Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all their panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified and opportunely taken, and medicinally used, but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ‘tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health; hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul. Here, however, it is medicinally taken.
--Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command
...The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
--George Eliot, “Middlemarch”
(Final epigraph in Terence Malick's "A Hidden Life")
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that he himself should not keep the appointment.
--G.K. Chesterton
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
—Theodore Dalrymple
From am ancient homily on Holy Saturday
Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.
For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.
See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.
I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.
Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.
"Why I Stopped Watching 'The Chosen'"
Our Sunday Visitor
Why I stopped watching 'The Chosen'
While the streaming show “The Chosen” has become a massive hit that is beloved by viewers around the world, Leonard DeLorenzo, a theology profe...
I had this experience in a more trivial way with the Lord of the Rings. Tolkein explains this in his essay "On Fairy Stories":
"The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his
imagination. Should the story say “he ate bread,” the dramatic producer or painter can only show ”a piece of bread” according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word."
I believe this applies, a fortiori, to prayer. To adapt Tolkein's adage, and with a broad sense of what the word "mind" captures of the soul, "Prayer works from Mind to mind and is thus more progenitive."
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Zapping within Amethyst connected to Alby wallet is exquisite. This is the kind of thing that makes me very excited to purple pill my people.
syn·ec·do·che n.
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
Which of these relays is filling my global feed with Chinese shopping spam?
Every time I try to load the global feed for puravida.nostr.land on Snort desktop, I get nothing
Works great on Amethyst, though
When I was younger I dreamed of adventure. I would watch Jacques Cousteau documentaries with my dad and we would stay up late into the night putting together scrapbooks of submarines, airplanes and ships – all the necessary tools of a good explorer. He would tell me that, one day, I too could travel like Cousteau, unlocking the world’s secrets.
Now, at age 28, I am trapped.
I pay for a car so that I can drive to work so that I can pay for my car.
I paid for education so that I can have a career that will pay for my education.
I paid for a house so that I have a place to live while I work to pay for a house.
I picked a good neighborhood so that I could get to know my neighbors, but all my neighbors have fences.
I own clocks so that I can see how little time I have in a day.
I own a TV so that I can watch documentaries about people who are unlocking the world’s secrets – my secrets.
--Jay R. Jones, Adbusters No. 69
Spreading the word about our hiring needs at our beautiful Catholic classical school!
(Photo from our recent confirmation retreat, in which we reenacted Montezuma, Cortez, and Saint Juan Diego)
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day of the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
Charles Dickens, “Hunted Down” (1860)
We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.
--Walker Percy
The Jack Aubrey series by Patrick O'Brian has been my primary literary accompaniment for years now, primarily thought the audiobook reading by Patrick Tull. I am constantly given words for my own interior states, in ways that lighten the load or retouch my experience with new subtlety. Jack and Stephen often seem as real or more to me than many of the people I live and work with. Sometimes that strikes me as a problem, but more often I am just grateful for the diligence of a writer who brought them to life with such humane generosity.
"He was eating his dinner not in the dining-cabin but right aft, sitting with his face to the great stern-window, so that on the far side of the glass and a biscuit-toss below the frigate’s wake streamed away and away from him, dead white in the troubled green, so white that the gulls, poising and swooping over it, looked quite dingy. This was a sight that never failed to move him: the noble curve of shining panes, wholly unlike any landborne window, and then the sea in some one of its infinity of aspects; and the whole in silence, entirely to himself. If he spent the rest of his life on half-pay in a debtors’ prison he would still have had this, he reflected, eating the last of the Cephalonian cheese; and it was something over and above any reward he could possibly have contracted for."
--Treason's Harbour
It is possible for me to feel so repulsed by the need to suffer along with people for their sins and their failures and their stupidity and all the ways they bring misery on themselves, that I withdraw from them, despise them, resent them. But fatherhood is a school of vulnerability, one that will guarantee a broken heart. Fatherhood is the choosing of a person, and the verification of that choice by not ceasing to love when that person abuses their freedom and brings misery on themselves and those they love and by whom they are loved. "Why isn't it easier?" we ask ourselves. Shouldn't sacrificing and not taking the wide and easy road have been... well, easier? A strange question, but it's the one I'm asking. How did we convince ourselves of this possibility? Was it a ruse to console ourselves in the midst of self-chosen hardship? That it would definitely pay off one day, and we would be spared the ordinary suffering, the unintelligent and undisciplined suffering of those who never sacrificed as we did? We took the discipline, we restrained ourselves, we chose the difficult good, and found that we still have to suffer with the rest in all the same ways they do.
Yet seeing this in no way causes me to regret the way of sacrifice and discipline. What is wisdom, anyway? Is it anything more than the sifting of a marginally deeper layer of the mystery, the full depths of which remain buried beyond my reach? Wisdom has no other payoff than itself. Am I any better for having grasped this? What am I to make of the resignation that would not renounce the free choices that brought me to this place of painful understanding, however helpless I remain? Is this what hope feels like?
OK. Finally landed on Snort for web client after trying a few, found a way to not hand over my private key by installing the Flamingo extension, and I'm using Amethyst for Android. Private Nostr relay over tor is only getting connected via web client, but I can't get Flamingo on Firefox so that's a no-go for now. Also added a lightning address on my node and once I connected it to my npub and got a NIP-05 identifier, I can receive zaps, sometimes even without crashing the tor proxy!
Making progress... but man, this is a lot.
Academy Delenda Est
"Student loan forgiveness... is a regressive solution that entreats the poor to pay the burdens of the rich. But student loan forgiveness on the backs of the universities that have become rich is a much more just and enticing proposition. "
The American Mind
Academy Delenda Est
Putting student loan forgiveness on the backs of rich universities is a just and enticing proposition.
