The leaves are large and generous now most everywhere. It is the season when you still get the sweet smells from shadowed things an endurance of summer with wither away. It is the time when the dandelions no longer small and winsome raise a forest of stalks along the dirty sidewalks. The crabs are dropping petals like manna and the approach to their shade is fragrant, but there is a brownness no longer tender.

Trees that did not make the spring but faded sometime with the fall or during winter stand bare and now unusual. The days are clear. The hints of spring have grown robust and strengthen toward the thick abundance required for enduring the summer sun. Soon the shimmering heat and glare, the dusty gravel, the thunderstorms, the insects of the twilight, the tall grasses start to stoop, mingling yellow and grey.

I finished A Thread of Years by John Lukacs while in Cleveland. Lukacs’s book is a series of imagined historical situations which he then discusses with his skeptical alter ego. He does all of this in order to convey to the reader a sense of the loss of faith and civilization that characterized the 20th century. I think the point of the discussion, after the imagined part, is to give credibility to his method of imagining something in order to explain what really happened—he debates himself, challenges things and so is conveniently provided with occasion to rebut and expand. History is supposed to rest on factual evidence, after all; something that really happened must back it up. At the same time, history is the business of interpreting that evidence and all interpretation requires imagination. History is not just the recitation of dates and events, but it is the arranging (both selecting and ordering) of what is remembered. What a historian wants to achieve is a sort of consent from his reader, persuading him of his interpretations: what these events mean.

* * *

He said many thought-provoking things. He always says thought-provoking things: he’s a thoughtful person and a trained observer. But he said one thing particularly about an older woman. He said that she had learned to see herself for who she was without including what she expected to become. All my self-respect is bound up in becoming a Science Fiction writer. If I am not that (in other words, if I do not include what I would like to become) what am I? There is a thought to stop one cold.

* * *

I am in Cleveland, and Cleveland is two things. On the one hand Cleveland is impressive. During the guilded age, many, many wealthy people lived and worked in Cleveland. They built impressive towers, churches, homes, bridges and assorted buildings. The curious thing is how much remains after so much has been demolished. One of the reasons the art museum is so fine and free is that it is superabundantly endowed, as is the orchestra, the botanical garden, and several other things. That art museum is worth living near to in and of itself, never mind the kind of music that comes through here, the public library and the architecture you can regularly enjoy. The other thing Cleveland is is a decaying place. The roads are bad, and a lot of this place is the unadulterated hood. The roads at this point are emerging from a winter of salt and plows, but they are truly awful, and on the highways the medians are crumbling, and I had to stop under a very ancient railway bridge while the train thundered overhead and I wondered if concrete and steel from a hundred years ago (at least it looked that old) would make it a few more minutes. That is not all of Cleveland–but how much of Cleveland is it?

Art Museum Observations

If you go to an art museum you’re going to have a more-or-less chronological experience. When you talk about painting, you’re talking about some 500 years of western cultural life–from dawn to decadence. And you can see it in the paintings: the loss of faith and then on the canvas itself something happening that is not unlike a loss of vision until you are left with the anarchy of present art.

* * *

There is always–because where else in the world would it even be–the early American painters’ work. It tends to be rough and crude, mostly, and perhaps of value more historical than artistic, but have you noticed how many of the women in those paintings have strikingly masculine features? Living in the age we do, perhaps you can but I can’t help thinking they look like transvestites–only they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of painting them back then. So, how does one account for that?

* * *

This is not so much an art museum observation, but coming out of the place both times (indeed we did go twice) it started snowing. Maybe it’s part of the whole lake effect but we got snow in little balls, like fuzzy styrofoam. Now I’ve had experience of the snow in many varieties, but never altogether such–that I can remember. Maybe because I’ve never really looked at snow while coming out of an art museum in daylight? At the MIA we usually went after dark in winter. Anyway, this snow blew through the city several times, cutting off visibility and sticking to things, before giving way (we found a nice Italian place in it though). The sun shone too, near the end of the day, and set in splendor–as in many paintings in the art museum–behind the towers of Cleveland.

