Damned, but affectionately
Do people still make miscellanies? I mean collections of things that strike you when you’re reading, and you write them down because they’re witty or striking or profound or humorous, or whatever. Today I came across this gem that I stumbled upon some years ago while looking for something else. It’s from an article in the Dublin Review on the Evangelical movment in nineteenth-century England and of the Rev. Robert Aitken in particular.
Thus it happened, in many instances, that a movement which seemed destined to give fresh life and vigour to the Established Church, and which has done much to infuse emotion and spirituality into the dry bones of High Church preaching, yet resulted, in the case of many of those who gave themselves up most unreservedly to the movement, in their coming into the Catholic Church; much to the grief of poor Mr. Aitken, whose lamentations and denunciations resembled the distress of a hen when she sees the ducklings, on whose hatching she had lavished a mother’s care, taking naturally to the water. He had a great deal of the old anti-Catholic prejudice still strong in him, and he honestly believed that he was doing God service in striving to prevent people from submitting to the Catholic Church. Thus he concluded his farewell letter to Mrs. Leslie:
“You will be damned, I believe, eternally. I remain, yours affectionately, Robert Aitken.
From The Dublin Review (1899) 263.
Reminds me of the salutation of an already infamous email recently sent by one member of congress to another:
See, now it is possible to damn someone to hell in an entirely civil manner. Liberals and Conservatives should take note.
unagidon, he damned her to HECK.
One of my grandmothers used to keep a scrapbook of miscellanies she clipped out of magazines, newspaper, etc. Mostly it was very sentimental stuff about chickadees and daffodils. And, oddly, a lot of Irish jokes of the type my grandfather used to tell. (Like many Irish, he felt extremely ambivalent about his heritage …). I wonder whether they used to look at it together. They seemed so distant and undemonstrative in life, it was had to imagine them cozying up on the couch.
From the letters of Evelyn Waugh to his Oxford friend, the poet John Betjeman. Waugh tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Betjeman to follow the example of JB’s wife in abandoning Anglicanism for Catholicism:
————
Dec 22, 1946
. . .You may not get another chance. It would be a pity to go to HELL because you prefer Henry Moore to Michelangelo.
THIS GOES FOR PENELOPE TOO.
Evelyn
———–
April, 1947
. . . Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy. Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.
Love to Penelope.
Evelyn
Penelope told Waugh to cut it out and he did, reluctantly.
It is not in the same vein but the New Yorker has an interesting view of a book about Atheists who want to claim the higher ground over religion. Although one cannot prove the existence of God, many theologians and philosophers have pointed out that the fact that Atheists keep talking about God is the greatest “proof” of God’s existence. To talk of a distinct incongruity.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood
A miscellany being akin to what I call a commonplace book? I did keep one, and have a few year’s worth now on computer files, but like so much else (drawing and reading actual literature, most notably) it has fallen by the wayside and I regret that.
Dr. Aitken’s letter seems like a more elegant version of innumerable letters I have received over the years from disgruntled readers, many of them hilariously vulgar and condemnatory, that end with assurances of Christ’s love, which seems to imply, unlike Dr. Aitken, that Jesus is the only one who could love me.
Perhaps. But when I converted to Catholicism I received any number of similar upset responses from family and lifelong friends who said they would not see me in paradise. (They may be right, but Lord knows for other reasons than they suppose.) The hurt they felt was a part of the affection, I know, and mitigated much of it.
Miscellanies are good things.
For those who love good writing, here’s something from Denis Dutton’s Bad Writing Contest. He invited academics to submit examples of terrible writing, and there were some lulus. The worst examples were from literature teachers, except maybe this one which seems to be from a philosopher.
“Finally, a tour de force from a 1996 book published by the State University of New York Press. It was located by M.J. Devaney, an editor at the University of Nebraska Press. The author is D.G. Leahy, writing in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself.
‘Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).’
“Dr. Devaney calls this book “absolutely, unequivocally incomprehensible.” While she has supplied further extended quotations to prove her point, this seems to be enough.”
There’s more at: http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm
“… when I converted to Catholicism I received any number of similar upset responses from family and lifelong friends who said they would not see me in paradise. (They may be right, but Lord knows for other reasons than they suppose.) The hurt they felt was a part of the affection, I know, and mitigated much of it. ”
If I had a miscellany, I would put this in it to remind myself to be more generous about everybody in our families who hated our conversion (and, worse, that of our then four-year-old).
