In this fragmented landscape, we need not just diagnoses but prescriptions. How might we rebuild the foundations of culture when our very modes of attention have been compromised? The answer may lie in recovering an ancient understanding of leisure—not as idleness, but as a form of directed contemplation.
Josef Piper, writing at the same time as Eliot, but in a defeated and fragmented Germany, declares leisure the basis of culture. By “leisure,” Pieper does not mean idleness, but the more ancient type of leisure — leisure as the Greek σχολή (scholē), or school.
Pieper’s leisure is a contemplative one—it is, in essence, a style of unconstrained research. Such leisure is not merely, or singularly, the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” nor is it simply “reading for pleasure.” The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.
Write a plugin for Visual Studio Code so that I can compose posts in markdown and publish them directly to microblog
Plan an itinerary for a two-week trip to the UK this summer
Introduce a novel with a summary of its historical context, the author’s situation, broad themes, major characters, and their relationships.
Write a Greasemonkey script that removes all sponsored/paid posts and reaction updates from my LinkedIn timeline, leaving only original posts or reposts.
Review essays for grammar, spelling, or structural issues without regard to the content
Adjust the style-sheet for Lynx so that it more closely matches my terminal theme
Write a terminal/ncurses app to display real-time data from my personal weather station
Explain NFL punt return rules
Add IR control to the Arduino/WS2811 LED light project that I use for the Christmas tree
Lay out the instructions for building a GPS-powered clock, for which I have the parts and now only need some time
Paz on pause for a bit and having another go at Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’ll alternate. Apropos, here’s another use I’ve found for Claude: I have read X and Y; what things should I know before reading Z? It’s nice to have a quick digest of context, setting, major characters/relationships, and themes.
Back home again after another formation weekend. We wrapped up canon law and I have the take-home test sitting here in a sealed envelope waiting for my attention. I’ll probably work on this weekend. Friday is something of a company holiday, so I’ll be off of work, but more or less alone at home. One more bit of travel this week and I’ll be done for awhile. At the end of the month, we’ll begin the final class of formation, which is the second half of moral theology. One weekend of sexual ethics followed by another one in April on medical ethics which (I believe) is the specialty of our instructor. Syllabus reviewed, texts inbound, etc. That our studies are nearly complete still feels sort of weird but in a really good way.
Looking ahead, we have some travel planned for spring and summer, a graduation in May, and I’ll need to make a canonical retreat in the fall. All of it good stuff, praise God. After that? We’ll return monthly for fall liturgical practice, and I think we have a how-to-do-stuff session scheduled with our tribunal folks which should be interesting. Ordination is set for the 20th of December. What happens after that is up to the Bishop.
Things continue to slowly wake up outside. Trees are beginning to visibly bud and the perennials are all sending up shoots, crowns, and other things. Even with the nights still dropping in the 30s, the spring peepers are making a bit of ruckus thought it sounds a little subdued. They’ll be going all-out again soon enough.
I’m having to make a particular effort to moderate my news intake. Scan of the headlines and round up of RSS feeds is about all I can manage these days. Some advice I got in spiritual direction recently was to be mindful of letting the theoretical eclipse the concrete. That is, there are things in front of me right now that require my attention, and other things that are sort of Out There which may or may not happen but are in either case beyond my control. Stay concrete. God bless.
Back from a bit of business travel to Las Vegas. The weather was nice, the time productive, and the trips there and back without incident. Honestly, that’s about all I ask for these days. I’m home long enough to rest a bit before heading to another formation weekend, where we will complete the second half of our canon law course. Then I’ll come back from that and prepare for a quick there-and-back trip to Charlotte. Such is the life of the jet-setting businessman these days.
On the flight out, I knocked out an assigned text (Annulment: The Wedding That Was, by Fr. Michael Smith Foster) and spent most of the flight home reading El laberinto de la soledad, a collection of essays (or one long one) by Octavio Paz which reflect on the roots and contours of Mexican identity, in particular the historical and cultural movements which shape it, or at least as he perceived them in the 1950s. I’m about halfway through it and finding it an easier go than the fiction so far. Somewhere around here I have a collection of his poetry (A draft of shadows) that I need to take another look at too. I certainly have a greater appreciation for a particular Mexican vulgarity after Los hijos de la malinche!
…pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.
The very “weirdness” of things pre-modern is part of what makes them different and thus attractive to those of post-modern sensibilities. It’s a little like the difference between going into a coffee shop on some cobbled street of old Catholic Europe, with its not-to-be-found anywhere-else-in-the-world ambience and picking up a coffee at Starbucks. Those who were young in the 60s may have been excited by the proliferation of modern chain stores, replicated in every town in the country, but today’s youth are bored by this. If, for example, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany, they like receiving a little packet of blessed chalk from their parish priest so they can write the initials of the three magi—Caspar, Melchior,and Balthasar and Christus Mansionem Benedicat (May Christ bless this house)—above their doorposts.
I liked it a lot. The narrative is non-linear which made it a challenging read in Spanish. I leaned heavily on plot summaries and occasional AI queries to make sure I wasn’t missing the thread. Will probably watch the Netflix adaptation this weekend while it’s still fresh on my mind and am curious about how they’ll handle some of the weirder stuff. I found myself reaching for the dictionary frequently, but rather than a Spanish-English dictionary, I’ve decided to switch a conventional dictionary (in Spanish). I used the online version of the DLE but have a hard-copy version on the way. It’s shipping from Germany, which I think is sort of funny, and will be here some time in March. Some of the scenes are just indelible in their weirdness, particularly the narrator’s meeting with the brother and sister about midway through. I won’t go into much more detail. If you know, you know.
I’ve started El llano en llamas (“The Burning Plain”), which is a collection of Rulfo’s short stories. I’m finding some of these even more challenging than the novella. I looked up one word in the dictionary and couldn’t find it, so I used Google and nearly all the hits were from people posting the text of the story. Back to context clues and educated guesses. The story was El hombre and the word was “engarruñándose,” in case you’re wondering.
I caught a reference in one of the short stories to Media Luna, which is an important locale in Pedro Páramo. I did some digging and, sure enough, Rulfo set his stories in a fictionalized version of his native Jalisco, along the lines of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, thought without the persistent family stuff. I’ve written here before about fictional geographies and the weird itch that the tend to scratch for me, so it was gratifying to add another page to my mental atlas of “Places That Are Real But Also Not Real.”
I can also tell you that reading stories set in a place which is always warm - where the sun, shadows, and heat play a large part in the mood - as we stare down another cold snap with snow in the forecast has been just terrific for my general mood. And, you know, the pictures of Jalisco I’m seeing online are perfectly lovely…
I’m about halfway through Pedro Páramo. It’s slower-going than Borges—I have to check words and phrases more often. The story is also very surreal, with many shifts in time and place. Last night, I noticed that Netflix released a movie adaptation last year, so I’ll watch it after I’ve finished.
There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. You cut them off from what we have laid out for the next generation, and the next. It’s in the technology of writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a cruelty – and a stupidity – for which we should not expect to be forgiven. We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books.
Thus we can never pronounce a man to be wicked without danger of falsehood. If we must needs speak, we must say that he has been guilty of such an evil deed, at such a time he misconducted himself, or he is now doing so; but we should not condemn today because of today, still less tomorrow.
But whilst you give good heed to speak no evil concerning your neighbor, beware of falling into the opposite extreme, as some do, who, seek to avoid slander, praise vice. If you come in the way of a downright slanderer, do not defend him by calling frank and honest-speaking; do not miscall dangerous freedoms by the name of simplicity or easiness, or call disobedience zeal, or arrogance self-respect; do not fly from slander into flattery and indulgence of vice, but call evil evil without hesitation, and blame that which is blamable.
He goes on to add certain conditions, particularly as it becomes necessary to speak in front of others:
When you blame the vices of another, consider whether if it is profitable or useful to those who hear to do so…Above all, you must be exceedingly exact in what you say; your tongue when you speak of your neighbor is as a knife in the hand of a surgeon who is going to cut between nerves and tendons. Your stroke must be accurate, and neither deeper nor slighter than what is needed; and whilst you blame the sin, always spare the sinner as much as possible.
