just a few thoughts...

     This is an all-too brief response to my friend Tripp's post over at Conjectural Navel Gazing. He poses a few questions, to which I of course have catechetical like answers. Bear with us.

     'If one believes in angels but not in "the Church", is that a religious belief (the angels bit) or a spiritual insight?' Well, one could be an orthodox Jew or a Muslim, but let that pass. For most of the people I meet who 'believe in angels,' and I meet a lot of people in my line of work, it's neither a 'religious belief' nor a 'spiritual insight,' but a trace of sentimental whimsy. I doubt most have any idea what an 'angel' might be. (Here's a hint: they're terrifying, and if one appears to you, he's there to ruin your life as you know it).

     'If one sits silently with one's eyes closed, feet placed comfortably on the ground or legs folded underneath, and meditates on breathing in and out seeking peacefulness, is this a spiritual practice or a religious one?' Neither, but it does sound like a good way for an insomniac to fall asleep.
     'What spiritual practices can one participate in that are *not* an invention of some human being somewhere?' It's terrible to have to deal with all those humans and their inventions. (Invenio, etc.) I know folks like to imagine there is a pure, unmediated form of 'encounter' with the 'divine,' but since I like being a human among humans, I'll take the stuff they invent with all their 'ethically ambiguous histories.' 

     After all, humans were never meant to be angels; humans were meant to sit in judgment on angels. 

clarification...

     Why yes, I do enjoy revealing the horror latent in beloved children's classics. Thank you for asking.

falling ladders, a Seussian psychopath, boys' names, and Beethoven...

     What's happening around here, you ask?
     As a contractor, I carry around in my truck these folding ladders. As you can see from this link, the typical heavy duty sort weighs around 54 pounds or so. Well, earlier this afternoon one of these collapsed onto my right foot as I helped an idiot insurance adjuster extend his. 'Got away from me,' he said rather laconically. Huh. Anyway, I am apparently what the kids call a 'lucky bastard,' because there isn't a mark on me, and the foot only aches a little. Now, I had boots on, but they weren't steel toed or otherwise protective. (Needless to say, I now need a new pair.)
     In other words, my foot was crushed by a ladder collapsing at top speed, and nothing happened. Weird it is, in every sense of that old, old word.
     What else is new?
     Do head over and give a listen as Leonard Bernstein all to briefly descants on the wonders of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica. The simplicity of means by which Beethoven achieves the most daring and complex works always astonishes me. 
     What else, what else...how can I beguile you into staying with me instead of taking in the latest episode of Black List? 
     Speaking of Black List, does that show rock, or what?
     Anyway, what else, what else...o, I know. As you can see from this gif, my brothers and I - William, Daniel, Thomas - are distinctly outliers when it comes to popular names for boys over the years. William does not come into its own until fairly late in the cycle, and then only in a few southern states. Daniel and Thomas don't seem to ever make the cut. For no reason at all, this pleases me. 
     Finally, it seems I need to explain my hatred of Sam-I-Am. For those of you who don't remember him, Sam-I-Am is that noxious little troll from Dr. Seuss's beloved tome Green Eggs and Ham. I have always, and I do mean always, loathed that pestering, nagging, intrusive little sonofabitch. To my ear, he sounds like a monomaniacal psychopath. Had he not succeeded in browbeating the hapless guy into eating what, let's be honest, sounds like food that's gone off, then I shudder to imagine how things would have escalated. I see Sam stalking his prey for months, growing ever more violently insistent, until...o, dear reader, let us not sully our evening together with such horrors.

more grad school idiocy...

     To be sure, grad students kill themselves at an alarming rate, but this article is nonsense. 'Graduate programs should offer (or even require) courses or workshops that teach yoga and mindfulness techniques.' Not on my dime. If forced to do yoga, I might just take some folks with me when I decide it's time to trip the light fantastical. Besides, no one seems to have thought of what might need to be cut from the course of study to make room for such 'courses or workshops,' or are they to be added to an already heavy load of work? 
     What's more, 'mental health' as a barrier to success sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for 'stupidity'. Yes, again, some few grad students need real help, but most are just too stupid to deal with the demands of a good program. Of course, we get into a loop here: a good program will never require something a insipid as yoga or 'mindfulness' techniques. Spare me. Finally, overlooked in all this is the simple fact that folks might just have a reason to be a little crazy. Is that so bad?

poor, poor anna...

