Truth and Custom

From Daughter Zion:

...a custom contrary to truth. Such customs either wither away because their root, the truth, has dried up, or they continue to proliferate contrary to conviction, and thus destroy the correlation between truth and life. They thereby lead to a poisoning of the intellectual-spiritual organism, the results of which are incalculable. (p.11)

The purification of Christianity, the search for its original essence, is carried on today, in the era of historical consciousness, almost entirely by seeking its oldest forms and establishing them as normative. The original is confused with the primitive. (p.38)

 The first quote, I believe, makes the case for why we should take thought of those who make Christmas a secular festival.

The Physics (and Myths) of Baseball

Some of the more useful facts I gathered from The Physics of Baseball:

The inclination of the arc of the swing does not strongly affect the velocity of the struck ball, but it does affect the mean angle at which the ball leaves the bat and, hence, the probability of hitting a very long ball and a home run. The great high-average line-drive hitters...swung the bat such that the barrel crossed the hitting region just in front of home plate, traveling upward on the same line that the average pitch is moving down....Then, if their bat position is correct but their timing is slightly off in their effort to hit the ball over second base, they still connect with the ball squarely...(p.98)

With a lower maximum frequency and the addition of a strong component of lower-frequency sound from the natural bat oscillation, the "crack" becomes more of a "thunk."...A onetime center fielder advised me that "when the ball is hit straight at you...if you hear the bat "crack," run back; if the sound is a "thunk," run in." (p.128)

Generally, the player who drills out his bat stuffs the hole with cork or rubber. But this added material serves more as a detriment than an advantage...that energy will not be effectively transferred to the ball...the extra material will then only slow the bat down a little and slightly reduce the distance a ball can be hit. Such a filler will take another 3 feet off a 400-foot drive. (p.137-8)

The Hidden Classical Background of Pooh

From The Pooh Perplex:

I shall say nothing of Wart's theory that Pooh is an Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics–a clever idea, but one that is given a disproportionate weight in Wart's sense of the total meaning of the book. (p.7)

Pooh's nightmare of endless Heffalumps making straight for his honey supply and eating it all requires, I believe, no complicated analysis (and least of all a Freudian one!). It is the very image of proletarian revolution, of the workers arising in a concerted mass to seize the means of production from the jaded bourgeoisie. (p.25)

Piglet has doubted whether Pooh's Ode to him, which at first sight looks as pure and false as Pindar upon whose locker-room eulogies it is patently modeled, really has told the truth...False, you see, but not naïve, and not false in Pindar's sense of toadying to the fixed system of glory, either. (p.33)

 Milne's chief spokesman, Eeyore, is a veritable Thersites, a malcontent who would have put Marston to shame. (p.43)

For those unfamiliar with Frederick Crew's work in The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, the assembled critical essays are in jest.

Doyle's Miles Gloriosus

From The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard:

He was a good boy, this Duroc, with his head full of the nonsense that they teach at St. Cyr, knowing more about Alexander and Pompey than how to mix a horse's fodder or care for a horse's feet.

...it would have interested me to see something of the customs of the English, which differ very much from those of other nations. Much as I should have wished, however, to have seen them eat their raw meat and sell their wives,...

Truth and the Critical Spirit

From Etienne Gilson's Héloïse and Abélard:

We have seen the birth of the "Critical Spirit" and all the pedantic fiction with which it encumbers history, fiction which at its best is not even entertaining. For it is characteristic of the "Critical Spirit" to be itself the measure of historical reality. When an event surprises it, the event loses its right to have taken place. When a sentiment goes beyond its grasp, he who expresses that sentiment loses the right to have experienced it. It is to be feared that this story of great souls, reduced to the stature of the scholars who write about it, is sometimes wanting in graphic beauty, but it will inevitably be wanting in truth when that truth consists in personal greatness.

There is nothing quite comparable to the passion of the historians of the Renaissance for its individualism, its independence of mind, its rebellion against the principle of authority, unless perchance it is the docility with which those same historians copy one another in dogmatizing about the Middle Ages of which they know so little.

The best example we can find of historical cliché is the concept of an anti-Christian Renaissance which historians of literature pass on from one to the other as though Lefèvre d'Etaples, Budé, Erasmus, ever pretended to be escaping from any dogma, or as if their adherence to dogmas ever prevented St. Bernard from being eloquent, Dante and Petrarch from writing well, or St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas from thinking.

In conclusion:

What, then, do the facts teach? That Abélard was the first of the moderns? This would be to substitute one piece of foolishness for another. That Héloïse was the first modern woman? On the contrary, as Jean de Meung would say, the world has never since seen her like: Mais je ne crei mie, par m'ame, / Qu'onques puis fust nul tel fame. (By my soul, I do not believe / That another like her ever lived)

I also found this fact interesting:

Either the abbess [i.e. Héloïse] has a good memory, which is most likely, or there was a copy of [Ovid's] The Art of Loving at the Paraclete.