From Introduction to the Devout Life. This comes directly after his meditations on rash judgements. Providentially, this has been my spiritual reading for the last couple of days as I’ve also concluded that I need to maintain a foothold on one or two social media platforms. I do this with extreme reluctance.
For one, I’m not keen on being at the receiving end of The Algorithms. If I let myself go down the Reels rathole, for example, the minor adjustments to the feed because obvious pretty quick and things get porny in a hurry. No thanks. Second, the engagement based on anger or fear works on me just like it does on anyone else and I can function just fine online without using a front-end which monetizes the worst. I have a decent daily rhythm of RSS reeds and other text-heavy sites and can stay pretty well informed as far as news and daily events, but there are plenty of local organizations and groups which don’t publish via RSS and only push out communications on Facebook, Instagram, or X. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.
On the other hand, keeping up with the constant news cycle puts me alongside everyone else who’s doing the same, and who is it that I desire to serve, anyway? It doesn’t feel like I can just opt out and go completely monastic; that’s neither my station nor vocation. On the third hand, I can’t give what I don’t have, and reasonable peace feels like it’s pretty short supply so I will, once again, try to look into the craziness without wading into the middle of it. Because, let’s be honest, there’s nothing social about it it at all. When everyone’s feed is exquisitely tuned to the viewer, there is no shared experience. A bathroom wall is more democratic; at least we’re all looking at the same graffiti.
THEY PAINT THE WALLS TO HIDE MY PEN, amirite?
Wherefore now, o Poet?
Retreating into the relative silence of text is what I want to do; but this begins to feel like a withdrawal from the world (such as it is) in a way that’s at odds with diaconal ministry. And by text, I mean it: I run a local RSS aggregator called Miniflux and follow daily 160 or so feeds of varying activity. I also skim a handful of other news sites using elinks, and all of this behind a pi-hole for the times that I do use a full browser.
Anyway, I feel obliged to keep up so I don’t think this is FOMO masquerading as concern. I would happily punt it all, smartphone included, but people expect me to know what’s going on and responding with lol idk what that is doesn’t seem particularly helpful.
Unrelated: I went down a long rathole this weekend, guided by the Extropia’s Children series of posts at Gradient Ascendant. Part of this included revisiting the cypherpunks list archives from the mid-90s. I lurked on that list for quite a while but eventually drifted away because of a lot of craziness. One thing that strikes me now is how conditioned the discussions were based on the technology of the day: email. So much time spent obsessing over email: securing, authenticating, remixing/remailing anonymously, and so on. Remember anon.penet.fi? It seems so quaint now, 30 plus years later.
My opinion is that the future will look on a lot of the rationalist/extropian stuff the same way we look at the teeming chaos of 4th century gnosticism. It all seems cut from the same cloth, and will probably come to the same general ends: either death or Christ.
I have been thinking about the desert fathers again, and spent part of last night re-reading sections of Derwas Chitty’s The Desert a City, trying to put my finger on something. There are probably too many contingencies in history to draw direct parallels, but it surely seems that Religion has saturated the air in a way that has a lot folks wondering where and how faith is practiced. Things feel…well, not exactly unhinged, but definitely not settled. Claims are being made, victories recorded, and frisson seems to be the order of the day.
A sort of dualism has taken over completely - us and them, the pure and the impure, in and out. What’s more the conversation happens and re-happens hourly, every event read in terms of signs and symbols, every pause is an opportunity to assert, fight, and claim. We have filled our spaces with noise and have forgotten silence, if indeed we ever really knew it. Our connections to one and another have created a city of the entire world. No silence, only city. Only an endless marketplace of shouting and infinite walls of graffiti.
The answer to the city is the desert. The desert is where the demons lived and where the fathers went to fight them once the cities had been made Christian. To go into the desert was to confront the devil in your own sins, in ways that were somestimes fantastic and grotesque and in other ways that were subtle. Maybe those were the hardest. One thing the fathers learned was a sort of detachment, and the silence that was necessary to listen to God.
