T. S. Eliot

The Weekly Wrap: October 26-November 1

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The Weekly Wrap: October 26-November 1

Why I’m Not a Horror Fan

I’ve made through the month of Spooktober! No twelve foot skeletons have snatched me up. Nor have I been bitten by any giant spiders. I’ve not been spirited away by any goblins hanging on trees. And I’ve not read any of the horror novels that were the subject of so many newsletter articles this month.

I’m just not into horror. That’s not a judgement on anyone else’s literary tastes. One could argue that horror makes a great escape from the scary realities of modern life. But not for me. I find that what I need is either perspective that helps me face these things or books of consolation for the precious things we are losing that I have little hope of changing.

One of the phrases that occurs over and over in my Bible is “be not afraid.” Horror functions by saying “be afraid; be very afraid.” So do conspiracy books. Every imaginary fear functions by making us believe something could be so. I’ve simply made a personal decision that I will not live by fear. That doesn’t mean I won’t reckon with danger.

Ultimately what is feared in horror is death–often in a grisly manner. I wonder whether it is good to fascinate oneself with macabre forms of death. And the beings that inhabit the beyond are usually not Caspar the Friendly Ghost. C.S. Lewis offers good guidance that we neither disbelieve in devils nor excessively focus on them. I try to follow that.

Finally, there are just so many other books I am interested in reading that what life I have left is too short a time. And in the Eternity that follows, horrors real and imagined will come to an end. Somehow, horror just doesn’t fit, for me.

Five Articles Worth Reading

But if I were to take a dip into horror, I would probably start with Stephen King. The only one of his books I have read is 11/22/63. Gilbert Cruz has written “The Essential Stephen King,” a guide to his work beginning with your interests

One of the first American masters of horror was Edgar Allen Poe. As it turns out, the most enigmatic mystery has to do with the cause of Poe’s own death. In “The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise,” Open Culture explores the different explanations and the evidence.

In addition to his poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote a lot of prose. Essays, printed lectures, and book reviews (lots of them). People wondered whether he really read all the books he seemed acquainted with. At very least, the reviewer of his Collected Prose, Vols. 1-4, insists that the quality of analysis confirms that he read carefully what he reviewed. “What We Can Do Is to Use Our Minds: T. S. Eliot, Collected Prose” is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of T.S. Eliot and what he gained from all that writing.

I’ve seen several reviews of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine, which contends that our modern techno-capitalism is undermining the foundations of our civilization and destroying the earth. I have the book and will be reviewing it soon. “Let ‘The West’ Die” is adapted from his book and will give you the gist of his thought.

In my early adult years, it was not uncommon to get some friends together, put on some music (usually on vinyl),” crank it up and either dance to it, or just take it in. Recently, my son brought back a vintage Tony Bennett album. Perhaps the greater gift was savoring it together. Jonathan Garrett, in “How to Make Music Popular Again,” considers what we’ve lost as music listening has become a private experience on headphones.

Quote of the Week

Novelist Evelyn Waugh was born October 28, 1903. He made this fascinating observation:

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”

Have any limitations you want to keep?

Miscellaneous Musings

I lost a day to sickness on Wednesday. It was kind of weird–just profound tiredness accompanied by unsteadiness on my feet and a fever. I nearly fell asleep in my soup during lunch! Slept all afternoon into the evening, took some acetaminophen and started feeling better, and by Thursday, felt better other than feeling somewhat drained. When I was awake, I couldn’t read–nothing registered. I could handle an episode of The Chosen, a video series. That was all. It meant delaying my reviews by a day. I was in no state to write one on Wednesday for a Thursday posting. It reminded me of what a gift health is, and the amazing, even at 71, recuperative powers of our bodies.

Ironically, on the day when I missed my regular posting time, I had one of the best days of the year with traffic on the blog. Louise Penny’s and Charlie Mackesy’s new books had just dropped and it looked like people were looking up my reviews of their previous books. There’s a lesson for me here. By the way, I have both of the new books and hope to review them in November.

I wonder if there is a silver lining to cuts to the humanities and the arts, and to libraries and public media. If they can replace lost revenue with private support without becoming “beholden” to a particular interest, it seems that they would gain a new degree of freedom in our highly politicized atmosphere. We all can make a difference in our buying decisions and charitable contributions to help make that possible.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: October 2025

Tuesday: Ian Mc Ewan, What We Can Know

Wednesday: Georges Simenon, Pietr the Latvian

Thursday: Crystal L. Downing, The Wages of Cinema

Friday: Jonathan Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case For Liberal Education

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for October 26-November 1.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: The Year of Our Lord 1943

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The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary: Drawing upon the work of five Christian intellectuals who were contemporaries, explores the common case they made for a Christian humanistic influence in education in the post-war world.

