Return to me!

Every day this week, Samuel has come home from school expecting to have received the latest issue of his (free) Lego magazine. No luck. I share in his disappointment.

Today, then, we were happy to find a magazine in our mailbox.

But it wasn’t the Lego magazine. It was an unexpected, free issue of Harper’s.

Eveloping the regular cover was an outer cover, on which was printed this enticement:

Dear Former Subscriber:

Remember the story of the prodigal son? How his father put on a feast and welcomed him back with open arms?

Well, that’s what we at Harper’s want to do for you.

Instead of setting a sumptuous table, we’ve come up with something far more satisfying: a money-saving opportunity to subscribe to Harper’s at the lowest available rate!

Restart your subscription today and get a full year of Harper’s (12 issues) for only $14.97 – that’s 86% off the annual newsstand price. You save $92.91 just by saying YES!

And so on.

I have to say, I’m put off. Harper’s Magazine is not my Heavenly Father.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. Even so: In the pretentious field of long-form journalism, Harper’s achieves a kind of modesty by going out of the way to pose as what, in Peppa Pig, is referred to as a “clever-clogs.” (The “clever-clogs” in Peppa Pig is Edmund Elephant.) The Harper’s style is to dress up serious reportage or reflection in snark.

Harper’s plays the wise fool.

The quintessential Harper’s article is Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” (1932).

Articles mentioned on this issue’s cover:

“Revolt in the Heartland: Can Old-Time Populism Save the Country?”

“Ghost Towns of the Darién Gap”

“On the Front Lines of Canada’s Ostrich War” (didn’t the Australians have an ostrich war? No, they fought the emus)

That I’ve been a more faithful subscriber of Harper’s than of, say, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books surely reflects my own penchant for off-the-wall self-effacement.

Or that I’m a cheapskate. Those other mags are pricey.

February’s poems

More of Iona Opie’s and Rosemary Wells’s Mother Goose.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Oh, the brave old duke of York,

He had ten thousand men;

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

and he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,

And when they were down, they were down,

And when they were only halfway up,

They were neither up nor down.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is fifteen miles,

From Wobbleton to Wibbleton is fifteen miles,

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton, from Wobbleton to Wibbleton,

From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is fifteen miles.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If these two poems are about “relations of ideas,” this one is about “knowledge by acquaintance”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Whose little pigs are these, these, these?

Whose little pigs are these?

They are Roger the Cook’s,

I know by their looks –

I found them among my peas.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Or perhaps the speaker is not identifying which pigs they are, so much as deciding what will become of them.

Now, a more famous poem:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Baa, baa, black sheep,

have you any wool?

Yes, sir, yes, sir,

Three bags full.

One for the master,

and one for the dame,

And one for the little boy

Who lives down the lane.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This is Samuel’s favorite in all of Mother Goose. He recites it with gusto (goose-toe). Yessir! Yessir!

Karin admires it, too. I like it that the sheep is implying: I do have wool, but not for you.

But this is not the only way of reading the poem. In Wells’s pictures, the sheep appears to be conversing with the little boy. I have wool for YOU, the sheep means (this is a more tender interpretation).

My favorite is this poem about a donkey:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If I had a donkey

that wouldn’t go,

D’you think I’d beat him?

Oh, no, no.

I’d put him in a barn

and give him some corn,

The best little donkey

that ever was born.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A typical October

Classic fall weather again – on the whole, a good thing. Leaves have been coming down in earnest and the lawn is thick with them. We don’t own a rake. I’ve read that it’s OK to mow over the dead leaves so as to “mulch” them, and that’s what I’ve been doing. The grass grows so slowly now that I keep telling myself, “One last mowing for the season”; and then, after one or two weeks, I mow again.

And now, my reading report.

(1) Patrick Allitt’s I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom describes several tantalizing U.S. history books, a few of which I’ve acquired. The golden discovery has been California: The Great Exception – the assigned text Allitt’s students loathed the most – written for that state’s centennial by Carey McWilliams, with lovely phrasing, apt detail, and shrewd analysis. Even in 1950, California’s growth was cause for wonderment. A boom in mining led to booms in farming, oil drilling, manufacturing, what have you. The mining boom was relatively egalitarian: claim sizes were restricted, and individual miners could prosper without capital. Then, the wealth gained by mining in California funded the mining elsewhere in the Far West, but this was company mining, adhering to other methods and rules. That’s what I’ve read so far. Agriculture, etc., will be discussed later. Allitt told his students to read the chapters about rivers and irrigation – the subject matter of Chinatown. They were bored to tears. I already look forward to reading McWilliams’s Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California and North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States.

(2) I liked Allitt well enough that I’ve begun another of his books: The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities throughout American History.

(3) Also: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, which I read so long ago I hardly remember it. I’m not even sure I read all of it before.

(4) Some Gothic things for the fall:

• Agatha Christie, Endless Night (excellent, just excellent)
• Hilary Mantel, Fludd
• Ghost stories by Edith Wharton and M.R. James

(5) The Masters, the fifth and most famous book in C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series. It’s about the politics of an unnamed Cambridge college. Sure enough, it’s good; it might be THE ONE in the series to read, if that’s all you have time for; but it’s no better than the others.

R.I.P. Nick

My teacher, the philosopher Nicholas Sturgeon, has died. Ours was a rather lopsided relationship: he was generous, encouraging, and constructively critical; I benefited. (I assisted him one semester, so I suppose he also benefited – although, since he seemed to review everything I graded, I may not have saved him all that much work.) I’ve already written how, last year, made frail by illness, he went out of his way to serve as one of my dissertation examiners. Now I’d like to say a little more about his work, character, and influence.

Nick was best known as a defender of “Cornell Realism,” a cluster of views about the function of moral discourse (it purports to describe objective facts) and the nature of morality (it’s a mind-independent part of the natural world, and, for all we know, it isn’t reducible to anything we can describe in purely non-moral terms). Although, as a supernaturalist, I didn’t quite adopt Nick’s position – I continue to think about how much of Nick’s picture of morality a Christian could agree with – his influence led me to break decisively with moral subjectivism and all deep forms of moral relativism.

Nick was the best classroom teacher I ever had. His colleagues and graduate students were in awe of his lecturing, which he famously did without notes. The lectures were thorough, rigorous, clear – and often pleasurably dramatic, even suspenseful. I remember perching on the edge of my seat as he explained to beginning ethics students the intricacies of Joseph Butler’s refutation of psychological egoism. Though the topic is a staple of ethics surveys, I haven’t seen anyone else explain Butler’s argument better (Butler himself comes close).

It was typical of Nick to pay close attention to a historical figure. I regret that I never found time to read through the British Moralists under his guidance (which he agreed to provide). I also envied the undergraduates and graduate assistants assigned to him when his turn came to teach Introduction to Philosophy: I would’ve loved to hear him lecture on Russell’s Problems of Philosophy and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, two of his chosen texts. I did profit from his lectures on Butler, Thomas Hobbes, J.S. Mill, G.E. Moore, Philippa Foot, J.L. Mackie, and Bernard Williams. He knew all these distinguished moralists inside and out.

Many who passed through Cornell will recall his goodwill. With me he was rather withdrawn, though always kind (and I was quite shy in his presence). He was very helpful when I had to clear hurdles for my M.A. and Ph.D.

David has a good story about meeting Nick at a conference. He told him, “My brother John-Paul really likes you!” and Nick said, “Ho, ho! Well, I really like John-Paul!”

Here’s one memorial notice. It has another philosopher’s recollections of Nick.

And here’s a notice with more recollections in the comments, and a photo.

Closing credits (2017)

Zero degrees, Fahrenheit. “Feels like −11°,” says the Weather Channel. Plenty snowy, too.

No heat in the church building, so tomorrow’s service is canceled. I’m glad Karin gets two full days off (the 31st and the 1st).

And so ends 2017. This is my hundredth entry of the year.

For providing material to discuss, I wish to thank:

Karin.

The kitties, Jasper and Ziva.

All the soccer players.

The weather.

Kazuo Ishiguro.

Bertrand Russell.

Russell (the dog).

My other family members.

My tutees.

The LimeBikes of South Bend.

The fire department of South Bend, for turning us out of our first marital dwelling. (That building has been demolished. There’s a vacant lot where once was so much love.)

The church camp.

President Lenín Moreno.

President Donald Trumpie.

ProQuest, for storing many dissertations.

The State of Wisconsin.

Brianna and other in-laws.

The Bee Gees, for singing “Fanny.”

The Isle of Man.

Wilkie Collins.

Flashman.

The Irish. I didn’t blog about them, but they figured prominently in what I read and watched on TV. A nod, also, to the Scottish (it goes without saying that I was obsessed with the English and the Australians). I wonder if 2018 will be the year of the Russians.

I hardly saw any new movies. The most I did was to catch up on the offerings of the last decade. Two standouts were It Follows (2014) and Man on Wire (2008). Tonight I saw Nerve (2016), which was a cut above most of what gets released nowadays. (It strikes me that all three of these movies supply a good dose of existential dread.) I did watch a lot of TV. I spent many happy hours immersed in Broadchurch, Midsomer Murders, and Shetland – British crime shows – and in Rake, which is about lawyers and politicians in New South Wales. (I was transfixed, if not happy, watching The Fall, another British crime show.) Of these, I urge everyone to try out Rake; as one reviewer puts it, beneath its farcicality it’s about how to be good. Man on Wire I also unreservedly recommend. It’s about how sometimes a person’s calling has nothing to do with being good, but with doing one beautiful and useless thing.

Good night!

In praise of idleness

Karin was going to take a bath. She was sad. The weekend was drawing to a close.

With some hyperbole, she told me: “I think that people shouldn’t work.”

“I basically agree,” I said. “While you’re in the bath, why don’t you read this article, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ by Bertrand Russell.”

“I’m not going to read it in the bath. That would require too much work.”

“Then I’ll read you the first bit,” I said.

“How long is this article?” said Karin after a while.

“It goes from page 9 to page 29.”

Presently, I finished reading the article out loud. Karin groaned. “You read the whole thing.”

“I guess I did!”

Then Karin took her bath.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve never believed that working, in and of itself, is virtuous. I’ve always regarded it, in its usual severity, as a curse due to the Fall – or, at least, as a natural consequence of the Fall, of humanity’s rejection of God as its sovereign.

Russell (an atheist) explains tidily why this is so. He argues that if we had good central planning, we’d be required to work considerably less than we actually do (though each of us would have to contribute his or her fair share). Not only would this bring us more freedom, it would improve civilization, make us less warlike, and allow us to be “better-natured,” i.e., kinder and more loving.

But instead our rulers are unjust, and we’ve accepted their self-serving message that working is virtuous in and of itself. And so we resent each other and have wars, and, in our meager leisure-time, we’re too tired to do anything but watch TV.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Jesus says: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”