the whole it is quite plain that he has no love for Her.
Second, if those insanely brave Jesuits at the sharp end of the Faith had discovered that their new flock already worshipped some Great Spirit that ruled over all, surely they would have trumpeted this finding? A barbarian people who practice genuine monotheism are already three quarters of the way to accepting Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, and I find it hard to believe that such a phenomenon would not have made it into the Relations.
As to the broader question of the acceptance of Parkman’s and/or Chesterton’s positions, I confess that this beats the heck out of me. For all I know, there may well be dozens of books thoroughly debunking both positions! I only offered the comparison because it was triggered in my mind after reading GKC’s take (which, btw, contains no citations or references). They obviously have incompatible views on the subject of monotheism among North American peoples prior to European contact, and one of them, just as obviously, must be mistaken. I have not done research any farther to determine who was right, simply noted the difference because I find it interesting.
Recently I have been reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, his refutation of evolutionary materlialism in general, and the writings of Chesterton’s contemporary H.G. Wells in particular.
Well, trying to read it, anyway. My copy, issued this year by the Feather Trail Press, is printed in such small typeface as to make study of it extremely difficult.
Anyhoo, I was interested to read this passage in GKC’s discussion of paganism, and his sense that pagans have always focused their conscious thought on a kind of lower strata of deities, while tacitly acknowledging a general guiding force above such characters:
“They [i.e., primative pagan belief systems] all testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as distinct from talked about. There is a striking example in a tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California which starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: “The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children”; and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because “It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.” That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is remembered in the highest moral grades and is sort of mystery. But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his mythology and taciturn about his religion.
In all this, I understand that GKC is setting up a kind of stratified awareness, a suggestion that pagans, for whatever reason, have always acknowledged monotheism as such without, well, embracing it, as it were, preferring to live their lives in accordance with a set of much homier local deities.
Well, fine. For all I know of the various pagan cults of the savages, GKC may be right. Except that his mention of Indians in particular reminded me of something I had read elsewhere. Specifically, and although I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment, I distinctly remember the assertion of Francis Parkman, that great recorder of early North American exploration and colonization, that the natives, in fact, possessed no concept of an overarching, unifying deity until after their contact with Europeans in general, and the Jesuit missionaries in particular. In other words, the “Great Spirit” referenced by Chesterton and many others is nothing more than a hazy interpretation of Christian doctrine and is not native to the, er, native view of spirituality in North America.
Now I am neither a historian nor a theologian. But I’d be willing to bet dollars against doughnuts that Parkman has a better bead on the thoughts of Indians than does Chesterton. Whether this hinders or actually emphasizes Chesterton’s general point about the human approach to God, I don’t know. But I thought it interesting nonetheless.
My fellow port-swillers, your responses to my post below blegging for T.S. Eliot reading material prompted me to remember something I had seen on the teevee long ago that I thought extremely funny.
Well, thanks to the magic of YouTube, I can bring that memory back to the here and now. Thus, I give you SCTV’s presentation of the NASA production of Eliot’s “Murder In The Cathedral”. Enjoy!
(Incidentally, for those of you curious, in thinking further on my own bleg below I visited the devil’s website and picked up copies of Knox’s The Belief of Catholics and The Hidden Stream: Mysteries of the Christian Faith. I reckon these are as good a starting point as any other.)
It occurs to me that I ought to read some T. S. Eliot and some Fr. Ronald Knox. Given that I haven’t read anything beyond the former’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and the odd quip from an essay by the latter, any suggestions for particular volumes from either gentleman would be greatly appreciated.
I see where there’s a new exhibit on Jane Austen opening at the Morgan in New York, an exhibit containing rayther a large number of Miss A’s own letters and manuscripts. Judging from this review, it appears that the exhibit is emphatically not one of those that seeks to mold her to fit modern sensibilities, although it seems that the producers could not resist the temptation altogether. To wit:
The only thing out of character is a self-conscious, 16-minute documentary, “The Divine Jane,” created for the show, in which contemporary figures speak about Austen’s importance — though little that Cornel West, Fran Lebowitz or Colm Toibin have to say comes close to what the documents communicate on their own.
Heh. I should think not.
At any rate, this leads back to the question that occassionally gets bandied about here: What is the basis of the enduring Austen craze? What is it about her that attracts so many fans nowadays? The reviewer, I think, nails the problem:
The difficulty comes, though, in imagining Austen herself. She was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, so knowing about their flaws and virtues, yet herself so opaque and mysterious a presence that it is hard to imagine her in the flesh. You have to read her the way her most sentient characters read their companions, attending to subtle signs, mannerisms and language.
I would submit, given nobody could suggest with a straight face that we live in an era of “subtle signs, mannerisms and language”, that some many most modern readers of Austen very probably misunderstand her after all, and instead are infatuated with an image or images of her of which she herself would have been horrified. The wealth of gubbagy adaptations, prequels, sequels and erzatz biographies (e.g., “Becoming Jane”) bear me out in this, I think.
Interestingly, I happened to come across a quote about Jane as I was reading some Chesterton (his What’s Wrong With The World). Says G.K.:
I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Brontë; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man.
No doubt this will send up howls of outrage from defenders of Jane Eyre and Middlemarch. I’ve never read either and have no plans to do so, but from what I know of the general genre, and especially from what I know of Jane’s own writing, I strongly suspect Mr. Chesterton was, as he so often is, on to something here.
Perhaps just by chance, but last evening I happened to reread George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, his account of his service in the ranks in Burma during WWII. Here is his summation:
Glad I was there; I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. A good thing to have done, and to have been, as Samuel Johnson so wisely observed. No regrets about it, and much gratitude. I can almost hear an interviewer saying: “What about guilt?”, to which I could only reply: “What’s to be guilty about? I didn’t ask for the bloody war.” He might speculate, because it seems to be the fashion nowadays, on guilt for having survived where others did not – which is one of the silliest notions I have ever heard. If you feel someone got killed because you let them down, that’s a reason for guilt, no question – but to feel guilty because the man next to you caught it when you didn’t, that’s pointless. Remember him, revere him, but don’t feel guilty.
It’s terribly trite, no doubt, but like most trite things it’s absolutely true: the best comment on infantry war, the best philosophy, and above all the best advice, was written in four lines by Rudyard Kipling. It isn’t jingoistic, it’s realistic; it has nothing to do with the higher questions of morality, but it has deep meaning for anyone who finds himself, as so many have done and will continue to do, facing the moment.
When first under fire and you’re wishful to duck,
Don’t look nor take heed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful you’re living, and trust to your luck,
And march to your front like a soldier.
Seems quite fitting to the day to me. So pray charge your glasses in salute to all the brave men and women who have done so in the past – both those who made it and those who didn’t – and continue to do so today.
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