     "'Yes, yes,' said Anna, turning away and looking out of the open window. 'But it wasn't my fault. And whose fault was it? What does "fault" mean? Could it have been otherwise? What do you think?'...," Anna Karenina, p. 635.
     She has no doubt rehearsed this justification over and over again with great discipline. 
     And can anyone tell me what has become of Banana Republic's 'Anna Karenina Collection'? Something so absurd is somehow salutary. 

apropos of nothing at all...

     Why doesn't the guy just kill Sam-I-Am? He could stuff him in a box, he could serve him up with lox; he could bury him in sand, he could mount his mummied hand; he could dispense with all green eggs and ham, he could find peace without that Sam-I-Am.
     Think about it, dear reader, think about it. 

simon conway morris, heretic...

     We find this on page xiii of Life's Solution, by one Simon Conway Morris: 'There is, however, a paradox. If we, in a sense, are evolutionarily inevitable, as too are animals with compound eyes or tiny organelles that make hydrogen, then where are our equivalents, out there, across the galaxy? . . . To paraphrase much of this book, life may be a universal principle, but we can still be alone. In other words, once you are on the path it is pretty straightforward, but finding a suitable planet and maybe getting the right recipe for life's origination could be exceedingly difficult: inevitable humans in a lonely Universe. Now, if this happens to be the case, that i turn might be telling us something very interesting indeed. Either we are a cosmic accident, without either meaning or purpose, or alternatively ...'
     It indeed trails off, that isn't an ellipsis of omission. If you know anything about the good paleontologist, you will know the significance of that ellipsis. (Let's just say that it's enough to drive some folks to distraction.) If you don't know anything about the good paleontologist, then his department faculty page is a good place to start.

all good things...

     I have tried several times to post this link on Facetube, and it just won't work. This cannot stand! You need this vital link! How is the information and transparency revolution that is Facetube to advance from strength to strength if I can't post links to gifs? What's next? Will I be refused the power to show the waiting public real time photos of my lunch? 
     The horror!
     Our technological ascendency is at an end. My only course of rational action is to drink scotch in my bathrobe at nine in the morning, and lament the passing of an era of greatness.

take and read, contemporary poetry edition...

     From the fantastical poem, 'Lord Byron's Foot,' by one George Green, comes this final stanza.

It’s best if we just contemplate your bust,

a bust by Thorvaldson or Bartolini, 

and why is that you ask, and why is that? 

So no one has to see your friggin’ foot,
your foot, your foot, your clomping monster foot,
your foot, your foot, your foot, your foot, your foot!

Is that not hilarious? Do read the whole thing. You might also want to pick up Green's book as well..

take and read thrice over...

     Head over and see what Robert J. Richards has to offer. The man writes a good book. If you want to understand what Darwin, Haeckel, and the gang were really doing, you need to have a look at Richards's work. Whatever one ultimately thinks of the matter, the story is fascinating in all its complexity.

it occurs to me...

Nietzsche had it wrong. 

That which doesn't kill you isn't worth a damn.

another thought...

     Before I return to bed, it occurs to me that a Victorian is a Romantic who identifies the Absolute and the Sublime with the Vulgar and the Utilitarian. 
     It's just a thought.

Lyell's prose, along with Darwin and Kafka...

