Winter XXVI. Relativity of time + Fog of War + Memory + Music + Tale of Two Engines

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXV. The virtue of being self-centered

Impatient for the light of spring, I have slept lately with my blind drawn up, so that at waking, I have the sky in view. This morning, I awoke just before sunrise. The air was still; a faint flush of rose to westward told me that the east made fair promise. I could see no cloud, and there before me, dropping to the horizon, glistened the horned moon.

The promise held good. After breakfast, I could not sit down by the fireside; indeed, a fire was scarce necessary; the sun drew me forth, and I walked all the morning about the moist lanes, delighting myself with the scent of earth.

On my way home, I saw the first celandine.

So, once more, the year has come full circle. And how quickly; alas, how quickly! Can it be a whole twelvemonth since the last spring? Because I am so content with life, must life slip away? Time was when a year drew its slow length of toil and anxiety and ever frustrate waiting. Further away, the year of childhood seemed endless. It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience; the week gone by is already far in retrospect of things learnt, and that to come, especially if it foretell some joy, lingers in remoteness. Past mid-life, one learns little and expects little. To-day is like unto yesterday, and to that which shall be the morrow. Only torment of mind or body serves to delay the indistinguishable hours. Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to a moment.

I could wish for many another year; yet, if I knew that not one more awaited me, I should not grumble. When I was ill at ease in the world, it would have been hard to die; I had lived to no purpose, that I could discover; the end would have seemed abrupt and meaningless. Now, my life is rounded; it began with the natural irreflective happiness of childhood, it will close in the reasoned tranquility of the mature mind. How many a time, after long labour on some piece of writing, brought at length to its conclusion, have I laid down the pen with a sigh of thankfulness; the work was full of faults, but I had wrought sincerely, had done what time and circumstance and my own nature permitted. Even so may it be with me in my last hour. May I look back on life as a long task duly completed -- a piece of biography; faulty enough, but good as I could make it -- and, with no thought but one of contentment, welcome the repose to follow when I have breathed the word “Finis.”

Alpha.

Amen to that.

This has turned out to be a bigger project than I imagined at the outset, Blogger tells me there are now 153 posts (and you will be surprised to learn that I haven't even published everything I've written, since I simply couldn't find a place for some of my topics). But this has also been more satisfying, and thought provoking, than I had expected.

I'm especially fond of my section titles -- Gissing simply numbered the sections -- and "Relativity of time" is a natural enough title given the text, but it has, for me, an additional virtue. Gissing completed The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in 1901 and it was published in 1903. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his Annus Mirabilis papers including the papers on special relativity -- the equivalence of matter and energy (E = mc²) -- plus a paper contributing to quantum theory. Time would continue to be experienced as relative, just as Ryecroft describes it but, within just two years of Gissing's death, our understanding of time and light and the very substance of reality would shift forever. With that in mind, Ryecroft above is saying “Finis” to more than just an entertaining book or life. This is “Finis” to an entire way of viewing the world.

Before we reach my final indulgence, I want to report on the literary ads that follow the Index in my old edition of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. One page lists Modern Biographies for Tolstoy, Verlaine, Lafcadio Hearn, J.M. Synge, W.E. Henley, Mahommed, and Paul Bouget. The next page features Philosophies Ancient and Modern including Early Greek Philosophy, Stoicism, Plato, Scholasticism, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, Berkeley, Epicurus, and "Manicheeism." The following page covers Religions like Hinduism, Early Buddhism, Magic and Fetishism, The Psychological Origin and Nature of Religion, Pantheism, Early Christianity, and Islam. Then comes The Works of George Meredith; Mary Johnston's Romances; and Pocket Editions of Famous Books (Ryecroft is the only title I recognize here). The penultimate page flogs Constables' Sixpenny Novels including titles by Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, Gissing, and Upton Sinclair. And finally there are the Works of Bernard Shaw.

While putting this together, I just discovered yet another online version of this book in a very nice format. See here. And now for some final topics that I couldn't fit in elsewhere:

Fog of War.

