An interesting article on editing and editorial styles...

From yesterday's Guardian, by Alex Clark. The gruesome pages (and yet more pages) of thanks and acknowledgements that one reads in popular fiction (if that is the term I mean; thrillers and mysteries and 'novels of suspense' and the like, the sort of book I read for twenty minutes before sleeping) are certainly obnoxious and perhaps also a symptom of the "more collaborative" authorial and publishing worlds that Miss Kirsty Gunn decries.

"What had drawn me away from faith had not been real reasons against it, but the fact that the reasons for it no longer spoke to me."

Mr Aaron Pidel SJ translates Romano Guardini on his conversion, from the theologian's Berichte über mein Leben. No Hans Castorp, our Romano.

Jesu dulcis memoria dans vera cordis gaudia...

The great cantus that is used in the Sacred Liturgy to celebrate the Holy Name is the focus of this lovely post at Idle Speculations, and St Bernard, to whom was commonly attributed authorship for many, many years.  One knows from the Fathers, from Origen to Rupert of Deutz and Bonaventure, that we perceive the realities of the divine Beauty through our 'spiritual senses'; this essay about the subject (more or less) from ages ago in Theological Studies was the only text I could find (without the loss of too much time, and without wading through the miasma of New Age, pagan nonsense about the subject; Heavens, people are effing idiots) that suggests the depth of Tradition's embrace of the concept. My recollection is that P Hugo Rahner SJ also discusses the subject in his Ignatius the Theologian, and this book by Dr John D. Green (it's at Google Books) includes a discussion of P Rahner and the development of the theology of the spiritual senses.  It may be an understandable deviance for the Madame Guyons and their enthusiasts of both sexes to forget, for just a second, as it were, the spiritual and intellectual contexts in which one can usefully and 'safely' speak of the spiritual senses; but I think our way of being Catholic is much reduced if we cannot contemplate e.g. Bernini's extasy of St Teresa without also and at the same time thinking of Dr Maligno's psychobabble.

Jesu decus angelicum,
In aure dulce canticum,
In ore mel mirificum,
In corde nectar coelicum.

Qui te gustant, esuriunt;
Qui bibunt, adhuc sitiunt;
Desiderare nesciunt,
Nisi Jesum, quem diligunt.

O Jesu mi dulcissime,
Spes suspirantis animae!
Te quaerunt piae lacrimae,
Te clamor mentis intimae.

Mane nobiscum Domine,
Et nos illustra lumine;
Pulsa mentis caligine,
Mundum reple dulcedine.

Jesu flos Matris Virginis,
Amor nostrae dulcedinis,
Tibi laus, honor nominis,
Regnum beatitudinis.
Amen.

I must be saving William Cobbett's Rural Rides...

For my old age; can't think of any other reason why I've never gotten around to reading it (well, them, really, since we're talking about a collection of essays rather than a dogmatic treatise on England at the edge of the precipice). At Laudator Temporis Acti, a couple of paragraphs today. An edition is now on the Kindle, from Project Gutenberg.

Fog that you might cut with a knife all the way from London to Newbury. This fog does not wet things. It is rather a smoke than a fog. There are no two things in this world; and, were it not for fear of Six-Acts (the “wholesome restraint” of which I continually feel) I might be tempted to carry my comparison further; but, certainly, there are no two things in this world so dissimilar as an English and a Long Island autumn.—These fogs are certainly the white clouds that we sometimes see aloft. I was once upon the Hampshire Hills, going from Soberton Down to Petersfield, where the hills are high and steep, not very wide at their base, very irregular in their form and direction, and have, of course, deep and narrow valleys winding about between them. In one place that I had to pass, two of these valleys were cut asunder by a piece of hill that went across them and formed a sort of bridge from one long hill to another. A little before I came to this sort of bridge I saw a smoke flying across it; and, not knowing the way by experience, I said to the person who was with me, “there is the turnpike road (which we were expecting to come to); for, don’t you see the dust?” The day was very fine, the sun clear, and the weather dry. When we came to the pass, however, we found ourselves, not in dust, but in a fog. After getting over the pass, we looked down into the valleys, and there we saw the fog going along the valleys to the North, in detached parcels, that is to say, in clouds, and, as they came to the pass, they rose, went over it, then descended again, keeping constantly along just above the ground. And, to-day, the fog came by spells. It was sometimes thinner than at other times; and these changes were very sudden too. So that I am convinced that these fogs are dry clouds, such as those that I saw on the Hampshire Downs. Those did not wet me at all; nor do these fogs wet any thing; and I do not think that they are by any means injurious to health.—It is the fogs that rise out of swamps, and other places, full of putrid vegetable matter, that kill people. These are the fogs that sweep off the new settlers in the American Woods. I remember a valley in Pennsylvania, in a part called Wysihicken. In looking from a hill, over this valley, early in the morning, in November, it presented one of the most beautiful sights that my eyes ever beheld. It was a sea bordered with beautifully formed trees of endless variety of colours. As the hills formed the outsides of the sea, some of the trees showed only their tops; and, every now-and-then, a lofty tree growing in the sea itself raised its head above the apparent waters. Except the setting-sun sending his horizontal beams through all the variety of reds and yellows of the branches of the trees in Long Island, and giving, at the same time, a sort of silver cast to the verdure beneath them, I have never seen anything so beautiful as the foggy valley of the Wysihicken. But I was told that it was very fatal to the people; and that whole families were frequently swept off by the “fall-fever.”—Thus the smell has a great deal to do with health. There can be no doubt that Butchers and their wives fatten upon the smell of meat. And this accounts for the precept of my grandmother, who used to tell me to bite my bread and smell to my cheese; talk, much more wise than that of certain old grannies, who go about England crying up “the blessings” of paper-money, taxes, and national debts.