To spite them, I’ve never told them what a bad Catholic I am. I wonder if that makes me a more faithful Catholic than I think. Or just deceitful through omission, a sin that will extend my stay in the Pension Purgtorio.
A miscellany being akin to what I call a commonplace book?
——-
That’s what I thought they were called, too.
A few years ago I bought a commonplace book from 1933 advertised on Ebay. Kept by a woman who lived in the tiny town where my grandparents lived after my grandmother inherited a house there from a brother who died.
It’s a 5 x 7 “Blue and Gold” tablet. It had been a 7th/8th grade notebook, completely filled with pencil writing. I can see a few notes on the edges, but the woman, Alice Jones, pasted clippings over the notes so thoroughly, that few are visible. She clipped stuff from the local paper and from the Kansas City papers. I was delighted to find the account of my grandmother’s brother’s funeral in it, with Grandma’s name listed with the other mourners.
Alice liked crime, such as the kidnapping of Nell Donnelly, and weddings, such as that of a nephew of Grandma’s: “The groom is a hustling young cattle buyer and the couple are popular with the young people.”
Many of the clippings are about school events, like operettas, banquets, sports. There are jokes, verses, items about funerals, including Coolidge’s, divorces, including Aimee Semple McPherson’s from the “rotund” David Hutton, and babies, including the Dionne quintuplets, about to “Go On Display at World’s Fair”.
I have kept a reading/reflection/musings notebook for years. I cound at least nine of them on my bookshelf. A couple of years ago, some entries were culled into a single volume and published by Sorin Books under the title “Things Seen and Unseen.” Please excuse this shameless act of self promotion and, by the way, the volume is now available on somethng called a Kindle.
It looks wonderful. Congratulations!
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Seen-Unseen-Catholic-Theologians/dp/1933495251/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1312903821&sr=8-2
The Kindle is ushering in a whole new way of commonplace clippings. I’ve just started using a Kindle this summer, and to get used to it, I’ve read several books of a type I never read, light novels. I’m amazed at the feature where lines appear under certain passages, and you can click to see how many other readers clipped that passage. They’re things like the handsome new boyfriend’s recipe for salsa.
Didn’t Ronald Knox say somewhere that there is a “Catholics Only” sign posted outside the gates of Heaven? Or is the story apocryphal? How did he treat his Anglican friends after he defected to Rome in 1917? — a defection that lead to his being cut out of his father’s will.
About Ann Olivier’s post of the quotation from D.G. Leahy’s Foundation: Matter the Body Itself (winner of the Bad Writing Contest some years ago): I ran across this passage when it won the prize, and actually checked the book out of the library to see if a reputable press could really print such stuff. Yes, indeed, it could and did. What on earth it means, I haven’t the foggiest. I wonder who does.
Nicholas –
I checked the Amazon reviews of the book. One of them actually says it is the most important philosophy book in the last 100 years. Sheesh. I actually tried to understand it. I think it is another example of a philosopher trying to accommodate apparently contradictory experience — by accepting the contradictions. Very Hegelian. As such, I think it is ultimately insane. Accepting contradictions is what psychotic people do, so say the psychiatrists, and I think they’re right. Unfortunately, there’s rather a large amount of such nonsense in some philosophers, Heidegger being the latest important example (even worse than Wittgenstein who says explicitly that contradictions don’t matter). Sigh.
“Do people still make miscellanies? I mean collections of things that strike you when you’re reading, and you write them down because they’re witty or striking or profound or humorous, or whatever. ”
I used to keep notebooks for things acquired from reading as well as other formats – a lecture or a conference, for example. I would include my handwritten notes along with clippings or pictures – sometimes annotated. When I was employed, I was able to avail myself of a firm laptop and that allowed me to use some rather good commercial note taking software which I was able to paste audio, video, pictures, screen captures into, etc. I think for people who have the income, it is easier than ever now to keep a miscellany electronically which for my tastes seems far superior to the hard copy ones especially with regard to indexing, searching, and distributing.
MAT –
Beware of keeping things electronically. Three weeks ago I bought a new laptop. The next day I returned to the Apple store with my old laptop to have the data transferred. I was followed home from the store where I had this done, and was mugged in my own driveway. There went years of notetaking, articles of note, addresses, etc. Moral: always make back-up disks and keep them at home.
The police tell me this has become rather common in other cities. Beware.
Ann:
Ann:
This is horrible news for anyone who writes! As they said in an older time: God blast that wretch!
As for me, I follow the advice of the late Thomas Merton:
“Contemplate with a pen.”
MAT: It is the case that if you write with a pen it is hard to find things written unless one indexes the material which I do not do but that master of the journal, Emerson, did so; once he filled up a volume but he was far more disciplined than I am.
I have to wonder what kind of rarified air you people breathe.
Miscellanies are alive and well and big business. It’s called “scrapbooking” and people have parties to put together life books, special occasion books, and etc. that hold those pressed flowers from the prom, invites from weddings, newspaper clippings and stuff.
Maybe this is just a rural Midwest thing (like euchre and party stores), but our village, which can’t support its own pharmacy or dimestore, actually has a scrapbooking store that has been a going concern for six years.
Ann: I am so sorry to hear about the mugging, and I hope that you were not injured. What are the chances you’ll ever get the new laptop back?
Yes, miscellanies and commonplace books and scrapbooks appear to be the same sort of thing. I’ve kept one only sporadically–I’m even less disciplined than Larry Conningham says he is–and now I tend to make my notes on the computer, which is where I found the one above.
Affectionately Damned: Sounds like an old Seinfeld episode where atheist Elaine finds out that her Christian boyfriend Puddy believes she’s going to Hell. She’s upset that he isn’t upset about it.
Ann, that is a nightmare — I hope you are okay. Being assaulted is bad enough. Losing words and photos and the rest is salt in the wound. I fortunately became quite attentive to back up drives and such, as I shlep my laptop around alot and it will go missing one day.
My paper writings may be the most perishable. I read now about these poor people in London whose homes have burned down, and I remember how afraid I am of a house fire. I covered so many as a cop reporter, and seeing people in front of the charred remains of their home, all their memories and keepsakes burned to cinders, was terrible.
But one must organize papers. I am weeding out my old yellowing clips from days gone by. I figure they’re online someplace. And trying to locate my great-grandfather’s Civil War letters, the ink fading so badly it was hard to read them years ago already. And he wrote crosswise over the sentences, as they did in those days.
Jean, scrapbooking sounds like keeping bit of things and maybe some newspaper clippings rather than copying in passages from Suetonius.
Sueton-who? More like “Footprints in the Sand” and lines from movie weepers like “Titanic” and “The Notebook.”
Scrapbookers are lovely, sincere people, I’m sure, but I hate getting buttonholed by them at parents functions and having to listen to them plan their next project. One woman talked about her prom-theme book that would include fabric swatches from her and her daughter’s trip to the dressmaker’s with a big star around the swatch chosen for the dress.
Lord help me.
Oy vey. That’s not my idea of a commonplace, Jean. I think it is best when populated by found objects. In that vein, one of my favorite features in The Tablet (of London, not Brooklyn) is the excerpt from the pages of 50 and 75 and 100 years ago. Other periodicals do this, but the Catholic stuff evokes the language and sensibility akin to the passage Father Komonchak cited.
David, I understand that a commonplace is a place to store knowledge and wisdom. As far as the scrapbookers are concerned, it doesn’t get any better than prom swatches and “My Heart Will Go On.”
As Gerelyn noted above, a scrapbook could become quite an interesting historical artifact many years from now. Certainly descendents of scrapbookers (assuming they are not a hard-case inveterate thrower-outer like me) will find these fascinating insights into the pasttimes of their ancestors.
Most of the scrapbooks are sentimentalized records of the Big Events in the lives of the scrapbooker’s children as well as “words of wisdom.” Sometimes they have favorite recipes and household hints. They are often given at high school graduations (usually on the mistaken assumption that said child is going to move out and follow the advice in the books, hahahaha).
A few years ago, I started a talk by referring to the booklet that contained the 100 theses in dogmatic theology on which we would be examined in our comprehensive exam for the STL. I told the audience that I still had my copy–Komonchak, I told them, in Slovak means “pack rat” (It doesn’t really.)
The pack rat gene is well rooted in our family, on both parents’ sides. My father kept scrapbooks and all sorts of memorabilia from his years as a court stenographer on the Twentieth-Century Limited, when that was the elite train that ran from New York to Chicago. Out of all that he was able to write a little memoir of his encounters with the rich and famous on the train.
My maternal grandmother doesn’t seem to have thrown anything away. We inherited not only the doctor’s bills from her husband’s treatment for heart problems back in the 1910′s, but also about thirty letters that she received fifteen years earlier from various beaux when she was considered, it seems, quite a catch. Only two of those letters are from the man she eventually married, eloping with him while her parents were in California. (We also have her mother’s letter expressing disappointment at the news.)
All of these things have come in handy as I’ve tried to write up the history of the families from which the twelve of us are descended. But to all of this will now be added all my papers, and I pity the person who will have to go through them one day. There don’t seem to be any inveterate thrower outers in our family.
I don’t know what these are called, but I have several velvet-covered books of girl high school graduates with all sorts of notes to friends, lovely drawings by one particularly talented girl in the class, protestations of eternal friendship, etc. One notices that most of their handwritings were very good to beautiful, but there were some awful ones too :-) My great-aunt Caroline’s book is a total mess, but I love it because I loved her.
Her sister, my grand-mother, was a neatness-freak nerd who had three different and beautiful handwritings, one of them very much like the old Irish uncial script. (I wonder who retained that rt so many centuries! I really should show it to some of my calligraphy friends.) When she was 80 she still had a notably beautiful hand. Her book has some of the usual sentimental stuff, but also she enters interesting information by school subject. Notable is a geometric proof going step by step from axioms to conclusion. (Wonder where I got that gene?) My favorite section is the history section on the kings of England. She lists them by causes of death, of all things. True grand-daughter of Erin, she didn’t think much of the English kings. She says one of them died of apoplexy, another “of a rage”.
By the way — do not just throw such things out! I was once told by someone who works at the Historic New Orleans Collection (a local repository of things of historical interest) that historians love not just letters, but *all* items which reveal everyday life, even things like bills from a store. (Talk about rat packers.) So offer your stuff to your local museums, historical societies, etc. They might be glad to get them.
Thanks for all your kindly commiserations. I was injured, but lucky I didn’t break a hip. Now I really appreciate that joke “A conservative is a liberal who was mugged”. (Just, jokin’, Jeff, just jokin’.)
Word to the wise to you women: beware of being followed home from a mall if you have bought something obviously valuable, like a computer. Thieves are doing that all over the South and it might spread.
Ann, I have unloaded some stuff on historical societies–my grandfather’s WWI uniform and some ancient pill packages of my great-grandfather. They were very happy to have them.
I also saved some of the nicer stuff to send as wedding/anniversary gifts to nieces and nephews. I am not a cheapskate, but they appreciate having this stuff, and I don’t want it cluttering up my house forever
I’m now inspired to keep my own commonplace book. Sadly, my handwriting is so poor, no one will be able to read it.
While we’re into family relics ==
I kno3 that there are now programs for writing family “histories”, not just doing boring genealogy. (I’m not interested in the begats.) But I always enjoyed hearing stories of the ancestors and their times. The stories might not be exactly true, but even legends have their influence.
Does anybody know of a good simple program like that?
Ann, I know of no program, but when I tried searching, I kept coming up with “50 questions” to ask if you are doing a family history.
Thanks, Jean. Those are supposed to be good too. Unfortunately, I’m now one of the oldest members of my family. The only older one older is a 95 year old uncle-in-law. I’m sure he has some stories worth recording — a liberal living in Baton Rouge from the 50′s on.
Some years ago a neighbor who was a member of some historical group did a neighborhood history by asking questions of me and a friend. My friend has lived in the area even longer than I. I found it interesting. Amazing what we don’t know about each other and how we’ve lived.
Ann, too bad parishes don’t do these types of things more.
JEan –
It would be very interesting to see some trained historians do oral histories of various sorts of parishes in different parts of the country, or even the world Then we might find out why people have left the Church in droves. But I fear that when my generation is gone you won’t get a complete picture. (My generation was the first one to have the pill available in the 50s.)
And isn’t this the sort of evidence that the bishops would have to have to really *know* what The Faithful actually believes? I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to happen.