Confessions of an Unlucky Good Girl…

Vilonia, AR.

It is Tuscany yellow. The room where her 
Mind will not stay. His is Othello’s
Rage portending a thousand slaughters. 
The sun has set. Death rehearses
Violent hours. She hopes in sleep,
Perchance to dream, to wish—to be 
No more unsifted. She Knows not 
What she shall be. A battered Bitter’d 
Soul sings a dirge. Weep willow—
For Barbara as she cries. 
“Come all you forsaken and mourn you with me,
Who speaks of a false love, mine’s falser than he
—for I may die with his wound.”  
She fears she does not yet know Who. 
He spoke no words, He heard none too. 
His razor sharp, His cuts heal. 
Made serene in His tempest. Wreck’d by the Quiet.

So begins the prologue of the literary memoir of a formerly good girl. Existential angst? Uh-huh. Crisis of meaning? You bet. Boethian? Most assuredly. “I find your writing is elegant, almost poetic at times—you have a real gift of written expression, it is obvious you are well read,” responded a major publisher. The manuscript outlined the bad fortune of a family overtaken by a number of disorders, betrayal, corporate espionage, AIDS, abandonment, patricide, filicide, suicide, and an eros that dare not speak its name. Like Boethius, who suffered grave injustices through no fault of his own, she was alone in a room with an almost disinterested stranger pondering the unlucky turn of a home destroyed. The misfortune is spiritual fodder for “all things working together for the good.” What is good? Surely, a book deal is good. But, the publisher urged her to “go back through it and make your points a little more starkly, but not luridly.”

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Published in Front Porch Republic: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/09/awakening-to-virtue-confessions-of-a-well-read-unlucky-good-girl/

Domestic Arts and the Mundane

Vilonia, AR. Sarah Orne Jewett was an American short-story writer, best-known for The Country of the Pointed Firs. Like Wendell Berry, she belongs within the tradition of American literary regionalism, also known somewhat condescendingly as “local color” realism. Labelled “the best piece of regional fiction to come out of nineteenth century America,” Pointed Firs is layered with meaning. Feminists laud Jewett’s exceptional abilities as a writer, and modern scholars co-opt her anachronistically to fit postmodern narratives, but her Congregationalist Christianity, which is implicit throughout her work, remains neglected. Jewett emphasizes a concern with caring rightly not only for one another, but for God’s good earth.

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The Domestic Arts: Finding a Quiet Dignity in the Mundane

A Graced Grit Eulogy to Charles Portis’ “True Grit”

Graced Grit: A Hymn-laced Eulogy to True Grit Author Charles Portis

By Barbara A. Castle

Vilonia, AR. Charles McColl Portis’ funeral was February 25th at the Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, Arkansas just thirty some-odd miles from my home. It was an intimate and understated affair, just as Portis might prefer. A close friend reminded us of Portis’ genuine humility; the simple American-flagged draped coffin appeared small compared to the man in repose. His friend’s thoughtful, tender words came after “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” the reading of Psalm 23, II Timothy 1:8-14, a homily, an Affirmation of Faith in Christ and “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”

Mary-Mary: The Two Revolutionaries

Tags

Sexual Revolution

I commend to your reading the New York Times critique of Charlotte Gordon’s new book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley.Romantic Outlaws

Romantic Outlaws

Consider how the author of the new book, by the critics admission, gives unsatisfactory weight to the destruction of the feminist worldview – but notice how the critic goes on to “lighten” the impact of the consequences by stating that the same type of havoc occurs in traditional relationships. Does it really?

Ms. Nehring only touches on the brokenness and despair in the lives of these two women –  and the men in their lives. But Shelley’s monster speaks the unspeakable for her (and her mother). Where she could not utter the horror unleashed on her family via sexual revolution – Frankenstein did. Where Wollstonecraft is merely left standing in the blood of the French Revolution in this critique – in real life – she was drenched in it.

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”

“Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, death like solitude.”

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”

“When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Greek Thoughts: Wine Dark Sea

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Homer, Plato, The Iliad, Worldview

Philosophy, though important in bringing one to the light of truth (small t), is a discipline in which we are shown to be shivering and naked in the cold, though now we are a much improved mind, instead of the last piece of disassembled machinery. We nitpick ideas, reduce logical complexities, exchange thoughts in forums, read dense obscure narratives, and reason consequences out to a hundred years. All the while, the worldview knowing that culminates in what Francis Schaeffer referred to as true truth or Truth (with a capital T) is a ten year old reclining in an easy chair with wide-eyed amazement at the just read passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

In Angels in the Architecture, Dr. George Grant posited,

Worldview is as practical as garden arbors, public manners, whistling at work, dinner-time rituals, and angels in the architecture.

Unlike the Greek philosopher Plato, Homer doesn’t leave us shivering in the cold reality of discovering the chair in relation to chairness. Nor does he invite us to the light to realize our failure to know the difference. Instead, Homer delivers to us a stain glass window in which we can enjoy the beauty of the light. We have escaped the cave in order to learn that words have wings, that the sea is wine dark, and Odysseus’ horses are like sunbeams.

The 50 Best Books of the 20th Century

The best books of the 20th Century according to Intercollegiate is a good and informed list. Disagree or not, a person looking to be fully educated would seek to be familiar with the majority of titles and the ideas therein contained.

50 Best Books of the 20th Century

THE 50 WORST BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Alfred Kinsey

How do I count the ways in which these 50 have influenced our educational system?

