Many Have Quarreled

... about religion ...

Memories

Last night I watched a movie made in the '30s--a movie that portrayed a Tennessee chapel revival/conversion scene without irony, and without making the churchgoers into criminals or the convert into a victim.  This morning I got up to hear all about Perry and Windsor.  With all due respect to my conservative friends who want to see the decisions as examples of judicial restraint, they are really reminders of how far we have come ... in not even a century ... from ideas that we used to hold about the place of religion in our lives, and the place of certain other things that were seen as so natural as to be even more basic, if possible, than religion itself.

True Virtue

... is a bell that rings out true at every blow ...

Actually

... I'm on vacation right now--more or less.  Even more actually, I'm giving a talk on Shakespeare and natural law (which some time next week you will here about hear)--which makes this not really a vacation, but something rather better.

Dost Thou Love Life?

Then do not squander time ...

Guilty

--a word for how I feel about what happened to classical music last week.  Well, alright, not really guilty.  But some sort of atonement is in order.

There Is No Riches

... above a sound body, and no joy ...

Beep Beep Beep

I don't know if this is really muse-like, but it is amusing.  And if you don't know about Beethoven's Wig, you should.  Let this be your introduction.

Frivolities

G.K. Chesterton is somewhat notorious, even among his fans, for producing in his novels a range of stock characters who spend most of their time arguing about the ideas they and Chesterton—and we—think important without doing a great deal in the way of development.  Change there may be, damnation or (what is more likely, since Chesterton, by temperament depressive, was by faith an optimist) conversion; but the critic will search in vain for the reasons for such change.  His search will be vain because he is looking for the wrong sort of reason: for love or hate, for rivalry over a woman or a job, for boredom or ambition or that fact that Michael Moon's mother spanked him as a child (a probability, I must say, since he was an Irishman).

A Man

... must keep his mouth open a long, long while ...