The Last Election--Again

As another election approaches, the Hermit looks back to 2008. What was he thinking then? And who in the world was P.Diddy? Not much has changed, except that the Hermit had a great garden in 2008.




MUSINGS FROM THE WATCHTOWER: Election 2008

As I write, I am half-listening to two men dither about what to do about the current “global economic crisis.” It is like listening to two dapper passengers on a sinking five-master debating the causes on the sinking; nearby, two experienced sailors in a dinghy who know the sea, the ship, the captain, the weather, the first principles of navigation, and a lifetime of sailing in difficult seas, roll their eyes heavenward and, as much as they can, laugh at the fools who are debating as the ship goes down. John McCain and Barack Hussein Obama are like those gentlemen, well-dressed rats, who do not even begin to perceive the etiology of economic disaster and its roots in spirituality, history, politics, and, yes, theology.

As the poet John Donne wrote in the First and Second Anniversaries, when we ponder human existence in crisis and grief, it is necessary to “get up to the watchtower” and see things from a larger point of view. I was fortunate in the other day to receive The Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, of which not a few of us are now members. This issue contained an essay by M.E. Bradford (1934-1993) called “A Teaching for Republicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Identity.” It is an inspiring look at where we came from, our original conception of ourselves as citizens of a Republic in analogy to the old Roman Republic. I urge my readers to read that essay because it covers important ground usually omitted in university literature and political science courses—omitted because most of the teachers have no classical roots or sensibilities or are so imbued with deconstructionist antipathies that any mention of hierarchy, authority, virtue, military strength, or personal sacrifice causes them to go into anal implosion. I would suggest that Senator Obama would be at a complete loss to understand Bradford’s point; his 1960’s rabble rousing education appears to be the mélange of sociological confusion that neo-Marxism inspires in third-world minds—which seems to be the kind of mind he has. That is the reason his views resonate with young people today who have the same “education.” As for John McCain, he appears to have slept through Annapolis.

Bradford suggests that we can best understand those Roman roots and the way they profoundly affected the quite different education of Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Dickinson, and other formers of our tradition, who thought sitting up at night and reading Cato (the Elder and the Younger), Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Sallust, and others, an important business for the founders of a new nation. From their studies, and more, from constant imagining of themselves as Romans, our founders formed certain views and attitudes that lay at the root of their constitutionalizing: 1) Distributism: the view that a general distribution of property made for a sane society; 2) Piety as the basis of polity: the view that the ancestral religion of Rome, with its emphasis on the centrality of hearth and home and the memory of the past, must feed the virtuous education of youth; 3) Nationalism: a constant sense of the worth of what Michael Savage wisely calls “language, borders, and culture,” that is, national identity and pride of origins, together with a distrust of foreign values and the corruption they can bring (multiculturalists need not apply); 4) Agrarianism, with its grounding of culture in agri-culture, in which the pater familias knows how to use a plough, a sword, and the language. These attitudes, and they are, at root, attitudes, or what Edmund Burke called “prejudices,” foster a living culture in which character-building is central, teaching and guiding the young to exemplify “honesty, thrift, patience, labor, and endurance,” while reverencing the “home place.”

Scan the debates of Tuesday night, and hold this Roman mirror, this Romanitas-derived American mirror, up to them. Does anything either candidate said ring true? Bradford notes that after the defeat of the Romans by the Carthaginians at Cannae, “Roman women were forbidden to weep. . .no man (soldier, planter, or merchant) charged the state for his goods or service, [and] no one took political advantage of his country’s distress.” Out of this kind of ethos came the defeat of Carthage and the greatness of old Rome. I could not help comparing such an ethos to the behavior of Wall Street in the last week: a spectacle of CEOs bloated with billions, pitifully or defiantly saying “I’m sorry,” but unwilling to lift a finger or donate a dollar to help their country.

As we know, the Roman Republic did not last, and the Empire came. Why? The decay of this healthy nation, Bradford says, follows from these causes: “(1) the removal of the Roman armies from the category of citizen-soldiers into the classification of fulltime military professionals; (2) the consequent decline of home agriculture and village life; (3) the growth of a large, slave-operated, absentee-owned estates; (4) the large concentration of wealth in a new group of imperial managers and international traders; (5) great dependence on foreign food and the skills of educated foreigners; (6) a sharp decline in character among the plebeians of the city—the emergence of a useless, dishonorable proletariat.” Bradford summarizes: “Without a rural nursery for virtue or a necessary role for all citizens, and with Romans in the army detached (and almost in exile), the ground had been cut from under the institutions of the old Republic. Add to these harbingers of disaster the decline of the official Roman religion and the concomitant ‘passion for words flowing into the city,’ the foreign rituals and forms of speculation [my emphasis added], and we can understand why old Cato drove out strange priests and philosophers.” And stock analysts and currency traders?

Good old Cato the Censor, as he was called! Can you imagine his response to the Obama-McCain debate? Or to a culture sick on speculation, credit cards, hatred of life, contempt for virtue and religion, pornography, and luxury. I would suggest that in the list above there is food for thought on what has happened in America since 1865 and 1932, which is also echoed by Bradford’s characterization of what the Empire did to Rome: “The spread of wealth unconnected with merit or the spirit of public service . . . the substitution of ‘nobles’ (rich men) for patricians (men of good birth); of proles (faceless members of a mob) for plebeians (plain but solid fellows).” And more, as lamented by Sallust: “Yet there were citizens who from sheer perversity were bent upon their own ruin and that of their country.” As a result, Sallust continues, “in every community those who have no means envy the good, exalt the base, hate what is old and established, long for something new, and from disgust with their own lot desire a general upheaval. Amid turmoil and rebellion they maintain themselves, without difficulty, since poverty is easily provided for and can suffer no loss.”

Is it any wonder that John Adams feared a spirit of innovation for its own sake or that he distrusted Alexander Hamilton’s rootless, abstract drive for federal control of the country through banking and borrowing? And no wonder agrarian Jefferson hated Hamilton as well. The sage of Monticello could resonate to those chapters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in which “the bank” devours land and people.

What Bradford emphasizes most in his essay is that the early founders of our—since deracinated and derided—Republic understood that a new nation does not begin in an ideological tosspot. They were men of the West and for generations had been living in the same culture as the nations which sent its pilgrims, exiles, and seekers to our shores. They knew that a citizen is formed by a commonwealth, and that his sense of bond and debt to that commonwealth is the condition of civilization, that is, of being a citizen. “Citizens. . . depend upon each other for their individual liberties. . . . Confederation for liberty . . . . liberty, meaning collective self-determination and dignity under a piously regarded common law [which is] a check upon ideology, not a source. For modern regimes the alternative is the hegemony of an ideal as an end, not condition [emphasis added]. And the arrangement finally becomes the hegemony of a man, a despotism which makes a noble noise. Between 1775 and 1787, we discovered no new doctrine [emphasis added]. We left that to the English. Self-defense was our business. . . .Courage and discipline . . .self-sacrifice.” One may contrast this heritage with the false ideology it has become by reading Phillippe Beneton’s brilliant Equality by Default (ISI Books 2004).

P. Diddy, are you following me, baby? Do you grasp that you are a citizen of a commonwealth? Diddy says he is afraid of Sarah Palin because she does not read the right media publications (good for her!) The word citizen in its full Roman Republican sense does not ring with us as it should and must. I heard it in that sense when Father Joseph Kennedy, S.J., roared with anger as he locked me out of my dorm room in 1956: “I thought you were a citizen!” A citizen was one who accepted his existence in a commonwealth which, like St. Benedict’s order, was a school for virtue. Father Kennedy taught history straight from the shoulder; he was a man who revered the West and revered old Rome. He did not care a fig for the fact that I paid for that room or for any two-bit regulations cooked up by MBAs or for my “civil rights.” He did not accept the contemporary sense of “citizen,” which I would suggest means only taxpayer, regulation-follower, servile PTA member, political kool-aid drinker, lottery-ticket-buyer, and government teat-sucker. Got that P. Diddy? Barack Obama? John McCain?

Reading Bradford and listening to the debate back-to-back arrested me with a huge sense of distance, the same great sense of distance I experience when I face a classroom these days. It is like entering the cave of winds. Or a distortion chamber in which nearly every opening word or sentence cries out for Socratic exploration. That is one reason why I address students as Mister and Miss. It is one small teaching gesture I can use to break with the “therapeutic culture,” as Phillip Rieff called it. I could not do that with the Obama-McCain concert, nor could anyone else. The media saw to that.

Distance. The distance from the real and the true and the good and the beautiful. Even minor contact with the flow of culture in which one now swims strikes one with a sense of distance. I was listening yesterday to radio right-winger Phil Valentine in one of his riffs about Barack Obama, this one about Obama’s childhood formation as a Muslim. Phil Valentine never realizes how much he is only a liberal with a reactionary coat. “I don’t care if he is a Muslim,” Christian Valentine rants. “Being a Muslim is perfectly all right with me. What’s wrong with that?” Thereupon Mr. Valentine shows he was an attentive little bugger as he soaked up the fundamental ideology of multiculturalism. What’s wrong, Phil, is that Islam is the wrong religion, a false religion, an alien culture, antipathetic and hostile to Christianity and the True West. Yes, there is something wrong with being a Muslim, and the true missionaries of Christianity—St. Francis and Ramón Lull, for example, knew that. Now I know Phil is arguing this way because he wants to get to Obama’s political views and away from what he regards as character assassination. But to accept his reasoning is, well . . . to accept his reasoning. Poor Phil does this on subject after subject. A few minutes later he was raving about the need for a law requiring sterilization of women as a precondition for welfare because these women are hatching children which will deprive him of . . . you guessed, it, money. Poor Phil. Not only a liberal without knowing it, but a Nazi in the bargain, as many are today. In the past I have argued with him over his denunciation of home-schooling. He doesn’t get that either. So where will his own children get the deep sense of virtue and civitas? P. Diddy and Co.?

