The Monthly Salon: October

Discussion · 27

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• − opinion#696 17 likes at the source

  Glad to hear your pilgrimage tours are doing well. You sound very cagey about what's happening in the world that I somehow stay ignorant of. Yesterday I made an important discovery: I think we've managed to resurrect Pericles' Athens and are living in it right now in the West. Proof? Open any Aristophanes play, swap the names, and you won't feel the millennia between. That depresses me no end, with or without artificial intelligence. "Democratic" Athens was always full of sexual scandals, gossip bubbling everywhere, and far too busy for the comfort of living creatures rather than machines. And the justice system... Now I'm off on my 20 minute walk to the pool on the river that's still my daily paradise. We'll see how long paradise lasts as it keeps getting colder, including the water. Life during the apocalypse can still be sweet. Courage to all, my friends. This morning I caught a glimpse of a kingfisher on the river. A beautiful jewel, a joy. The world is still beautiful, even if/when we are not...
• − opinion#697 10 likes at the source

  I really miss the preinternet days. No cell phones or 9 million channels to pick from. I deleted all the social apps and picked up Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Canticle for Leibowitz to start reading books again. It feels great to just sit and read a real book. I'm halfway thru the Bible too but taking it slow.

  • − opinion#713 3 likes at the source

    Same here! I'm just glad I got to be there for it.
  • − opinion#714 3 likes at the source

    One thing I'm grateful for about my life, at least the stretch of it I've occupied, is having had a fully formed adult brain before mass internet arrived.
• − opinion#700 5 likes at the source

  I appreciate your work and posts, Paul. The technological spider spins her web faster and faster. I take monthly breaks from it all, and each time I come back to see what's going on it feels more and more like eavesdropping on an alien species. I have hope, I won't surrender that. I'm a big fan of Iain McGilchrist and am working through TMWT a second time. Such a rich work. I'm working on establishing a retreat in the Rocky Mountains. Three days of silence, fasting, a cold plunge in the morning, and a meal the last night before leaving the next morning. During that meal a myth or story gets read but no talking until the next morning as we pack up. No tech, a night sky without pollution, tents and sleeping bags, coffee and cream for breakfast, a fire to warm up after the cold and in the evenings. The whole idea is to unplug from everything, shake the craze and the velocity of life from our souls if only a little, face one's self and find one's self in the natural world. Maybe even approach the questions: Who am I and why am I? No ideology, no agenda. The movement comes from inside the individual, drawn out by beauty, silence, the sun and stars, the cold and the fire. Curious what other followers of Paul might think of this. Thank you.

  • − opinion#715 2 likes at the source

    Love it. I want to do the same, for the rest of my life. What a massive con and lie our times have been.
• − opinion#701 4 likes at the source

  There's an old church in my town that's been turned into an office building, and the steeple was replaced with a 5G tower designed to blend into the architecture. I look at it all the time and can't help thinking it's the most blatant example of the creep of the Machine I've ever seen.

  • − opinion#716

    Our church just bought an office building near Tokyo to turn into a church. It can work both ways!
• − opinion#698 3 likes at the source

  Are you familiar with Iben Tranholm, a Danish Catholic theologian / journalist? I've always enjoyed her take on what is and has been happening in Europe. When people abandon their own culture and religion something else rushes in, and indeed has... she notices there's an obsession with physical health treated as the highest good... I find her very prescient and thoughtful. She went to Russia some years ago and reported back on the flourishing of Christianity there... while the West is becoming the opposite. I think she took a lot of flak for reporting the truth.
• − opinion#699 3 likes at the source

  Hope it's okay to post this here. If not, feel free to delete. Wendell Berry, whom Paul has written about beautifully at length, lived two counties from me in Kentucky. I've loved his essays for years but see the moment of his passing, on August 31st at age 92, as an invitation to re-discover his fiction. To that end I'm hosting two free conversations on his novel The Memory of Old Jack, each in November, 90 minutes each. Thank you. RIP, Wendell Berry
• − opinion#702 2 likes at the source

  I asked my class the other day if they could think of any technology that was truly neutral, and one student suggested a can-opener. Before I could say anything, another student chimed in: "I don't know; that seems at least to reflect a lot of assumptions about the production and availability of food." Not bad for a sixteen year old. Maybe I'm turning them all into cynics. Haha!
• − opinion#703 2 likes at the source

