Chant for Gregory's feast day

At mass today, we chanted the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus dei in honor of the feast of St. Gregory the Great. In that same spirit, here's another piece of Gregorian chant.

Ego sum panis

I hope it's not cheating, but I put a mild reverb on it because the flat acoustic of my computer corner grows wearing.

The Last Picture Show

I don't know about you, but when we sit down to watch a DVD we have to go through a set of delicate maneuvers with the wire that runs the video from the DVD/VCR player to get the picture to come in. The contact is so loose that we've had to brace the plug with CD cases to wedge it in. The jack is located right under the screen, so the whole setup gives our living room an air a certain air of trailer-park elegance.

If we just want to watch t.v. we have to go through the same procedure, since the contact for the cable on the back of the television was ripped out in one of the several incidents in which some young thing stood on the cabinet and tilted it enough to allow the t.v. to slide off. Both television and children have emerged relatively unscathed from these shenanigans (except, of course, for the cable contact). Not so the heirloom coffee table on which the t.v. landed full force.

Of late it's become more and more difficult to get the picture to resolve, and yesterday the contact finally gave up the ghost. There won't be many tears shed when the shell is put out on the curb. We didn't have a t.v. in the house when I was growing up, and Darwin's family rationed t.v. time sparingly. The girls can imitate the youthful example of their parents and find other things to occupy their time, like walking to school in the snow uphill both ways.

And then in a few months we can get one of those spiffy wall mounted t.v.s that won't take up valuable floor real estate, which we couldn't justify while the old t.v. still worked. Now if only the vacuum cleaner would finally die...

Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Behavior

Psychology Today tells me what I always knew:

Physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women's reproductive success than to men's. The generalized hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons. Once again, this is the case. Americans who are rated "very attractive" have a 56 percent chance of having a daughter for their first child, compared with 48 percent for everyone else. (emphasis mine)

Here are some of the other "politically incorrect" truths:

• Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
• Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
• The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
• Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Found via Arts and Letters Daily, which I found via Reconnaissance of the Western Tradition.

Thy Kingdom Come...

When I saw several weeks ago that the parish bible study was going to be tackling Revelation, my first thought was: Well, maybe I'll sit it out one more time and see what they're about next time around.

I'd never found Revelation particularly interesting reading. However, on further thought, it occurred to me that perhaps the fact that I found the book so uninteresting would be a good reason to go to the bible study. After all, it's part of the bible. I assumed that there must be something I was missing. Plus the study was being given by our new assistant pastor, fresh out of seminary and a really solid and enthusiastic guy. So I've been going.

It's still not my favorite book of the bible, but I think I'm beginning to "get it" more than before. Last night, covering chapters 4-7, a section struck me as in a sense reflective of some things I'd been thinking about lately.

In the second vision, the scroll with seven seals is brought forward, and it is asked who is worthy to open the scroll.

One of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed, enabling him to open the scroll with its seven seals." Then I saw standing in the midst of the throne and the four living creatures and the elders, a Lamb that seemed to have been slain.... He came and received the scroll from the right hand of the one who sat on the throne. When he took it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each of the elders held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the holy ones. They sang a new hymn: "Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth." I looked again and heard the voices of many angels who surrounded the throne and the living creatures and the elders. They were countless in number, and they cried out in a loud voice: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing." (Rev. 5: 5-12)

As the lamb opens the seals on the scroll, terrors are released upon the world to tear down the established order. In the context of last first/early second century, what is being discussed here is the chaos that doubtless must take place before the old pagan order of the ancient world can be remade according to the Christian faith. Part way through the various calamities described:

When he broke open the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered because of the witness they bore to the word of God. They cried out in a loud voice, "How long will it be, holy and true master, before you sit in judgment and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" Each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to be patient a little while longer until the number was filled of their fellow servants and brothers who were going to be killed as they had been. (Rev. 6: 9-11)

Here those who have given their lives for the faith and ascended to the heavenly kingdom are saying "faster please" -- asking when the reign of God on earth will begin. The answer is that they must wait until the suffering of the Church on Earth has reached its conclusion. Taken imminently, that might be taken to mean until a Christian society is established. Perhaps that's what the original readers saw it as. Or perhaps they saw it as the point when the temporal world was brought to its conclusion. Looking back, we can certainly see that despite the conversion of the Europe and beyond, a truly "Christian world" is necessarily illusive. And so we too continue to wait for the time when all will be rolled aside and true justice will reign throughout the world.

Perhaps this is a case of applying what you're thinking about at the moment to what you're reading, but it struck me that this speaks to a permanent tension within the Christian mind.

On the one hand, we believe that through Christ's Word we've come to understand how humans are meant to live their lives, and believing that we know that there's a natural desire to want to re-order the world to function more according to that truth.

On the other hand, Christian teaching pertains to how each one of us ought to lead our lives in order to one day be united with God in heaven; it does not describe a specific end state for earthly society. As such, attempts to perfect earthly society have distinct limitations.

The question of how much one should strive to perfect earthly society (and in what areas and by what means) versus how much one should hunker down and focus on one's own progress towards God remains a fertile ground for argument between Christians.

Wake up and smell the vocation

Last night Darwin and I were trying to have an adult conversation of the type that involves discussion of the day's news, philosophical speculation, analysis of current projects, and a bit of innuendo for spice. Unfortunately, our dazzling display of linguistic and intellectual prowess was wasted on the ravening hordes, who tumbled off couches and pushed each other and slid down the banister and interrupted every few minutes to complain that their sister had taken their hat. After the conversation was shelved yet again when a particularly percussive incident resulted in everyone being banished upstairs to take baths, Darwin shook his head and said, "Wake up and smell the vocation."