As I listen to this accursed debate, I am struck, as I often am, by deeper things. Yes, the audience listening knows deep down that neither of these men can do a damn thing about the “problem,” but they persist in their desperate seeking for answers because they are either incapable or unwilling to pursue the problem to its origins. They know something is deeply wrong, but they are ill equipped to begin to understand the depth of that wrongness. To solve a “problem,” one must grasp its roots. They do not know who they are or where we are.

I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones.

So wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land when he very clearly grasped the spiritual crisis that we landed in as the last of Old Europe broke up in the trenches of World War I. In that great poem, Eliot focused on the minds and souls of the common people of England and Europe in the jazz age. I marvel that few now really understand what the poem is about: it takes place in Spring when things and persons should be born, but throughout the images of the poem, the emphasis is on sterility, promiscuity, usury, birth control, and abortion: the prescription list for Western despair. That is why it is a waste land, a land of death, a culture of death.

If we lose that sense of distance, our distance as a culture from everything good, true, and beautiful in life, we have lost everything. Right now conservatives and Christians are working themselves into a fever over the upcoming election. The pressure builds. Pro-lifers again surge to the front with fears about the Supreme Court. “My friends,” if I may mimic John McCain, the one thing we know about the Republican candidate is that on every major issue that comes up, he wants to know what the liberal majority is thinking before he decides. On illegal immigration, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, “global warming,” and the bailout, his position is indistinguishable from those of Biden and Kennedy and Pelosi. He is on record as having said that Alito was “too conservative for my taste,” meaning that his Senate Democrat buddies would not like him anymore if he seemed too “conservative.” So what would McCain do if there was a Supreme Court vacancy? My friends, you know, you know. Yes, yes, he was a great war hero, but so was Benedict Arnold, whose name was subsequently scratched off the wall at West Point.

For young Chestertonians, it is worth remembering that conservatives have been seeing each election in my lifetime as a defining one for our existence as a society, and as Christians, we have been lured time and time again into the same trap by a party that represents itself as the party of life and morality, but which in fact turns out to be the party of the wealthy, just as my father warned me it was. That party has been in power for the better part of half a century and our country has declined in morality steadily, before Roe vs. Wade, and after. Republicans have presided over a holocaust of unborn children, and Republicans, including the slippery John McCain, push us further into the anti-life culture, which I now prefer to call the pornographic culture.

As Christians and especially as Catholics, we should know that the ages of darkness can be very long and that the greatest causes usually go down in glorious defeat. Votes are very small things, maybe the smallest thing we do. The insistence of the leftists that it is the most important thing we do in life is the biggest lie of all. If we are truly concerned about the future of our nation, our political actions should begin at home, with what we are doing in our families and our immediate environment. A few years ago I voted for Alan Keyes for President and after the election, I and a radio talk show host in West Virginia tried to find out how many votes he got. We could not. I do not believe they bothered to tally them. Who remembers that? As Thoreau noted, a vote merely indicates a vague wish that your will will prevail. Already a month before the election, thousands of homeless people will have been trucked to the polls to vote for Obama and a spot of gin.

Every family of home schoolers I meet, Catholic or no, I approach to tell them that they are doing the most important thing in the country. I believe that, short of what we do in prayer and self-denial, that is the best we can do: the cultivation of the old virtues of the polity, the cultivation of the new virtues of faith, hope, and charity. An hour on the knees counts for infinitely far more than an hour of standing in line. And—are we ready? Obama or no Obama, the rush into a socialist, godless, pornographic, anti-life future is going to require the heroic virtues of enduring persecution and martyrdom for, and with, Him.

Finally, I report that the Chestertonian garden on the Craven plantation yielded great fruits and called forth good fellowship. Over a thousand Roma tomatoes, a few hundred Brandywines, hundreds of peppers of many varieties, corn, squash, watermelons, a half bushel of beans, and Mr. Jones’ celebrated tobacco crop. As far as I am aware, none of these fruits have any speculative or stock market value beyond their substantial, real, manifest existences as benefits from Our Father. You can pick them. You can hold them in your hands and eat them. A depression is coming. Pray. Fast. Plant more beans and potatoes, and a few flowers for glory on the altars. That is a true economy.

The Hermit in Winter

One of Us: A Paean

Yes, a paean, a hymn of thanksgiving and gratitude. When I finished reading Steven Faulkner’s Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2003), sitting on my worn couch in my Tennessee hermitage, I was flooded with a wave of enormous gratitude, a metaphor that will seem more apt when you have finished his marvelous tale of a thousand-mile canoe journey. Trying to put words to what I felt, I suddenly said “yes,” quoting Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, “he is one of us.”


It is enough to make one believe in magic, I thought.

In Hans Christian Andersen, a boy is given a withered seedling and finds himself in a choir of angels singing God’s praise. Near a century ago, a professor at Columbia University hears a young man complain “but I can’t read all those books,” and says, “Well, then, here, read this one,” and hands him a copy of Plato’s Dialogues. And a traditional Benedictine monastery that will last a thousand years rises on the scrubby hills of Oklahoma. A tired student at the University of Kansas finds a copy of the journals of Pere Marquette in the basement of the library and we are given Waterwalk, which, to use Chesterton’s words, “touches the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.” In the world in which everyone has forgotten who he is, Faulkner’s book makes us sit up and bristle like porcupines.

The connections between these things stirred deep recognitions of my participation in events that now not only awaken wonder, they tell me who I am. I am, among many other things, a man who can read Steven Faulkner’s tale with the knowledge that I am in a community of fellow pilgrims. A fellowship of “those who know.” These are the fellows one sees on the other side of a canyon, upward bound on a parallel trail, to whom one shouts out with a wave, halloo! Our tracks are separate and unequal because we are not the same persons, but we sense that we are one from our shared destination.

A few months ago, I decided to contact an old friend who was a fellow graduate student at the University of Kansas in the early 1960’s. What followed , magically, was the appearance of a newsletter from the KU English Department. Usually disgusted by reading of the doings of the tribe that has taken over the Humanities—the multicultured band of postmodernists, feminists, Marxists, and what have you—I nearly tossed the thing. Then I saw a photo of Dr. Dennis Quinn, who died in this past year, and a reminiscence and tribute by one Steven Faulkner, who said he had taken every course Quinn and his friend, Dr. John Senior, had to offer. Faulkner’s praise brought a flood (another metaphor you will appreciate more after reading Faulkner’s book) into my aging brain. The tribute was read by the Chestertonians assembled, a small but doughty crew. Suddenly there was a fellowship in the room: we knew he was “one of us.” It was a connection.

The connections, say, between the blowing of a horn and the falling of an ogre’s castle, as Chesterton tells us in Orthodoxy, are the connections of fairie or elfland. They are not the connections of cause and effect, as in science, but the mysterious connections “deep down things,” as Robert Frost puts it. A man says the right word, and Sesame opens. A girl fails to do what is commanded, and all is lost. In the world of elfland, in which we really dwell, all this makes sense. The connections are not nonrational or irrational, as new age religions would have it, but rational, as reality is rational and mysterious at the same time. These acts of giving and receiving are called teaching. Enter these enchanted woods ye who hunger for true teaching.

In my first year of graduate study at KU, I was already world weary and mystified. Poor and beleaguered, having given, as Francis Bacon said of marriage, “hostages to fortune,” I had a wife and child and a Master’s degree from very nice folk at Marshall University in West Virginia, I also had the beginnings of a real education from pre-Vatican II Jesuits, who had given me a foundation in Thomistic philosophy and a love of literature and the arts. Suddenly I found myself among savages and barbarians who taught literature as a kind of apprenticeship in demonic power arts. Hankering to be a real teacher of literature, I felt trapped and hungry for something, I knew not what. I needed to hear the sounding of a horn. I needed to hear the reassuring words of Aeneas to his followers that all this travail must make sense somehow.

Several fellow convicts passed me a copy of Arvid Shulenberger’s Orthodox Poetic: A Literary Catechism (see March 31 and August 10) and pointed me to classes taught by Dennis Quinn, Arvid Shulenberger, and Frank Nelick. Soon I was in the presence of men who understood the connections, and who knew that good literature was actually about something: reality. The horn had sounded, the bells had rung, and like fairy tale heroes, I had been touched and awakened again. In Dr. Quinn’s class on the Metaphysical poets, the connections were the deep analogies of love and death in the poetry of John Donne. In Shulenberger and Nelick’s seminar on literary criticism, I knew the grasp of natural law that informs the best fiction of Hemingway and heard with rebellious chuckle the irreverences they committed against the idols of the academic theater.

The man who finds and celebrates these connections deep down things is called a poet—and all true teachers are poets, even if only by hankering. Waterwalk could as easily been titled Connections. No mere academic Steven Faulkner, a man who spent years on working with his hands before he met the fancy tribes, many of whom have never touched a tool or labored for bread and beer(here one may consult this blog on Oct 24), this fellow more than meets the low-rung standard I heard in paean of a teacher at Marshall University. With awe, the young man from the back hills of West Virginia said, “He knows more than one book!”

