Today the cold. Not enough cold yet, but cold enough to warn us the cold is in earnest.

Today, also, The Old Man and the Sea. I enjoy Hemingway awfully. I am arrested by the descriptions. I want to write more simply, if I can, to let a description go without overworking it. I want to write lavishly also. The theme is the thing to determine the style.

Today, also, a wonderful hamburger stew. I eat to it heartily. I eat to it with the enthusiasm which is its due.

We went down. We went down the swift highways, wending our way past round pillars and down curving ramps, moving with other silent cars, moving in the galaxy of city lights: streetlights of friendly indifference, blind and alternating traffic lights, banded lights in random patterns in high towers, signs blinking, flashing, gleaming, steady, and the myriad reflections. We came out of the darkness and were engulfed in white fluorescence. Inside we went down till we rested in our own parking place, far below the ground in a cavern under Minneapolis—Minneapolis, one of those perplexing and wondrous places where everything is concentrated into a small space and the small space is exploited deep and high; a point in the map that is dense with human significance and light; a city.

And we went up. We went up in the elevator, elevated above the sidewalks to emerge on the generic festivity of the carpeted skyway of the Hilton. We headed away, toward dingier regions of the skywalk, toward brighter and darker regions, and toward regions more rich; the Wells Fargo Center, the Westin, the extravagant marble and gold and chrome, the indoor fountains of Minneapolis, the glad luxury east of the IDS Center. And everywhere outside: the light and darkness of Gotham: below the street lamps, above the lighted windows, the distant pinnacles of human achievement. It makes one look up from the skyway, and it makes one look with longing along the ranged bank of elevators, noting how high the highest will go, catching a guard’s eye and looking away.

The descent on the steel ledges of mindless escalators is gradual. These revolve in continuous diagonal motion; the glass doors revolve in sporadic vertical motion. One a constant grumble, the other a starting roar. Outside the bracing air makes one wonder how much of the effort of machines warms all the indoor spaces. Huge throbbing engines, great boilers and furnaces overzealous or overworked make the air inside close. But outside is the free: rushing wind and wide sidewalks. The light gleams on the marble and through the lighted glass of displays. The great, steel doors on ramps sloping down from the street shut in the caverns under the city. Within the dark luxury that prowls the pavements, the predatory sports cars, sedans, and the oversized ones to which the understatement vehicle is applied wait in neat, silent rows. Outside, in the light of the entrances and small, neon signs, another row of patient taxis.

The ascent is the windy ascent of the bridge. The dark waters go rushing below; the traffic passes over the southbound river; these streams are indifferent to each other, and the lights on the bridge only make the night dim. One can look back and see, rising into the air with deliberate and unprovoked patterns the dense mass. Sounds rise out of it like wandering beacons; lights call into the blind darkness; the city reaches up, recumbent, arterial, pulsing, humming, digesting, with life running in and out between its strong sinews, the sparkle of glass and the clear sound of silver alive on the white table cloth of its inner elegance.

***

Inside a sandwich shop people sought refuge from the cold. There, in line, stood a couple with matching knit caps and parkas, with long, skinny frames, with glasses and boney noses, with a stroller and the convenient accessories fumbled by awkward indecision. In the corner, emboldened by smarmy companions a swarthy and ill-favored client lounged leering: the type of a villain, the sort for a cutthroat. Nearby a neat little business man was simultaneously disposing of the sandwich wrapper, finishing his drink through a straw, holding a folded newspaper under one arm, pushing a chair in with his left foot: the type of a compact citizen. He would toss the cup even as he turned, and have one of his coat buttons done up before the cup hit the bottom of the can.

In that moment from behind the counter came a call and another client was served. The awkward couple moved up to the counter, their order prepared for announcement, like a list on a crumpled paper flattened and smoothed. The slouching and sly man in the corner surveyed the world through the lewd orifice of his eye. The door swung silently and the business man went out to the pavement, his purpose took him in the gusting wind to the light-rail terminal.

***

The hall is modern and abominable. Part of the architectural effacement of the seventies, the decade of nightmares. It is never praised for anything but its acoustics, as if acoustics excluded all other considerations. From the vertiginous third tier the musicians below jerk and twitch like insects. From the second tier they jerk and twitch like small, deranged beings. From the first tier the musicians begin to take on greater proportions and upon their face can be seen, expression. From the ground below the stage, they rise into the air like gods, they loom upon the stage like an intricate enchanted city. The hall is transformed as the city pours out into the air refined and elaborate music.