As the girls get older and more able to occupy themselves, it seems that we ought to have more free time for conversation and leisure. And in some senses that's true. But it seems that our role has expanded now, not contracted. Instead of just keeping babies from hurting themselves, we're finding that we need to keep big girls intellectually and physically engaged. We're not allowed to hoard our free time or our spare energies for our own purposes. We knew, of course, when we started that parenting was an absorbing job, but sometimes the reality of being on call all the time is daunting. It's fine when one can send the older ones off to make their own fun; not so fine is when it succeeds all too well and one finds they've been entertaining themselves with makeup or a pair of scissors.

God provides the grace necessary to handle the challenges of one's vocation. These graces, however, work on His terms, not ours. Having a truly Catholic family life doesn't mean that the children will be utter cherubs and never cause their parents a moment of worry or frustration. It means that when the water pours from the ceiling fan or someone wakes up the baby or throws a tantrum or takes a permanent marker to the carpet that one can step back and take a deep breath and refrain from beating the children or yelling (more than is necessary to make the point) just long enough to pray for that grace. Or even just long enough to let an earlier prayer for grace, said at a more peaceful moment, take effect.

In some situations, a line must be drawn. Take, for example, a purely hypothetical situation in which a five-year-old learns to pick the lock of her parents' door with a penny. It seems to me that the proper response to that sort of hypothetical invasion of privacy is swift and sharp, so that it is impressed upon the child that Mommy and Daddy are adults and need their privacy and that five-year-olds may never pick locks. Ever. Hypothethetically.

That's when you really wake up and smell the vocation.

GNXP: Ten Questions for Greg Clark

GeneExpression Classic has one of its Ten Questions interviews with Greg Clark, whose Farewell to Alms (about "economic evolution" and the creation of wealth in western society) was discussed a little bit here and on Examined Life a couple weeks ago.

In his new book A Farewell to Alms, Greg Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, contends that "[t]he New World after the Neolithic Revolution offered economic success to a different kind of agent than had been typical in hunter-gatherer society: Those with patience, who could wait to enjoy greater consumption in the future. Those who liked to work long hours. And those who could perform formal calculations in a world of many types of inputs and outputs...."

Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the door wide open. Could be parent-to-child cultural transmission, could be genes, could be both.

While much of the discussion of Clark's book has focused on his "survival of the richest" hypothesis, Clark himself appears to be equally devoted to demolishing the widely-held view that economic institutions are the key to modern economic growth. He notes that the British people had solid property rights, limited government, and sound currency for centuries before they had their Industrial Revolution. Drawing on early work by Nobel Prize-winner Douglass North, he argues that economic institutions are largely endogenous and relatively efficient, at least when we're talking about time horizons lasting a century or more. If institutional change wasn't the driving force behind modern economic growth, then what was? In Clark's view, the driving force was change within human beings themselves.

The GNXP interviews are always high quality, and this one sheds some interesting light on Clarks research and what he thinks it shows. This makes me even more curious to read the book.

What Mr. Bennet Read All Day

The monkeys have become attached to watching the 1980 BBC dramatization of Pride and Prejudice (to my mind, by far the best of the various dramatizations). It's certainly better than most things kids get into watching, though it results in some interesting questions. (In response to questions about Lydia's running off, I've explained to them that it's always very bad to run away from your family with a stranger.)

Lately, this got me into wondering what exactly it was that Mr. Bennet spends all his time reading. He always seems to be hiding out in his library, book in hand. It seems out of character for him to be reading novels, and besides, Austen was writing in the very earliest days of the English novel: there weren't many to read. So what was he reading? (Pride and Prejudice was written in the late 1790s and published in 1813, so I'm putting the time period as about 1800.)

There are a few things I've read which I know were fairly popular at the time. Samuel Johnson's The Rambler (a series of periodical essays originally written in 1750-1751, which became highly popular once collected in book form) is a very enjoyable read, and seems Mr. Bennet's style. Also fun to read (and still popular though nearly 100 years old by 1800) were the collected essays of The Spectator.

The best thing I could hit on was doing a search on Advanced Book Exchange with the publication date range of 1750 to 1813 and using the vaguest possible keywords (I used "leather" cover and "good" condition). Here are the results. (There are 16,000+, so enjoy. But a few pages worth give a good feel.)

So what looked like good Mr. Bennet reading? Well, collections of essays seem to have been quite popular, the less famous cousins of The Spectator and The Rambler.

Histories also seem quite plentiful, such as this one: THE HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: AND A VIEW OF THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY, FROM THE RISE OF THE MODERN KINGDOMS TO THE PEACE OF PARIS, IN 1763. IN A SERIES OF LETTERS FROM A NOBLEMAN TO HIS SON. That sounds like the right sort of thing for Mr. Bennet.

You also have collections of letters and published diaries such as Letters of the Late Lord Lyttleton or Letters [Lettres} of the Marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, afterwards Earl of Oxford, from 1766 to 1780. To which are added Letters of Madame du Deffand to Voltaire, from 1759 to 1775.

There are quite a few collections of sermons and general theological works (even a fair number of copies of the Imitation of Christ, mostly printed in Ireland) but I don't see Mr. Bennet as going for those as much, though I'm sure Mary read sermons of the more dull sort.

There's also quite a bit of poetry, but again, I don't see that as Mr. Bennet's cup of tea, unless it was satirical, translations of the classics, or perhaps a trifle ribald.

One also sees a certain number of biographies, some more or less colorful-sounding (of both real and imaginary people), which I could definitely picture as something Mr. Bennet would enjoy. Memoirs of Frederick and Margaret Klopstock or LIFE OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI, Called the Magnificent.

And finally, we see others among the early novels, such as the Vicar of Wakefield. I'm not sure this would have been Mr. Bennet's normal reading, though.