I’ve mentioned Karl von Clausewitz before, I believe with reference to the cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. Most people have probably heard his name and, as with Quantum Mechanics, most people have probably heard one idea connected with Clausewitz -- the Fog of War. Briefly stated, this is the notion that the commander never knows, because of the chaos of the battlefield, all the facts he would wish to know before making command decisions. In every other field, the person in charge hopes to have all the facts in hand before making his decision. Often this decision maker actually knows less than they think they know, but this is the ideal. On a battlefield, Clausewitz noticed, and taught in his book (sadly only a draft of a book as cholera finished him before he finished the book), the commander never knows all the facts. Much is concealed from him by literal or figurative smoke and, even worse, some of what he thinks he knows is almost certainly false. And yet he has to make a decision, and he has to make it right now. To dither is almost always the worst possible option (of course there are exceptions).

I titled this section “The Fog of War” and not “von Clausewitz” because I was determined to limit myself to just this one crucial concept -- that, alone, would be a sufficient support for the man’s reputation. But, alas, talking about this leads inexorably into a discussion of what makes a good commander. It was the opinion of Clausewitz, that a good commander shouldn’t be too intelligent. Intelligent people tend to be analytical and want to make their decisions based on the facts, precisely what the battlefield commander can’t do. The successful commander is more likely to have an intuitive sense of what to do, which is very much like saying that he has good luck. We are left here with the option of seeing the commander as a lucky gambler -- the crass alternative -- or as a kind of mystic, able to intuit the true state of affairs on the battlefield and know how to respond to it. Clausewitz's book is titled On War, but, as I tend to favor the second, more mystical interpretation, I would rather he had titled it “The Art of War” -- because it is, in this sense, less a science and more of an art... but then that title had already been taken by Sun Tzu thousands of years earlier.

Memory.

The subject of memory has come up quite a number of times in this blog, but I’m going to talk about it once more. There is an interesting use of the term “memory” to describe the way a traffic slowdown, on a freeway for example, radiates back in space and forward in time -- so that cars often will come to a near standstill miles behind an accident that has already been cleared away. If you are in a car approaching this “wave” of congestion there is no way to “see” the cause of it. It is simply a remnant of an earlier event.

I’ve long speculated that there is a kind of memory event in a neighborhood -- I’m thinking of the kind of suburban neighborhood where I grew up, but I imagine this to be a universal phenomenon -- in which information is passed on, year by year and generation by generation, in a static process. Mostly this concerns children’s games (though “game” here should be defined in the most generous way). The slightly older children pass on lore -- rules or secrets or something -- to the younger children who then, a few years later, pass that information on to still younger children. Where in the traffic example the memory wave moved backwards up the roadway and forward in time, this wave is fixed in place and at a certain age (or age differential) of children.

Undoubtedly there are similar standing wave patterns relating to young adults moving into a neighborhood and buying and learning to maintain houses. Or to elderly people making the transition into a compromised state of decrepitude and dependence (in a retirement home or nursing home, for example.)

There was probably something else I wanted to add to this, but I forget.

In the end, music.

To play us out, I will introduce you to a game we used to play in my online community: What are the next 10 songs played by your iPod on shuffle? I thought of this some time ago and recorded the first 10 songs my iPod played. I thought I might do that a couple times and then choose the best of the bunch, but I'm really pleased with the original batch, so here they are. Rather than fill the page with YouTube windows, I'll let you click the song title to go to a song if you so choose: Iris Dement, “The Way I Should” ; James Taylor, “Carolina In My Mind” ; John Lee Hooker, “Annie Mae” ; Alison Krauss and Union Station, “Bright Sunny South” ; Nat King Cole Quartet, “Sweet Lorraine” ; Evanescence, “Going Under” ; Natalie Merchant, “It Makes a Change” ; Patsy Cline, “She’s Got You” ; Eddie Harris & Les McCann, “Kathleen’s Theme” ; The Cranberries, “Zombie”.