I cannot say how pleased I am with the NC. It is full of many valuable articles. I do not encounter many articles in it that I do not find worthwhile or fail to finish. It comes in at a good near-one hundred pages which I reckon works out to a two-hundred page book. For the money, it is worth it. The November edition included a symposium on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which contained some prolonged fulminations against popular culture and Rock music. The last contribution offered some worthless criticisms of Bloom, but the whole was invigorating.

Weighing in at three hundred and thirty pages, the long-anticipated summer installment of the MA (a quarterly review) is in its last volume under the editorial leadership of George Panichas. One wonders if Mr. Panichas is cleaning out the backlog before he turns over his vacated office to R.V. Young, his successor. Part of what weighs this issue down is a symposium on the conservative crisis of identity. Among the fourteen contributors is Christopher Olaf Blum, whose ISI lecture and article on French conservatives ended with the memorable line, God is a conservative. I am eager to read all sixteen of these articulate conservatives answering the question, What is a conservative? Another consideration is that the volume starts at page 194, which still allows it to be voluminous, but not as much.

R.V. Young, incidentally, is featured in the fall IR. More punctual than the MA, the IR is considerably more small: sixty pages. I do not subscribe to it. I used to get it free when I was a student. I was given this one by an elderly gentleman who has gone south. This fortuitous event has placed in my hands a review of one of Scruton’s latest works. If the review is good, it will no doubt be valuable to me later.

I thought I had finished with FT, but I recently found myself contemplating another one, wrapped in plastic and bearing my address. I wish they would just quit with the pretenses and make it a Catholic journal of religion and public life. In this issue they feature Mark Noll who ought to be better than the last two evangelicals featured whose articles I went to no trouble to finish. There is, besides the Public Square, of course, one redeeming feature to this issue: it has a picture of Hilaire Belloc in it.

Well, I’ve gotten some good feedback on one of my stories from the writing class. It has been a good lesson in evaluating criticism. I got remarks about wanting to know the age of the princess, of wanting more about her character, questions about puzzling bits here or there, questions about dissatisfaction with the conclusion. During the course of this, the contradictory nature of some of the criticism made somebody ask how to take all the criticism; how is it weighed?

It is a good question. For a writer who gets outside criticism, it is crucial. Whose ideas do you listen to? Who is sympathetic? Who understands what the writer is attempting and can help the writer to understand it too? This last is not preposterous. The great writer of short stories, Flannery O’Connor said she would first write the story and then go back to figure out what she was trying to write. Then she rewrote the story.

What brought the criticism together for me, in the class, was that I realized the remarks of our instructor accounted for all the other criticism, explaining not only what she saw, but giving a rationale that explained all the other dissatisfactions the rest were trying to express. It is a bit like textual criticism: the criticism that best accounts for all the criticism is probably the best criticism. The problem was not the character, although that needed work; the problem was not the ending, although that needed to be refined. The problem was that the central conflict was not sufficiently clear. Rather than being a stark choice, it was ambiguous. So everybody was trying to suggest ways to get at this without really seeing what was wrong, just knowing something was wrong.

In this business, a multitude of opinions is helpful. You take them all seriously, mostly, but they do not all weigh the same. The problem has now come clearly to light, and perhaps it will interest you. I will post the locked story and the key will be X. I first put it up when I wrote it—I wrote it back in February.

I have been near the close, wet clouds when you can smell the moisture and the winds stirs cold. I have seen them in the mountains when they close in the world—the diffused light still suggests the space that is all around and beyond them. These clouds give you a sense of impending fog, impending ghostly monochrome, also impending rain and the murmur of running water, the sun afterward, the freshness that follows. This is the joy damp highland weather promises.

The suffocation of sight, the smell of drowning in a thick fog must be uncomfortable for some. Straining must be the reaction, rather than receiving, contemplation. Does one proceed into the fog by limiting the senses? Walking without needing to see? Hearing muffled sounds? Tasting the fog on the air while the ground rises and the track remains underfoot? The sheep are undisturbed by the fog; dirty they crop the grass. Their wool is damp and hangs down; they continue placid in the mist.

