Time and Tide Wait For No Man

I have been thinking of two poems on this first day of the year 2019. I started by thinking of an old Thomas More College classic, The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy, but for some reason my mind ran to some lines Richard Wilbur uses to describe what he calls "pilgrims of defeat". In his poem for the newly built Statione Termini, he laughingly rebukes them with almost exultant lines. Whether they are historians, archeologists, or more likely, nostalgic traditionalists, "who with short shadows | Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline | And would not take the sun standing at noon | For a good sign", he wants to dig them all up. It is a fitting thing to remember on a new day of a new year, especially if you have a tendency toward nostalgia... So when I read this beautiful poem for the opening of a new bridge, it strikes a similar note. A praise for the way things have been and are, for the tradition that makes a place a place and makes all those "lost centuries of local lives that rose | And flowered to fall short where they began" worth having happened. And just as Wilbur's poem has a call, so too does this one. Get up! it calls us. Get up and keep on doing what is worth doing! Time and tide wait for no man.

Bridge for the Living

Philip Larkin

(The words of a cantata composed by Anthony Hedges to celebrate the opening of Humber Bridge, first performed at the City Hall in Hull on 11 April 1981)

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

In her remote three-cornered hinterland

Long white-flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half-submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on
Tall church-towers parley, airily audible,
Howden and Beverly, Hedon and Patrington,

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness,
A lighted memory no miles eclipse,
A harbour for the heart against distress.

*

And now this stride in our solitude,
A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,
A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.

Wikipedia: “The Humber Bridge, near Kingston upon Hull, England, is a 2,220-metre (7,280 ft) single-span suspension bridge, which opened to traffic on 24 June 1981. It was the longest of its type in the world when opened, and is now the eighth-longest. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. When it opened in 1981 both sides of the bridge were in the non-metropolitan county of Humberside until its dissolution in 1996. The bridge itself can be seen for miles around and as far as Patrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As of 2006, the bridge carried an average of 120,000 vehicles per week.”


Special thanks to Adam Cooper for this one of several Larkin poems.

For the New Railway Station in Rome

Richard Wilbur

Those who said God is praised

By hurt pillars, who loved to see our brazen lust

Lie down in rubble, and our vaulting arches

Conduce to dust;

Those who with short shadows

Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline

And would not take the sun standing at noon

For a good sign;

Those pilgrims of defeat

Who brought their injured wills to a soldier’s home;

Dig them all up now, tell them there’s something new

To see in Rome.

See, from the travertine

Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall

Sails out into the air beside the ruined

Servian wall,

Echoing in its light

And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete

The broken profile of these stones, defeating

That defeat

And straying the strummed mind,

By such a sudden chord as raised the town of Troy

To where the least shard of the world sings out

In stubborn joy,

“What city is eternal

But that which prints itself within the groping head

Out of the blue unbroken reveries

Of the building dead?

“What is our praise or pride

But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?

What does it say over the door of Heaven

But homo fecit?”

What Happens When Gravity Takes Over Your Macbook

Strange...

Embalmed on his Honda CBR600F4:

Full story here.

Le Cafe

Dixi, custodiam. Psalm xxxix.

LORD, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; * that I may be certified how long I have to live.
    Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; * and verily every man living is altogether vanity.
    For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; * he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.
    And now, Lord, what is my hope? * truly my hope is even in thee.
    Deliver me from all mine offences; * and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: * every man therefore is but vanity.
    Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling; * hold not thy peace at my tears;
    For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, * as all my fathers were.
    O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, * before I go hence, and be no more seen.

The Avenging Narwhal Playset

"Now, once a year, in a continuous effort to keep their enemies at bay, the Narwhal leave their homes to embark on a treacherous migration to Antarctica in the hunt for baby penguins and seal pups. Many will not return... Along their journey, they will spend time in Australia, swimming up stream to the inland habitat of the koalas, where they will actually leap out of the water to spear the deadly koalas from their perches high in the Eucalyptus trees."

