An Old Acquaintance Not Forgotten

In The Enemy in the Blanket, second in Anthony Burgess's "Malayan trilogy" The Long Day Wanes, the failing solicitor Rupert Hardman regards the missionary priest Father Laforgue:

His office was displayed frankly in a long white tropical soutane that spoke of the clinic more than the altar, and the sweeping aseptic dress made sense for Hardman out of the words of Finnegans Wake: 'They do not believe in our doctrine of Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soul-surgery of P.P. Quemby.' Sooner or later everything in Finnegans Wake made sense: it was just a question of waiting.

I never made it far into Finnegans Wake, but concede Burgess's right to have a solicitor, a sometime RAF pilot, well acquainted with it.

Just now, in reading Chapter 29, "The Golden Age of  Democratic Evangelism" in Sidney E. Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, I found

Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, who tried in his way to evolve a scientific view of mental healing, did not stress these affinities, but Warren F. Evans, a former Methodist minister in that city, became an ardent Swedenborgian after being healed by Quimby. Evans published his views on healing well before Mary Baker published Science and Health, and with other disciples of Quimby he founded the New Thought Movement.

A question of waiting, indeed: for the fictional Hardman call it a dozen years between university and his encounter with the Father Laforgue; for me, thirty-five years between first reading The Long Day Wanes and encountering P.P. Quimby.

Rooms and Telescopes

Schopenhauer writes that

Thus we shall find that author profitable the occasional use of whose mind when we think affords us sensible relief, and by whom we feel ourself borne wither we could not attain alone. Goethe once said to me that, when he read a page of Kant, he felt as if he were entering a lighted room.

Certainly there are authors who produce that effect for me, though I would more likely name historians than philosophers. But Schopenhauer continues

Inferior minds are not such merely by their being distorted and so judging falsely, but above all through the indistinctness of their whole thinking. This can be compared to seeing through a bad telescope, in which all the outlines appear indistinct and as if obliterated, and the different objects run into one another.

Many translations of German philosophy are bad telescopes. I have put aside a copy of Kant's  Critique of Judgement because the effort of discovering the thought through the English is wearying when not maddening. Kant's philosophy is in itself difficult enough without the obstacle of a bad translation. I hope to find a better one soon.

(The quotations are from Book II, Chapter XV of The World as Will and Representation.)

Boards and a Book

In The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, Robert Farrar Capon writes

Let me go further, therefore, and suggest that your cutting boards be numerous: a chopping block, if you can manage it, then a bread board, a fish board, and an onion board. Except for the chopping block, these can succeed each other in a kind of hierarchy. A new board is always a bread board; a retired bread board becomes a fish board (for filleting and skinning); and a retired fish board becomes and onion board. the principle is simple: At any given period in its life, a board will come into contact with nothing stronger than that for which it is named. A retired onion board, accordingly, becomes firewood.

I remembered the passage this morning while I was chopping onions on the board we use for all foods, and have for years. No doubt the rectory kitchens of Long Island, some of them anyway, had more room than our kitchen does. And certainly Capon had a more sensitive nose than I do--nearly everyone does, and he writes about his ability to smell peanut butter on the breath at ten paces or tobacco at twice that.

The Supper of the Lamb reminds me in some ways of Laurie Colwin's columns on cooking. I would be hard put to find a recipe that I followed or technique that I learned from it, yet the tone of common sense and the explanations of why one does this or that are encouraging. One reads, and may decide to try something new.

Capon was a priest of the Episcopal Church, and taught in one of its seminaries as well:

You have arrived at the point where you will have to trust me. I am a teacher. Every time I start a class in elementary Greek, I tell the members that I can teach Greek to anyone, provided he will do exactly what I tell him and nothing else. The ones who believe me go fast; the others give themselves a hard time. I say the same thing to you about pastry.

 Elsewhere he mentions teaching dogmatic theology. His professions and convictions inform the book. In the introduction to the 1989 second edition, accounting for the book's success, he writes

Which brings me to the major reason I think this improbably combination has proved successful. There is a habit that plagues may so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm. To me that is a crashing mistake--and it is, above all, a theological mistake. Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; Gog who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over his own concoctions. And it is God's unrelenting love of the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment. So if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist.