Speaking of the lake effect, we went down to the shores of that great body. It was the first time, I think, I’ve ever worn my pea coat near a body of water. It was warranted, the surface of lake Erie being troubled by a steady wind. On the windward side of the rocks there was a good rime of ice from the waves and spray. On the shores of the lake, there were a lot of dead fish the overhead fowl disdained to investigate. Caught in the water between the rocks on the lee side of things, one even seemed to swim though it was dead. Which reminded me that we had started the day at the West Market–a true market–where many such fish I had seen, but in neat rows and stacked up, like sausages.

Here is an art museum observation: I saw a painting with two herrings hung in it, and I thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, may he rest in peace. Didn’t he end up choking on a herring at the end?

Speaking of that and of becoming, there’s a guy in our church who just got accepted for a full ride to the Ph.D. program at CUA to study Aquinas. It is like a dream come true, he said to me. When, I wonder, will my application to the Science Fiction writers’ guild be filled and be accepted?

* * *

You know what is interesting? though the paintings of our age on display in the museum are mostly hostile in one way or another, not all the recent art was. One thing to consider is that artists keep their work or sell it privately, and another is surely that curators have other fish to fry what with artifacts going back to days of Egypt and them trying to make sure collections are robust enough to fill a gallery enough to delight and interest. In other words: I’m not sure I should expect to see the best of our age, whatever it is, on display in a museum at this point. But among other things there were sculptures made with glass with curious things going on inside not unpleasant. And there were some jugs or jars after some ancient Egyptian pattern and in memory of 09-11-2001 which even made sense.

In one gallery they had the whole of a rug made specially for a 17th Century French monarch’s dining room. When they start picking through our age, what will they end up with at a museum near you (if there’s any)? The wondrous dashboard of one of those cars recently on display in the Geneva auto show? It will look oddly reduced, don’t you think, in a glass case attached to nothing else.

* * *

So without what I expect to become, is what I am more than the fragment of an unreconstructed pot such as you see on display in the art museum? A fragment of an unreconstructed pot–but, and here’s the key, recovered on a different planet. I should try and get these things etched on something so they end up somewhere . . . like a museum  . . . where they put things the future of which is clearly done.

Oh Cleveland! I will believe in you if you will believe in me.

You should read Remonstrans today. You should read it every Monday and Friday. I know a lot of you are not men enough to do so, and that is shame and that is the truth; but you should be. I know it does not win persons over for me to put it that way: I only say it because it is true, not because you are persuaded.

But a religious culture, remember, does not just teach us the art of feeling (as easily forgotten as that is), it also establishes the motives on which a community depends.

It is things like that which are not said all the time by the other persons you read that ought to take you back to Remonstrans. That sentence is worth re-reading and stopping over.

* * *
I went to an organ concert yesterday. I had not been to one since Minneapolis–which was a long, long time ago. My wife mentioned it to one of our new friends, our (rather good) church organist who also happened to have time to go and was present there beside us.

“It looks like an interesting program,” he remarked, not altogether without irony. “Everything from Bach to the Beatles.”

Even though I’m a sabbatarian in a denomination that contains quite a few of life’s remaining sabbatarians, I decided to stay. Do I listen to secular entertainments on the the Lord’s day? I try to put on only music for the Lord’s day, myself, but here we were. Should we walk out on Buxtehude and Bach and Mendelssohn because the show culminated with selections from the Beatles and Andrew Lloyd Webber? I didn’t, but I’m not sure that was right.

Anyway, it was a lackluster performance–which seems to be par for the course in Columbus, OH.

“What is it? the performance or do you think the instrument could use some maintenance?” I asked our (good and even excellent) church organist. He had just told me he was thinking even our electric job at Grace OPC could sound better than this.

I wish I had written down the reply. It was very English, an oblique disparagement not entirely to do with the instrument, but not for that reason crushing.

And I’ve been thinking about it, in the sense of how does one account for what happens. Now if I were a historian I’d investigate, but since I’m clearly not, since I’m an author of science fiction, I speculate. How do you write a story that leads up to this and makes sense of all the pieces you end up with? I was playing my accordion this morning and it struck me that the audience has a lot to do with the performance you get. What they expect. That you need the appreciation of criticism in order to have good performances.