Were I to pick the songs, instead of letting my iPod decide, I wouldn't have chosen some of these artists. And, given these artists, I wouldn't have picked these particular songs. But I love this mix of artists (including at least two I've mentioned before: Nat King Cole and Eddie Harris & Les McCann.) And even the songs I would never have selected myself are perfect in their own way. These ten songs cover 1990s folk, 1960s folk rock, blues, traditional bluegrass, 1940s jazz, 2000s gothic metal, 2000s hard to define, 1950s crossover country, 1960s jazz, 1990s rock. I am a little surprised there's nothing from the 1970s or 1980s, but there are several songs from just before and one from just after.

A Tale of Two Engines.

This should have come before the music section, but I'm so certain of my losing any audience (that has even made it this far) with this final indulgence, that I wanted the music to have some chance of being seen.

When I used to workout in the early afternoon, it seemed there were always History Channel documentaries about WW2 on at least one screen at my gym. Regardless of the particular subject of the documentary, there was always footage of the Battle of Stalingrad. There are, in fact, endless interesting stories you can tell about that battle, but modern wars are actually won by more prosaic things -- like very high octane aviation gasoline and superior aircraft engines.

The U.S. Army Air Force began the war with a bunch of sleek, planes (the P-38, P-39, P-40, and P-51) all powered by the same V-12, liquid-cooled engine, the Allison V-1710. Only the P-38, with two turbo supercharged engines, had adequate power for competing with enemy fighters. The P-39 and P-40 were either used in secondary theaters of the war or given to desperate allies. The P-51 Mustang originally found a home with the British, desperate for anything that could fly, who thought to replace the Allison engine with a Rolls-Royce Merlin. The Merlin, which powered the Spitfire, Hurricane, and the Mosquito, produced over 1,000 horsepower on 100 octane fuel near the start of the war and by the end of the war Merlins were generating over 2,500 HP on 150 octane fuel in tests. Also by the end of the war, P-51s were supplied with a Packard built version of the Merlin which, along with drop tanks (made of paper) to extend range and a new bubble cockpit (to improve visibility), made the P-51 arguably the best pure fighter of the war.

But what I want to talk about is the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp. This was an old-school, air cooled 18 cylinder radial that started with 2,000 hp and worked up to 2,400 late in the war -- and this was routine use rather than just in tests. The Double Wasp powered the USAAF P-47 and the U.S. Navy F4U Corsair and F6F Hellcat (plus a bunch of two-engined types). These are not pretty aircraft (though the Corsair is at least distinctive) but they were, for the time, powerful and rugged -- air cooled engines are much more forgiving of damage than are liquid cooled engines. You can shoot up a Double Wasp, even destroy a cylinder or two, and the thing will keep flying. Poke a single hole in the cooling tubes of a Merlin or Alison and the engine will quickly freeze up.

The Corsair, and especially the Hellcat, won the air war in the Pacific, while the P-47, with eight (rather than the usual six) .50 caliber machine guns in its wings, was the most feared fighter-bomber in either theater. I read a story about an RAF squadron that was switched from Spitfires to P-47s late in the war. The pilots were depressed when they first saw their new mounts -- no one ever called the P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed the “Jug”, a pretty aircraft -- but they were quickly won over. While lacking the grace and beauty of the Spitfire, the Thunderbolt could perform tasks -- like bombing and strafing -- that a Spitfire either couldn’t or shouldn’t perform. And when pressed into aerial combat, they could hold their own against the best (piston powered) planes the Germans could field. And in WW2, if tanks had become the new heavy cavalry, fighter-bombers like the P-47 had become the new light cavalry -- making quick and devastating strikes hundreds of miles behind enemy lines.

And, just now, I noticed something I hadn’t thought of previously. Two of the Double Wasp powered aircraft I didn’t mention earlier were the B-26 and A-26. Since, later in the war, these types were used exclusively in Europe, along with the bulk of the P-47s, engine logistics within the U.S.A.A.F. were simplified by what I always assumed was a decision based on the disinclination of pilots in the Pacific to fly the B-26 and A-26. That may have been a battle the U.S.A.A.F. was only too happy to let the pilots win.

"Finis".


Though you might like to take a peek at another blog: Regieren.