 

Farewell and Adieu to You...

Farewell trusty Vans. I must leave you in Rome...

If I Had To...

Not that I would ever go out and buy a sports bike/fighter; I hate them.

                   But if I were compelled...

The Buell XB9SX might just do.

Vicious...

 

And You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse...

Fahey's new advertisement for TMC in Human Events:

 At what point do I start lying about where I went to college? 

Mother: "We'd understand each other better if you'd studied some philosophy in college."  

Daughter: "You mean dead white guys like Aeropostale

Don't laugh: that girl's probably the product of some nearby Cliff's Notes College, where all it takes to graduate is half-an-hour a day with Cliff's Notes.

Contrast her sorry education with that of our friend and patron, Robert Novak, who passed away just last week.

In his memoirs, he fondly recalls the values that were instilled in him by his liberal arts education from the very first day he stepped on campus:

"It was a golden moment for a 17-year-old boy from Joliet, leading to four years of exploration in the riches of our heritage: Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, John Donne, Hawthorne, Melville, T.S. Eliot --- dead white men all. How barren would be my life without that background!"

In subsequent decades, armed with his classical Western education, Robert Novak battled --- and defeated --- many formidable, well-educated thinkers. But much of his time was spent swatting lightweight lawmakers who learned pygmy philosophy, politics, history, and foreign policy at their local equivalent of Cliff's Notes College.

Answer me this:

Would you let a Med School Lite surgeon operate on you?

Would you trust a Cliff's Notes Captain to lead your son into battle?

Are you comfortable with congressmen who can't tell Aristotle from Aeropostale deciding whether we legalize gay marriage, fight in Iraq, or let the government take over health care?

 Robert Novak never was.

Not for a second.

Which is why, when he gave large sums of his own money to colleges to carry on his legacy, he turned his back on the Cliff's Notes Colleges that clutter our nation and instead established a scholarship here at Thomas More College . . . . . . the school that provides the kind of education that, so many years ago, laid the foundation for Robert Novak's many strengths and his great wisdom.

As he told our graduates in his Commencement speech here just three short years ago, "You are entering the world as something rare today: educated men and women." 

He saw that on our modest campus of less than ten acres, we've created a gracious community of faculty and students rooted in the virtues that alone make civilization possible and give it the strength to endure.

Students walking around campus

He knew that for four years, we require each of our students to dwell in the Great Books that built Western Civilization in the first place, authors whose study nurtured him, and will once again make our nation a shining city on a hill: Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Cicero, Plutarch, St. Augustine, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jefferson, Madison, de Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Melville, T.S. Eliot, and the other great men and women whose wisdom gives courage its meaning.

He recognized that Thomas More College provides the education our nation needs today --- and countless respected conservatives agree.  

Says Patrick Buchanan: "Excellence in every respect is what Thomas More College offers young people. I do not exaggerate when I say that Thomas More College is exactly the kind of college you want your children and your children's children to attend."  

And National Review: "In all the hundreds of letters National Review received about scores of different schools, none brought with them an eloquence or a passion the equal of the ones from the friends of Thomas More."

Unfortunately, praise doesn't pay the plumber, Great Books don't win big grants, and we've been slammed by the market's collapse, as have the parents of most of our students.

To help our beleagured students continue their education, we've slashed all non-essential expenses, and last Fall some of our professors even went without pay.

Those cuts have not been enough, and now, with just two weeks left before classes start, we need to raise a final $150,000 to provide our students the aid they need this fall.

You know, our graduates don't merely know the difference between Aeropostale and Aristotle: they understand and value Aristotle, and the other great thinkers whose wisdom undergirds all that is great about our nation.

What Robert Novak said about our students a few years ago at Commencement remains true today:

They are entering the world as something rare today: educated men and women.

Consider what that means: consider the impact that just one such educated man --- Robert Novak --- had these past decades, the young boy who recalled with joy his own entry into such a school: "It was a golden moment for a 17-year-old boy from Joliet, leading to four years of exploration in the riches of our heritage: how barren would be my life without that background!"

