In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts - or let us call them essays - on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming to revive a career in the bureaucracy, but perhaps gripped by the fates to know, as I know with high resolution tonight, that poetry and… Continue reading 13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
There are few funny stories to emerge from American politics over the last two months, especially during the constitutional embarrassment of the latest faux and cursed impeachment. There is, however, one story that stands out as laugh-out-loud funny, and symptomatic of the cultural decay, which has been a constant theme of this blog since its… Continue reading Sound and fury told by the American cultural “elite”
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of "soft totalitarianism" described in Rod Dreher's Live Not by Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020). The last year has seen lockdowns, curfews and bans on the most fundamental human relationships (attendance at… Continue reading On living not by lies
Oblivion. Death. The rites we practise to farewell the dead. What better themes to end 2020? This afternoon I have begun a reading plan for 2020 that incorporates listening to audio books, and in one afternoon I have completed, while talking a lunchtime walk and doing the pre-dinner dishes, the magnificent sentences of Thomas Browne's… Continue reading My last words on 2020 from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the Russian literary critic and philosopher. The text comes from a late work of Bakhtin, Speech Genres, although I took the text from Clark… Continue reading Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
In my study is a box of old index cards with fragmentary thoughts, notes on narratives and characters, and quotations taken from my reading. The box is labelled "Notes to Digitise," and perhaps that will one day be a retirement project. But for now it is a stimulus to dig deep down into the Burning… Continue reading Fragments from the Burning Archive: Anna Akhmatova
The year of fear 2020 has been the year of the Great Fear. This Fear has locked us down in safety. This Fear has opened the gate to soft totalitarianism. This Fear has sabotaged the freedom, responsibility, associations and independent thought of hundreds of millions of citizens. This Fear has shed the aged liberal skin… Continue reading The year of fear: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing and abusive regime. I do not mean just the errant minor provincial government that I serve as lowly under-castellan. I mean the wider institutional regime… Continue reading The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
My repost today comes from 22 April 2018, and seems relevant to the difficulties we are experiencing in our distressed republics today. I also posted something of a follow-up post on the Collapsing New Buildings of Government. Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies During the week I was discussing with a… Continue reading Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies
Today, I am reposting this response to William Dalrymple's magnificent The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. I wonder if, over the next 5 to 10 years, we will be conducting sad online mushairas (poetic symposiums) and singing laments for the collapse of the Washington court? Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857 (February 4,… Continue reading Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about fifteen, I found Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle in a library. It was my introduction to literary modernism, and their progenitors, the French symbolists. Over time… Continue reading Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia
"even well-educated, amiable, open-minded people in the United States do not realize that their country has a Hispanic past as well as a Hispanic future."Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States Over the last few weeks I have read Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. The… Continue reading America’s Hispanic Past and its Hispanic Future Proves it is not Exceptional
Terrible events occur in history that devastate the cities that our minds build. The Barbarians sack Rome, and other-named disasters have similarly brought ruin to all past civilisations across time and the globe. It is hard not to see, from my crumbling Tower of Thucydides, in all the obscure runes of our time, a similar… Continue reading The Coming Renaissance of the Second Culture
And if and when Trump is no longer President, all the ills of political system can no longer be blamed on Trump. For four years now – in America but also through viral spread around the world – all the ills of our deformed, barren political society have been personified in a metonymic myth: Donald… Continue reading Our barren, deformed political society
“The former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born.... A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time"Émile Durkheim Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the French founder of… Continue reading Anomie Today and Cultural Decay
Yuval Levin argues that the institutions of contemporary society, primarily America in his account, have become degraded. There is a good discussion with Yuval Levin on this topic over at the Hoover Institution Youtube channel. We have lost trust in these institutions, he argues, because simply they have become less trustworthy. Their performance has been… Continue reading The failure of institutions in the pandemic crisis
In today's world the falcon cannot hear the falconer. In the widening gyre of overlapping world crises, our minds have lost contact with our culture. We are hunters alone and adrift in terrain we have not mapped, and can not find our way back home. I will not repeat the well-repeated line, too often fenced,… Continue reading What on earth is going on? Reflections on the current unrest
The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 is now a forgotten and neglected conflict of the century of peace in the nineteenth century. Yet it was a surprisingly fertile conflict in its unintended consequences; moreover, this war between the two titans of the Russian and British Empires has an uncanny resemblance to the events of… Continue reading A very modern Charge of the Light Brigade
The psychology of power is enigmatic and poisonous, and it infects more than just the ruthless and the mercenary. Principled men and women of medicine succumb, even at their moment of apparent triumph, when a whole society kneels in submission before their authority in the hope of a cure or more miraculously yet, a vaccine… Continue reading Public Health Rulez, OK?
The stay-at-home urging continues, and we are all doing the responsible thing. Some order appears to be returning to the supermarkets - yesterday I was able to buy nearly everything, except a whole chicken, that I wanted to. We are confined at home. Even young lovers are practising social distancing to protect their doctor parents:… Continue reading Plague Notes