Winter XXV. The virtue of being self-centered + Beauty

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXIV. Time and money

The dark days are drawing to an end. Soon it will be spring once more; I shall go out into the fields, and shake away these thoughts of discouragement and fear which have lately too much haunted my fireside. For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much better employed, from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world. The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything. I know only one way in which I could have played a meritorious part as an active citizen -- by becoming a schoolmaster in some little country town, and teaching half a dozen teachable boys to love study for its own sake. That I could have done, I daresay, Yet, no; for I must have had as a young man the same mind that I have in age, devoid of idle ambitious, undisturbed by unattainable ideals. Living as I do now, I deserve better of my country than at any time in my working life; better, I suspect, than most of those who are praised for busy patriotism.

Not that I regard my life as an example for any one else; all I can say is, that it is good for me, and in so far an advantage to the world. To live in quiet content is surely a piece of good citizenship. If you can do more, do it, and God-speed! I know myself for an exception. And I ever find it a good antidote to gloomy thoughts to bring before my imagination the lives of men, utterly unlike me in their minds and circumstances, who give themselves with glad and hopeful energy to the plain duties that lie before them. However one’s heart may fail in thinking of the folly and baseness which make so great a part of to-day’s world, remember how many bright souls are living courageously, seeing the good wherever it may be discovered, undismayed by portents, doing what they have to do with all their strength. In every land there are such, no few of them, a great brotherhood, without distinction of race or faith; for they, indeed, constitute the race of man, rightly designated, and their faith is one, the cult of reason and of justice. Whether the future is to them or to the talking anthropoid, no one can say. But they live and labour, guarding the fire of sacred hope....

Alpha.

This section reminds me of Settembrini in The Magic Mountain, hard at work on his Encyclopedia of Suffering. The key phrase here may be “teachable boys.” The use of “teachable” I approve. The notion that educating everyone, in this sense, is absurd. But, again, limiting this education to boys is missing a great opportunity. It is easy enough to write this off as being a sign of the times, but he has, presumably read Austen and Sand and other women. He (Ryecroft or Gissing) really should know better than this.

Beauty.

...beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.

Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

-Paloma in The Elegance of the Hedgehog

There’s a passage in one of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels where we learn that prostitutes dislike cut flowers for the grim symbolism -- beauty cut down in its prime and destined to quickly shrivel and die. True or not, this is a compelling aspect of natural beauty in general and feminine beauty in particular. How much does the ephemeral nature of beauty contribute to our appreciation? Would a cherry tree in bloom, or a Japanese maple in its full autumn finery, be so compelling if it’s time was not so limited? Is the aesthetic feeling of the person from the stable tropics different than that of the dweller of temperate lands with distinct seasons?

Just as “happily ever after” makes for a poor story, is lovely forever the end of a certain appreciation of beauty?

And while we have both “happily ever after” and The Elegance of the Hedgehog in mind, I need to SPOILER the paragraphs below for people who have not finished Hedgehog and think they might read it at some time in the future. You are warned!

Hedgehog, in my view, is a lovely novel about beauty, perception, and death. I have just reread the fateful scene, but not yet it’s denouement. This reading I have particularly noticed how well the author has prepared us for this -- though always with a strong dash of misdirection. Renee has mourned the anticipated departure of Manuela. Paloma has envisioned how her death will shake up her family and neighbors. We have been told, by Paloma, that the most important thing is what you are doing when you die. We have been told by Renee, just a few pages ago, “... I am weary. Something must come to end; something must begin.”

By coincidence (?) I am also re-watching -- yet again -- the final episodes of the TV show Dead Like Me. The premise of Dead Like Me is that certain people, after they die, get to stay on earth (with a different physical appearance) as Grim Reapers -- they take the souls of people just before they die. The Reapers are supposed to keep to themselves and not get involved with the living, and especially not with the dying, but on occasion they do favors for the dying or make their ends a little more pleasant.