It is different below freezing. Then the fog clings white to every surface with the intolerable suggestion of sugar-coating. Sugar-coated shacks, miserable sugar-coated shrubs with tinkling music of the sewer’s flow in the background gurgling. The sting of frost is in the air, the sting of death, the death of water-based vegetation. The fog is not sugar but curiously tasteless water. Life is fluid and not rigorous crystal, not the crystal sugar-coated lie but a flowing and murmuring truth.

The sifted sugar coat of snow shows slumping slopes of shack roofs made of corrugated iron waiting the dawning promise of the sun. Dense prose wants poetry, but that crystalline structure I do not desire more than the living flow of fluid language lapping in my brain like the blood in the morning. Yet there is another adventure in the fog, even something ominous. Figures in the fog are said to loom. A lake under the fog expands its possibilities because the light extends itself along the water’s surface. One could wish to rise from the shore and glide unerring like a heron through the fog: The heron is a thoughtful bird, a bird of meditation. He wings his flight through silent fog of looming contemplation.

Here’s an example of the kind of story selling in the market I’m interested in. If I tried to commend it to you the usual way I’d give it away. Instead, if you’re interested, notice how quickly it goes and yet how slowly the discoveries emerge. I think that the writing of our time is like driving a fast car: you want to go fast but you don’t want the road to slow you down. You want to go quickly so you want the road to be gradual.

RIA Novosti regularly includes propaganda slide shows. I like them and I find the captions can be interesting. In this one, an unusually long one, the caption writer becomes increasingly hyperbolic. Eventually the captions become less coherent and then they abruptly cease. It is funny. In fact, whoever has to put the watermarks on the pictures gave up before the photographer did. The pictures are worthwhile too.

Down with urban designers. What a rabble of fad-following marketeers.

When I think about the achievement of Tolkien it strikes me that what began with a good and enthralling children’s story took on a great deal of dignity.

I have been reading the latest book that Christopher Tolkien has released, a bit more of the Silmarillion’s majestic tale: The Children of Hurin. When one enters Tolkien’s worlds again one is reminded of the proliferation of names. His love and understanding and skill is bright in the names. They are remote and strange names, names that would otherwise have been unheard. But they’re not laughable, they’re not cliches. The names Tolkien creates have an intrinsic dignity; they have the context of a whole world, a world Tolkien makes us desire and which is further explained by the names.

As the sun began to rise I saw the clouds in the sky in bands, rose on blue. And then as the midnight blue lightened, the clouds near the horizon became orange so bright they seemed lit from within. The pines stood against the brilliant, golden-orange clouds in a row of stark silhouettes. Looking above the pines one could see, against the blue and rose bands of the sky, a tangled November lace of black branches.

That first I saw without. The second thing I saw within. Wilkie Collins showed me a strange sight set in Shetland. He described the ruddy light of a fire late in the day. In a darkened room by the firelight appeared a veiled woman playing on an ancient harp. Around her were six cats, and as she played they danced around her like living shadows.

You may remember (you who read diligently and miss no thing), I had a rather brilliant pair of stories which were coupled to a rather lame one. Here is a little of their genesis that will help you see what I was doing.

The first one, of course, came to me during a meeting. When meetings get prolonged they become, to my seeming, even more ridiculous than they were to begin with. Do not mistake me, I believe good can come from meetings. But one ought to recognize a bad idea, and when one is in a longer meeting, one tends to recognize more. The idea for the story was not voiced, but seemed to me implied. So I jotted down a paragraph afterward.

The second one came as a result of tuning into the linked podcast. It suggested itself to me as the result of the music. I believe it is a masterpiece.

The third one was the result of having nothing to do while waiting for another meeting to being. Having a clean pad before me, and a pen, I could not resist putting down words. What I got was pretty promising.

On Saturday morning I rose early and began to work on the stories. The first one was considerably expanded. While not altogether satisfying, the end is reasonably satisfying. The second one needed little in the way of work. It was born a masterpiece. It was the third one into which I began to put my effort when people began to show up for this and that. When I took it up again, much later, I really did not feel like putting the effort into it so I gave it a cheap ending. I regretted it at the time and I regret it still. It is clearly not a masterpiece like the second; it is not even reasonably satisfying like the first. It is a dud and might even be suspected of making a point.

So I had another meeting today and worried at the problem some more. It has developed better possibilities.

Christmas With the Stars

Christmas in the Helen Marconi—friendly class starship—was a special event. They had welded together a Christmas tree six years back. Having nothing in which to stick the trunk, nothing to prop the tree up, they had welded it to the deck. So every year they decorated it. Then one year they developed a problem.