Suppose lack of money had exiled the young Robert Novak to a Cliff Note's College.

How barren all our lives would have been!

Please help now, so that not one of our students will have to leave here and enroll somewhere in College Lite.

$50 would be very helpful; $100 even better; but we need to raise $150,000 immediately.

No contribution is too small --- or too large!

And please remember to say a prayer for Robert Novak! He was a good and faithful man, and a good friend to all of us here, and to our students.

William Fahey,
President Thomas More College of Liberal Arts
Six Manchester Street
Merrimack, New Hampshire 03054

Recent accolades for Thomas More College  

Ranked as one of the top 50 schools in the country by All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith. 

Ranked as one of the nation's top 100 schools in the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's best-selling college guide, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools. 

Featured by Time Magazine in a cover story titled "Who Needs Harvard?" as a unique alternative to large, ivy-league schools for those seeking a rigorous education in the Western tradition. 

Included in The National Review College Guide: America's Top Liberal Arts Schools and Cool Colleges, and recommended by the Young America's Foundation.

St. Kiven and the Gentle Kathleen

By Thomas Moore

E L's illustrated Version

 

 

No. 1

By the lake whose gloomy shore

Skylark never wobbles oer—

Where the cliffs hang high & steep—

Young Saint Kiven stole to sleep.

  

No. 2

Here at least, he calmly said

Woman ne'er shall find my bed

Ah! the good saint little knew,

What that wily sex can do.—

  

No. 3

Twas from Kathleens eyes he flew,

Eyes of most unholy blue,

She had loved him well & long—

Wished him her's, nor thought it wrong.

  

No. 4

Wheresoe'ever the saint could fly,

Still he heard her light foot nigh,

Illustration Lost

No. 5

East or west, where'er he turn'd,

Still her eyes before him burn'd.

  

No. 6

On the bold cliff's bosom cast,

Tranquil now he sleeps at last;

Dreams of heaven, nor thinks that e'er,

Woman's smile can haunt him there.

But nor earth nor heaven is free,

From her power, if fond she be:—

Even now, while calm he sleeps—

Kathleen o'er him leans and weeps.

Fearless she had trackd his feet

To that rocky wild retreat—

And when morning met his view

Her mild glances met it too.

  

 No. 7

Ah! yes saints have cruel hearts—

Sternly from his bed he darts

& with rude repulsive shick

Hurls her down the beetling rock.

  

 No. 8

Glendalough, thy gloomy wave

Soon was gentle Kathleens grave,

Soon the Saint, but ah too late

Felt her love, & mournd her fate;

 No. 9

When he said, 'Heaven rest her soul—

Round the Lake light music stole—

And her ghost was seen to glide,

Smiling — oer the fatal tide.

From "The Marble Faun"

Miriam's View of the Precipice:

. . . "I fancy," remarked Miriam, "that every person takes a peep into it in moments of gloom and despondancy; that is to say, in moments of deepest insight."
"Where is it then, asked Hilda. "I never peeped into it."
"Wait and it will open for you," replied her friend. "The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and and we must step very daintily, not to break through the crust at any moment. By and by we inevitably sink! It was a foolish piece of heroism in Curtius to precipitate himself there, in advance; for all Rome, you see, has been swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him. The Palace of the Caesars has gone down thither, with a hollow rumbling sound of its fragments! All the temples have tumbled into it; and thousands of statues have been thrown after! All the armies and the triumphs have marched into the great chasm, with their martial music playing, as they stepped over the brink. All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets! All piled upon poor Curtius, who thought to have saved them all! I am loath to smile at the self-conceit of that gallant horseman, but cannot well avoid it." . . .