Jonathan Frantzen, eat your heart out.

"I always preferred 'Quum.'"

Winston Churchill, in his My Early Life, courtesy of the erudition and wit of Dr Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti.

... If the reader has ever learned any Latin prose, he will know that at quite an early stage one comes across the Ablative Absolute with its apparently somewhat despised alternative 'Quum with the pluperfect subjunctive.' I always preferred 'Quum.' True he was a little longer to write, thus lacking the much admired terseness and pith of the Latin language. On the other hand he avoided a number of pitfalls. I was often uncertain whether the ablative absolute should end in 'e' or 'i' or 'o' or 'is' or 'ibus,' to the correct selection of which great importance was attached. Dr. Welldon seemed to be physically pained by a mistake being made in any of these letters. I remember that later on Mr. Asquith used to have just the same sort of look on his face when I sometimes adorned a Cabinet discussion by bringing out one of my few but faithful Latin quotations. It was more than annoyance, it was a pang. Moreover Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested. So these evening quarters of an hour with Dr. Welldon added considerably to the anxieties of my life. I was much relieved when after nearly a whole term of patient endeavor he desisted from his well-meant but unavailing efforts....

"It was more than annoyance, it was a pang." Friday evenings after the work week dispose me to be amused by much that wouldn't otherwise catch my attention but in this case I think the writer deserves his laughter.

At 19 or 20 printed pages, I don't know whether I would attend...

Closely to the oration at Mass of the Abbé Nicolas MacCarthy's sermon on the Last Judgment or not; if it were delivered in the same let's-pretend-we're-having-a-conversation-in-the-driveway voice that I hear so often from clerics, probably not, in spite of its undoubted rhetorical power on paper.  Joseph Fromm at Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit g a.

Please, please, let 'Azania'...

Be chosen as the new name of the (soon to be) former southern Sudan. (While Joshua Keating hasn't proved himself a total idiot in the time I've read at the Foreign Policy blog Passport, I cannot vouch for the Andreas Markessinis person whose post is linked; Azania may do for Mr Keating, however.)  Emperor Seth will be able to rest in peace at last.

Nothing at all strange about V.S. Naipaul's troubles at...

The "European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul" (which sounds to be a proper lot of nonsense, in any event), contra David Blackburn at the Spectator: many Muslims have a hard time acknowledging their religion's violent history, and too few have undertaken the effort to distinguish in it that which may be morally defensible from that which isn't.

Have begun my always pleasurable annual reading of...

Well, well; I wonder if anyone knows the book.

"At the same time, though, it seemed to Miles that Billy, for all his bravado, was afraid of women, taking lovers the way Mithridates had taken poison: sip by sip to make himself immune against them."

One of the admirable things about this novel is that the craft is so well done that I am generally toward the very end before the plot's resolution recalls itself to my memory.

Having quite against my own self-interest spent too many hours...

Reviewing election returns this evening, it remains the inescapable truth that the next hour or so, making my peaceful and comfortably tired way through Dr Gilleland's auto-antonym posts, will be much more worthwhile and profitable than anything else I've done today, apart from the visit to the Blessed Sacrament earlier and (I suppose) the work I did this morning.  

Dr Gilleland's 'thought for Election Day'...

At the highly esteemed Laudator Temporis Acti, from Nicolás Gómez Dávila; a word for many of us today.

On reading Dante and 'just ignoring all that crap about theology'...

I see his posts, Mark Shea's, but usually only glance at them; this one caught my eye because he and his correspondent John C Wright, the author of works of science fiction excellent in their genre and convert, are mocking the execrable post-modernist, deconstructionist (or whatever the most fashionable theory is these days) nonsense that one has to muck about in in the academic world.

The Retronaut is a beautiful, wonderful site...

Run by a man named Chris Wild. Patri Finnigan p g a.

Και συλλογιέται η Φρόνησις...

The poem is Cavafy's, called 'An old man'; not old, nor peculiarly oppressed by memories of sacrifice and restraint, it does give rise to a certain grey and foggy pensiveness.

At the noisy end of the café, head bent
over the table, an old man sits alone,
a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old age
he thinks how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he’s aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
So brief an interval, so very brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,
how he always believed—what madness—
that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”

He remembers impulses bridled, the joy
he sacrificed. Every chance he lost
now mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much remembering
makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,
his head resting on the café table.