The problem was not the decorations. They had a whole two-ton cargo container full of Christmas decorations. They seldom used a quarter of the supply, and a third of what was in the container was broken or useless anyway.

The problem was not the will. For all they lacked the will to sort out the decoration stored in the container, they had great enthusiasm for the decorations and the festivities. They were so notorious nobody would contract the starship during the standard calendar months of November and December. So the ship spun in space, celebrating.

No, the problem became the music. They could all have listened to their own private music as they did all the rest of the time, but the spirit of decorating and celebrating together somehow required they play the same music over all the ship. Drip wanted save-the-whales music, which was perfectly mellow.

“The whales creep me out,” Meowan said. Everybody looked. It sounded really unreasonable.

“Dude, what do you mean?”

“All the chittering; it’s like aliens.”

There was a pause before two and two could be put together by one of the others.

“Aliens creep you out?” Pulgama asked with slow astonishment. “Wait, are you taking your mellowers?”

Everybody looked at Meowan with as much suspicion as they could manage. Meowan considered using the X word, but refrained. She looked at her spaced-out space mates and shook her head, but not in denial.

The fundamental alienness of aliens was undeniable: they were like no earthly creature. It was for this reason space crews had to take mellowers—drugs which suppressed the undeniable and unavoidable feeling humans experienced when they came into contact with the space dwelling beings called aliens. All space crews were required to take mellowers because there was no telling when one of the aliens would float through the ship inducing a profound and horrifying sense of something entirely unlike anything humans knew. The effect of encountering an alien was to make a howling sense of loneliness well in even the most insensitive human soul. Whole crews had been found reduced to basket cases, some of them dead and the rest terminally deranged when at last their starship was recovered.

Meowan usually took her mellowers, but sometimes she did not. Everybody skipped a day now and then, but not deliberately the way she did. Whether she really wanted to experience the presence of an alien or just detested the idea of being spaced-out all the time she would not have been able to tell. Perhaps it was something of both these impulses, or perhaps it was a strange xenophobic xenophilia. The mellowers could only be taken early in the day-cycle. Whenever Meowan approached the capsules, she would feel a thrill of fascination. On some days she gave in to it, deciding it was time to live.

It so happened that she gave into it this year when they started to decorate and had skipped for the next two days. Her system was almost completely free of mellowers. She had skipped her mellowers in the spirit of the festivities and now she could not agree with spaced-out space mates on the music; she was feeling rather jittery, opinionated and also paranoid.

“So maybe we could just have silence so we can all listen to whatever we want on our pods,” Dramilda said.

Everybody agreed. Most of them played save-the-whales christmas music a few times on their pods for a while before going back to their regular playlists. So the silence filled the Helen Marconi.

What can I possibly find to fail to examine today? It is time to transgress another border and show that nothing is beyond the pale, nothing.

The Victorian moment, I understand, has gone out of the world. It was a curious moment, but then, all of them must be. Something about ours, if you think of it, will also be preserved and prove, at least, curious. The curiously promiscuous and obsessed nature of our age will surely be remarked by others. In our age every propriety has been offended. At least the effect of such a transgression—the effect, that is, it was meant to elicit—has been worn out. Perhaps we can hope the practice will die out and eventually wear away.

I mention the Victorian moment because I am reading Wilkie Collins. I was trying to think of a proper description of how the moment struck me, at least from what the novel provides. I think it was a moment characterized by extravagance. The moment was less disciplined than the subsequent, it was emotionally more uninhibited, not concerned with a mask of knowing. It was more vivid in its drama. It was more expansive and less willing to be certain. There was nowhere the self-conscious tight hold of the twentieth century.

Of course, it could just be Wilkie Collins. My knowledge is limited. We only have the books, the music, the art and other artifacts, and my exposure to them can be considered limited. Still, I think individual peculiarities are not as evident to the uninitiated, and so they would not clutter up my view. When one first goes to Mexico one notices how mexican all the Mexicans look; one also sees them all alike: they look the same. Generalizing is perhaps something the uninitiated may attempt with greater success than particularizing. This, at least, is my rationale.

Perhaps the Victorian age is extravagant with a decadent profusion.

I have trouble reading some modern novels. The trouble is that the awareness of the characters into which these novels sink seems like nothing so much as the awareness of insects—insects whose consciousness has risen to one which is for humans degrading. The awareness is alimentary, reproductive, social in a narcissistic way, and generally devoid of anything spiritual, anything higher. It is mostly predatory or simply pathetic. I like Ian McEwan for making fun of it successfully.