In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’
We need this silence now more than ever. We can’t go to the desert, not physically anyway. We can, however rediscover what Martin Laird calls the “silent land,” which is the place of silence and stillness deep within us. You laugh - I can hear it, but it’s there. It’s always been there, though it may take a bit of effort to find it.
Getting to a place of silence - contemplative prayer - is difficult, at first, because we have trained ourselves to move and think and react constantly. The world we’ve built for ourselves demands it, but we can also remake small parts of it. And in those small parts, we can rediscover that our union with God - the matrix of our very existence - this union can never be lost or buried beyond reclamation. It is yours and can never be taken away any more than you can cease to suddenly exist. There, you will find the silence of the desert, and there you can build a hermitage, Carmel, or interior castle.
Antony said, ‘He who sits alone and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, seeing: but there is one thing against which he must continually fight: that is, his own heart.’
The more someone enters this silence, the more they become accustomed to it, and the fainter the noise around them becomes. And then the city is not quite as noisy, and the currents are not as strong and suddenly the swirling motion of modern life begins to break a bit against the eternal things.
Evagrius wrote: a soul which has apatheia is not simply the one which is not distrubed by changing events but the one which remains unmoved at the memory of them as well.
I can’t seem to stick with Marquez, so it’s Charterhouse. The portrayal of Waterloo was interesting, for sure. From our hero’s perspective, it’s just chaos from start to finish. He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what’s going on, who he fought, or even if it was the Battle of Waterloo. Granted, it’s early days but Julian was a more interesting main character for me than Fabrice is…so far. We’ll see.
In queue, I have:
El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Como agua por chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela
El laberitno de soledad by Octavio Paz
Also 2666 by Robert Bolaño, but that’s in English.
Classwise, we’re halfway through the Canon Law sequence. It’s…occasionally interesting but parts of it are pretty dry. The second section - which will focus more on marriage - looks like it will be more practical, in terms of Things Deacons Do Which The Tribunal.
Speaking of things deacons do, a recent episode of The Pillar podcast had a decent discussion about the diaconate in the present moment.
The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them. True devotion does still better. Not only does it not injure any sort of calling or occupation, it even embellishes and enhances it.
Moreover, just as every sort of gem, cast in honey, becomes brighter and more sparkling, each according to its colour, so each person becomes more acceptable and fitting in his own vocation when he sets his vocation in the context of devotion. Through devotion your family cares become more peaceful, mutual love between husband and wife becomes more sincere, the service we owe to the prince becomes more faithful, and our work, no matter what it is, becomes more pleasant and agreeable.
— St. Frances de Sales, “Introduction to the Devout Life”
Frances de Sales has been part of my spiritual reading for some time now. I took a run at Introduction awhile back but lagged after a little while. After reading Phillipe on contemplation and Chautard on the absolutely primacy of the interior life for apostolic work, I picked up de Sales again and am finding it much more resonant. The latter chapters (“Part Second”) are nice and short - perfect for meditative reading and teeing up contemplative prayer.
For leisure reading, I am (once again) tackling Cien años de soledad. It seems to be going faster this time, but I’m not sure if it’s because this is my Nth go-round or I’m just improving. Probably a little of both.
Looking ahead, I asked Claude for book recommendations from the Mexican literary canon; it suggested Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Laura Esquivel, and others. Very much looking forward to digging into them soon. I also have The Charterhouse of Parma sitting here on the desk.
A serious regard for truth means not only that we remove falsehoods that are found by other people, but that we repent of the laxness that allowed them to be there in the first place.
Now consider the case of using an LLM to write responses to people about Christianity. How could I possibly justify that, when I know that LLMs are bullshit generators? As Simon Willison put it, they are like a weird, over-confident intern, but one that can’t actually be morally disciplined to improve.
To put a bullshit machine on the internet, in the name of Christ, is reckless. It’s almost certain that it will make stuff up at some point. This is bad enough in itself, if we care about truth, but it will also have many negative consequences.