     So, it seems that I have a sinus infection. Haven't had one of these in a long time, especially one this bad. It's really quite painful you know. O, how I suffer! 
     Well, whatever - let the pain I currently endure with stoic resolve at the least explain the rambling nature of this post. For the seventeen or so of you out there who are real as opposed to VirtualBots - and that number has grown dramatically in recent days, as it used to be only around five or so - this will  be the thrill of your Saturday. O yes it will.
     What to do, what to do...
     I know, let's pick some books from around the desk, open 'em, and see what we find. Of course, the question then becomes, Where to start, where to start...
     From Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, we read, 'But it would be idle to controvert, by reference to modern analogies, the conjectures of those who think they can ascend in their retrospect to the origin of our system. Let us, therefore, consider what changes the crust of the globe suffered after the consolidation of that ancient series of rocks to which we have adverted. Now, there is evidence that, before our secondary strata were formed, those of older date (from the old red sandstone to the coal inclusive) were fractured and contorted, and often thrown into vertical positions. We cannot enter here into the geological details by which it is demonstrable, that at an epoch extremely remote, some parts of the carboniferous series were lifted above the levels of the sea, others sunk to greater depths beneath it, and the former, being no longer protected by a covering of water, were partially destroyed by torrents and the waves of the sea, and supplied matter for newer horizontal beds.'
     Lyell's great work appeared in three volumes from 1830 to 1833. Think what you will of the science, and I think quite highly of it, but you cannot deny, without thereby showing both moral and intellectual wickedness, that the prose is just damn fine. 
     Now, Lyell's work exerted a profound influence on the work of one Charles Darwin, so how fortunate that we have to hand Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (Just trips off the tongue, doesn't it?) The passage in question is not entirely a random choice. I marked and noted it just last night, as it is indicative to my ear of Darwin's character as a writer and scientist. That is, he is both a Romantic in quest of the Absolute and the Sublime, and a Victorian in quest of the Vulgar and the Utilitarian. To wit: 'In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind - never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.'
     If that does not strike you, dear reader, as a Kafkaesque image of Sublime Nature as a perpetually punitive Nightmare, then you lack all sensitivity to literature. What drives Sublime Nature to assume the form of a perpetually punitive Nightmare? Why nothing more than a concern with numbers in a ledger; with, if you please, an equation that is ever on the verge of flying out of balance. 
     With that, I must away. The drugs have worn off, so with your indulgence, I will drop some few doses of antibiotics, decongestants, and antihistamines, then slip back into bed.
     Peace out.

take and read this too...

     Since we're a little busy now, do have a look at this essay by Marilynne Robinson, 'A Common Faith.'
     Peace out,
     The management.

take and read...

     Dear reader, I give you Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Do spend a few happy hours with them.

why are my premiums going up?

     Apparently Obamacare, as the current health-insurance overhaul legislation is known to the cognoscenti, is a harbinger of the End of Days. Around here, of course, we thought the new sitcom with Robin Williams was enough of a portent, but folks need ever more dramatic reasons to believe the meteor is about to hit the earth. So, many ask with a combination of innocent wonder and bloodthirsty rage, Why the hell are my premiums going up? 
     The answer to that is quite simple: the elimination of underwriting for pre-existing conditions drives up the cost of claims and, thus, premiums bolt through the stratosphere. 

     The insurance companies are actually in a pickle. (Yes, among absurdity upon absurdity, the Current Madness makes insurance companies sympathetic.) The majority of Americans support the elimination of those restrictions, but don't connect claims and costs. The companies you see are required by law to have enough cash on hand to cover claims...
     I can see your eyes glazing over, but please bear with me. All premiums paid to a company for health plans go into a general fund, which is then quite conservatively invested so as to grow the fund from year to year. This becomes a vast sum of cash that the company can draw upon to cover claims. They do this, dear reader, because the law of the land requires it. Therefore, if they can't do underwriting, they must raise the cash to cover the projected flood of diabetics and terminal cases. 

     This is also the reason why everyone has to buy insurance. Consider an employer's group plan - there are no health questions because most everyone will enroll. Thus the plan draws from a decent population, allowing the premiums paid for healthy people to cover the claims of the sick people. Even then, however, there is often a buffer period before certain conditions can be claimed. Still, after that the conditions are covered no questions asked. Just so, requiring that all Americans purchase health insurance creates an enormous Group, allowing companies to eliminate health underwriting and simply cover anyone who stumbles along regardless of their pre-existing conditions.

     By the by, our Chief Justice was right - the fine for those who refuse to buy insurance certainly is a tax. How can it possibly be construed as a tax? Lessee, it's designed to raise revenue to cover costs of claims. See? It raises revenue, therefore it's a tax. QED. O, and that revenue is for federal subsidies intended to offset the inevitably higher premiums everyone will have to pay for private health insurance plans. Leave that for another day.

     Where does that leave us, my only friends? Whether we like it or not, as long as people demand that insurance companies eliminate underwriting for pre-existing conditions, health insurance premiums will remain ridiculously high, and that individual mandate must hold. 