It is tempting to go on quoting, but the book remains in print. It is not expensive, and you can see for yourself.

Capon died in 2013, and you can find an obituary from the New York Times, a brief biography in Wikipedia, and various other notices on line.

Reading Pelikan, Again

The fourth volume of Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine is Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700). It makes appropriate reading for the 500th anniversary year, by some counts, of the Reformation The book resembles its predecessors in the series in being clearly written, well organized for reading by the non-specialist, and having a scholarly apparatus that I imagine must serve the specialist well.

The book has seven chapters of three or four sections each. Each section runs to about a dozen pages. These pages are printed with the text occupying the the right two thirds of the page, the left being reserved for the references. A typical section, then, has the equivalent of eight full pages of text, meaning that the attentive reader can finish it in an evening. As for the references, the first paragraph of "The One True Faith", the last section of the first chapter, "Doctrinal Pluralism in the Late Middle Ages", has twenty-one of them, to the works of fifteen authors.

After two chapters taking the still mostly unified church through the end of the 14th Century, Pelikan gives the next four to the main streams of the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and Radical (Anabaptist, Socinian, other). The final chapter shows the three larger groups consolidating their doctrines: the Lutherans in their christological thought; Calvinists thinking through covenant theology; and Roman Catholics clarifying what their teaching on grace should be

It is a relatively drier read than Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, for it is doctrinal history, not cultural and political history. You will not read of Swiss printers announcing their adherence to the Reformation by consuming sausages in Lent, of Ulrich Zwingli falling in battle, or of the lively manner in which the early Jesuits held their missions. For that matter, you will not read how Archbishop Laud brought the Church of England some distance back from the Reformed tradition to something nearer Lutheranism and Catholicism. But you will, if attentive, come away with a sound understanding of what all the parties thought, and how they adjusted and clarified their thinking in opposition to one another.

A Bookshelf Riddle

The essay "Extra Shelves" in Clive James's Latest Readings begins

When is a bookshelf not really an extra bookshelf? When you don't have to build it.

The extra shelves he first mentions are kitchen counters, and the tops of kitchen bookshelves. As it happens, we have no room above the one bookshelf in our kitchen, and only a foot or so of books one counter. But there are stacks of books on two tables in the living room, and before the doors of a china cabinet in the dining room. I suppose that we could with more discipline thin the shelves to make room for the four or so feet stacked on tables. But how long would that last us?

We do not measure on a Jamesian scale, though. In looking through Latest Readings, I was constantly reminded that the man who reads an hour or two per day will never catch up with the man who reads six or eight hours per day. At twenty or twenty-five this reflection might have made me want to rearrange my life to manage that six or eight hours. Now I shrug: I have accumulated more compelling causes of regret.

I wonder about some of James's judgments in the book and have no way of evaluating others. I do agree with him on Ford Madox Ford and Parade's End:

Tietjens, as a character, is the merest wish fulfillment, the  self indulgence of a mendacious, chaotic, casually womanizing author who would like to project himself as a pillar of integrity and self-sacrifice, the honest master of his feelings.

 Yet he immediately follows this with

(In this respect, Tietjens is a prototype for Waugh's Guy Crouchback, the author's daydream about what he would like to have been, instead of a portrayal of who he was.)

Probably Waugh would have liked to have come from old Catholic gentry.  But in other respects it is hard to see how Crouchback could represent Waugh's wish fulfillment.

who.org?

A co-worker brought me the print-out of some email traffic: somebody had been unable to send email to a government office. The email gateway of this office said that our domain did not exist. Well, it did and does.

The rest of this post requires some knowledge of domain name service (DNS). Briefly, DNS is what turns symbolic names such as www.tufts.edu into numeric addresses, and lets us all send email, browse web sites, etc., without needing to have many four-octet physical addresses memorized. You could think of it as the equivalent of a system for turning "The White House" into "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW" or "Carnegie Hall" into "881 Seventh Avenue". The internet has a number of "root servers". These know where to forward queries for different domains: "tufts.edu", "nytimes.com", "doj.gov". In every case, there will be a server or servers responsible for providing the authoritative information. Other servers hold and supply the information, looking up the information at the authoritative source, caching it for some period, and responding to inquiries.