But the Sacred Scriptures are the remedy, or a remedy, for such fits of self-indulgence. Et sustulit me in spiritu super montem magnum et altum et ostendit mihi civitatem sanctam Ierusalem descendentem de caelo a Deo, habentem claritatem Dei....  

Four or five books, known profoundly...

Is a greater sign of the accomplished reader than libraries gone through superficially--that is the gist of Dr Gilleland's post at Laudator Temporis Acti.   "Aiunt enim multum legendum esse, non multa"; Pliny to Fuscus Salinator.

Varro cites Terence's Adelphoe...

"Eandem voluntatem Terentius significat, cum ait satius esse, 'Sua sponte recte facere quam alieno metu'...."

Which means, 'and that (voluntas) is what Terence is talking about when he writes that it's better 'to do what's right of one's own choice than because of fear of others'.

 A more difficult lesson for our contemporaries to learn, perhaps, than for the Romans.

Hay in the classical world? Freeman Dyson says...

No, but Dr Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti sets him straight.  On the other hand, he is apparently willing to credit the "so called dark ages" for inventing hay, so perhaps he isn't all bad.  The fact of the matter is that this LTA post  prompted me to go off and read about hay and hay-making for twenty minutes, which isn't necessarily a good thing at this time of day.  

Oh, I'm delighted to discover that Du Cange is online...

And freely available, albeit in pdf format.  Charles du Fresne du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis is one of those resources I'd give... well, at least a little finger and perhaps a tooth or two to own: it simply never occurred to me that it might be online, ha. Am delighted, delighted... although am aware that I can easily find sufficient reason to waste time wandering through the centuries; stopped subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary online for that very reason: but this is free; ha, there is a non sequitur for the ages.  The first word, following the phrases beginning with 'a':

AAGIATUS, egressus annos alienae tutelae, Gall. Majeur, en age. Franciae Reges regno maturi sunt anno aetatis l4. ex Edicto anni 1375. Oeteri ex jure civili Majores declarantur anno setatis  25°. Normanni 20°. Chronicon MS. Regum Francorum ex Musaeo D. de Cangey, ad Carolum V: Dominus dux Andegavensis frater suus antiquior incepit regnum regere, quod rexit usque ad secundam Octooris postquam Carolus fiilius dicti Regis fuit Aagiatus; id est Major renunciatus,
Gall, declaré Majeur....

(The word, aagiatus, means a man who has reached the legal age of maturity, his years of majority.) The text is driving the spell-checker out of its digital mind, ha. It will prove fairly clumsy to actually use, alas.

Why bubbles are amusing is unknown, but...

Jason the Commenter (not a particular friend of Holy Religion, alas) is posting on them seriatim and these have been happily diverting.

"I know them all by name as if they were my children..."

The splendid Dr Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has published a post written by Eric Thomson about Chateaubriand and his trees. (Dr Gilleland is interested in trees, fascinated by their life in art, and is researching the history of arboricide; I believe he may be working on a book.)  LTA is one of the few blogs that I never miss reading.

Our René wrote a series of poems he published under the title Tableaux de la Nature, the first of which is La Forêt.

Forêt silencieuse, aimable solitude,
Que j'aime à parcourir votre ombrage ignoré !
Dans vos sombres détours, en rêvant égaré,
J'éprouve un sentiment libre d'inquiétude !
Prestiges de mon cœur ! je crois voir s'exhaler
Des arbres, des gazons une douce tristesse :
Cette onde que j'entends murmure avec mollesse,
Et dans le fond des bois semble encor m'appeler.
Oh ! que ne puis-je, heureux, passer ma vie entière
Ici, loin des humains !... Au bruit de ces ruisseaux,
Sur un tapis de fleurs, sur l'herbe printanière,
Qu'ignoré je sommeille à l'ombre des ormeaux !
Tout parle, tout me plaît sous ces voûtes tranquilles ;
Ces genêts, ornements d'un sauvage réduit,
Ce chèvrefeuille atteint d'un vent léger qui fuit,
Balancent tour à tour leurs guirlandes mobiles.
Forêts, dans vos abris gardez mes vœux offerts !
A quel amant jamais serez-vous aussi chères ?
D'autres vous rediront des amours étrangères ;
Moi de vos charmes seuls j'entretiens les déserts.

He writes in the preface (quoting from himself, in his avertissement to the 1829 Oeuvres complètes):

... For a long time, before descending to prose, I had made verses. M. de Fontanes [in Wikipedia here--MP] observed my renunciation of the Muses with a certain regret: myself, I left them only so that I could more quickly say the truths that I believed needed saying....

(The preface is in fact a short discussion of a writer's quandary when he is gifted with the genius of both poetry and prose.)  I think that the wiser choice was taken.  'On your shadowed paths, in dreaming lost,/ I own liberty at last unbound!'; it is a pleasant enough poem, after all.