Two things led me to this conclusion. The enthusiasm for the four selections from the Beatles and the enthusiasm for the Franck (as in César). He got some bravo’s for both, and what interested me is that the organist beside me leaned over and said, “That’s more like it,” an instant before the bravo for the Franck flew through the air. He did not, I hardly need add, lean over and say that for the Beatles.

But he might have, because it was more like it in terms of what the audience appreciated.

So here’s the story I speculated up.

The church gets a new organist/music director. Why? Because they have the pipes there, they have an organ, they have old people who tend to pop off and endow the place.

“So, among other things, why don’t you do an organ concert?”

“Oh come on. Nobody would come to an organ concert.”

“Well, I would. I love Franck.”

“You’re probably the only person in the world who understands Franck.”

“Maybe, but throw in some Bach and maybe the Beatles. People used to come to organ concerts. We used to have organ concerts several decades ago. Don’t you have something from college you could play?”

Turns out he has some stuff from his college recital he can polish up. Add some of the Beatles near the end to engage the older generations who still think that’s cool (something pathetic and thumb-sucking like ‘Yesterday’), and an organish show-stopping stop to the whole show with the Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Tee-dee-de-de-deen, dee-dee-te-te-teen, etc. (I’ll tell you one thing, having AL-W after the Beatles actually put his music–I despise him–in a new and positive perspective.)

At least that explains for me why things were played as they were: it was kind of something the guy was prevailed upon though he does not really believe in organ concerts himself and perhaps not even in organs.

Now, for my story and the telling of how it came about, I’m not sure if having the Beatles performed to old people on an organ on a Sunday afternoon in a reputable establishment of former religion is something the irony of which is intended. Somehow I don’t think we live in an age in which it is.

* * *
So I read this morning, and I pause: “But a religious culture, remember, does not just teach us the art of feeling (as easily forgotten as that is), it also establishes the motives on which a community depends.”

Toledo has a good museum of art. I approve it. I haven’t seen half of it yet, but it is good.

* * *
The Toledo Symphony can really do badly. We went to a lackluster performance of the Messiah on Saturday evening. I did not imagine before that real orchestras finished with their rehearsing at the level this one performed.

* * *
The Park Inn Toledo is a jolly decent hotel. I approve it. Stayed on the 14th floor and thought it was very nice. I’d go back to the hotel, especially to be able to take in more of the Museum. I’d also like to get to see more of Toledo, although it has some tough areas.

It would have to be something awfully special for me ever to buy tickets to hear the Toledo Symphony ever again. What smiling mediocrities. Too bad the hall is so pleasant. Very pleasant, comfortable hall: the Peristyle.

Smile and smile and play the villain–I thought. The bass was a cretin; the tenor heroic and alone worth hearing; the mezzo looked like she would be a great, blowzy queen of a mezzo and then had no power; the soprano smiled from time to time, and played the villain accurately enough.

One out of four is not good enough. I don’t deny the Mezzo had many peculiar qualities of voice. Nor do I deny I was not disappointed that the whole Messiah was not performed.

There is no excuse for what was done to one of the treasures of all the world.

* * *
And the folk of Toledo insisted on clapping at every perceivable pause.

* * *
It was good to have good company however. If there is a next time, it has to involve more of the Art Museum and a whole lot less of the Toledo Symphony.

Time to be thinking about a Christmas tree. You know, they’re already on sale here. It’s been three years since we’ve had one because in Colombia people are banned from having real ones. If they allow it, they’ll cut down all the pines in the areas surrounding Bogota. Here they are part of the free enterprise system: people are making money on it and so the perpetuity of that stream of income is looked after and so it works.

* * *
Have you ever read Wealth & Poverty by George Guilder? Robust, interesting, a bit detaily on numbers (is wonkish the adjective nowadays?), but not what you expect in a book about the dismal science. It is luminous with the explanation of the metaphysicality of wealth.