Kenyon on Ransom's Triangle:

. . . "Not soon, I am afraid," acquiesced the sculptor." "You are right, excellent Tomaso; the world is sadder now!"
And in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild fables, he sighed in the same breath to think how the once genial earth produces, in every successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment are rarer in our refined and softened era,--on the contrary, they never before were nearly so abundant,--but that mankind are getting so far beyond the childhood of their race that they scorn to be happy any longer. A simple and joyous character can find no place for itself among the sage and somber figures that would put his unsophisticated cheerfulness to shame. the entire system of man's affairs, as at present established, is built up purposely to exclude the careless and happy soul. the very children would upbraid the wretched individual who should endeavor to take life and the world as--what we might naturally suppose them meant for--a place of opportunity and enjoyment.
It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than we were born in. It insists in everybody's adding somewhat--a mite, perhaps, but earned by incessant effort--to an accumulated pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be to burden our posterity with even heacier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill wheel for the tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right. . .

Then

Then when the ample season
Warmed us, waned and went,
We gave to the leaves no graves,
To the robin gone no name,
Nor thought at the birds' return
Of their sourceless dim descent,
And we read no loss in the leaf,
But a freshness ever the same.

The leaf first learned of years
One not forgotten fall;
Of lineage now, and loss
These latter singers tell,
Of a year when the birds now still
Were all one choiring call
Till the unreturning leaves
Imperishably fell.

Wilbur

Killer dogs sow terror in Sicily

The latest victim was attacked and mauled on Tuesday

Italian police are hunting a pack of stray dogs which killed a boy aged 10 and mauled a 24-year-old woman in the Ragusa area of southern Sicily.

They caught about 30 strays after the boy was dragged off his bicycle and killed on Sunday but about 20 dogs are believed still to be running wild.

The priest at the boy's funeral accused society of turning animals into icons.

It is an offence to kill a dog in Italy and the country lacks properly funded pounds in which to collect strays.

Reports suggest the dogs had been neglected and starved by a man entrusted with caring for them. A suspect has been arrested.

Animal rights groups estimate there are up to half a million stray dogs, mainly in the south of the country, many of them abandoned by their owners and left to run wild.

Although local town councils are supposed to round up strays and put them in public kennels, the law is often ignored as public funds are not provided for building dog pounds, the BBC's David Willey reports from Rome.

Health officials in Sicily are to meet on Wednesday to decide how to cope with the killer dog emergency.

Deep wounds

In the latest attack, the 24-year-old, a German tourist, was seriously injured while walking on a beach near Ragusa on Tuesday.

"Her face was particularly disfigured," said Christian Ilardi, a rescue official who was on the helicopter that rushed the woman to Catania.

"Her life is in serious danger due to the wounds, which are very deep."

Local police killed two animals which tried to attack them during the day.

Some 7,000 mourners people attended the funeral of Giuseppe Brafa, the boy killed on Sunday.

Architectural Accidents

Motorcyclist Dies in 2 Stroke Speed Record Attempt

Sep 5, 12:41 am EDT

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AFP) – A motorcyclist was killed after losing control of his bike at 385 kilometers (239 miles) per hour and crashing on Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats, authorities and reports said Thursday.

The American Motorcyclist Association said in a statement on its website that 49-year-old Cliff Gullett of Montana was killed in an accident during a time trial at the location, around 185 kilometers (115 miles) west of Salt Lake City.

The AMA said Gullett was competing in the 500cc class during a time trial speed racing event when his bike crashed. Reports said Gullett was aiming to set a record for the fastest two-stroke, two-cylinder motorcycle.

The Salt Lake Tribune cited police investigators as saying Gullett was travelling at 239 miles per hour before the crash.

The Bonneville Salt Flats have been used as a speed testing ground since 1896 and became famous in 1935 when British motorsport legend Malcolm Campbell broke the world land speed record at the site.

Wartime Author Mystery 'Solved'

From the BBC News

A former Luftwaffe fighter pilot may have ended the 64-year-old mystery surrounding the death of French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The author of The Little Prince disappeared during a wartime aerial reconnaissance mission in July 1944.

In 2004, wreckage from his plane was found off the coast of Marseilles, but there was no indication of how he died.

Now former German pilot Horst Rippert says he fears he may have shot down the author - though he cannot be sure.