     So, to answer your question as succinctly as possible, your premiums are so high because you got what you wanted. 

     Take the win, and have a nice day.

lines on an artist's vocation...

     I left behind a few possibilities - architecture, etc - because I knew I could never be *great* at them.* To my mind, this had nothing to do with recognition or fame - though it's impossible to practice architecture, for instance, without building the damned buildings (one must fail in public, while finding clients to pay for the failure). 

     No, as in poetry, I looked to those I knew to be great, the transcendent ones, and wondered if I would ever make anything as beautiful, daring, and true. As a poet, see, I'm more concerned with how John Donne or Dante will regard my best work when it's All Over. The Kingdom of God is given by grace; the Kingdom of Art is all about works, and reverence - even, and especially, when reverence leads you to try and surpass your masters. 

     So Yeats was wrong. For an artist, perfection of the work is ingredient in the perfection of the life. 

* Hell, I was barely competent at many of the things I tried to do.

changes!

     So, over the weekend I made a couple of decisions that will, by next autumn, radically change our lives around here. Ancillary to these decisions was a stunning insight (for me anyway) - the whole Seminary Quest is over. My last gasp of Seminary Nostalgia was the whole "I'm going to Nashotah House" debacle. Long time readers of ER have long grown used to such histrionics; to those of you who are new the the Spectacle, my apologies. As so often happens, I needed to make such a bold assertion in order to expel it for all time, and clear the way for the real decisions that force themselves upon me every so often. 
     In any case, it's clear to me now that Seminary, as a route to something called Ordination, is a phantom. It's never going to happen. That's not really my calling, dear reader. This does not imply that I will never return to formal studies in theology and philosophy, but such studies, if a reality at all, are in the future. For now, I have other work to do. 
     As for the details of those decisions made over the weekend, I'll leave those to your imaginations for now. I will say that if all goes as planned, this time next year my company will have a completely different direction and focus. I also hope to be launched on a difficult venture that could allow me to pick up some teaching gigs here and there. Again, leave details aside - suffice it to say that we have a plan, we have the means, and all we need now is patience. Yes, patience, my greatest virtue...

What a great poem by David Wheatley. Yes, that's a sort of sonnet, and it's brilliant.

Here you go. I love a good anthology.

more lazy cross-platformed lunacy...

In my reeducation camps you'll find only the best scotch. And tea. But no coffee - that will be banned from all areas of life, every sphere of our revolutionary world.

I'm sick of hearing about it. I can barely write or say the word.

Starbucks can remain, however, for the sake of the lemon pound cake. But they'll serve no coffee. Tea and scotch from 6am onward, with wine starting at a civilized 2pm - that's the universal drinks menu.

Some of us from the Flyover States will all be drunkenly laughing as we move into George Clooney's houses and take over Matt Damon's ranch and suchlike. In quieter moments, with our tea, we'll all recite from the Book of Kafka, and eat gumbo from Jamie Oliver's skull.

Can I still live in the hills of Virginia! asks a counterrevolutionary friend.

Absotively! I encourage it, once you are released from the camp. Just remember that when the wind shifts, the smoke from the ruins of the wealthier suburbs of Washington, D. C. will sting your eyes a bit.

This will be the first revolution against overweening pretension and condescension. So Warren Buffet is safe, but George Soros is hosed.

But of course, the ultimate goal is the incarceration of Bono until he signs the confession.

And anyone caught with a Che Guevara T-shirt will suffer some sort of indignity. Walter Salles will certainly be relieved of his $2.6 billion in assets and cash, and he will be forced to watch The Motorcycle Diaries backwards for the rest of his natural life.

lazy cross-platform posting about revolution or something...

     I propose a Revolution!
     When the revolution comes, and the wealth of the Ruling Class is expropriated, it'll impoverish whole populations in Berkeley, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Hollywood. New York'll be stripped bare. Texas will just secede, so we won't have to worry about 'em. Meanwhile, much of 'flyover country' will be just fine. 