* * *
Last night the associate pastor (to continue by associations, and yes, they have associate pastors in the OPC, and youth group sadly–can’t wait to as them to square that with the sufficiency of Scripture and the regulative principle; it is my notion that adding youth group is an affirmation of the insufficiency of Scripture if you believe in the regulative principle of worship [I'm not really interested in a church that doesn't affirm the regulative principle]) the youth paster, I say, wanted to explan to us how saints were saved under the old covenant dispensation of the covenant of grace–and his subsequent explanation of why it matters was the best preaching I’ve heard out of him so far. But before that he used this triangle he claims comes from Vos. Top of the triangle is the heavenly reality, bottom left is the OT shadow, and bottom right is the NT manifestation. Maybe I was wrong, but between the top on the one hand and the bottom corners on the other I imagined a line distinguishing eternity above and time below.

My question, under that scheme, is what is the heavenly reality being manifested in the crucifixion? I talked to the pastor (not associate) and he was more inclined to talk about shadows being cast in time: the signs, types and prophecies of the OT are shadows cast by the NT events of the Gospel. Where does that leave your heavenly realities? All this in the context of Hebrews which leaves no doubt as to the existence of such.

I even asked, what are the metaphysics of this, but no dice. Ah well. Next time that gets touched on the question will have to be, so what exactly is a heavenly reality? Because what I am after is that I think covenant theologians who are not nominalists find there the theological covenants: the covenant of grace or of redemption in this case. These are the heavenly realities, the forms taking shape partially in OT shadows and fully manifested in the Gospel. And for a metaphysical realist, that’s strong, strong stuff.

* * *
I do have to understand better why covenant theology does not completely identify the covenant of grace with the new covenant, but wading through tomes of badly written theology is not something I will willingly undertake as long as there are well written books to read instead. I have always had a problem concentrating on some books, and I think it is a big like Folgers. It’s just not Starbucks–and nowadays not even Starbucks is. I realize how effete that sounds to students of theology, but so does Starbucks to drinkers of Folgers.

* * *
You know, I have that problem with the younger Scruton and the works of his more recent effort. The older stuff is a bit hard to concentrate on, whereas the recent is luminous and compelling.

Well, a discouraging week. Romney lost the election and now we have the moral failure of General Petraeus. I admired Petraeus and can believe that some are stunned. I am among them. Just when I was beginning to sort myself out after the abasement of the thought of four more years: this.

I figured the election out by nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, and went to bed by ten. Wednesday was a low day, and so was Thursday, I admit, the only cheer being in the consideration that maybe the federal government will be gridlocked and the state governments in the hands of some not altogether despicable Republican governors. Not much cheer though.

Speaking of the election, I thought of writing a letter to Romney. It is honorable to make the effort, and honorable for somebody to put their character up as a target in a US presidential race for the purpose of stopping bad ideas, evil influences and profligate ideologues.

I don’t think there is all that much wisdom in the persons who are presently diagnosing suddenly obvious wrong moves and what should not have been done which all of a sudden they see very clearly. It doesn’t, as we say in Spanish, call me much the attention. I hope Romney doesn’t go for that kind of thing and I hope he doesn’t quit, whatever he does next. But then he probably has plenty of people giving him decent advice; so I didn’t write him a letter in the end.

So Petraeus is fallen and Biden is snug and Boehner must stand in a place where even the chief justice finds it difficult, and we must go on. And it isn’t the political situation that one finds discouraging, but what it all means or seems to mean. It’s like having a flock of bad omens gather in the bare branches above the way.

Maybe it’s just a bunch of birds and just another part of November’s routine novemberness. Still, one can hope, can’t one? This is how winter begins, and what could be more Nordic? I sit in my overwarmed apartment reading Sagas, and dreaming of the bitter wind and the North Atlantic Sea.

After the rain a blue, scrubbed day in Columbus. The leaves are wending down. The midnight of a recently paved back road still dark from the rain was spangled with yellow maple stars. The sun came out after the mist, all cheerful, warm and humid. In the deeper places where old trees give a woodland glade feel to the neighborhoods there was an early summer tranquility–with the freshness of rain. And still the leaves were falling and the gutters full of acorns and rotting walnuts. I don’t know why the air’s so still. Let the October winds come to usher in November.

I went down. Saw a grove of cottonwoods standing like Corinthian columns. Also saw in a place where ostensibly they preserve the prairie a dying cottonwood all alone–reminded me of Minnesota.