Mostly predatory or simply pathetic: there is a certain limited range of modern alternatives that the Victorians, for all their excess, did not have to endure. They had a range of possibility and the shades of nuance which allowed them to still be delicate. Delicacy in modern writing must be difficult because, it seems to me, it is rare.

I think Robert Penn Warren wrote delicately. I also think Faulkner was capable of it. I think it is for this reason Weaver made bleak pronouncements about the audience such writing could hope for. Flannery O’Connor understood this. Whether she might have written delicately is another matter, I am pretty sure she did not write delicately—and to good effect!

And now we do not live in an age where comprehensive explanations or ordered systems of thought find eager reception. These entire explanations do not appeal to us because we believe in their limitations more than anything else. We are not willing to attempt to explain reality in terms we cannot accept, and nowadays reality is too great and diffuse for us. If it has not grown, it certainly has become more mysterious, or confusing. In our day, being eclectic is a greater honesty than being loyal.

Their drama, Victorian life as they experience it, could be more dry, I think as I listen to the book. To tell the same thing I would want to be more dry. But it would not be Victorian, and to convert it and refuse the Victorian way of telling it would be to miss something touching on essential.

So why could not I write a Victorian novel? I am asking what makes me something else than a Victorian. The question is: what is different besides the chronological date? It is that I reject the meanings? Is it that their force, which seems inadequate, is not sufficiently delicate for my perceptions? I do not think it is delicacy which makes me resist the practice of their extravagance. I could never be so delicate, but the question is not a question of ability, it is a question of finding the characteristic of an age. They are sincere, but had I their powers I could never put things in their way while remaining sincere.

Where does the difference lie?

It seems a satisfactory explanation to me to say the apprehending moderns wanted to constrain the vital Victorian excess. We, in turn, are apprehensive—perhaps that is not quite the word. We do not approve the project and more than mistrust it; we dismiss it and begin anew with more meager and more fragmentary considerations. We are, however reduced, still more self-conscious than the Victorian chaps were.

The Honesty Corporation

Frustrated by the feedback they were getting, management appealed to the Diabolical Enduser Solutions Corporation to provide them a way to make feedback both candid and anonymous.

“Studies have shown this feedback is important to our business,” Carolyn B. Straynahan said over the phone to the CEO of DESC.

“How important is it to you?” the peculiarly suave voice asked.

“I have to do what it takes. They’ll give me the budget as long as I can show we’ll get what we’re asking for.”

“We can give you what you’re asking for.”

After he hung up, the CEO of DESC smole a smile. His protuberant eyes almost bugged out of his head. Here, he told himself, was an opportunity.

Six weeks later the DESC operatives were shown to Carolyn B. Straynahan’s office and she showed them the conference room dedicated to what DESC called the CANDICON IX: The Ultimate Feedback Solution (from the Diabolical Enduser Solutions Corporation: Solutions Businesses Committed to Aggressive Growth). It was ready in six days.

For optimum results, allow the participants to have six hour sessions, the manual read. Since the company had invested half a billion in the CANDICON IX, they bit the bullet and scheduled all the upper management to get into the room twelve at a time in six hour shifts.

“We’ll provide bagels in the morning and pizza afterward,” Carolyn B. Straynahan wrote in the email invitation. But what really allured the management was the topic sentence of the third paragraph in the email: “Using cutting-edge research and the latest technological breakthroughs, DESC has pioneered a tool of uninhibited performance.”

“I want to be part of that,” Dennis P. Tuphloss said with such enthusiasm that the Vice-President for Optimizing Human Resources Performance wrote his name down on his notepad and put a little star beside it. Dennis had been talking about it with Susan J. Swinehusker in the break-room while the Vice-President was getting himself a Mountain Dew. Both Dennis and Susan were slated for the first session.

Entering the CANDICON IX by way of a separate door, each participant found himself in a dark room looking out upon a conference table which appeared to be three stories down. The table had a light shining on it for each participant. When all twelve lights came on the soft, female voice of the computer began its instructions. Then the computer gave the first question and invited participation.

As each began to speak, the others heard a mechanically shrouded sound like a harsh grating. They began with the usual tentative niceties, but the mask of anonymity and the ugly sound of the other voices soon encouraged the candor which Carolyn B. Straynahan thought her company desired. And so in the weird darkness, looking down upon the lights at the table, there ensued a forthright and uninhibited outpouring of twelve human hearts.

