Category: Culture
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The Most Dangerous Words
The most dangerous words are the ones that you think you understand. This is a trap of old books, where familiar words often hold strange meanings.
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“God Knows”
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
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The Quality of Love
When King Lear begins to realize the truth of his daughters’ love, he exclaims, “Ingratitude! Thou marble-hearted fiend!” He never understood the quality of his own love.
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The Feast of Hallowmas
You can tell the strange disconnect between the holidays of October 31 and November 1 by the fact that the first is popularly called Halloween, and the second All Saints’ Day. Hallowmas and All Hallows’ Day are among the other names for the church feast of November 1, and from these names, of course, Halloween…
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The Principal Point
In a sign that nature is healing, Disney is once again blitzing the world with Marvel content. Disney released the trailers (and dates!) for its Marvel shows that have been coming and coming and may, in 2021, actually arrive. I will focus our attention particularly on the Loki series, it being an incontrovertible truth of…
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A Thanksgiving Thought
In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton turned to fairy-tales for an analogy and made the following remark: If the miller’s third son said to the fairy, “Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply, “Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.” If Cinderella says,…
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Two Classics
I read two classics this past summer: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Dostoevsky’s Devils. I was maybe two hundred pages into Devils when I realized, with a measure of surprise, that the book reminded me of Jane Austen. Not the political revolution, of course, or the atheism and murder; the book’s conclusion, in which Dostoevsky…
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An Acquittal
Dostoevsky’s Devils is a 700-page epic of spiritual lawlessness, conniving, and singularly poor decisions. For most of the novel, this plays out in long conversations, awkward domestic scenes, and some very unfortunate social events. At the climax, everything joins in a conflagration of murders and suicides, with two or three natural deaths for variation in tragedy.…
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Past the High Point
Genuinely compelling villains, although always too few, exist in fair abundance. Much more rare is a compelling villain who charts a convincing and satisfying redemption arc. Rarest of all is a compelling villain who, at the end of his satisfying redemption arc, does not promptly die. It grows predictable and, occasionally, rather bleak. Why can’t…