Novelists are, if you think about it, often Grim Reapers of the characters they’ve created. Is it kind or cruel to kill off your character just as she can see her “happily ever after?” Ignoring for the moment that, besides being boring, “happily ever after” is most often an illusion, I think it’s generous for the author (Creator, if you wish) to let the character (like Moses) see the destination. In this case, the character has mostly arrived at that destination. I would give Barbery credit for being a kind and generous Reaper. In that character's own words, at the time of her death, “I had met another, and was prepared to love.” I seem to recall Ryecroft saying, early on (of course I can't find it now) that happiness is as satisfying for a short period of time as for a long period of time. I can see the truth in this while still thinking that more happiness might be at least a little better. But in literary terms, this claim is definitely true.

Next: Winter XXVI. Relativity of time.

Winter XXIV. Time and money + Flash drive

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXIII. Summer in winter

Time is money -- says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth -- money is time. I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different my whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman. Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of purchase. He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough. What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.

Alpha.

Two weeks ago I bought some flowers at a little stand, in an alley, I pass by many times a week and almost never stop at. Two of the flowers I bought have wilted -- though I still have them as I like the look of them as they age -- but the other two still look surprisingly fresh... I just now trimmed their stems and changed the water. But the flower stand is gone. It had been in that (admittedly unlikely) location for as long as I can remember -- at least 10 years -- but when I walked through the alley this morning on my way to the gym, there was no sign it had ever been there. I stopped and stared... like an idiot, I imagine. I walked around the corner to drop some letters at the post office and came back and stared again. Perhaps the owner retired. Perhaps the building decided it no longer wanted a ramshackle flower stand clinging to its flank. Who knows? But it's gone and that alley, and the city, is just a tiny bit poorer for it.

Flash drive.

Sometimes a year will go by between occasions when I need to use a flash drive, but today I had to locate both of the drives I own for different tasks. I used one to transport a pdf file I needed to print for my building. That was the small capacity drive -- which is actually physically larger than the big capacity drive I took to the computer repair place to recover files from my burned out laptop.

My first hard drive, in 1985 or 86, held 20 megabytes, was as large as a good dictionary, and cost over $300. If you had shown me the gigabyte drive I now so rarely use, back in ‘86 I would have guessed it came from much further into the future than just two decades (more or less). Today, a quick search informs me, I could buy an 8 gigabyte flash drive for $5. 

The reason I so rarely use these miraculous devices is that I store, and backup, files to the Cloud now instead of to a local device. My biggest problem with losing my laptop is that it still held several files I was continuing to use with a local application. I had moved most everything to Cloud based apps (for just this reason) but now I have to get access to an older spreadsheet application just long enough to open some files and move the contents to the Cloud.

Recently I thought, mistakenly, that I had deleted some text in a file before I had actually transferred it to this blog. After an instant of panic, I remembered Google's Revision History feature, which I think I've used once before. I was quickly, and easily, able to browse through previous versions of the document -- seeing what had been changed and finding the passage I didn't actually need. When I recall the time I've spent in the past recreating text (or code) that today I could easily retrieve from the Revision History of a document... well, it's just better if I don't think about it.

Think what gibberish this would be to H.R. He despaired of typewriters. Aside from the monetary aspect of the thing, I wonder what he would have thought of the whole world having ready access to his musings (on that Project Gutenberg site, for example). Would he have seen this as a godsend and marvel, or as a Mephistophelean curse? Would he have reveled in the sudden expansion of his library to include everything on the Gutenberg site? Or would he have grieved the disappearance of the physical book? Perhaps both.

Next: Winter XXV. The Virtue of being self-centered.

Winter XXIII. Summer in winter + Photography and light

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXII. Puritanism

All through the morning, the air was held in an ominous stillness. Sitting over my books, I seemed to feel the silence; when I turned my look to the window, I saw nothing but the broad, grey sky, a featureless expanse, cold, melancholy. Later, just as I was bestirring myself to go out for an afternoon walk, something white fell softly across my vision. A few minutes more, and all was hidden with a descending veil of silent snow.

It is a disappointment. Yesterday I half believed that the winter drew to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid azure shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of spring. Idle by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to long for the days of light and warmth. My fancy wandered, leading me far and wide in a dream of summer England...