By 1943, it was becoming apparent that the Allies would eventually win the war. For the five Christian intellectuals in this book, the crisis had shifted from resistance to authoritarian regimes, living in the shadow of death, and how one persevered in intellectual work in war-time, to what ideas would shape the post-war world. The five intellectuals featured in this book, along with a cameo by Jacques Ellul in the Afterword, were known to one another but tended to operate in separate circles. They were: Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil.

The basic thread of this book was the common advocacy Alan Jacobs sees among these authors for a kind of Christian humanism that would shape education over and against the rising pragmatism and technocracy that prevailed in wartime. Jacob’s method is to follow these thinkers more or less chronologically, leading off with a particular thinker, and then turning to what others were saying, sometimes in response, but often independently.

Negatively, Maritain, Lewis and Weil particularly warned against technocracy. Maritain characterized it as demonic, and Lewis created the memorable N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. Without the moral framework of Christian humanism, you had the “flat-chested” men of The Abolition of Man. Weil called for a society that began with the notion of obligations rather than rights. Eliot and Auden, the older and younger, contributed to a Christian poetics, a vision of vocation, and a vision of Christian culture.

These were formidable thinkers yet one wonders why in the end technocracy and pragmatism prevailed. Jacobs describes a wider circle that several of these participated in called Oldham’s Moot. A more extensive study of this group would be fascinating. Most of those involved were Christian and were concerned with rebuilding the Christian underpinnings of European culture. They met regularly, debated various schemes, but eventually lost energy, especially after the death of German sociologist Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian Jew who was both odd man out and set the intellectual tone.

They illustrate a challenge that faced the five principals of this book as well–translating these ideas into the warp and woof of society–its political, educational, industrial, and civic institutions. Perhaps that is always beyond the capacity of such thinkers, except that they need to capture the attention and imagination of those working in these other realms who have some influence and the creativity to translate these ideas into policy and practice. One wonders if it was a lack of people outside their circles who shared their vision and worked entrepreneurially to foster it that consigned the vision of these thinkers to their books and publications.

Many think we are at another time of crisis, one that calls us first to prayer, and then to the communal work of thinking and refining and implementing anew. Jacobs shows us what these five were able to accomplish and educates a new generation to their work. Who will be the thinkers who engage in the retrieval and refinement of their work for our time? Who will be the actors who combine thought and action in creative ways? And will it be enough to check our slide into decadence and disorder in the year of our Lord 2022? These are the questions posed to me in this work.

Review: The Idea of a Christian Society

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The Idea of a Christian Society, T. S. Eliot. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 (First published in 1939).

Summary: Three lectures given in 1939 putting forth Eliot’s ideas for a Christian society in the light of rising pagan, totalitarian governments in the pre-World War 2 world.

Most often, T. S. Eliot is known for his poetry, whether the modernist poems like “The Wasteland” before his religious conversion, or “The Four Quartets” afterward. He also gave us “Old Possum’s Book of Cats,” the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. What is less known is that he gave these lectures articulating his ideas of what a society shaped by Christian premises might be like, and why that might be seriously considered.

The setting of the lectures that form this book is important. They were given in 1939, on the eve of World War 2. The world had already witnessed Communist revolution in Russia, and the rise of national socialism based on an Aryan vision of Germans as a super race. The concern he expresses, as Christianity became a minority opinion in Great Britain which was becoming an increasingly secular state, is that a position of neutrality could not hold. Eliot believed the possibility existed for the rise of a pagan state, nominally democratic (as was Germany) but equally totalitarian in character. He argues that of these alternatives, a Christian state, a Christian society is to be preferred to uphold a moral basis for law and justice.

Perhaps some of the most trenchant things he has to say address the economic structures of the British state, which were far from Christian, privileging a wealthy class at the expense of the flourishing of a broader society. While his proposal is short on practical details of how this would come about, he envisions both a Christian community with a broadly shared Christian vision worked out in shared social morality and a smaller Community of Christians, a group of societal leaders of character and Christian intellect. While he does not think of this in terms of a particular church in broader application but rather an inclusive Christian community, he does think that in the English context, the Church of England offers the best chance for the shared vision and social consensus he would see.

While he does not specify a particular form of government, he sees the commercialized, urbanized, and industrialized society of England as “unnatural” and calls for a kind of “conformity to nature” that anticipates more recent concerns about sustainability. He grounds this in the relationship of nature to the God of nature, severed in modern, mechanized views of the world.