Abaelard and Heloise surprised by Master Fulbert

Jean Vignaud, 1819

A Code of Honor

From Steinbeck A Russian Journal:

Among Moscow correspondents, particularly in the winter, a code of honor has grown up, rather like the code which developed in the West concerning horses, and it is nearly a matter for lynching to steal a man's book. But Capa never learned and never reformed. Right to the end of his Russian stay he stole books. He also steals women and cigarettes, but this can be more easily forgiven.

Sophists and Freshmen Composition

From the most recent issue of Classical World ("The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education"):

But Quintilian complains of Latin rhetors, the equivalent of Greek sophists, who wrongly forced the teaching of more difficult progymnasmata onto the grammarians. Those rhetors were like modern English professors who do not want to teach freshman composition. (p.79)

Old but Good News for Budding Classicists

From The University: An Owner's Manual (1990):

Departments of the classics can usually handle more students very easily. To indicate an intention to major in a subject that is searching for increased undergraduate enrollments may in a particular year boost one's chances for admission, although it is difficult to find out which departments are facing a shortage.

A university college has never consisted of five hundred Mr. Chipses surrounded by a few thousand adoring and adorable undergraduates.

All of us who have reached advanced years can recall teachers whom we vigorously detested in high school or college, only to discover in more mature years the excellence of their instruction. As evidence, I can cite my own and nearly everyone else's high school Latin teacher.

From the same on a more sobering note:

Dim employment prospects and low salaries are bound to affect quality of students now and quality of faculty later. Some will choose the academic life no matter what–individuals who are fatally attracted by the virtues and show little concern for the vices. But in the more ordinary cases, young people make rational and cautious career choices. All of us want to lead decent, well-remunerated lives, and when obvious and interesting alternatives exist, they will be selected without hesitation. 

I include a few other quotes about the profession:

There are three professions which are entitled to wear the gown: the judge, the priest, and the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer's maturity of mind, his independence of judgement, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and his god. [quoted from E.K. Kantorowicz]

Personally, I would be thrilled to see a return to the scholar's gown on more occasions than a swelteringly hot day in May. Here is the rather obvious:

An assistant professor does not assist anyone; an associate professor is not anybody's associate. These are merely designations for independent scholars who receive low pay and little secretarial help, while performing the same tasks as full professors.

Elsewhere:

The chances of having courses taught well–with verve and imagination–are greatly diminished when content and structure are imposed by "outsiders" without debate and discussion. Anyone who has attended schools run by our armed forces will have little difficulty in appreciating this point. 

Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose: Guinness and Thucydides

From Alec Guinness' autobiography Blessings in Disguise:

(16 yrs. old) The next thing for me to brush up some poetry in case the Cassons invited me to recite. I knew some Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which I found hysterically funny; also some Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton and a few yards of Shakespeare.

The last time I saw Sybil [Thorndike] to talk to was at a small private lunch party at the Garrick Club. She was an old lady by then, suffering acutely from arthritis but remarkably gallant and cheerful. I asked her if she still managed to learn a few lines of verse each day, which had been her life-long custom. 'Yes,' she said, 'but only a very few. I've given up the Greeks. But the real sadness is my silly old hands, which don't allow me to play Bach any more...' 

I would be quite happy to see a return of black for mourning, and to hear no more electric guitars in church. Perhaps we could return to resounding hymns... 

As I set off to join the Navy he [Guinness' father-in-law] handed me a pocket edition of Thucydides, saying, 'This will help you keep things in perspective.' Inside the book he had scribbled, 'Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.' It was a more acceptable gift than the vast unplucked turkey which he dumped, on Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of our tiny cottage. Seizing the duck we were going to have he said, 'That's just what I want; an extra duck,' and made off with it. The turkey wouldn't go in our oven anyway and Merula burst into tears. Not only had I found a wife; I had acquired a family.

Shaw and Greek

From Shaw's introduction to Major Barbara:

Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune. 

And now for a few quotes from the play itself about the profession:

LADY BRITOMART: Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman... (p.52)

LOMAX: Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick. LADY BRITOMART: Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles Lomax's remarks into reputable English for us? CUSINS: If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking of Autolycus, uses the same phrase. πυκινὸν δόμον ἐλθεῖν means a bit thick. (p.62-3)

CUSINS: Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr. Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver. (p.67)

CUSINS: ...the poor professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures,... (p.96)

UNDERSHAFT: ...Can a sane man translate Euripides? (p.99)

 STEPHEN: You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric.

Adolphus Cusins is, for those yet unacquainted with the play or Shaw's circle of friends, modeled on Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray.

Not that this is the first reason to study Latin...

From The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay:

...the best writers are always philologists...I would make three other suggestions for improving your diction over time. First, study Latin, a language whose roots constitute a surprisingly large percentage of our own language's words. Second, read widely. (p.80)

 I shall let you buy the book to find out the third...