A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse. Far on every side stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and clustered trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills. Slow, silent, the river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-green osier beds. Yonder is the little town of St. Neots. In all England no simpler bit of rural scenery; in all the world nothing of its kind more beautiful. Cattle are lowing amid the rich meadows. Here one may loiter and dream in utter restfulness, whilst the great white clouds mirror themselves in the water as they pass above...

It is all but dark. For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing by the glow of firelight reflected on my desk; it seemed to me the sun of summer. Snow is still falling. I see its ghostly glimmer against the vanishing sky. To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden, and perchance for several days. But when it melts, when it melts, it will leave the snowdrop. The crocus, too, is waiting, down there under the white mantle which warms the earth.

Alpha.

I love that one of the most evocative passages about summer falls in the midst of winter, when you miss and appreciate what you don’t have. 

What we don’t have here is snow, so I love the passages about that. In my 62 years I’ve passed 12 years in places with snowy winters. Add maybe 50 days spent vacationing or working where winter truly held sway. For me there is something magical about a snowfall. Only snow has the ability to totally alter a landscape -- country or city -- in a few hours. Snow is lovely on the ground and it makes the bleakest land or cityscape look perfect. But it’s the silence of a heavy snowfall that I miss most.

As a kid, however, it was the thaw and refreeze cycle, that most attracted my attention. It was my duty, as I saw it, to break, each morning on my way to school, as much of the ice that had formed over yesterday’s gutter puddles as humanly possible. How often in life does nature contrive to give you fresh toys to break every morning?

Photography and light.

Today was sunny and while walking I was struck by the beauty of a stone tiled wall. I actually stopped to admire it, only to realize that there was actually nothing exceptional about the stone except that the low, mid-day sun was hitting it at just the right angle to accentuate every detail of the very uneven surface.

It is something of a tautology to observe that photography is all about light -- photography is by definition the capturing of light to reveal images -- but it’s so much more than just that. Every photograph, bad or good or ridiculous, is a snapshot of light, but, when I look at my own photography, the best images are the ones where light is the actual focus. I once advised someone to ignore subject -- the “things” you can photograph -- and just look for the light. Where the light is doing interesting things is where you will find your picture.

Of course you can always fix things “in post,” which is easier now with Photoshop and other digital tools, but has always been a crucial part of darkroom photography. I was shocked to learn, long ago, that printing classic images by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams required following pages of notes about dodging and burning and other techniques to produce the desired result. I’ve done some of that (and perhaps I should have done more) but I’ve always preferred to let the light do what it wants to do.

Videographers, and still photographers as well, use lights or reflectors to bounce light on to a subject they are required to capture. I have no problem with this and if you have to photograph specific things, you should take steps to properly light those things. The results, when you don’t, are vile and yet I know people, who consider themselves professional photographers, who can not see this. I don’t even know what to say to them. I know I’m blind to so many things -- grammatically, for example -- but how can you be blind to light?

You know who made this point best? The artist character Elstir in Proust's Lost Time: Damn! I really thought I had a chance of finding that quote, but no. I think they are looking at a painting of boats and Marcel observes (perhaps) that Elstir really just sees the light and color that appeals to him and ignores the rest. He prefers certain clothes (bright white maybe) because they work so well on canvas. Well, that was helpful.

The point is: painters paint color and photographers capture light. Or at least that’s what I happen to like.

Next: Winter XXIV. Time and money.

Winter XXII. Puritanism

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XX-XXI. Hypocracy

It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism [“The Puritans were a group of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, including, but not limited to, English Calvinists. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England.“ -Wiki The Puritans provoked the English Civil War (1642–1651) vs the Stuart dynasty Royalists; settled the Massachusetts Colony and the Ulster Plantation; ruled England as the Commonwealth (1649-1660); and closed the London theaters after 1642]. In the heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it. Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for civic freedom which is our highest national privilege. An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of that which follows. Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tutor. Imagine (not to think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley [Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)], and the name of Milton unknown [John Milton (1608–1674)]. The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality. Regret, if you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wish that its piety had taken another form; later, there had to come the “exodus from Houndsditch,” [“Houndsditch was a Jew's quarter, and old clothesmarket in London, and was to Carlyle the symbol of the alarming traffic at the time in spiritualities fallen extinct.” -Source] with how much conflict and misery! Such, however, was the price of the soul’s health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better meaning. Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a relative term. From the point of view of a conceivable civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse. Of all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism [but see also here and especially at the bottom here], which, of course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves. What we call Restoration morality -- the morality, that is to say, of a king and court -- might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from religious revolution.

