In this little book Pope Benedict XVI explains that an important significance of Mary, mother of Christ, is to be found in her decision to say yes to her role, thus becoming an example of someone who says "'no' to the voice of selfishness and 'yes' to that of genuine love." Benedict does not deny the mysterious nature of faith. He emphasises many times that love is central to it.
"The true stars of our lives are the people who have lived good lives", he explains.
"Must try harder" was the repeated cry of all my teachers, and I'm sure it still applies. Books such as this are good reminders that there are spiritual as well as earthly goals.
David Lodge is a clever and amusing novelist. This novel is one he adapted from a play that was presented to good reviews and large audiences in a provincial theatre in Britain but not staged again thereafter. I hadn't thought about what a problem that might be for playwrights, and it seems rather brilliant of Lodge to decide to adapt the thing so that a wider audience could have access to it.
The adaptation works - Lodge created an entertaining novel from what must have been an entertaining play. It concerns one character who has given up being a writer and another who has kept going, becoming a script writer and part of celebrity culture. There is a slightly boring love triangle to hold the whole thing together. The end isn't perfect, but unfortunately that is true of 99 per cent of novels - and plays, come to think of it. Never mind, the book was enjoyable and I liked the justification the writer who has given up writing supplies for his decision, when how he could have stood giving up writing:
"You mean, how could I give up all those long, solitary hours spent staring at a blank page, or out of the window, gnawing the end of a ballpoint, trying to create something out of nothing, to will creatures with no previous existence into being, to give them names, parents, education, clothes, possessions ... having to decide whether they have blue eyes or brown, straight hair or curly hair or no hair - God, the tedium of it. And then the grinding, ball-breaking effort of forcing it all into words - fresh-seeming words, words that don't sound as if you bought them second-hand as a job lot .. And then having to set the characters moving, behaving, interacting with each other in ways that will seem simultaneously interesting, plausible, surprising, funny and moving ... It's like playing chess in three dimensions ... It's absolute hell."
The least good of the Cork books that I have read. I wouldn't recommend it. The central female character is hard to believe in and very irritating. I didn't want to see Mr Cork brought down to the level of a mere foolish man.
I admired this more than I enjoyed it, particularly the conjuring up vividly of the character of Aunt Matty purely through dialogue. Compton Burnett was clearly shrewd and perceptive. Her view of human beings I suspect matches that expressed by one of the characters in the book, who says:
"It is a pity we have to be human ... Human failings, human vanity, human weakness! We don't hear the word applied to anything good. Even human nature is a derogatory term."
The downside of Twitter is that you cannot lead a sheltered life there. The most recent example of its intrusive nature that I've experienced is my unwilling discovery that a journalist with the surname Toobin was sacked for masturbating while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues.
I think sacking this person was a fairly reasonable response to his behaviour. People do have a duty not to shock those they work with simply because they have forgotten what is taboo and what isn't in a public setting - or in his case, because they aren't very good at working technical things. My only objection to the sacking of Toobin is that it ought to have been the resignation of Toobin, in a world that made any sense.
But I don't think the problem with what Toobin did is a moral one - that is, I don't think his behaviour had a victim; he didn't intend (or cause) any pain, (beyond a fair bit of disgust), to anyone else. What he did do was offend social mores, behaving with such tastelessness and vulgarity that, I would have assumed, he would never, ever want to show his face again.
A normal reaction to the debacle Toobin found himself at the centre of would have been to feel the most unutterable shame - so intense that one would do everything in one's power to remove oneself from public life ever afterwards. Personally, I would probably have chosen to become a hermit henceforward. That would have been the approach of a civilised human to the sorry sequence of events.
But the reason I know anything about Toobin is because he has been given back his job - or some other job - in the media and, as a result, a video to publicise his reinstatement turned up in the Tweets I see.