     Yes, the wealthiest of the pretentious will be found among the Liberal Intelligencia, our Betters who daily encourage us to live ‘simply‘ on ‘less‘ as they carve for themselves ever more lucrative means of escaping a dystopia they helped to create.
     It’s not money in itself that is the problem. I don’t care if you own an island and half of Montana. No, I can do without their smugness, their smallness, their obvious love of power. 

     O how I hate people with jets and supercars telling the rest of us to ‘accept less mobility‘ so as to ‘save the planet’. Enough already of idiots milling about Davos chattering about income gaps and global warming while looking for a waiter with more champagne. Sink to the bottom of the sea Progressives With Expansive Portfolios, movie stars with ranches and palaces on Lake Como who lecture the Masses on Social Justice.

This tea isn't bad either.

You know, wine really does gladden the heart. My heart is gladdened after only two glasses with my dinner. Yes, it's a good consolation on the way.

everyone needs a profession...

Yes, I watch this sort of thing for fun. 

trendy trends trending...

'Pussy Riot' is 'trending' on Facetube - do I want to know what that means?

do stop whining about your ph.d. and the market for perfessors...

     So, you went and obtained, at great cost in both time and treasure, a Ph. D. in one of the disciplines delightfully bundled as The Humanities. Good for you. Perhaps it took many years, and perhaps you had to endure hour upon hour of hard labor to finish everything. Again, good for you. Now hear the good news - the world owes you not a damned thing for such an achievement. 

     That's right, you are owed neither a tenure-track position, nor a good salary, nor benefits, nor the prestige that used to accrue to the title 'Professor' (such as it was). If there are no good teaching jobs available for you, well, suck it the hell up. You took the risk, you signed on the line that was dotted, and now you have to live with your decisions.

     Here's the even better news - the sheer fact of obtaining a Ph. D. in The Humanities signifies nothing. From the fact that you now possess a Ph. D., I can infer nothing about your intelligence, your talent, your brazen originality or lack thereof. To be blunt, I find most Ph. D.'s to be little more than somewhat smart time-servers. They have an uncanny ability to please, to negotiate bureaucratic tangles, and to stay just on this side of the truly transgressive. Most can write somewhat serviceable prose, but don't ask me to spend time reading it. In short, rarely does the labor and time required to obtain a Ph. D. signify anything other than a desire to never leave school, and that, dear reader, qualifies a person to do absolutely nothing.

     This implies that the lack of good teaching jobs might just reflect on you, the holder of that newly minted Ph. D., as much as it does on the 'Market'. Perhaps, despite your GPA and all those reviews, you're at best a passable teacher and a mediocre scholar. To put it in the most brutal terms possible, perhaps you're just not worth the $250k a year a good school would spend on you as a tenure-track professor pulling down a good salary. 

     So please, stop whining about the State Of The Humanities. Stop whining, for the love of God, about how you can't make a living teaching Old Church Slavonic at the local state school. You knew the odds, you took your chances, now be a grown up and live with the consequences. 

     Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to review the Greek Verb in the Subjunctive Mood, then drive thirty miles to inspect an enormous roof. If all goes well this week, I should secure three contracts worth around $18,000 to my company. This might allow me to hire another person - it'll take some more math to figure out if that's possible. All the while, there will be world enough and time to read Homer, study some Greek, and contemplate Pranger's argument in Eternity's Ennui. What do you have planned?

Homer and Plato, together again...

     'The real culprits, and the only ones, are the gods, who live "exempt from care," while men are consumed with sorrow. The curse which turns beauty into destructive fatality does not originate in the human heart. The diffuse guilt of Becoming pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the Immortals,' Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad.

     Here we find a key, perhaps, to Plato's decree of exile for the poetes who would thus sow corruption not simply by the unworthy mimetic rendering of unworthy gods, but also by the displacement of responsibility from the human heart to the whimsy of those unworthy immortals. 

     Here too we find a theological crux that remains alive to this day. More about that anon - for now, note that Plato offers a radically new vision of virtue and the formation of the soul inclined to the Good. There may, for all that, be a way through the thicket, one which will allow us to have our Homer and keep some fellowship with Plato. 

     To find that way, we need Augustine as revealed by James Wetzel. We also need Paul. 

     It's a tangle, no?

stuff you really need to know...

     So I made spaghetti carbonara for lunch, and yes, I cooked with white wine in the middle of a workday. Even had a small glass. Altogether, it took twenty minutes to cook, forty to eat.

     It's called civilization my friends. You really should try it some time. I could descant on how civilization is a manifestation of our priestly calling as creatures made in the image and likeness of God but hey, you already know all about that.

     By the by, spaghetti carbonara is a peasant concoction, like most great classic dishes. Thus, you can now slide into a fine dining establishment and buy it for up to $30. 

     Mine probably cost about $6. 

     Both are civilized. Think about it.

     Anyway, back to work.

an amiable encounter...

Came upon this philosopher on my stoop yesterday afternoon. 

so it looks like 'Blame Canada' isn't just a South Park bit...

     'Meanwhile, one might have expected the American Civil War to have refocused American military thinking, but as Richard A. Preston shows in The Defense of the Undefended Border, until 1940 anglophobia remained a central motivating factor in the United States, and Canada a target for conquest. Between the world wars the United States developed three major war plans: one against Japan, one against Mexico, and War Plan Red, against the United Kingdom. (Germany was color-coded black, but there never was a War Plan Black.) In 1935 secret congressional hearings for air bases to launch surprise attacks on Canada, based on War Plan Red, were mistakenly published by the Government Printing Office and reported by the New York Times and the Toronto Globe. The story was re-discovered in 1975 and again in 1991 before being dug up once more in 2005. The existence of such a plan was treated with a sense of disbelief and laughing up the sleeve. But War Plan Red was not funny: it was detailed, amended and acted upon, and . . . it was no defense plan. The United States would start the war, and even if Canada declared neutrality the United States would still invade and conquer it, planning to "hold in perpetuity" all territory gained and to abolish the Dominion government. The plan was approved in May 1930 by the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy in expectation of "consequent suffering to the [Canadian] population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country." In October 1934 the secretaries approved the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City "on as large a scale as practicable." A second amendment, also approved at cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army to use poison gas at the outset as a supposedly "humanitarian" action that would cause Canada to surrender quickly, and thus save American lives. Even as late as 1939, as the free world was mobilizing to fight fascism, the U.S. Army War College and the Naval War College set as their planning priority "Overseas Expeditionary Force to Capture Halifax from Red-Crimson Coalition." This enduring hostility to Britain and Canada within the U.S. military was a legacy of the War of 1812 and was finally extinguished only by the Second World War, which ushered in the "special relationship,"' Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, p. 407-8.

intervention fever...

     Below you have an illustration from Punch, as found on page 318 of Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War. 'Reports of the terrific slaughter at Antietam shocked the nation [Britain]; the 25,000 casualties on a single day seemed inconceivable, especially when compared to the 25,000 Britain suffered during the entire Crimean War,' (p. 315). 

yes, i watch football...but not futball...

     OSU's football team plays the California Golden Bears later tonight. California Golden Bears - are their biggest rivals the Care Bears? Do they enter the stadium doing an interpretive dance? 

     If Urban Meyer is looking for a terrible fifteenth string player for this game, I'm available.

something apt to the day...

     'Achilles pays for nothing; to Hector everything comes dear. Yet it is not Hector, but Achilles, whose insatiable rancor feeds even on victories, and who is forever "gorging himself with complaints." The man of resentment in the Iliad is not the weak man but, on the contrary, the hero who can bend everything to his will. With Hector, the will to greatness never pits itself against the will to happiness. That little bit of true happiness which is more important than anything else, because it coincides with the true meaning of life, will be worth defending even with life itself, to which it has given a measure, a form, a price. Even in defeat, the courage of Hector does not give way before the valor of Achilles, which has been nurtured on discontent and irritable anxiety. But the capacity for happiness, which rewards the efforts of fecund civilizations, puts a curb on the defender's mettle by making him more aware of the enormity of the sacrifice exacted by the gods of war. This capacity, however, does not develop until the appetite for happiness has been stilled, the appetite the drives the aggressor, who is less civilized, on toward his prey and fills his heart with "an infinite power for battle and truceless war," Rachel Baspaloff, On The Iliad.

something from Fr. Capon +

     'Omnes dii gentium daemonia sunt; Dominis autem coelos fecit. Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them out of our [wine] cellars,' The Supper of the Lamb, p. 88.