Evidently the government email gateway looked up the mail exchanger (MX) record for our organization, could not find it, and rejected the email. We could not imagine why. The authoritative name servers for our domain are at Cloudflare, the mail exchangers are at Google. Hundreds if not thousands of other organizations must have the same arrangement. During the period that we could not send to this domain, we sent email to dozens or hundreds of other domains.

It was not clear how we could follow up. The government web site had no technical reference listed. The server rejecting our email was in the domain pitc.gov, for which I could find no information at all. The physical address belongs, ARIN says, to the Department of Defense: but the persons I spoke to at the number ARIN gave could do nothing to help me, though they tried. The co-worker's contact in the government said that he would inquire. A technical manager I found through LinkedIn asked a few questions.

About a week after we discovered the problem, the email started to go through. The last change that we made on our side was to make to set our  preference10 MX records according to Google's recommendations. It seemed implausible that this change could have removed the difficulty, since

1.  Our preference 1 and preference 5 MX records were according to Google's recommendation, and the lower the preference number, the higher the priority.
2. The preference 10 MX records that we had used were the names of machines owned and operated by Google, and accepting email.

But after at least a week of inability to send email, we were relieved to have email go through, and closed the help desk ticket.

Were the rejecting domain one used for private email, we would not have gone to the lengths we did in trying to troubleshoot this: we would have sent an email through another domain to the recipient, suggesting steps that the recipient's system administrators might try. In this case, that response was not good enough, and we kept up our (futile) troubleshooting. Ten minutes logged in to the government server, or five minutes' conversation with a system administrator might have resolved the difficulty, but neither was possible.

Carpe Librum Is Closing

Carpe Librum, on 17th Street NW between K and L Streets, will close on December 21.  The building where it now is will be torn down or at least renovated. I believe that it was only the prospect of this that made it impossible for the landlords to find paying tenants and so induced them to give away the space to Carpe Librum. It had a good four-year run here. Before 2013, it was a "pop-up", and a week was a good run for it.

Until it closes, the prices are halved: a hardbound volume or trade paperback goes for $2.00. If you can get to 17th and L Streets, you might find something you want for ridiculously little money. And that little money will go to a good cause, Turning the Page, an organization that promotes the engagement of parents in their children's education.

During these four years, it has served as a fine place to browse at lunchtime or after work, and the $4 maximum price has encouraged me to buy quite a few books, in quite a few categories:

1. Diaries: of Evelyn Waugh and of Count Harry Kessler.
2. Dictionaries: of French, Italian, and German, the first two fat and the last skinny; and dual-language dictionaries of English and each of French, German, Latin, and Spanish.
3. Essays: on education by Diane Ravitch, on literature by Henry James.
4. Histories: Die Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit by Egon Friedell.
5. Memoirs or autobiographies: of Anthony Burgess, August Fruge, Henry James, George Kennan, Wright Morris (both Will's Boy and A Cloak of Light, the latter twice), and Wilfrid Sheed.
6. Novels: by Benjamin Constant, James Fenimore Cooper, Michael Frayn, Henry James and Dawn Powell

Those are the books that I remember. No doubt there were others.

I would not be surprised to see Carpe Librum reappear in May in one of the open spaces at George Washington University. I hope that they will come back, and hope that they will find another space to use for a long stay.

Worldwide

Noticed this weekend in Chateuabriand's memoirs:

Incompetence is a freemasonry that has its lodges in every country; and this brotherhood has dungeons of which it springs the trap doors, and in which it causes governments to disappear.

Chateaubriand had just been visiting the court of exiled Bourbons in Prague, and the grand master of this lodge may have been the Baron de Damas or the Prince de Polignac.

Daniel Halévy's The End of the Notables ends, as I recall, with the refusal in 1871 of the titular Henry V to accept the throne of France unless the tricolor were replaced with the Bourbon lily. Halévy observes that this refusal had no relation to the essentially realistic approach of the French kings; he refers to Henry V as a nostalgist, a reader of Chateaubriand. Certainly Henry V was a nostalgist, and certainly Chateaubriand knew how to sound the nostalgic note; but from all that I can tell, Chateaubriand was far more realistic than that.