The focus of our educational systems on popular culture, political correctness, and the cult of self-esteem has had two consequences for everyday speech. First, young people prefer to remain silent rather than risk an opinion. Secondly, when they do talk, it is in an outpouring, in the belief that one person’s language is as good as any other’s. Bon mots, aphorisms, insightful quotations, nuggets of wisdom, or even ordinary apt remarks form only a tiny part of their conversation.

A degree in the humanities should have something of the ancient study of rhetoric. It should be equipping students to persuade, to use language gracefully and succinctly, and to speak and write with style. Persuasion comes not through statistics and theories, but through the artful aphorism that summarizes, in the heart of the listeners, the things that they suspect but don’t yet know.

–Roger Scruton

So that’s what you work with when you paint: shapes and colors. Make a mountain steeper and you have something not like the leveler mountains. I think the more steeply pitched the mountains, the more they approach a fairy tale. I made some with shapes that echoed pine trees across the silent landscape.

Isn’t it curious–the system of metaphors?

I was pressing my teacher on this point this morning. How do you know these colors are complimentary? She hadn’t thought about it. She supposed we saw them in nature and said: we like that and don’t like that.

They really believe, around here, that these things are arbitrary human fashions. Had a music student trying to tell me that on Wednesday about sounds and I kept pushing back.

No, I pressed, what do they correspond to? You say this color is warm and this one is cold. This blue gives me no chill, but we all recognize the metaphor of temperature. To what do these things correspond? What underlying reality are we making use of? Why do we say they complement or contrast and what is the idea underneath that that I can get ahold of and use color properly? I can’t accept just telling me this goes with this and this does not anymore than I can learn grammar if you don’t give me the reasons behind the rules.

She started saying subjective and objective. I said, it is beyond that. To what does it correspond, what connects the appearances in nature to the appearance on the paper?

I ended up telling her that I’m not interested in realism (!), imitating things merely: I want to paint ideas. And what I’m stuck on is what makes colors work as a system? What does the juxtaposition of certain colors mean within its own system and why does that system of metaphors work? I’m learning some of the vocabulary for handling it. One useful term today is what happens when you mix secondary colors together: you start getting neutral tones. It makes a lot of sense, the word ‘neutral,’ but why? I think she said we also talk about the chromatic level. Low chromatic level and high chromatic level: high being pure.

I didn’t stop her to say pure what? Pure primary is what I gather, but what truth is there in primary colors? What cleanness of light? She wanted to tell me for a while it was all arbitrary, to which I did not reply: not in God’s world.

Has anybody ever written an aesthetics of color? we ended up asking.

Maybe all rubbish, but a very interesting class just when I needed it!

One of the things that happens is that you find as time goes on that there is an adjustment of your tastes. When you left the USA you thought of Dr. Pepper and Cheezits, you remembered what passes for Chinese food in the USA and pizza, and your life in cars, in sealed buildings, what you could find in the MIA, the public libraries, all those things.

But after a couple of years what one finds is that one even starts to wonder if Dr. Pepper matters all that much. Strange, and almost a point of heresy, but true. I think I will always be able to miss going out and ordering a complete breakfast. I am not talking about the childish stuff all sugar and whipped cream and syrup which I don’t think people can so much enjoy eating as they do because of how it appears. No, not breakfast for the vulgar, I am talking about eggs, bacon, hashbrowns and good sausage, and perhaps some cajun rice, along with english muffins, and coffee.

They don’t do that here, though they do know how to make a scrambled egg very well. Which adds the final point. Where one to leave, one would have to re-experience the whole adjustment of tastes again, with the disconcerting attachment to the former things, and the impatience with ways not yet entirely assimilated.

Haven’t had a rainy evening in a while. So I put on the Bach Christmas Oratorio for a bit, and by Jove it feels like Christmas.

I miss the cold awfully. It comes back to me in flashes: steam in the city, the sense of desolation, the wind about one, the smugness of a warm apartment with many amenities.

Cold nights those of December there. Cold nights and massive buildings scattered over the uneven land with its broad highways. It reminds me I haven’t driven a car in over two years.

I remember entering buildings, the sudden smell of coffee after winter out of doors and mottled faces. Here you are always more or less outdoors and it doesn’t matter. There the windows sealed, the doors shut all the way.

I paint a lot with Phthalo blue here, remembering.

The watercoloring has me stumped because obviously I am going to have to go more carefully, learn to draw better, and fiddle with details. My problem is I want to paint in sweeping, masterful strokes!

So what helps is I chop the paper into little sixths, thirds or fourths and paint those with little brushes. What I need to do is combine the little on the big, or spread one thing over many little papers and then frankenstitch them back together into one horrible whole.

And I am running out of yellow. I am thinking of just getting cheap chinese watercolors to keep on experimenting (I have semi-cheap Brazilian ones now). If I get the expensive English tubes then I’ll feel inhibited. But maybe that will make me more careful.

* * *
Bray on The Doctrine of God is what one wants, mostly. A bit silly on Natural Law in the section discussing the Ethical Argument, with the usual silliness about polygamy in the OT and whatnot. It is so inane I ought to write a book against it. It goes to show the limitations of an age of specialization. He is really good within the confines of Systematic Theology, but when he has to depend on things outside of his specialty he can be rather conventional.

Is it a symptom of our malady that in order to solve this we think we need specialists in generalizations?

But I am very pleased with Bray. He put some things together for me that I had vaguely in mind. What he says about Omnipotence being the fundamental attribute is very compelling, especially when he ties it in with Apophatic theology and speculates about Calvin’s influence. Nothing could be more along the lines of my theological thinking in the recent years than that. I am intrigued by his Calvinistic solution: God is unknowable in his essence but is known in his persons.

I have to read again what he says on predestination, but I found it clarifying. He is excellent at working the historical development of things, something approaching the great Vladimir Lossky in that department; most unexpected and welcome too.

* * *
2nd time through A Voyage to Arcturus. It still has me, and it gives me ideas. The chap had an enviable imagination and a formidable clarity of vision.

I also read short stories, at least one every day. De Maupassant, Singer, Bowen and other things. I don´t have time to slog through a real, regular novel at the moment, so I save those for vacations–having learned from Lewis.

Fond memories of clear, November mornings, of the cold beside the windows and the outdoor weakness of the sun. Sharp the air and austere the literary books in a way that makes me think of Joyce. No fecundity, no fertility but a beckoning winter of clearcold penetrations, understanding, shrugging apprehendings and brittle, yellow pages on a table.