The video is one of the most unsavoury and uncomfortable exchanges I've ever witnessed. But also, for me at least, it is exceptionally depressing - because Toobin doesn't seem to understand that he has disgraced himself, that it will never be possible for anyone to look at him again - ever - without wondering if he is going to dash of for a quick private moment or has just returned from one. From the day that that Zoom story broke, every time Mr Toobin's hands are visible, everyone around him will find it hard not to wonder where they have been lately. And heaven forfend that handshaking ever comes back in in Toobin's social circles. Just, sorry, no.
Yet Toobin seems curiously unaware about the consequences of his unusual (I hope) behaviour. He doesn't seem to recognise that he has blown it - not morally, as I don't think what he did had any victims, but reputationally. He is ruined. He is a clown. He is a man known first and foremost for his sexual urges. From now until eternity, as a result of his gaffe, he will remain, at best, a figure of fun, a person who has acted with such exceptional vulgarity and tastelessness that he cannot ever be taken seriously again.
The fact that Toobin doesn't recognise what he has become only increases his lack of decency. "I am trying to become the kind of person that people can trust again," he declares on the video - but it isn't at all a question of trust but of manners and mores.
The only person Toobin has hurt is himself and he seems not to see this. Toobin hasn't made himself frightening but he has made himself absolutely disgusting. Just as, once you have made yourself famous, you can never go back to anonymity, so, once you have proved yourself unsavoury, creepy, skin-crawlingly uncivilised, you cannot just wipe yourself clean.
Toobin has exposed himself - no, not just like that, I mean spiritually. Reintegration is not an option. Profumo understood the problem. He knew that when you make a total arse of yourself you cannot return to public life. In the end, his acceptance of that fact did return to him a very tiny bit of respect, but even then he remained the man who'd done what he'd done.
Mr Toobin, with his desperation for yet more attention, proves himself a savage - and the fact a media organisation is complicit in attempting his rehabilitation proves that we live in truly depraved times.
And it is that that makes this story, ghastly as it is, very important. The return - or attempted return - of Toobin to the spotlight, the belief that he can be rehabilitated and regain respect after such behaviour, is a sign that we have reached a very low ebb indeed. Decadence is upon us. Civilisation is in the steepest of steep declines.
I had no idea Edward de Bono was still alive until I saw his obituary in the Times just now. Until I read it, I knew very little about him, beyond the fact that he existed.
It turns out he was half Irish and half Maltese, a doctor and the person who introduced "lateral thinking" into the language. As a home sewer - (no, I don't mean the underground kind; a person who sews is what I mean - the word 'seamstress' strikes me as suggesting too much competence to be applied to me) - perhaps the detail in the obituary that I am most in awe of is the passing reference to de Bono's colourful self-made ties. The obituarist mentions these in such an offhand way that I have to assume they do not realise that making a tie that actually looks okay is a tricky thing, requiring quite a bit of skill.
Aside from that, I thought the obituary contained two other details that made it worth a commemorative blogpost. Here they are:
1. Edward de Bono suggested 'to the Foreign Office [that they] ship large quantities of Marmite to Israel. De Bono explained that both Arabs & Israelis suffered a zinc deficiency due to consuming unleavened bread. Marmite might thus offer a partial remedy to the Middle East problem.'
In my experience, Marmite is not a great unifier. However, it might have had the effect of reorganising the opposing parties along new lines.
2. 'Every morning he rose before 6am to type his latest thoughts on an Adler typewriter. So frequently was he heard bashing the keys that his son Charles, when asked at the age of ten what his father did, replied: “He’s a typist.”'
The permanent secretary of some government department suffered a similar fate on a visit to Japan, when an interpreter introduced him as the department's constant typist.
Under the obituary, there are various comments, including little puzzles of de Bono's that people have remembered. There is the one that represents the title of this post - 'Entury' - and there is this one - 9547653821S13735784A79073F9654E74574T2957387Y6375487 - which I probably don't need to provide the solution to (that said, I only got it because the commenter did provide the solution, so don't hesitate to ask if you can't be bothered doing puzzles [I'm not a keen puzzler myself] but would like to know.)
Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words and nothing’s true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion, may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn; you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror: mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it religion, and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds— crested pigeon, rosella parrot— who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