I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'

French newspaper Le Figaro has published extracts of a book in which the former Messerschmitt pilot describes spotting a twin-tailed Lightning P-38 plane flying below him.
He went in pursuit and shot him down.

"I didn't see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to know that it was Saint-Exupery. I hoped and I still hope it wasn't him," he said.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was best known for his book The Little Prince, a fantasy about a prince from an asteroid who explores the planets.

But his other works focused largely on his experiences in aviation. Although he moved to New York after the Nazis occupied France in 1940, he returned to join the Free French air force in Corsica.

His disappearance became one of the most enduring mysteries in post-war France.
Eventually, a bracelet belonging to him washed up in a fishing net off Marseille in 1998 and debris from his plane was later found by French diver Luc Vanrell.

With the debris was the engine of a German plane shot down a few months earlier.
Mr Vanrell then set to work with Lino von Gartzen of the Bavarian Society for Underwater Archaeology.

Mr von Gartzen told the BBC News website that he made 1,200 phone calls to former Luftwaffe pilots and their families in search of the man who shot down the French writer.

Finally, he was told about a man who had a clear memory of the events of 31 July 1944, the date Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared.

"I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'."

Lino von Gartzen said it came as a big shock: "I never thought I would find who shot him down. I was quiet for some minutes as this was too much for me".

For another two years he continued to check Horst Rippert's story and is convinced by it.
"From my point of view as a professional historian it's a very, very good hypothesis and everything he told us seems to be true.

"He feels guilty and very, very sorry about it. He was very scared that the cheap press would massacre him."

In the published extracts, Mr Rippert describes being a fan of de Saint-Exupery's work. "In our youth, at school, we had all read him. We loved his books," he said.

After the war, Mr Rippert became a sports journalist. He is now 88.

Borromini's suicide

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened. I had been feeling ill since the feast of the Magdalene [22 July] and had not been out on account of my illness except on Saturday and Sunday when I went to S. Giovanni [dei Fiorentini] for the Jubilee. Last night the idea came to me of making my will and writing it out with my own hand, and I began to write it about an hour after supper and I went on writing with a pencil till about three in the morning. Messer Francesco Massari my young servant ... who sleeps in the room next door to look after me and had already gone to bed, seeing that I was still writing and had not put out the light, called to me, 'Signor Cavaliere, you ought to put out the light and go to sleep because it is late and the doctor wants you to sleep.' I replied that I should have to light the lamp again when I woke up and he answered: 'Put it out because I'll light it again when you wake up'; and so I stopped writing, put away the paper on which I had written a little and the pencil with which I was writing, put out the light and went to sleep. About five or six I woke up and called to Francesco and told him to light the lamp, and he answered: 'Signor, no'. And hearing this reply I suddenly became impatient and began to wonder how I could do myself some bodily harm, as Francesco had refused to give me a light; and I remained in that state till about half past eight, when I remembered that I had a sword in the room at the head of the bed, hanging among the consecrated candles, and, my impatience at not having a light growing greater, in despair I took the sword and pulling it out of the scabbard leant the hilt on the bed and put the point to my side and then fell on it with such force that it ran into my body, from one side to the other, and in falling on the sword I fell on to the floor with the sword run through my body and because of my wound I began to scream, and so Francesco ran in and opened the window, through which light was coming, and found me lying on the floor, and he with others whom he had called pulled the sword out of my side and put me on the bed; and this is how I came to be wounded.

(taken from Anthony Blunt, Borromini, pp. 208-209.)

Francesco Borromini would die as a result of his self inflicted wound. He was buried in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, as the brothers at San Carlino (where he had wished to be buried and had spent much of his life as the architect) would not permit a suicide to be buried in their church.

Death Masks

This is Pascal's death mask. He looks like a pretty nice guy. I think I would have enjoyed meeting him.

This is Voltaire's death mask. Pretty scary... just like the man. He would have his eyes open. What a freak. He reminds me of Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas.