fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Thomas Merton’s Silence, Chopin’s Greatness, and Overparenting Americans

Also: Metaphysical words, a Catholic "Dracula," and more.
640px-The_Abbey_of_Our_Lady_of_Gethsemani

While he was at Columbia, Thomas Merton would spend his evenings with friends in loud nightclubs listening to jazz. After he converted to Catholicism, he thought about joining the Franciscans, which may have led to a life of teaching. Instead, he joined the Trappists, Why? “When he recalled his first days at the monastery, Merton described a box ‘that was to represent all the privacy I had left: one small box, in which I would keep a couple of notebooks full of poems and reflections and a volume of St John of the Cross … and the letters I would receive.’ His letting go of the world would be every bit as extreme as his letting go of the personal. There would be no newspapers, no radio. The world was to disappear from him just as much as he was to disappear from the world. He would give up his name and be known in the community as Frater Louis. But he was never destined to be an obscure monk. Although he assumed that he’d leave his writing life behind once he entered the Order, at the urging of his abbot he wrote the story of his young life, his conversion to Catholicism, and his entry into the monastery. The result, The Seven Storey Mountain, became one of the bestselling books in the US. The unforeseen, extraordinary success of his autobiography meant that his solitude became, in its way, very public.”

Chopin is one of the most popular composers in the world. But is he great? Terry Teachout argues he is in Commentary: “Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin (as his name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete works continue to be played regularly—indeed, without cease. Most of the pianists who had major international careers in the 20th century performed and recorded such staples of his catalogue as the A-flat Polonaise (‘Heroic’) and the B-flat Minor Piano Sonata (‘Funeral March’). They remain central to the repertoires of the rising generation of virtuosi, just as they have always been beloved by concertgoers. Yet Chopin’s phenomenal popularity was long viewed with suspicion by critics, in part because his compositions, without exception, all make use of the piano; in addition, most of them are solo pieces that are between two and 10 minutes in length. No other important classical composer has worked within so tightly circumscribed a compass. This fact initially caused Chopin to be depicted, especially in Central Europe and Victorian England, as a figure of lesser consequence than his contemporaries, a miniaturist who turned out salon pieces that were wrought with deftness and grace but nonetheless did not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as the large-scale masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. H.L. Mencken summed up this point of view in a 1912 epigram: ‘Chopin—two embalmers at work upon a minor poet.’”

Samuel Goldman reviews F. H. Buckley’s The Republican Workers Party: “Buckley combines vignettes from the campaign with extracts from journalism published in the two years since the election. The result is somewhat episodic and baggy, like many books intended to be timely, but it is far from a partisan defense of the President in the style of Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie’s recent Trump’s Enemies (2018). Rather than praising Trump per se, Buckley contends that disruption of the GOP in particular, and the political system in general, was a precondition of changes that might make America great again. How to define great? Although it includes some concessions to the mores of the present, Buckley’s vision of a better future resembles nothing so much as the idealized America of about 60 years ago. That is at the same time its greatest strength and its fatal weakness.”

Overparenting Americans: “When Jean Phillipson’s family returned to Fairfax, Virginia, after living in Bolivia, the main thing her 10-year-old son complained about was the bus ride home from school. ‘He wasn’t allowed to have a pencil out,’ says the mom of three, ‘because it was considered unsafe.’ Welcome back, kid, to the land of the outlandishly cautious.”

“Just over a year ago, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors – which is why, on 20 January, Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people.” In the BBC, Vasileios explains how he survived.

A Catholic Dracula: “Nicholson’s vampire is a demon who possesses the corpse of a person who is somehow complicit in the process, while other victims have differing degrees of complicity and culpability…Dominican friars tasked with destroying vampires (itself a nod to the Order of Preachers’ significant role in combating heresy and developing Eucharistic theology and the devotional practice of Adoration of the Eucharist) perform exorcisms and protect victims in convents.”

Essay of the Day:

The secularization of language, Ewa Thompson argues in Modern Age, has been bad for literature and public discourse:

“The meaning of words in a language is in constant flux. We change the language we speak with each utterance, although in an infinitesimal way. These changes become significant as the meaning of words is modified by many speakers and writers, most of whom speak and write in such a way as to secularize the public square. In ages past, the public use of words in a spiritual context was frequent enough to endow all texts with echoes and associations related to human spirituality; transcendence is the territory that evokes the most profound and lasting interest among humans. When transcendence-oriented usage became rare, words began to lose their secret glow. Their ‘value added’ content collapsed. They ceased to radiate spirituality. They not only began to mean less but also lost the power to attract the way they did in past centuries. The change has snowballed in our time as the public square has been swept clean of spiritual ‘ballast.’ I contend that the ability to carry on traces of the ineffable made many texts written before our time generate excitement of the kind contemporary texts seldom do.

“In centuries past, in addition to strictly religious writings the anagoge was routinely present and recognized in all but the most utilitarian of texts—through association, echo, or context. It permeated many social situations, as in the German Grüss Gott, still a functional greeting in parts of Germany, or Niech będzie pochwalony (May He Be Praised) in Poland. These brief greetings not only carry a heavy historical load but also proclaim the metaphysical dimension of humanity. They provide links between daily chores and the meaning of life. The invocation in literature of anagogical meanings plays a similar role, and I daresay the popularity of nineteenth-century Russian novelists in the West is largely due to the fact that they did not shy away from invoking metaphysics at a time when western European philosophy and literature were abandoning it. It’s this ability to draw on past works of literature (even without having read them) that T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote that ‘Art never improves. . . . Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. . . . [The artist must acquire] the sense of tradition.’”

* * *

“The hints that language may be used for something other than scientific discovery, everyday communication, or aesthetic pleasure are also absent from school textbooks. What matters is practical things; students are tested electronically on their skills in dealing with these practical things. As I consider school textbooks and what is being valued at universities (technological discoveries that use language as a tool in explaining and mastering the material world), I note that all this takes place on the first and second level of language, seldom on the third and never on the fourth.

“Medieval intellectuals explored, named, and renamed various aspects of language. The broad range of views they displayed while probing the possibilities of expression contrasts with the contemporary American university culture based on epistemological uniformity. In Medieval Exegesis, Lubac mentions dozens of language philosophers of the Middle Ages; one is humbled by the realization that one has read only a few of them and that there exist profound texts most educated people do not know anything about. Instead of building on them, we started anew during the Enlightenment and declared that the anagogic level of language does not exist and attempts to connect to it should disappear from public discourse. We learned to read and write texts as if there were no metaphysical dimension to language and as if the range of possible meanings never exceeded what the New York Times offers us as intellectual food.”

Read the rest.

Poem: Michael Spence, “The Oscillation of the Waves”

Photo: Kananaskis Lake

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here