What doesn’t is the hickories–I think they’re hickories–and the sycamores with their great batwing leaves. Acorns are falling, and the drought we have inherited from August has turned some of the leaves. Aloft in the sunlight the winds from a cold front I understand is at last moving in sent a yellow, heart-shape leaf tumbling down to where it belongs.

The crazy Americans were out, with bicycle helmets that have rear-view mirrors, fat guys with bulging calf muscles, slender women with strollers and dogs on a leash, working on getting back to slenderer, and in a field that looked destined for a future parking lot a lone worker in a bulldozer was putting on what seemed the finishing touches (in Colombia you will never find that kind of work being done alone).

Sylvan Ohio, with the low Olentangy winding brown in the exhausted lingering summer of September was loud with insects. Already I can name so many things here, and it surprised me; and describe better, and that surprised me; but do I belong?

Who are the strong and who are the weak in the faith? The strong are the more mature, it seems to me. I had a friend once tell me the strong had better understanding. Perhaps, but it is not knowledge alone. Knowledge puffeth up but charity edifies. And it is the insight of love that gets past the superficial. I think the hangup of the one who is weak in the faith is in dealing with appearances and phaenomena and not getting to the inside of things. Why is it that in two out of three major passages on the theme of Christian liberty Paul mentions that God’s commands are summed up in loving? Why does he come to that unifying point on the inside of all the particular manifestations? It is an understanding, a more fundamental understanding, but one achieved not by a fragmentary knowing about, but by knowing the heart of the matter.

I am going to mention that on Sunday, and if anybody afterward is intrigued, I am going to recommend they read Plato.

* * *
I’ve been preaching from Romans 12 forward. Never thought I’d do something like that, but I was so tired of doing long book studies after Luke and Genesis that I could not contemplate anything else. So I’m in paraenesis and the struggle there is to make it interesting. I still can’t even figure out how to make an outline for my sermons without killing them dead. Which is why I prefer narrative, because the emotional climax is so easy to find, work toward, and be the place where the applications are made, before you wind up the story. I’m enjoying Daniel.

* * *
Daniel, now, was picked to make me get into eschatology. I suppose I really never was much of a dispensationalist to begin with. Hard to be, when it has no positive associations for one. I was established in progressive dispensationalism by witnessing one Burgraff attack it. I knew I wanted to be whatever he was not, but I didn’t realize at the time that I could be a covenant theologian (the rigidities I have shed over time—I didn’t even realize I didn’t have to be a fundamentalist then). One of my worst dispensationalist teachers was always complimented for being consistent. Where is the appeal in that? I was always embarrassed for him that the best thing these people could say was that he was consistent. He was a nice chap too and was rather fond of above average buffets—several of which he treated us to more than once.

Speaking of that, the hermenutical differences between dispensationalists and the people of God (that’s a joke, for those with too literal a hermeneutic) are set forth in a book by Peter Masters called Not Like Any Other Book. He’s not the clearest, most scholarly, or even the most precise; in fact, he’s sometimes aggravating, but he does understand the difference between how Calvin interpreted, how Spurgeon interpreted and how the dispensationalist interprets the Bible. He’s not into single meaning, not into abandoning allegory, not into limiting parables. He’s not into irresponsible hermeneutics either . . . much. I love him, mostly.

Not the first author I usually turn to, and certainly not an evangelical celebrity author, but we have a book dealer here who’s friends with Masters’ daughter and gets fresh translations sent direct; which is why I have ended up reading two of his books, neither of which I have found all that great but both of which have been useful for conversations, for starting a bit of thinking. The bookseller here is going to write the daughter and ask her to please tell her dad to be a bit more precise and careful in the future. We’ll see how that goes.

* * *
You know, I wonder about that. I wonder about the value of the chap who gets a bit of thinking started. He doesn’t get it right, he doesn’t even do that great a job, but he puts his finger on the issue or at least eliminates possibilities unintentionally so that somebody after him comes up and reaps the benefits of seeing at last what the problem is. It is part of the historical process of things, it seems to me.

It happens to you all the time when you know how to teach and you’re listening to somebody else do it. With the benefit of that person’s study you can sometimes move ahead of the guy as you listen to him speak on a subject. I don’t doubt it happens when I teach to other people. At least I hope so, sometimes it is my only consolation.