Benedict on the importance of Classics

From Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977:

Latin, as the foundation of one's whole education, was then still taught with old-fashioned rigor and thoroughness, something I have remained grateful for all my life...In retrospect it seems to me that an education in Greek and Latin antiquity created a mental attitude that resisted sedition by a totalitarian ideology. (p.23)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

From Goodbye, Mr. Chips:

We haven't got the confidence we once had, now that we know about those bombs. It is a hard time to try to write fiction. (After the Soviets acquired the bomb, from the preface)

"Colley, you are a splendid example of inherited traditions. I remember your grandfather, he could never grasp the Ablative Absolute. A stupid fellow, your grandfather. ANd your father, too I remember him, he used to sit at that far desk by the wall–he wasn't much better, either. But I do believe–my dear Colley–that you are the biggest fool of the lot!"

Sometimes he took down Vergil or Xenophon and read for a few moments, but he was soon back and again with Doctor Thorndyke or Inspector French. He was not, despite his long years of assiduous teaching, a very profound classical scholar; indeed, he thought of Latin and Greek far more as dead languages from which English gentlemen ought to know a few quotations than as living tongues that had ever been spoken by living people. He liked those short leading articles in the Times that introduced a few tags that he recognized. To be among the dwindling number of people who understood such things was to him a kind of secret and valued freemasonry; it represented, he felt, one of the chief benefits to be derived from a classical education.

And suddenly, in a torrent of thoughts too pressing to be put into words, Chips made answer to himself. These examinations and certificates and so on–what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness–what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory–a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. 

Lighter Christian Essays

From Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays by James V. Schall, S.J.:

His [Hilaire Belloc's] reading now consisted entirely of The Diary of a Nobody, his own works, and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, which he would read with the satisfied intentness of an old priest poring over his brievary. (p.24)

Sacred music, most proper to churches, should never be applauded, in my view, preferably not even in formal concerts... (p.153)

Women don't have rights. They have, rather, graces, and sacrifices, and tolerances, and patiences, and commitments that make the word "rights" sound ridiculous as a term adequate to cover what it is they confront and accomplish in life. I know very few women whom life has treated "justly". (p.158)

(On Fixed Prayer) Neither eloquence nor a pleasing personality ought to be downplayed. They too are gifts, but what is said or repeated ought not to be things that a talented Christian clergyman or layman simply makes up and "shares"–awful word–with whoever happens to be standing by. The ex tempore, valuable as it can be, in my experience, is almost always more narrow and less freeing than the precise, "rigid", more accurate forms of prayer that embody the simplicity, eloquence, and authority of the ages of the Church. (p.190) 

 

 

Dorothy Sayers on the Trivium

From The Lost Tools of Learning:

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

And:

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16 ...

Pausanias and Athens

Only the Athenians met all their obligations. They stood against the Persians, twice against the Macedonians, and against the Gauls, and, he says, they were also the leaders in the last three crises–which is correct for the battles against Philip and Antipater (I.25.3), but not for the repulsion of the Gauls. The Athenians did fight against them, and they fought bravely, but the Aetolians were the leaders. Nevertheless, as Pausanias sees it, the Athenians were the only Greeks who never failed Greece. (Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.108)

p.s. An interesting quote from the correspondence between Frazer and Housman can be found in an Appendix on the scholarly reception of Pausanias:

"He [Wilamowitz] has always seemed to me a sophist with an infallible instinct for getting hold of a stick by the wrong end. I do not forget how, with the stick (wrong end up, as usual), he belaboured my poor old friend Pausanias and no doubt many a better man." (letter from Sir J.G. Frazer to A.E. Housman, October 1927, quoted in Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.174)

Waugh and Cardinal Heenan on Vatican II

From A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes:

Dear Sir, –The pundits explain the continuing process of change in the liturgy by saying that it helps the laity to 'participate' in the Mass.

Can they, please, explain how this desirable object is furthered by today's peremptory prohibition of kneeling at the incarnatus in the creed?

Your obedient servant, Evelyn Waugh. (Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 24 April 1965)

Why are we constantly asked to give money to schools if the children learn so little there that Corpus Christi, Pater Noster, Domine, non sum dignus are unintelligible to them? (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 17 July 1965)

Certainly many cannot follow the Latin liturgy any more than an infant can understand the words which are spoken at his baptism. The flow of Grace is not impeded by vocabulary. (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 7 August 1965)

...another large part is fasting through vanity, to the extent of paying up to  £50 a week to starve in clinics...If, as they claim, the liturgists wish to emulate the Church of the earliest centuries, would they not do well to fast rigorously? (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 21 August 1965)

 

 

 

Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves

As with the title of this book, so the format of the blog.  Here are some quotes from Goodbye to All That:

The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new Anglican chaplains in four months; finally he applied for a Roman Catholic, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of one who failed to do all that was expected of him and more. Jovial Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line. (p.190)

So I stayed and tried to compose Latin epigrams, which was, in those days, my way of killing time... (p.200)

The returned soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and race with the Proctor's 'bulldogs', as in the old days...G.N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree just before the War and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: 'I can't make out my pupils at all. They are all "Yes, Sire" and "No, Sir". They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can't remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-War days.' (p.291-2)