I found myself alternatively fascinated by his prescience and frustrated at other points by what seemed a certain naivete’. He anticipates the structural critiques of democracies and foresees how authoritarian movements can develop in democratic states. He articulates an early form of Christian environmentalism. Yet his assumptions of consensus among Christians and his blindness to the corrupting influence power could have on high-minded Christians, are born out in what we see of the American church of the last fifty years. In Blinded By Might, Cal Thomas wrote about how political influence corrupted early pioneers of the Religious Right. I believe similar narratives might be written of the progressive wing of the church and these divisions give the lie to Eliot’s vision of a consensus of Christians.

What I think Eliot gets right is to raise the question of alternatives, and whether secularity provides a sufficiently robust framework for a just society, for limited government, and the rights of the people. When we move from an assumption of the inherent fallenness and fallibility of human nature to one of the inherent goodness, do we open the door to the attractions and hubris of authoritarian rulers?

But the question remains of how this works itself out in a pluralist society. I don’t think Hauerwas’s stance of prophetic engagement, James Davison Hunter’s faithful presence, or the Christian political activist stance of either the right or the left quite answer the question of what it means to be a Christian in society. Perhaps there is something in Eliot’s call for a Community of Christians who function not as an organization or party but as a “body of indefinite outline, composed of both clergy and laity, of the more conscious, more spiritually and intellectually developed of both.” It seems to me that there is a need for Christian leaders not beholden to political alliances who can think and pray and work and learn from each other across a variety of boundaries, both for renewal in the church and in society. Might Eliot’s vision of national Communities of Christians capture something of what this might look like?

A Poet in Your Pocket

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John_Adams_by_Gilbert_Stuart,_c._1800-1815,_oil_on_canvas_-_National_Gallery_of_Art,_Washington_-_DSC09727

John Adams, by Gilbert Stuart, 1815

John Adams once said, “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

In reading Marilyn McEntyre’s book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, one of the practices she commends is the reading and memorizing of poetry. In a later chapter, she writes about the delights of wordplay, including wordplay in poetry. In her chapter “Practice Poetry” she writes:

“What the discipline of poetry requires most of all is caring about words and caring for words. I do not believe we steward language well without some regular practice of poesis–reading poetry, learning some by heart, and writing–if not verse as such, at least sentences crafted with close attention to the cadence and music and the poetic devices that offer nonrational, evocative, intuitive, associative modes of understanding” (p. 145).

Reading this chapter made me realize the relative lack of poetry in my life. Apart from the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms, which I find myself regularly turning to, to give words to my prayers, I have little poetry in my life. You may notice I have not reviewed works of poetry here.

In college I first came in contact with the poetry of T. S. Eliot. As bleak as “The Wasteland” was, I felt it captured an essence of his time, and our own, in words that resonated deeply. I thrilled to the mysterious question in this stanza toward the end:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

 

Who is the third…I wonder still?

Another memory of a poem shared was the time our Dead Theologians reading group, between books, spent a morning parsing preacher and poet George Herbert’s “Love (III),” one of many in a collection known as “The Temple.” He wrote,

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
        Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
        From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
        If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
        Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
        I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
        “Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
        Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
        “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
        So I did sit and eat.

It left me with a deepened sense of wonder of the “Love that bade me welcome.”

There was a time when people memorized both the scriptures, and poetry, two things very akin to each other, it seems to me. There was a day when both the psalms of the Bible and the sonnets of Shakespeare were things we carried around with us, either in our pockets, or in a pocket of our minds. I wonder if it led to a different sensibility, and as McEntyre suggests, a care for words?

In researching this post, I learned that there is a Poem in Your Pocket Day each year during April, National Poetry Month. This year, it falls on April 27, 2017. I discovered that the day was initiated by the Office of the Mayor of New York City in 2002. I found this poem posted at the Mayor’s website (I’m not sure if it was from that first day):poem6-monday

It was plainly intended to be cut out and placed in our pockets. I wonder what would happen if this practice were adopted by more of our political leaders?

I also discovered that Everyman’s Library has a collection of more than sixty “Pocket Poets” books, allowing us to have a somewhat more durable and attractive way to carry poets in our pockets.

I wonder if it might not in fact be time for me to have some poetry in my life. Maybe some of you are further along this way than I. I would love to hear your suggestions of poems that have been life-giving to you, or at least taken you deeper into a care for words. If I receive some suggestions, I’ll post them on Poem in Your Pocket Day!