Anybody with a sizeable collection of books has had the experience of some twit of a non-reader looking over the collection with no real discernment and wondering if the owner has read them all. The tone–or something about the way–in which the question is expressed seems to imply that the best answers would be either a Yes or an Almost.

Of course, that isn’t the answer they get, at least not from this reader. They get a No. One doesn’t acquire all one’s books with a view to reading them in the immediate future: that isn’t the way things are done. It isn’t the way things are done because all books are not read the same way. Certainly some are read immediately, especially if you’re the kind of reader who never has and never will use lists to read by. But some are acquired with a view to filling up a spot in a life that would drag on tediously should one ever run out of things to read, say a year from the day, or five, ten or twenty. And yes, there are people who worry about running out of good books to read and tend to hoard.

It does puzzle me to know there are people who read by lists, because I do not find that I understand when I read strictly under compulsion. I read well when I am interested, but not so well when I am compelled. And I have, somewhere, a quotation from Dr. Johnson corroborating the general idea too.

To what is this due, this triumph of desire over duty? One doesn’t read all books similarly, for one; and for another, there are seasons to reading. The true, hard-core, binge-reading reader is not a person with a simple insatiable desire for books of any sort whatever. Is the true, hard-core, binge-eating eater a person who shoves food down his throat indiscriminately, or does said person sometimes crave chicken, sometimes pizza and chips, from time to time a vegetable? I think it must be the latter. I think a person for whom eating is a true pleasure, to relinquish some of the exaggeration, has seasons to his eating, he enjoys things severally and in variety: today an omelet, tomorrow a potato. Would one not be surprised if said person’s refrigerator were on the whole kept always empty?

Which is why an avid reader has a sizeable collection of books on hand, many of which are unread and must remain so for years; various: for the various seasons of desire, for the various ways of reading, for savoring for the first time or reading again after a sufficient pause.

______________
Note on something else that occurred to me: it ought to be considered that I am not speaking of the personal library of one who does research which must sometimes grow exponentially. When the non-reading twit comments on such a library in such obtuse insinuations it is also impertinent because he is telling someone who knows how to do what he does what to do. That is the philistine streak, I’m afraid.

Good vacation. I think I’m having withdrawal symptoms from Dr. Pepper or English muffins. I shall miss the bath tub. Resolved: never to live without a bath tub again.

What else I miss: the trees. You can’t just go out and walk in a place alone with the trees here. Ironic since there are so many jungles. But near the populations it does not obtain. One wants old, great tall trees.

And the bookstores. Man, I need to be around bookstores and libraries and the books I like in English readily available.

I miss already the winter contrasts. The warm and the cold; the cold cups in the uninsulated cupboard, the warm neck and the cold nose, the steam and static.

* * *

On the way back we paused in Atlanta. Had breakfast and was satisfied. Walked in a fragrant neighborhood. Old oaks there, ponderosa pine, magnolias with their leaves still on. Generous country. Would not want to live there of a summer, but February there is pleasing.

Need to figure out how to live in New York City is what I need to do, or close enough to head down into it regularly might do. If you have Manhattan, you do not really need mountains.

* * *

Have mostly quit shaving. Never thought I could, but when I saw that in 1976 Solzhenitsyn had grown the mustache too I decided to quit shaving altogether, at least for now. That was pretty early on, for him. I hadn’t realized he had the mustache from 1976 on. Besides, the thing I have appears to be on its way to being fashionable. You see it quite a bit here, but then in the endless reruns of the Superbowl or something like they kept showing in the USA one of those chaps had it. That’s no good.

* * *

Is there such a form as a crippled sonnet? I’ve been working on something that is alternating tetrameter and pentameter lines. The final couplet is a bit hard to judge, you know?

Maybe I’ll have to invent the form.

* * *

Did not want to work at anything at all this morning. I think it has to do with returning to this country. Not keen on remaining anymore. Not that I want bathtubs and bookstores and sausage patties for breakfast inconsolably. But that it isn’t where I fit. Not a Spanish chap in final analysis. Give me English immersion. Must be in the context and among the possibilities of it, the literature inexhaustibly at hand.