Susan J. Swinehusker did not last more than an hour. She abruptly left the conference before the scheduled time, in tears of rage. A few days later people found out she was no longer with the company.

Carolyn B. Straynahan had all the codes and did not delegate the task of secretly overhearing the conversations. At first she did not convert the harsh grating into the real voices. Nor did she avail herself of the option of having the console show which room was speaking so she could identify the speaker. After all, the whole point was complete anonymity and utter candor.

Once the conversations progressed and the old inhibitions were shed, however, Carolyn B. Straynahan, first shocked, then hurt, then hardened, began to reason with herself. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have that harsh grating of the unfortunate masker. I’ll have to talk to DESC about it, she resolved as she switched the masker off to hear the voices. I can’t believe that’s Dennis saying all that stuff about . . . She became very attentive as the conversation moved on. After a while, uncertain of the owners of three of the voices, she turned the identification on.

At the end of six hours eleven very grim managers came out and barely glanced at the pizza. Carolyn B. Straynahan could hardly make eye contact and she knew her smile was fake. But nobody looked at her. They all went back to their desks.

The next day, still with a hangover but feeling a lot more positive about the whole thing, Carolyn B. Straynahan reported to the executive committee that the CANDICON IX was a really great thing and, if given the support it needed, would revolutionize the company. The executives were a little hesitant just listening to her speak, but she got together an amazing power-point (mostly cribbed from the sales material DESC sent her) which made them all feel better. And then she clinched it all by saying, “They didn’t even go for the pizza afterward; they went straight to their work.”

The CFO nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “I ate a whole pizza because there they were, just sitting there.” Somebody suggested they put the CFO in the room next and the subsequent haze of laughing and joking made everybody feel good about the CANDICON IX.

Six months, six days and six hours later, when the company went under, the DESC corporation had not trouble recruiting Carolyn B. Straynahan.

The planet lay below us. We could see the cities, the transport lines leading away from each, connecting city to city. We watched the natural and artificial topography below. And around us was the gentle wash and wonder of outer space. We rotated slowly, the ship and awed capsule of serenity. The stars were bright, and we floated before the great glass panels.

Slowly I thought about it: save the whales! I swam in slow motion through the cabin on my way over to the wales. They were in a little jar. I scanned the instrument readout. The whales were fine. Fine, I repeated to myself gently. Fine.

I wept within myself for joy. I floated in a field of gratitude. I embraced all my space-mates and we wept within ourselves till the rotation of our ship lulled us all to sleep.

We woke to the slow-sounding horn of heaven. It was beamed through all the galaxy from the X-76bmi, the mothership. It was like an ocean in the fires of the heart of the galaxy, that ship. Oh my mothership, I cried silently. I wept within myself and heard its long, dwindling horn.

Holy Cow, I thought. Just like that. Then I realized something and wept within myself, man. Holy Whale. Holy. Whale. And I heard the gong and the first words of the aliens coming into our serenity. Their voices scrabbled around us with an electronic chitter. It was so weird; I felt glad.

Glad. It was like the music of the whales. I went back to look at the jar as the horn sounded more slow and faint. The wales were gone. The aliens chittered one last time and then the sound went out like the tide.

Christmas With the Stars

Christmas in the Helen Marconi, Friendly class starship, was a special event. They had welded together a Christmas tree six years back. Having nothing in which to stick the trunk, nothing to prop the tree up, they had welded it to the deck. So every year they decorated it.

The problem was not the decorations. They had a whole two ton cargo container full of Christmas decorations. They seldom used a quarter of the supply, and a third of what was in the container was broken or useless anyway.

The problem was not the will. For all they lacked the will to sort out the decoration stored in the container, they had great enthusiasm for the decorations and the festivities. They were so notorious nobody would contract the starship during the standard calendar months of November and December. So the ship spun in space, celebrating.

No, the problem was the music. Nobody could agree on the music. They could all have listened to their own private music as they did all the rest of the time. But the spirit of decorating and celebrating together somehow required they play the same music over all the ship.

“Dude,” Bjink said. “We should have that Christmas with the Whales.”

“Christmas in Wales would be fine,” Jot said.

“Man, that is not what I’m talking about. You know what whales are?” Bjink said.

“I know.”

“That would be like Johan,” Dlog said.