It is said that there are two things that can bring about real change in a person...the company they keep, and the books they read. Our school systems are birthed from these books…the teaching philosophies were founded by the men on this list and the textbooks are replete with their ideas. The antidote is not to NOT read these books – but to juxtapose them with the 50 best books of the 20th Century, and see for yourself what all the hub-bub is about.

Note: I would add to this list Howard Zinn’s A People’s History,  which BTW is already in your local high school history books and coming in full force through the new history standards of Common Core.

Click here to see the list Intercollegiate’s 50 Worst Books

Unconfessions and Literature Part 7: Of the Dragonish Sort

Tags

confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself…he realized he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed.^[1]

Alas Eustace comes to himself. He sees the reflection and we are delighted with his providential journey to Aslan who alone removes those dragonish scales with his razor sharp claws:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt…Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much I was very tender underneath now that I had no skin on – and threw me in the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone.^[2]

Post-modernity is not only religious tradition unhinged from reason, but it is truth unhinged from the absolute, sex unhinged from the moral order, and language unhinged from meaning. How are dragons to lose their scales in such a world?

Hamlet’s conundrum is our own. The Greek undercurrents of Shakespeare’s masterpiece have meaning in the same way as does Prometheus and Narcissus in our modern epoch. The Greeks are bearing gifts if we clear the dullness of our understanding. Like the prodigal son, Hamlet is narrative poetry without a proper ending. He left Horatio to tell the story and Christ has left us.

Only through the imagination, that sees the need of bread to have nothing to do with physical hunger; that can see a boy as a dragon, or trees that talk; can we make the proper confessions. Like the unexamined life….the unconfessed life is a life less than what we would hope and an extremely dangerous undertaking.

The End.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Unconfessed Life and Literature Part 6: Of Mirrors, Pictures, and Other Such Reflective Tools

Tags

confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

The days of Bauman’s candid confessions are over. Post-modernism is not only about going through the looking-glass but about holding forth a different sort of mirror; the reflection of Greek Narcissus in which one is not obsessed with self – but of the reflection of self. This portends many dangers for civilization for as long as persons, relationships, and cultures hold up, not a mirror of their true state, but an imagined state in which there is no need for confession because they are right with the moral order – then all is well. If we fail to give them affirmation of their acts as morally right—then we risk our very lives (and life is made up of many things including our livelihoods as bakers, photographers, and such).

Oscar Wilde

Deceiving ourselves is a risky business as Oscar Wilde points out in The Portrait of Dorian Grey for the painting takes on a life of its own, as the real Dorian continues in his youthful twenties for decades. He discovered the pictures strange power after breaking off his engagement to his fiancé when she declared she could no longer be an actor. He was only attracted to what her talents could offer his narcissism. Sweet and sincere in her love for Dorian, she wants nothing more than to leave acting and make a life with him. Once he perceived that she could add nothing to his self-image, he disposed of her at once. Upon arriving home, he sees the likeness of himself in the painting to appear cruel. The portrait is reflecting truth that cannot be tolerated, so to the attic it goes.

Oscar Wilde’s character goes on to live a life of hedonism, as prescribed in a yellow book given to him by Lord Henry, a demonic influence encouraging Dorian in decadence. He hides the painting in the attic where it continues over the years to grow hideous and ugly with each act of selfishness done by Dorian. At age thirty-eight, he shows his secret to the artist who painted it, at which point he is pleaded with to repent of his sin and destroy the painting. Instead, he murders the messenger, and hides the body. Loathing what he had become, Dorian finally destroys

Unconfessed Life and Literature Part 5: Contempt for Confession

Tags

confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

I am a witness to the final death throes of the shift from modernity to post-modernity as it relates to the abominable acts of a love that dare not speak its name as Wilde phrased it. In The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, Robert Bauman describes a life out of control, “It is pointless to deny the truth. I was guilty of criminal conduct…and far worse, I must accept responsibility for betraying my wife, our marriage vows, and dishonoring my family. I compromised my religious beliefs and my personal honor.”

Bauman instinctively knew that whatever force drove him, this uncleanness of spirit over which I seemed to have no control,”  …was evil.. After being caught in the act with an underage boy, he sought help. Instead of healing, he was encouraged to override guilt and the natural conscience^[1] of what we can’t not know, what is biblically known as the “searing of the conscience.”^[2]

In his book, What We Can’t Not Know, J. Budziszewski, author of The Revenge of Conscience, calls for a return to moral sanity. We are now in a period in which things that most people know intuitively are treated with contempt. The indecent or vulgar is paraded as normal.

He states, “I believe, not just from theory but from experience, that to be confused about such fundamental things [moral truth], one must deeply want to be…” Budziszewski admits that none of us can live up to moral truth, for we are all sinners. The argument is not between sinners and innocents, but between sinners who confess the moral facts which accuse all, and sinners who deny them.

Bauman and many others, learned to “deny” that anything was wrong with their behavior, even though, at least in the beginning they could identify it as not only wrong, but unclean. Given time, the conscience is so overrun that it becomes decadent,^[3] taking pleasure in immorality. As Bauman put forth the question, “How could any normal and moral human being do what I did?”

Continue to Part 6

[1] Romans 2:15; Titus 1:15

[2] 1Ti 4:2 Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;

[3] Rom 1:28 And even as they did not like to retain God in [their] knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;