Steven Faulkner, waterwalker

More than one he knows indeed. As he carries us along his epic canoe trip from St. Ignace, Michigan, to the levee at St Louis, Faulkner touches docks and sandbars named Marquette, Belloc, Hemingway, Josef Pieper, Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, Lord Tennyson, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.S. Eliot, Dante, Virgil, Graham Greene, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twain, Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Reading Faulkner’s tale, I am at home with many a book and passage I first heard from the true teachers at KU. “He is indeed one of us!” I sighed as I put the last page aside, with deep gratitude for the connections, like epiphanies and kinship lists invoked around a campfire.

Like many poets, Faulkner has chosen to write the story of a journey, not one merely imagined but one lived, a long, arduous journey by canoe through beauties and horrors—the horrors of modern life, the bleakness of destroyed towns and farms, the crudeness of savages—as well as the moments that allow us to see ordinary people at work and play, many of whom are extraordinarily kind to the sometimes hungry and exhausted travelers. As we follow Steven and his son Justin—for this is also a powerful father-and-son tale—through swamps and sloughs and rapids, we have the constant company of Virgil, Homer, Dante, and the vivid reports of Marquette and Joliet, the first Europeans to brave a journey from the Great Lakes toward the Mississippi which, as Indian tribes warned them along the way, was a place of lurking disasters and monsters. Picture Steven and his son by a campfire on a sandbar, reading aloud from the Odyssey. Picture Steven and his son on the Mississippi, now among the monsters of locks, oil barges, motorboats, and strange, uncivilized tribes of rowdies and, yes, nudist colonists.

It is sometimes a sad and inglorious tale in which we are brought up against what has become of America in the ages of industrialization and post-industrialization—the trash age, we could call it. Faulkner refers to Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, where we may read—

Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey
The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay,
‘Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.

And—

Even now the devastation is begun,
And half the business of destruction done;
Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,
I see the rural virtues leave the land . . . .

Faulkner does not lecture or sermonize, but his well-drawn pictures make us aware that there is indeed a distance between a “splendid” and a “happy land,” an opposition that would be lost on many a pilgrim soul if a Faulkner were not there to show us. He has listened well to Conrad’s words in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: “My task . . . is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see.” To these imperatives, Faulkner could be said to add, “to make you smell and to make you taste.”

But he goes a step further, as a poet should. To Conrad’s goals he adds the imperative, “to make you glimpse eternal things at the edges of material things.” Along the way, there are churches in small towns, where a scruffy, brushed-up poet and son sit in the back row and hear sermons, one of which tells the story of the Basilian priest of Lanciano, who was privileged to see the bread and wine of the Eucharist turn visibly into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, so that twelve centuries later the bloody flesh can be tested to show that the blood type is AB, just as it is in all the ten similar Eucharistic miracles world wide. "What are the chances of that?" Faulkner asks, just as he asks the same question when he sees a tugboat on the Mississippi named the Marquette.

Pere Marquette teaches the Indians. By Wilhelm Lamprecht.

True teaching. True poetry. True adventure. And soon a movie of the book will appear, premiering on April 7 in Green Bay. Also, the author tells me, another book is nearing completion, "'Bitterroot: A Father-Son Journey into the Wild West,' which includes bits of Francis Parkman's 'The Oregon Trail,' which I read with the professors, as well as accounts of Father Pierre Jean De Smet's two first journeys along the Oregon Trail to establish the first Catholic missions in the Rocky Mountains."

The Chestertonians of Middle Tennessee await.


Note: I welcome comments below. If you don't want to fight all the computer fol de rol, you can just choose the "Anonymous" option.

A CHRISTMAS TAIL IN HEATHEN TIMES

The following tale is my Christmas gift to kith an kin, including children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends. If any enemies happen upon it, be merry!


A Christmas Tail for Heathen Times

It was December 12, the morning of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas. As usual, I was talking to my cat Luthien. We were standing in front of my statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe which I had decked with Christmas lights to honor her and to astound my Baptist neighbors.

“It was cold then, too, in the mountains,” I said, “that is why the blooming of the roses was such a miracle.”

“What blooming miracle?” Luthien said. She has a touch of limey on her Tolkienish side.

“When Juan Diego of Mexico saw the Blessed Virgin on Tepyac mountain above Mexico City she gave him the roses in his tilma to show to the Bishop, who had demanded a sign that Juan Diego was not another Aztec fruitcake. When Juan carried the roses to the Bishop, the Bishop knelt in wonder as he beheld the image of Mary as a young Aztec woman somehow emblazoned into the tilma, a very humble cloak made of cactus fiber. Though these tilmas usually decay into dust within twenty years, this one, dear furry friend, is still in perfect condition after six hundred years or so, and no scientist can understand what the colors are made of or how the tilma resists decay. ‘Who painted it?’ So the bewildered Hilary Clinton asked a priest. “God,” the priest answered to her bewilderment. Or, for that matter, how this image converted a million Aztecs and, later, won the battle of Lepanto, but those are stories you don’t want to hear. . . . though you could read about them in the book in the house called God-Sent: A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary.”

I paused, suddenly aware that I was probably talking to myself, an affliction of the aged. But I heard a feline yawn.

Our Lady of Guadalupe












Cats normally have an attention span of about thirteen nanoseconds, so I was surprised to see Luthien listening and raising one paw in question.

“Books, those things that get in my way when I want to find a nice nook to curl in?”

“That’s all you have to say? I figured—”

Luthien questions me





“No, wait a minute, I have some questions. All this talk of miracles and Christmas.”

“Yes, must be a puzzle to a mere cat.”

“Don’t be insulting, I am not a Meerkat. My honest line of domestic cathood runs back to Egypt and Babylon.”

“I’ll try to ignore the fact that I am talking with a cat and chalk it up to lonely hermit visions, but for the sake of . . .”

“Of St. Alzheimer, no doubt.”

“No, for the sake of wonder, the seed ground of faith, I’ll hear you out.”

Luthien leapt up on the bannister. “Not until we go inside where it’s warm.”

I knew an old ploy when I saw one, but it was a feast day and I was shivering too.

Inside I had to wait for her to go through her seemingly endless ablutions—cats make Muslims look like pikers— before she consented to go on.

“A cold coming we had of it,” she started.

“That’s from T.S. Eliot’s 'Journey of the Magi,' the lines he appropriated from Lancelot Andrewes. Stop playing around.”

“You are missing it. You humans have no patience. That was my purr-lude.”

“Go on, I’m trying to pay attention.”

“Okay, you think I don’t attend, but I do. All this purring sound is really a different level of perception; we cats kind of hum into knowledge. Now, you have this silly Mexican statue you bought from Wal-Mart, if truth be told, but some of your neighbors have manger scenes in their front yards, right?”

“I didn’t know you observed anything but squirrels and birds.”

“I’ll let that pass as a specie-ist insult. If you were as observant as I am, you would notice that in Eliot’s poem and in all these manger scenes, there are camels and oxen and sheep and even horses, but not a single cat. Not one. Not ever."

“Well, Saint Luke only mentions flocks of sheep, so . . .”

“My point exactly. All the rest about oxen and camels is ex-trope-olation by tradition, eh?”

“That’s extrapolation . . .”

“Not very wise in Scripture study are you? A trope is . . .”

“All right, I get it. The animals kneeling, as in Hardy’s poem, are poetic tropes invented by Christian tradition.”

“And if that’s so, there’s my species-ism proof, your whole Christian culture leaves out cats, creatures of God, but not only are they left out of manger scenes, there’s not a single cat in all of Scripture. One stinking dog in the Book of Tobit—and that’s left out of the Protestant Bible—but not a single—”

“Stinking cat?”

“We are superbly clean, cleaner than thou, you . . .”

“Mangy hermit?”

“Thou hast said it, not me.”

“So what do you want to do about it?”

“I have purr-poses you have not even begun to guess, white boy.”

“But I am about to learn, I suppose.”

“Furs-t, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit. I have a true story.”

“You’re not about to try to add to Scripture, are you?”

“Well, think a minute, what temperature was it on the night Christ was born and what were the constellations in the sky?”

“Errrr—”

“Exactly, but if astronomers and other scientists could tell us those things, would that detract from the Sacred Book? Neither will what I have to tell you, not one whisker.”

“And the source of your story?”

“At last, we’re getting to the tail I have to tell.”

“Tale.”

“In your lingua franca, not my Cat-alonese.”

By this time I was lying on my back with a cup of cocoa by my side and approaching the region some romantic poets must have visited after a good puff on the pipe. But no matter, I had the secret of true culture—leisure, which means time that is like sleeping and love: “the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation,” as philosopher Josef Pieper puts it in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the wisest and most illuminating little book of the whole twentieth century.


Outside my window cars were rushing past, cars full of frenetic Christmas shoppers desperate for sales and purchases and mad with the peculiar madness of capitalist activism. I was in the proper mood to hear a story, even one from Luthien, a story in which I could wander and know as one knows from true stories.

“This story is a secret story handed down in my cat family—

“There was a cat and he had a boy. . .”

“Don’t you have that backwards? A case of puss-lexia?”

“No, it’s you that have it backwards. Think outside your human box for a minute, and no more interruptions!”

“So this cat, followed by his boy, was on his way up a road in Judea to a town called Beth-le-hem, when he heard angels singing--I said don’t interrupt! Cats can hear things you can’t—as a matter of fact, we hear them singing all the time, not just then. Why do you think we sleep so happily while you are grumbling and grousing around?

The boy, of course, heard nothing, he just followed my great-great-great-great(x times 2,642) great-grandfather Judah Ben-jamin Cat—”

“Hold on a minute, this cat was a Jew? You’re really spinning a yarn, Luthien—”

Judah Ben-Jamin Cat





“I told you, we are very, very clean. Where do you think we got that? Okay, now we have to do a flashback. If you can lie still for it. Though cats are not mentioned in the Bible, that is because they were originally pagans in Egypt. They were even worshipped and mummified, you know, there were festivals in their honor and temples and all kinds of federal entitlements. It was high times in Egypt, I tell you, the cats thought it was the promised land. Then the Jews came in. For a while that was good too, they had their fleshpots and the pickin’s were easy in their camps. Cats everywhere, stealing everything, and nobody allowed to touch a hair on their sacred heads. So you wonder why the Jews weren’t too hot on cats when they wrote all their histories and stuff?

An Egyptian cat . . .

. . . and an Egyptian cat god.


“But then these Jews refused to worship any of the Egyptian gods, including us, and wanted their own religious ceremonies, which really riled the Pharoah, or the Fur-oh, as we called him then. Fur-oh, he say stop all that Jew stuff! But they had stiff necks, same as you got some days, and they wouldn’t bend. Then this guy named Moses and his sidekick Aaron got feisty and told Fur-oh, let my peoples go home! Fur-oh, he would say yes, then he would say no, and every time he said no, bad stuff happened. Locusts and hail and pesty things striking the crops and cattle and frogs getting in the food bowls and lice in our fur and all the fish stinking dead in the river and even the children falling down dead. Down at ground level, things were bad for the cats, nothing to eat and nothing to steal and the Gyp-shuns stopped putting sacrifice food in the cat temples. Entitlements dried up and you couldn’t find a dog-fly to snack on. Most of the rats all died and the mice too and the kitties were lean as Somalis. It was hard times in the cotton fields. So our great (all the greats x 3765) ancestor cat, Al-Furry-oh , called all the cats together and jammed about this.

“’Hissss!’ he said. ‘Fur-oh’s wise guys have lost all their mojo, so it would appear, and these Jew guys going out of here to a land of milk and honey AND looks like the rats and mice that are left goin’ with ‘em too. It’s time to fish or cut bait and we don’ have no fish and no bait nuther.’

“Well, to make a long story short—”

“Puh-lease, Luthien—”

“They went with the Jews into the desert and griped a lot along with the Jews and ate the hard tack and listened to a lot of hard talk, but they survived and came into the Promised Land.”

“So why aren’t there any cats in the Jewish scriptures then?”

“I didn’t say they loved us. They have long memories and no patience with fur-i-ners. But we stuck in, and even today—”

“Yes, I fed bits of my Argentine steak to kitties under my table in an outdoor Jerusalem restaurant—”

“You never gave me anything like that to eat—”

“Let’s not get off on that. So finish the story—”

“Huffffggghhh. There you go again, away from the contemplative mode of catness, back into demanding quickie results and rushing to conclusions, the whole protestant work ethic and spirit of capitalism. I’m purring contemplation here, beholding, not snacking. The picture of the cat and his boy walking toward Beth-le-hem upon a midnight clear is a picture worthy of the master painters and hours of simple beholding. But in de-fur-ence to your sick impatience, I will go on.

“It was a cold night and everyone on the road was rushing to find a meal and a bed in the crowded town. There was this census thing on and all the Jews who were of that city had to register or get in trouble with the Roman feds, who wanted total control over the peoples they ruled. Fortunately, there was no rule on cats, so my great (X 2642) grandfather Judah Ben Cat sniffed opportunity—all those people, all that food—and went straight for the inn, which was packed. His boy, a very poor fellow without a name even, who wandered the roads of Rome looking for food himself, trotted behind him. Then they heard—

’Please, sir, my wife is about to give birth, if you could find a place for us. I am a carpenter, tomorrow in payment I could fix something for you.’

‘Do you have a reservation?’

‘No, I am a simple man seeking a place where my wife can give birth, we are on the road because of the census, please for the love of Yahweh, do not turn us away.’

‘I’ve already told you, all our rooms are full and besides, we don’t take barter, only Roman Express cards. Now for the last time, scat.’

“Being told to scat,” Luthien continued, “well, that’s talk Judah Ben Cat had heard before from every people on the planet. And being without a place to stay, Judah knew what that meant, though he prided himself on being homeless and beholden to no man.

‘I saw a bunch of shepherds outside town,’ the boy suddenly said to the man, who said his name was Joseph and he was of the House of David.

‘No house of David here, sir,’ the boy said, ‘just this Holy Day Inn, but it’s packed with rich merchants who can pay the high price. But maybe the shepherds outside town might know a place, maybe a cave.’

“This Joseph went back to his wife, Miriam I think she was called, and held her in his arms. It was clear she was having birth pains every few minutes.”

‘There is no time, we must do something now. The baby is coming fast,’ Joseph told the boy.

“Then,” Luthien said, “Judah Ben Cat saw Joseph kneel down in the street and lift up his hands in prayer and ask his Father God for help. All his ancestors that had come through the desert knew this strange behavior and respected it because it often brought food and with the food, which fell out of the sky, tasty mice and rats.”

“Typical cat thinking,” I interrupted,” always the food.”

“Did you not know that smells and food and eating are important in the Divine Plan? Judah Ben Cat and the homeless of the earth know that God relates to food more than you can know. But that’s a secret that comes later, a very big secret.

“Anyway, Judah’s boy saved the day. ‘Sir Yusef, quick, there is a stable behind the Inn where we can at least find some shelter and straw.'

"Actually he knew this because he had seen Judah Ben Cat disappear around the corner in that direction, but humans always fail to credit the wisdom of cats. Straw? Stable? That’s cat heaven.

“Imagine the place, a crowded dirty stable, half shed, half cave, noisy with the honking of camels and the noise making of horses and donkeys and geese and chickens cackling in cages, and the animals crowding around the food troughs—mangers, you know—and poor Joseph and Miriam looking around for a place. Finally the boy and Joseph pulled one of the troughs to a corner and put as fresh straw as they could find in it. When the baby came, Miriam wrapped it in some clean rags and laid it in the rough straw. About that time the shepherds showed up and knelt as if this baby were God Almighty and Judah Ben Cat knew that something big was happening, something very, very big, and he heard Miriam and Yusef discussing the name for the baby, which was to be JESUS, a name they said had been given by an angel when the baby was conceived.

“The word that has come down to us from Judah Ben Cat is that that is a name at which every knee should bend, and so, when all the other animals knelt on the stable floor, Judah knelt too, even though, as he said, he didn’t quite understand the why or wherefore. It’s something deep, he said, very deep in all creation, that all animals know, even the mice and rats and stupid dogs. Judah’s great grandson followed this family to Nazareth and back into Egypt when the baby-killers came after JESUS and spread the word to his kin that were still there. Something big had happened, so big the baby-killers wanted it stamped out, but wouldn’t you know it, this big new thing in the world traveled by word of mouth among exiles and homeless and back streets and prisoners and the poor and some soldiers, not by billboards or proclamations in the street.

“Later, my kin tell me, that baby grew up and preached the Truth and got killed for what He said. There were cats at the foot of the cross, weeping. For they had heard JESUS say to his followers, ‘Go forth and preach the Gospel to every creature.’ That is our faith, and we do not know how it will work out for us when the kingdom He promised comes, but we cannot believe we will be left behind, for we too are followers, as best as we can be.”

“And now,” I said to Luthien, who had now perched on my couch with one closed eye, “I suppose you will tell me you are a Christian cat?”

“A Cat-lic Christian, not baptized of course, but blessed and touched by the Spirit. That is why when you play music in the house, if it’s liturgical, I purr along, but if it’s not religious, it sounds like cats yowling and I demand to go out. Especially if it’s that Muslim, Cat Stevens, the horror! But mostly, as you know, we prefer silence; some of my fur-bears were Desert Fur-thurs, keeping the mice out of hermit caves and such.

“In the Divine Economy we keep to our place and our own purr-ishes, we preach without words but show necessary disapprobation with flicks of our tails, we mind our own business but we will cuddle anyone who needs warmth, and we mew our thanks to the baby who is God, to whom our fur-bears knelt in the straw. We keep the Occupiers—infidos and hare-e-tics—out of the gardens. And we honor all the feast days by feasting! And when the fasts come, we beg in the streets like the saints. And oh yes, we have a patron saint, St. Gertrude, the patroness of cats . . .”

“Forgive me, Luthien, if I find all of this a bit hard to take, some of it seems so comic, cats in the stable, cats following Moses into the desert—”

“Hufff! All good Christian stories are comic in nature, just as comic to me as you standing there and thinking you own me. Ever read the comic exchanges between Our Lord and the Pharisees? And think back to poor Juan Diego and Our Lady on the mountain. There he was trying to get back from the Bishop to take care of his sick uncle and he was afraid that the mysterious Lady would snag him again, so he went around the other side of the mountain hoping she wouldn’t. Like all true comedies, it’s Divine, even cats know that, and you, sir, are a very funny fellow with strange views. As for comic, have you ever looked at a camel? The missionary who would preach to that creature must be a case for the books.”

My cocoa was in need of replenishment, and it was time to turn on the lights I had strung around Mother Mary, time to open the door and let Luthien go on her mysterious missions, time to rejoice and strain my ears to hear the angels singing. Purr-haps if I would raise my old paws in prayer . . .

IT AIN’T SCIENCE FICTION NO MORE: CONCLUSION

I think we are much more like the Nazis and Dachau than we imagine.–Walker Percy

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin–T.S. Eliot


“I have heard of dead men walking. What of blind men walking? That is what I see when I look at your Western Culture, so-called.”

Thus said Jabar Al Jabar to the Mad Hermit the day after their discussion of the Penn State sex scandal. The Hermit was on his usual afternoon perch, astride the burnished head of the sperm whale skeleton, ready for a skirmish with the Arab philosopher. Around the tip of Masirah Island, a small pod of whales was turning to the south. Playing in God’s eyes, Who made them for his delight, the hermit thinks silently, just as the psalmist sang.

“Blind men walking to doom in their pride,” Jabar continued, walking impatiently up and down the beach, “and carrying the rest of us with you, like as not.”

“And what of your people, you Muslims, Jabar—Pakistan, Syria, Iran—you have enough nuclear weapons to incinerate us all. What of your insane pride and blindness?”

“The better to scare you with, my friend, to awaken you to the inner truth of Islam. Remember, we are all Muslims, that is, children of Adam; you post-Christians simply are not awakened to the fact. Perhaps we can wake you up with fear, though I personally doubt it. Even on the brink of total destruction, the real message of Jihad will not penetrate your brains sick with lust and materialism. That was the point of hitting the World Trade Center, to strike at the heart of your usurious and luxurious culture.”

“So you have come here today to continue the jihad and perhaps push me into the ocean? Come, Jabar . . .”

“I will leave this topic in a moment. Permit me to remind you that your rationalist madness opened the secrets of nature and gave us Hiroshima and the new world of fear. We did not make it, we have only sought to defend ourselves as a sane man would in a prison of madmen. No lectures please.”

“I have none. Remember what you call my culture and the West is not the Kingdom of Christ. Throughout the world we are poor exiles driven into enclaves where we are persecuted by socialists and Muslims alike. Many in my world—especially in my own country of America—would seek to identify the political causes of governments with the Gospel.”

“You said yesterday that we are enemies and should remain so—”

“You are my enemy because you serve a false god and a false religion—”

“But you are commanded to love your enemies—”

“And love you I do, because true love desires the good for its enemy, which is Christ the King and Creator, which you reject—”

“Hold! You are on the soil of Islam and Allah!”

Properly steamed, Jabar paced back and forth, his hand on his khanjar. For the moment, the hermit thought it prudent to retreat into the desert silence and pray a few Jesus prayers.

“No,” Jabar finally said, assuming a more philosophic mood. “No, that is not why I came here today.

“Remember, we were on the deep contradictions and ambivalences of your culture. Not only about sex and love, but about the value of life itself. For some decades, since West accepted the fiction foisted on your minds by Max Weber and the sociologists, that life is not inherently and intrinsically valuable because created by God but a sort of malleable stuff that you ‘place’ value upon, like tying a price tag on a product. You drifted away from the solid vision of the high middle ages. As your poet T.S. Eliot put it, you experienced a ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ which in very plain terms . . .”

“Means a Cartesian separation of body and soul, spirit and flesh . . .”

“Exactly. This whole business of talking about where you ‘place’ your values has even entered the ordinary conversations of so-called Christians. If I may say, it has become a cardinal principle of your culture as much as usury and luxury. Catholic priests and protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis parrot it every day. And that is why you are rushing to a doom greater than nuclear attack. Said Qutb saw and smelled it in your streets and homes. Who, dear hermit friend, are you to decide what is the value of anything God has made? I hear the women chattering in your marketplaces, ‘I have issues with that, I am deciding what my values are, it all depends on where you place your values,’ et cetera ad nauseam.”

“Ah, Jabar, you cut deep with your philosophic sword.”

“I have found that the best place to know a culture is to listen to ordinary speech in marketplaces and coffee shops. For instance, I hear this as a common question now, ‘what will you do with your parents when they get old?’ Do? Do with? Do you see the underlying world view here? On all the earth, in tribes and villages on every continent, this is not a question for civilized people, who keep their parents with them as naturally as they breathe.”

“Yes, it is the same question that is asked now when a woman has been given the gift of life in her womb. What will we do with it? You are right, we are become as gods.”

“Let me put it as simply as I can. What I hear is that the disposal of individual lives has become the automatic response of a technocratic culture that sees everything as products that become outmoded and must be eliminated. The emperor ‘I’ is the autocratic disposer.

A friendly Nazi neighborhood extermination van


“Then there’s the official language, the false language adopted on death as it is on sexual abuse. This is a phony language of tenderness and sympathy; it fills the brochures of the nursing homes, hospitals, retirement communities. It pretends to be a language of reverence for life, whereas in fact it is the language of murder and death, in the melodic tones of ‘choice,’ just like the language of the abortion clinics, so called. There is only one premise in all this: suffering and inconvenience must be eliminated for everyone at all costs. At all costs, mind you. The price tag has been placed, is placed, because that is the lingua franca of the death factories—the Soylent Green Industries, if you remember the movie. ‘Your suffering is my inconvenience, your death my solution.’ The poets . . .”

“The poets? What?”

“Your poets—a few of them—have prophesied for your people but few listen. I am still struck by the fact that millions of people have watched The Lord of the Rings a dozen times, but have missed most of its meanings, including the evil of Mordor, the archetype of State madness.”

“Yes,” the hermit sad sadly. “I know. I taught an Honors seminar on Tolkien a few years ago in which the students—most of them—absolutely resisted knowing what Tolkien meant. It is incredible that this major poet has been such a successful failure.”

“But let me point to two poets (I use the word in its traditional sense) who have gone to the heart of the matter on the direction of humanistic and anti-religious societies. These are two poets whose prophetic messages have been ignored by your intelligentsia, who mark them ‘odd’ or ‘mad,’ and turn away.

“The first is The Canticle of Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959); the second is The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy (1987). A pivot point between them is “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz,” an essay by Walker Percy written in 1971, during the period in which Percy was becoming more aware of the depth of cultural sickness in America and beginning to shape his fictions as messages wrapped in comedic strategies to elude the literati. With his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, the message was all too clear, and the critics opening that package were horrified to find that their pet Catholic novelist was up to the same game as Flannery O’Connor, writing in giant letters and grotesque plots the meanings that the West needed to hear, like warnings shouted on a sinking ship.”

“I remember these strange, powerful novels, Jabar,” the hermit responded. “Remind me, how do they reveal the deep ambivalence of our culture toward death?”

“Simply, that the West has nothing to believe in any longer except death itself. Death is the solution, the only solution that makes any sense, release from the suffering of life. Instant Buddhism, if you will, cloaked in a lying reverence for life. No matter how much the secular humanists prate about the value of life, they can only define it as the power to exterminate—in euthanasia, abortion, infanticide, or nuclear war. After wildly hinting at his vision for four or five novels, Percy risked spelling it out—a sort of ‘Life and Death Issues for Dummies.’”

“Yes,” the hermit recalled, “he reveals one of the best kept secrets of the twentieth century, the roots of the Nazi holocaust in the left-wing politics of the Weimar Republic, in which the State took on the mantle of savior by redefining the value of life. The doctors of liberal Germany spelled it out in The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value (Life Unworthy of Life) (1922) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, and the legislators proceeded to pass the laws that would allow the government to forcibly sterilize the ‘feeble minded’ and euthanize anyone who did not fall without the parameters of ‘meaningful’ life. Hitler’s Nazi government did not need to pass a single law; the statutes were already in place. The friendly vans from the government could begin euthanizing mental patients wholesale. This deep interconnection between the leftist view of life and the Nazi view of life . . .”

Life devoid of value with a price tag


“Yes,” the hermit agreed, “is definitely hidden in the left’s educational syllabus today, while Peter Singer is taught as a respectable philosopher and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, clearly a neo-Nazi with a particular animus against black people, is celebrated as a savior of society. I wonder why abortion ‘clinics’ do not have little Sanger shrines and pass out Sanger holy cards.”

Saints Sanger and Singer: Prophets of Death



“Walter M. Miller was a real prophet. He saw where things would go. In A Canticle for Leibowitz he pictured earth in the third millennium as a place where a second nuclear holocaust would leave millions dying of radiation exposure and where a small band of Benedictines would be the last line of defense against the euthanizing Mercy Camp crematoria of the government. Abbot Zerchi and his monks protest the smarmy government murders that are committed in the name of mercy—”

“Yes! And in The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s ‘science fiction,’ it is a Catholic priest, thought to be mad by most, who preaches a sermon at the opening of a hospice—in which he startles his hearers by saying that the Great Prince Satan is ruling the earth and that ‘tenderness leads to the gas chamber.’ ‘Beware, tender hearts,’ he says, ‘don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers . . . . More people have been killed in this century by tender-hearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all the centuries put together. . . .Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists.’ Then, like Mother Teresa, he invites these doctors to send all the ‘suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn, whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery’ to his hospice.”

“So both these poets point to the central lie that the State should be allowed to define who is worthy of life and to act accordingly.”

“Yes,” Jabar replied, “but note that it is the citizens of the State who rush to embrace this evil philosophy. And that is why I say that the culture of the West is eaten up with a love of death disguised as a love for life.”

“Yes,” the hermit said sadly, “in my last years of teaching, I was astonished to hear students defending every unnatural thing. From homosexuality to involuntary sterilization to a preference for animal rights over human rights. In particular they reacted with revulsion to the mentions of large families, virginity, chastity, traditional marriage (the only kind), and cheered on abortion, euthanasia, birth control, eugenics, cloning, you name it.

Saint Margaret, Mother of Mercy, speaks to the KKK

“The current enthusiasm for socialism among the occupiers is all of a piece: the first thing a socialist society does is to deny the worth of, even the existence of, the human person. When I was a college student in the last century, I read Pope Leo XIII’s denunciation of socialism as a philosophy in which the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the ‘socio-economic mechanism.’ In other words, life has a price tag. All those who follow the wonderful celebration of painless death now popular in medical and nursing schools will perhaps be surprised when they themselves hear the hiss of the gas chambers. Nazis R Us, but we don’t see it and, like Ann Frank, wonder that the Nazi philosophy could so completely surround us.”

When the hermit heard no reply, he turned to see the figure of Jabar Al Jabar moving steadily away from him into the desert, as if he were suddenly seized with a fear that the hermit himself carried the Western contagion, and needed to purify himself in the burning hot sands. With an added ironic gesture, Jabar shook the dust from his sandals.


Note: I welcome comments below. If you don't want to fight all the computer fol de rol, you can just choose the "Anonymous" option.

IT AIN'T SCIENCE FICTION NO MORE: PART ONE

The Mad Hermit was interrupted in his musings by Al Jabar Jabar, a professor of Islamic philosophy at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. He came by to check on our hermit friend from time to time to discuss issues of the day though, as he always said, the issues of the day are always the same. This time he brought the news of the Penn State sexual child abuse scandal, and wondered about the Hermit’s thoughts.

“An evil,” the hermit said, “always a great evil. But what is new about that?”

“Yes, I believe you are sincere in this, Hermit friend, but I wonder at the sincerity of the horror expressed by most people in your country. Why are they so horrified by something that their culture is also busy endorsing?”

“Eh, what’s that, Jabar?”

“Everything is always upside down in your culture. Your people are always busy denouncing the very thing that they really support. Now that the Internet god allows everyone in the world to see what’s going on in your so-called culture, we know you are frauds pure and simple.”

“Explain, please.” The Hermit idly poked a stick at a hermit crab.

“How many clothing ads do I see in your media that show very young people dressing provocatively? How many discussions do I see among parents that agree that even pre-teens should be dating and going to dances? It would appear that you are encouraging young people to enter the sexual phase of their development at the first possible opportunity, and not for the sake of starting families, but for its own sake, as an end in itself, which is, of course a good definition of sterility as well as of perversion.”

“But Muhammad and his child brides, Jabar, don’t forget that.”

“Yes, Hermit friend, all true, but that was for marriage and children, not for the encouragement of promiscuous behavior as what you call a life-style. Do not confuse the sacred and the profane.”

“But I don’t see how . . .”

“The connection with really promoting sexual child abuse while condemning it? I also understand that the seculars and the liberals in your culture—the very ones who are calling for errant football coaches to be hanged and emasculated—ordinarily take their daughters to the doctor and have them outfitted for birth control at the first sign of puberty. What kind of message is your culture sending thirteen-year old boys and girls? Not only with this kind of behavior but with an entire media—yes, I have seen your movies—blasting away daily to encourage children to think of their sexual lives. Worse, remember the little girl in Colorado? Jon Benét Ramsay? The one who was murdered? Her parents routinely dressed her like a prostitute and displayed her in public as a sexual object.”

“And your point is . . .”

“I’m not through. One more element of my evidence. I see that there are Man-Boy sex organizations in your country, and yes, I know they represent a small minority, but what interests me is the conflict of values among your liberal middle class. When they have to think about this, they experience what you call a brain freeze.

“On the one hand it seems they are outraged at the idea of grown men exploiting young boys for sex, but almost immediately . . . yes, imagine how the levers in their brains operate. . . ‘I am certainly against that, but wait, those men are homosexuals and I must not be a homophobe . . . and they have equal rights. . .perhaps the boys are consenting… but then, what, after all, is consent? . . .. .I don’t want to be like the Boy Scouts . . .that would be fascist and I must be for freedom . . .but some of the members of the Man-Boy-Love thingy are Catholic priests, and that is an outrage …but don’t they have equal sexual rights too that are being frustrated by not being allowed to be married by the guilt-ridden Catholic fascist homophobes?’

“Interesting to see how moral ambivalence operates, isn’t it? Especially on your networks and National Public Radio. Perhaps that is one reason, other than football dollars, that there was no great revulsion and stampede to inform the authorities. Before you ask, my point is that there is no clarity in your culture about what it calls 'values.' How can there be when the culture is simultaneously pretending to be horrified at the sexual abuse of children while doing everything it can to turn children into promiscuous adults? And things for use?”

“I see what you mean, Jabar. I guess I have been in this country for so long that I have lost any sense of the western attitudes toward children and how to dress them and teach them. I guess I am so upset by it that even when I see it—as I sometime do on the televisions in the hotel lobbies in Oman—I write it off to a small minority in our culture—how strange, after all this time, to say those words, ‘our western culture,’ because it isn’t any more and hasn’t been for at least a century, and now it seems that the young ladies I had in my classrooms at SQU, all dressed modestly in black, are more a laudable norm than what I see in glimpses on television—girls nearly naked, in tattoos and facial jewelry—and yes, I have caught glimpses of them in the tourist hotels here . . .why do you think I have become a hermit fleeing to the desert?”

“Welcome to the desert, my friend, the home of the birth of prophecy and religion. But I am sure you know we are developing some of the same problems in Islam? The Internet, the DVDs, everything you have is creeping into our world. Why do you think there are such things as Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood? And more such things form by the hour in the streets of Yemen and Iran and now, the back streets of Egypt again. Because from the time of Sayid Qutb’s visit to the United States, when he saw the West for what it is now, there has fermented a widespread rebellion against the notion that one can mix cultures like cuisines or have a fruitful relationship with the enemy culture. As he put it, the choice of a culture is absolute: it must live in accordance with a system of morality and law that corresponds to the nature of reality. If it does not, it is a society of jahiliyya, that is, ignorance of religious truth. The West, he said, which became great on the strength of its religious values, has turned against its very roots. Your Dostoevsky would agree. And as Kipling put it . . .”

“Yes, The Gods of the Copybook Headings are unforgiving . . .”

“The purpose of all culture is to teach the virtuous life. That is what your culture has forgotten, and why you are dying of your own internal contradictions.

“I visited your country recently. Out of curiosity I visited various places including a suburban Catholic church where I saw altar girls smacking chewing gum and trying to look sultry in makeup. The young women and girls in the pews were also following the sick culture of the day, their skirts and shorts and tattoos and way of walking . . .”

“Please, do not help me to imagine it. I am here to burn out such things.”

“So where is your culture now, including your Catholic culture?"

“I am afraid since the wrong turn of Vatican II—the idea that the way to save the world is to become like the world— it has been driven into tiny enclaves. The Society of Pius X, small traditionalist parishes barely allowed but definitely not encouraged to exist by the Vatican, and the small parishes of Byzantine Catholics still keeping to Orthodox ways and Orthodox theology. So yes, there is a parallel here with Islam, except that in Islam those faithful to Islamic roots are winning, while in the West . . . I recall hearing of one parish where a traditional Latin Mass was permitted, and the modernists joked about the traditionalists as dressing like Mennonites.”

“Your thoughts?”

“Perhaps the Mennonites and their offshoots the Amish saw what was coming from the so-called Renaissance . . . but let’s not get into all that, Jabar. I know you have deeper things on your mind with all this talk about sex and culture.”

“Indeed. These minor conflagrations of false or diluted conscience over the Penn State scandal point to deeper ambivalences and contradictions in your culture. The lie about sex is paralleled and underwritten by the lie about the value placed on life itself.”

“Before we get to that, would you suggest that those in the West would be wise to be friends with those in Islam who call for a return to the roots of Islam?”

“Quite the contrary, dear hermit friend. Since you are a devout Chestertonian and a lover of paradox, I would suggest that the best way we can be friends is by being enemies. The best service an enemy provides for me is by showing me what I must fight against, and what I must return to. The enemies of true Islam were the modernizers in the Nasser era. The enemies of true Christianity are those who want to compromise with the devils of secularism.”

“But Jaber, I saw the face of the Islamic radicals when I taught in Kuwait, and I must say I did not like them very much.”

“Excellent, Hermit friend, a very just and honest response. You should continue not to like them, even to hate them, and ask yourself, what is it in your modern culture that they hate so much, and to what extent have you yourself bought in to it?”

There was a long silence from the Hermit. He remembered wondering what message the burning towers of the World Trade Center really carried for the West.

“Every time I talk to you, Jaber, you turn me back to my task. You are like the followers of Muhammad raging in the marketplaces of Mecca.”

“Thank you, my enemy and friend, and tomorrow I will rage again, here, if you will have me.”

“Come, and come armed. It is what I need. It is so easy to forget truths, and so hard to remember them. And that, after all, is what a hermit is supposed to be for.”

“Tomorrow, in sh’Allah, if Allah permits.”

WHISTLING IN THE DARK AND CALLING IT DAWN

Note: the Mad Hermit does not usually take on a Vatican document and it is unlikely he will do so again. Somewhere in Catholic land “liberals” are chortling and cheering over the latest Vatican document, which calls for the creation of a world banking authority; in other places, “conservatives” and “orthodox” writers are twisting in agony and biting their nails as they struggle to endorse the proposal and square it with right thinking. Well, you get neither from the Mad Hermit for, after all, he is mad. Very mad.

A shocking, horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests teach as they wish; yet my people will have it so; what will you do when the end comes? --Jeremiah 5: 30-31.

The document in question, “Note on financial reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace,” has created a stir by calling for a central world banking authority of some sort. Such an entity would have the absolute authority to set everything right in terms of money. As usual these days (i.e., post Vatican II), the major appeals of the writers are to Pacem in Terris and Populorum Progressio, as well as to statements by Blessed John Paul II and the present Holy Father’s Caritas in Veritate. As one could have easily predicted, the document does not concern itself with the saving of souls nor does it refer to any Papal Encyclical such as Pope Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis that does so.

On a promise to some friends, I have actually read this latest document, just as I read the encyclicals above. When I was an undergraduate we read all the major encyclicals of the 19th and 20th century, many of which had real and practical social implications, such as the endorsing of the labor movement and the right of people to organize themselves into unions for the sake of justice. While recognizing the palpable reality of the political movements of the times, the Vatican called out specific injustices (such as the Nazis and Communists) and pointed to the need for resistance to them. If I am not mistaken, prior to Vatican II, the Popes and the Vatican did not take on the remaking of human society under a single secular global authority. True, St. Thomas Aquinas seemed to want such a thing in the 13th century, but then his globe was much smaller than ours.

I will, however, leave to others the task of chasing the documents and confine myself to my reaction to this one. As I write, I see that the Obama administration has sent soldiers to yet another African country, proceeding unilaterally and unconstitutionally toward that very world authority our president seems to ardently desire as long as we are in charge of it and as long as the leftist newspapers will like it.

Meanwhile, Wall Street and the streets of cities from Nashville to Nome are crowded with thousands of (mostly young) people holding signs calling for the ending of greed and selfishness and pollution and capitalism. If a thousand of these people are questioned about their aims and goals, they will give a thousand answers ranging from “I am hurting” to “somebody’s got to do something about this.” Like Bill Clinton, I feel their pain; I hurt too, hobbling along on low income; and even if I could join them (no car, no money), I am not sure I could add much rationality to their grief and rage, other than to point out that their major cheerleader—opportunista Obama—is largely responsible for the particular nadir we find ourselves in. His chief solution, absurd on the face of it to any Swiftian or Orwellian or Twainist, has been to fire money like shotgun pellets in all directions, money we do not have, money which he is, like the archons of the Weimar Republic in Germany, printing with mad abandon. One might observe that these same left-wing archons passed the eugenics and euthanasia laws which allowed the succeeding Nazi government to murder the weak, the Jews, and the Christians, for the surest way to eliminate social problems in a society is, well, to eliminate them.

Ay, there’s the rub, which is the central point of my response to the Vatican document. In addition to sounding like a commencement address that urges the graduates of today to go forth and serve justice and peace and nice stuff, it ignores the fact that no matter how often you overturn the tables of the moneychangers—something, indeed, that does need to be done on a regular basis—the money changers will not as a class be deterred until the Roman Legions come in and destroy the temple where they do their business. That, indeed, was a world central authority straightening things out. Most of the graduates listening to the commencement address will stampede out of the auditorium bent on the usual economic rape and pillage. Who, besides a totalitarian government, will stop them? Is that what the Vatican wants?

The document refers frequently to the United Nations and its importance in pointing the economic directions the Vatican itself espouses—a central world authority with the power to end abuses. Pardon, but are the writers of such documents insane or only wilfully ignorant? The one non-religious central authority the planet has at present is dedicated more than anything else to, among many other evil things, universal abortion and euthanasia. The various appeals by the Holy Father and the limp protests of the American Catholic Bishops have had no effect upon this tendency other than to strengthen it. From the time of H.G. Wells, the utopians of our culture have been able to see no solution to human problems other than the elimination of most humans.

The Nazis call for the elimination of useless life on the basis of economics.


The “world political authority” called for by Pope John Paul XXIII is, for the writers of this document “the road that must be taken,” regardless of whether it will lead to a sane society. It will be “a new model of more cohesion, polyarchic international society that respects each people’s identity with the multifaceted riches of a single humanity.” (Good grief, who can write such abominable prose?) The writers go on: “It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good.”

Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple (Giorda)



And what is that common good? The whole principle of the Gospel is that there are common goods in God’s universal laws. Nowhere in the Gospel, as Dostoevsky saw clearly, is there any room for misty-eyed statism that delivers justice with a fist or a Comintern. Whether justice is delivered by a fist or a massive mind control, as in Brave New World or 1984 or We, it is still a false justice based on a central socialist authority that knows what’s good for us. Dostoevsky, by the way, predicted the marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and international socialism.

The “institutions with universal competence,” which the Vatican writers imagine to be the guardians of the new world bank against corruption—where are they? All the evidence is that the world is racing madly toward an anti-life totalitarianism, a “brave new world” of eugenics, abortion, infanticide, mind control, and a political correctness that outlaws all dissent as well as all common sense and individual expression. The solution to this apocalyptic nightmare is not a new world government, calling for which is like sending gasoline trucks to put out a fire, but the one offered in A Canticle for Leibowitz—building small Benedictine communities as the centers for sanity and holiness and continuing in the virtue of hope while resisting anti-life evils.

St. Thomas Aquinas, despite his fantasy about world government, said that a society with few but necessary laws would be the best; for this reason, he agreed—much to the shock of modern day Jansenists and Puritans-with Ron Paul that laws against prostitution and drugs will only make matters worse and take our eyes off our need for conversion and individual charity.

Of course capitalism stinks; global capitalism stinks even more—the gift the Protestants gave the world (R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) does, in fact, rage over the surface of the earth like a genetically re-engineered plague virus. Tamed occasionally by individual state governments, it does not respond dutifully to law (remember Prohibition?). But a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper will give us, precisely, that: a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper.

The writers’ appeals to subsidiarity—a basic ethical and social doctrine of the Catholic Church—are fatuous and, on the face of it, absurdly contradictory. Genuine subsidiarity calls for authority to be exercised at the lowest possible social level, only moving to the next level when that is impractical or ineffective. Calling for a world economic authority seems more an act of despair. Like some of the most vicious critics of the Catholic Church today, I would call for the Church to follow its own doctrines, to mend its seminaries and parishes and families, before holding itself up to scorn with documents of this kind which, as a Catholic, I know that I am permitted to ignore.

When I was in high school our parish priest (R.I.P.), a good man and a good priest in most respects, preached that the parish needed more money to build a new gymnasium and a new convent for the nuns. To effect this fund-raising, he announced that each year his office would print and distribute a record of what each family gave by week and year. I was scandalized and angered, for each year thereafter, my father’s donations (those cursed little numbered envelopes) never exceeded a dollar a week, the amount he earned for an hour at union wages. Meanwhile the big wigs of the parish outshone all the working families who cursed the meat and went without the bread. The gymnasium now stands empty, the nuns are gone, the school closed, and the bell tower—which really does need to be fixed—leans dangerously, a good symbol of what wrongheaded solutions can bring.

I’d say—but no one asks—empty the Vatican of committees and idle priests. Send them out to preach the Gospel and live on the charity of those in the pews. I think there is something about this in the New Testament.

STARTING OUT

There is a place before the use of words, a place of smoke and mist and fog. It is the place of starting out.

People talk about what is universal to humans but they miss this point: even if you have no formal religion and baptism or initiation or whatever, you know what starting out means. I know.

Starting out—there is nothing like it. The southern West Virginia winter morning is a fog bank of low cloud smothering the world in secret.

It hangs over the rail yards down past Sacred Heart Church and school and the smoke of the trains roll up into it and the whole white and brown brume covers me. I breathe it in, icy and stale and sour at the same time. And that is the world, the whole world.

When I step out on the porch at five it is still murky dark; the street light just opposite is like a dying punk that can barely light itself. Our house, like most houses in the town, hangs on to a steep bank on the hillside. I can barely make out a few more streetlights, big bulbs with tin saucers over them, muffled and bluish yellow, down by the convent. And out past that, darkness and more fog, but I have to guess at that.

I stop for a moment on our high porch which leans out over the street below like the quarter deck on a sailing ship in Two Years Before the Mast or Treasure Island. I go in the basement below the porch—I told you the house is on a hill side—and rattle the grates under the coal fire, then shovel in coal and punch it with a poker, then take out the “clinkers” (coal burned into a hard, shiny rock) with a tool like a claw, and pile them into a rusty can for the garbage man. I stand for a moment with the furnace door open and watch the new coal catch and feel the heat on my face. Then, it’s time to go back out: icy cold razor wind sharp up the nose and chill trickling down the back of my neck. Everyone inside asleep above me, everyone down the hill asleep too, including Father and the nuns. If anyone is awake it’s a few engineers and switchmen, maybe a few coal miners in vans on the way to the shafts down south, but I don’t think about that yet. I just want this, the quiet emptiness. It’s just me, I think, me and the world, and the world hasn’t started up.

The empty canvas newspaper sack rides my shoulder. Like the cassock and surplice at Mass, it makes me official, but this is different: I am in charge. I get to decide to go or not go, to go the way I want, I can even start from the other end of the route and come back if I want to, I can even skip a house and lie and say sorry I missed it, I can go fast or slow, I can stand anywhere I want along the way and listen to hissing and ding-dong of the switch engine bells in the yards. For at this moment no one is looking at me. No one is watching me, no one is seeing if I make a mistake or make faces or drag along or peek in windows or dawdle or dance or waste time or throw rocks or dream or stop and swing on the butt-cold swings or not pay attention or go off somewhere in my head or daydream or think about something I’m not supposed to think about or ain’t allowed to think about (or say, like “ain’t”) or didn’t ask permission for or have to account for. No, I can stop right in the middle of the street—it is dizzying to walk right down the middle of all the streets, swinging my newspaper bag—“like a fool,” Mom would surely say—and think about something that often comes to me, that there is somewhere in the hills and mountains a place where no one but me has ever been, where there is a cold spring pouring out of the rocks and ferns and I can kneel down, cup my hands, and drink the pure stream all I want to. Thinking about it, I swing the paper sack madly around my head. “In the beginning,” I recited from Genesis in a school program, “God created . . . .” “What a rush,” the druggies would say in later days. He could do whatever He wanted. Perfect freedom. I stand on the porch and step out into the fog of the world unfettered and unafraid, to taste that freedom for the first time, and I love it beyond all hope and all reason.