The political services of Puritanism were estimable... To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed by the term English prudery... It is said by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation. If by prude be meant a secretly vicious person who affects an excessive decorum, by all means let the prude disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness. If, on the other hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life, cultivates, either by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of thought and speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then I say that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and I have no desire to see its prevalence diminish... An English woman who typifies the bégueule [prude] may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow’s other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature... Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism... it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all the best things which Puritanism had to teach. We who know English women by the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of language betokens, far more often than not, a corresponding delicacy of mind... It is very good to be mealy-mouthed with respect to everything that reminds us of the animal in man. Verbal delicacy in itself will not prove an advanced civilization, but civilization, as it advances, assuredly tends that way.

Alpha.

How Victorian. And how in keeping with the notion that women are an Other, separate from the real body politic. As I read all these books from the 19th and prior centuries, I am constantly disappointed by the lack of female perspective. And by "English women" I have a feeling H.R. does not have Gissing's Nell or even his Edith Alice in mind.

Manichaeism

Catholic orthodoxy struggled against the Manichaean Heresy from before 296 CE, yet with less than total success, obviously. I have mixed feelings about this: On the one hand much vicious stupidity, especially in the centuries after Luther, are a consequence of a belief in the Devil -- the Bad to God’s Good. On the other hand, what the Catholic Church was attempting was the equivalent of trying to keep the sea out of the streets of Venice. It’s futile and the water will eventually find a way in. A Hindu conception of the world that embraces both the dark and the light, is one thing, but trying to build a moral structure on Light alone is doomed. The Problem of Evil is fatal for any belief system based on a single, entirely Good, god. The People will, naturally, try to introduce balance to this deluded mono-culture of Good by celebrating a co-god, a Devil, to do the nasty work for a deity who has much in common with Ryecroft’s Victorian conception of the feminine ideal. Women and God must remain unsullied by the infernal forces that contaminate men and nature.

Viewed from this perspective, the slippery definition of a witch, in those Puritan centuries, perhaps makes more sense. A witch was a woman who sinned by being fully human -- or call it “animal” if you prefer. And perhaps the underlying fear was that God was actually no better.

Antisemitism

Am I imagining it, or is there here (and also on the part of the most Tory Christopher Tiejens, in Parade's End) the hint of a polite variety of antisemitism? It would not be strange if there were, given what Braudel tells us of the role Jews played in the history of capitalism.

In Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, Fernand Braudel traces the development of capitalism from the annual markets of, I believe, the 12th century, to Venice and Genoa, to Spain and then, after the expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella, first to Amsterdam and then to London and finally to New York. What drove the whole business, and the reason the Jews were central to it all, was the need for credit -- which Christians and Muslims were forbidden by their faith to give... at least in return for interest. (Has the Tea Party rediscovered its anti-interest principles, I wonder.)

Viewed from this perspective, you can erase Mephistopheles and insert Shylock as the cause of the right and proper Tory world going to hell in a hand-basket. Without credit, there would be no Industrial Revolution. There would be no bourgeoisie. There would be nothing but subsistence agriculture, the gentry, the church, and the most primitive industry. From this perspective, the Jews are not just people of trade, but they are the Typhoid Marys who infected the Western World with the bourgeois cancer we no longer even fight.

And who needed that initial credit? Farmers. If only they had had access to derivatives (the ability to sell contracts to buy their crops in the future at an established price) it all could have been avoided. And would that have been better? When reading Ryecroft (or Austen) you have to wonder. But the world view of the gentry, or of a recent beneficiary of a handsome bequest, may not be the most revealing view of the times.

Next: Winter XXIII. Summer in winter.