“Like, maybe Jonah?” Jot asked.

“Wasn’t Johan in the whales?” Dlog asked.

“Dude, Dlog,” Bjink said. “He wasn’t, like, among the whales, ok?”

“I thought he was a biblical character. Do you mean to say Jonah was Welsh?” Zipper asked.

“That totally makes sense because Christmas is also in Wales. I had been confused thinking they were in the Bible.” Dlog said.

And so, as you can imagine, none of the music they had really fit. What happened, as a result, was that the crew decorated, had long discussions about the music, and eventually gave up and celebrated until the season was over.

One of the things that intrigues me about the modernists is the agedness that breathes out of their work. There is a great weariness about The Wasteland, an ancient ebbing of vitality. Modernism always seems to me a movement for old men. Was TS Eliot ever young? Think of the weariness of James Joyce’s Dubliners. You might subtitle it Stories by an Old Man. Think of Brideshead, that long drawn-out farewell to youth, that sad remembrance. The works of Faulkner seem to me the works of an old man. The evidence might be selected selectively. No doubt it is at least limited. I realize it is an impression and for the observation that rests on it rather on the fleeting side. Still it seems to me that modernism was always an aged movement.

***

The older we grow, the more we resemble death. There is upon old people the look of an unending Hallowe’en: we see the living masks; the skeletons emerge; the flesh sags away; faces are made strange. Nowadays old people take on the attributes of androids gradually as the doctors put gadgets inside them or replace living parts. This also seems to me another way to resemble death; we prop up vitality with machines and spare parts.

And we ought to admit that upon every human being is the look of death, especially in the light of November. Our flesh is falling away from our skeleton, I thought as I sat in a conference room watching the people to keep from getting bored by what they were saying. When we are not smiling our skin back onto our bones it is falling away, and you can see it. In the dreary activities of labor we are seldom animated. Perhaps never. But in the lofty activities of leisure we are animated, and our flesh returns to our skeletons a while; we get a glimpse of spirit. When I distracted the conversation from business there was some animation for a while—till we returned to business with a look of death.

I do not say there is not an animation without vitality. But the animation I speak of is not the bizarre animation of someone talking volubly and fast about an irrelevancy we will all abandon at the stroke of the weekend. It is the animation you see in people performing upon musical instruments.

***

Reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory one seeks for the power and the glory in the story. There is the power of the writer and the glory of his skill. How many luminous moments can a novel have? How many quotidian situations in the dust and squalor of Mexico can be rendered so they are fraught with significance? How quickly he can turn a conversation into a searchlight of the soul! Graham Greene has the power to show a sight of the significance of man without using very remarkable characters at all. There’s glory for you.

The novel is set in the days when the redshirts were killing Catholic priests in an effort to eradicate religion. The story is the story of a Catholic priest. It is full of a humanist theologizing; it is full of everything that makes a thoughtful and un-academical exploration of religion interesting. “Who was he,” the priest asks himself at one point, “To disbelieve in miracles?” If anything you see the power and the glory of the meanings of Christianity, especially when these are denied; the denial is what makes the Christian meanings of the habits of the priest’s life more significant.

The power and the glory echo in the heat and silence of the story. With all the Christian elements in the story you cannot help thinking, For thine is the kingdom and . . .

The tale is of a long and utter defeat. It is the kind of defeat that is not only suffered but is also accepted to the point of complete humiliation. At this point in the story (which I have not yet finished) the priest picks up a Gideon Bible and reads through the suggestion it contains: if tired of sin read Psalm 51, etc. (Tolle Lege the children sang. And St. Augustine read. It is not the same with what the priest reads inside that Gideon Bible. There is something about the laundry list which cannot ever sing). The comical inadequacy of these glib exhortations, so uncomprehending, so unaffected with the tragedy of the human condition, is well rendered.

***

The thing about the Modernists is that with almost superhuman effort they found metaphors—they strained for the objective correlative and succeeded. They understood the end they sought; they worked mightily for means, and by the time they laid hold of the means to achieve the ends they were exhausted.

They were great for attempting and great for succeeding; the first is power and the last is glory. The Modernists were the last old men before the rest were compromised with evanescent youth, for a popular culture is a culture of youth, and Modernism was the attempt to preserve high culture by dissevering it by means or erudition from the common culture. And yet high culture without folk culture’s nourishment lacks necessary vitality. For this reason it has its aged feel; it is the culture of old men.