Or, I think about old Stony Ridge on the other side of the tracks, where the torrents of fog come rolling down its long slopes, and where the mortar shells land just where I put them when I squeeze the steely in my pocket. I may fire off a few before I start down the stairs, just to scare the gooks, even if I can’t see the bursts. Watch out, I say with grim determination, we have the power, we will beat you in the end. Squeeze, fire, silent wait, whoomp.

Down past the school, the convent, the rectory, the church, wisps of fog swirl under the street light at the corner. I turn down past the filling station to the bridge. This is the gem, the downtown morning route I earned after slogging through two crummy afternoon routes. Yes, that’s right, turn left at the church where all that black murmuring is sleeping inside with the single red sanctuary lamp hanging by its chain over the cold stone floor. He’s there in the closed tabernacle watching me, flits across my mind; no, He’s asleep. There’s a tiny chill as I dare to wonder if it’s true, and I am down Monroe Street through the neighborhood of decaying houses built by the railroad for its bosses. The railroad people are mostly gone except for an older couple slumbering in the house with the grand white columns; their daughter, a blond lady gym teacher, is sleeping too. Later, she will walk her two Irish setters, Pat and Mike, wearing her horsey jodhpurs. Let her sleep, let her walk them in her sleep. Let Mrs. Keen in the apartment house next door sleep before she teaches steel-clad grammar without ever a smile on her heavy face. Let everyone sleep. I am awake and walking down the middle of the street.

Then I come to the downtown. I can go one of three ways now, my choice. Left over the hump and past the colored Catholic church where I serve Mass sometimes and down past the movie theatres where my Dad works, straight past the auto showrooms and garages, right and down the main street by the railroad. I can feel my feet twist in the fun of making up my mind. There is a moment of grinding, like when the big Mallet engines drop sand on the tracks to keep from sliding; so I go that way, where the steam and coal smoke rise up brown and orange into the fog cloud, and I can hear the big engines breathing hard as if they are waiting for something. Above the wall that separates the street and the yards, I can see the smokestacks and the top of the boilers, hear a switch engine pushing an extra sleeping car down the siding for when the morning passenger train comes in from Norfolk. I don’t see anyone on the street except a few brakemen coming off their shift like tired ghosts, their lunch pails dangling empty. Then an engine lets out a long sigh of steam as if it’s tired and old and I can smell the coal smoke warm and brown settling down over the street and dropping hot cinders on my face. Somehow I feel I am part of all this, that I with my canvas sack on a mission to get and deliver the newspaper am part of something much bigger than myself, that I am the brakemen and the engineers and the silent dark buildings with the coal smoke from their chimneys, all moving toward something called the dawn.

But I don’t want to hurry it. I saunter some, looking in the windows of Woolworth’s and the movie posters at the Colonial. That movie will run today, but right now Clark Gable is frozen on the poster, grinning serious and thoughtful, one gun pointed skyward. But I will bring the news to the sleeping town. At the newsstand across from the passenger station I see the wired bale of newspapers sitting in the doorway and think, no, I will beat you, I will have the papers all over the downtown before you open your doors, Mrs. Goulasch.

A police car sails smoothly past. A warning. Get on before this is all lost and changed and there are people on the streets, lights coming on. At the newspaper building, I come up the back where the trucks are loading more newspaper bales for out in the county. Here they come, the morning papers rolling down the conveyor belt and I’m in line waiting for mine. Crawfish counts them out with his huge ink-stained thumb, ten at a time, but I count them over, I am tired of being shorted. Back out of the shouts and the grumbly motors rumbling, I am in the silence again, carrying the words. At the corner I stop a second and look at the front page, the news I will take from office to office and house to house, what the people are waiting for, Panmunjom and the 38th parallel and the Choisin reservoir and President Eisenhower and the communists in our government. At school, I will know all these things as if I had lived a life earlier than everyone else. I will be old and wise and secret. I will know.

The silence is an ocean of waiting, despite the train noises and the occasional shout or starting car. I float back into it, the bag of papers on my hip, the bill of my earmuff hat over my eyes. Monday let’s say, a light load today, the paper slim and serious after the weekend, and this a school morning again. I have not said any prayers and don’t even think about it. I will hear about all that later, that is part of the day that hasn’t started yet though Mass will start in about an hour now. I don’t really think about this as I breathe in the fresh day of fog and smoke but I do think about words, especially strange words I don’t know the meaning of. They are like the box cars on the railroad, the freight train racketing along with its announcements: Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Rock Island Line, C&O, B&O, New York Central, Chicago and Northwestern, Virginian, Chessie. Peace Talks, Dogma, Arbitration, price controls, OPA, liquor, sex, extreme unction, brain washing, salamander, permanents, icebergs, blizzards, persecution, displaced persons, divorce, atom bombs, salt rising bread, girdles, griddles, grits, bump and grind, boogey woogy. I say them out loud and watch my breath make more fog with the words. Hic Est Meus Corpus Meum. But if I say it nothing happens. Why?

I am in why, which is better. The answers I get when I ask questions never satisfy me, so I am better in why. While it is still dark and foggy with the great smoke clouds rolling up off the yards, the billows—there’s a word!— rolling in on themselves and trailing away behind as the engine moves down the tracks, the thunder of the wheels on the track pounding the earth below like a mighty hammer, and the long whistle of death as the coal train announces the sorrowful news of the long lonesome valleys that stretch forever in both directions. I stop to listen. I can feel it as the rumbling of the Mallet wheels rolls under the street and passes up into my legs. The only other time I feel like this is when I’m reading and I hit something that shakes me inside, a terror or a wonder. But the trains make reading better because you can look up from the book and know the words have that kind of power and loneliness. I wouldn’t want to read up in our attic if I could not see and hear the trains.

Which is another place and time where you have that freedom, the toasty warm attic at the top of the two storey-house (all the heat goes up there) down by the rail yards, just you and a stack of Life or Look magazines and some old books and some things your uncles brought back from the last war, a sharp shell fragment, an ash tray made of an ammo casing. The engineers of the switch engines wave, even sometimes the engineers or conductors of the coal trains. You don’t know them and they don’t know you but there is a kind of friendship there that makes me feel good. Best is when a caboose is heading off west and the conductor in his red kerchief waves with his lantern at you leaning out the cupola window and waving like you know him, especially at night or in the early morning, like something great and important is happening that you cannot begin to understand and it will never happen again the same way.

Then comes the time when the sun begins to burn off the fog and the street lights switch off and the grey noises and people begin. The last paper has been plopped on a porch where they probably won’t pay up, some of the people standing out waiting for it and looking at their watches. They irritate me, I don’t even count them, they are day people, part of the world ending my time alone. Traffic is picking up, the first busses stop at the bank and rumble black exhaust, waiting to fill up. Delivery trucks bring the milk and bread to the restaurants, which turn on their neon signs to lure the railroad men and the passengers from off the first train, soldiers and sailors from Norfolk, salesmen, big shots followed by redcaps and hopeful winos cadging for dimes. Sometimes, before heading home, I cross over the avenue and walk through the train station, hoping to sell the extra paper I have left over.

For no reasons except my own, I stand on the platform and look at the Pullman cars and the dining car that pull in under the sparsely lighted steel canopy next to the ticket window. Red caps, some of them with baggage wagons, hurry around, ready to sing out to the people getting off. Here it comes. The passenger train eases in magnificently, stops with bursts of steam that flood the platform; I wait until it will start out again with an occasional slipping of the big wheels on the steamed tracks. Inside the dining car there is another world, a bright lighted world I am outside, will never be a part of. Big men with cigars reading newspapers and finishing breakfast, fancy ladies in furs primping and looking out cold at me, a sad, hopeless being who can never bother them. Watching the cars move slowly out with important, staring conductors standing at the doors makes me feel I am dying and alone. The cars rock over the rails, couplings squeak and groan. Slowly, slowly, the world of the train floats out and I get the sensation that two worlds are moving, mine and theirs, but then, no, the morning news is this: I am stuck here and they are gone, the rickety- rickety-rick fading down the line. And the whistle sounds, one blast long and slow, a few short, as if the train is saying something I can’t grasp.

It’s all grey now, my sack is empty, the day has started, no one cares what I have done but me, but I don’t know for sure if that’s bad or good. It’s like when you start to tell somebody of something great that happened to you and you can see in their eyes they are a thousand miles away, just waiting for you to stop talking and you wish you hadn’t started. I cross the street back where the newsstand and the restaurants are coming alive with sailors and soldiers and whores. I walk back up the hill to our house and creep in to read the newspaper by myself before anyone else gets up. Years later, I miss the feeling of those mornings and want it back. I want the smell of my socks dried out on the hot radiator or hung on a chair by the coal fire grate when I get ready to go out in the morning. My socks, warm for my feet.

Starting out. It’s what I want again. It’s what we all want.

Copyright 2011 R. Kenton Craven