  For the last few months I've been enjoying an in-depth study of the Gospel of John. The coming of the Eternal Word into history is a truth whose depths we will never finish plumbing in this world, and probably not even in the next. Reflecting on this is a wonderful balm and corrective for the view of history we might otherwise get from following current events in these dark times. I found myself reflecting too on the nature of time and eternity. There's mystery there beyond our grasp, but we can still try. This poem is my attempt to picture that Day we all long for. RESURRECTION The tombs are empty / The death they contained is no more / He looks into his own / So this is where... How long did I lie here? --- Centuries or millennia, or maybe only months / Time itself is a memory, a relic of expired ages / He can read it in the sky / A pastel blue, not deep but gentle / With nothing to prove, at one with the clouds / The storm has passed, unspeakable energy now dissipated / A confident whisper of forever in the tranquil air / The fury of ages is spent --- The tombs are empty, and death is no more / There is only life / And an eternity to live it --- The Day has come / He thought it would be like a dream / But it is the inception of Reality / Casting shade on all that came before / That other age, it was not unreal / But he knows now...it was an abstraction / Full of true…

  • − opinion#717 1 likes at the source

    Thank you for posting this. Your poem is good medicine against the Machine. It brought to mind two other connections with resurrection. Wendell Berry's great poem, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmers Liberation Front," closes with the line, "Practice Resurrection." The second is Paul's closing paragraphs in Against the Machine, chap III (The Faustian Fire), on the useful work to be done as the Machine encroaches into creation: "... To prepare the seedbed ... with love for a resurrection of the small, the real, and the true. But first, we are going to have to be crucified."
• − opinion#704 1 likes at the source

  I had the privilege of visiting the Berry Center this past weekend. The trip was planned before Wendell died, but in light of his passing it really was a pilgrimage of sorts. What wonderful people there. Even got to meet Mary Berry briefly. Also visited the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani and hiked some of their beautiful grounds. Whatever is going on elsewhere, everything felt right with the world in those two spots.
• − opinion#705 1 likes at the source

  It seems we're in a time similar to the decadence of Rome, a breakdown of trust in institutions that were once seen, imperfect as they were, as one way to form the morals and minds of the young. Because of that I've seen a lot of union between nationalism and Christianity, especially here in America, though I imagine elsewhere too. People need connection, they need higher meaning. But many, if not most, of these forms seem like nationalism or even racism with a coat of Christianity to make their views more palatable or morally upright. As a Christian, how would you respond to so many youths becoming so focused on using Christianity in the political sphere? I'm a lay-elder at a small Reformed Baptist Church with a decent-sized college a mile away. So though we're a small town in Texas, because of our university's national and global ties, the nations are literally coming to us. Trying to be faithful to our flock, reminding them to focus on Christ for Himself, that God Himself is the gospel, not these other goods that have come through Christian influence in the world. It can be hard at times though, wanting to have answers to their questions while also spending the time I know I need with my wife. The world keeps spinning faster just when I want to slow down and lead a more grounded life. Anyway, really enjoy your work, and looking forward to possibly more fiction from you!…

  • − opinion#718 1 likes at the source

    I have a daughter in her twenties, sadly estranged from me, who is full of self-righteous passion and heroism. She's impatient to do good, without seeing that her energy might be aimed wrong or that how she expresses it could be harmful or work against her. It would be nice if we Westerners had a rich stock of myth showing the dangers of that kind of hubris. (I assume she never read Sophocles in high school the way I did.) I can't come up with another good example, which is my own shortcoming. Kids take in hero narratives, and rightly so, but they rarely meet the hero whose journey goes badly wrong because he skipped the careful preparation, the tending of his own spiritual growth first.
• − opinion#706 1 likes at the source

  What do you make of the NYT piece about religious scholars meeting with Anthropic?

  • − opinion#719 5 likes at the source

    I was reading it this morning and folding some of it into my US talks. Deeply sinister. Did you catch, near the end, the suggestion that AI could turn into a kind of 'post-religion' spirituality built around a giant super-intelligence? If that isn't the classic definition of the Antichrist, I don't know what is ...
• − opinion#707

  Something we could all talk about more is music. It's a brilliant expression of both the zeitgeist itself (blech) and of pushing back against it. On the pushing-back side, the growth of physical media has been encouraging. Partly it's obviously a return to a more tangible connection with what we choose to 'consume', but there's also been a rediscovery of older recordings getting new life as people dig through the mountain not yet buried in a landfill. This shows that whimsy, devotion, and awe are still at work in the world for those with eyes to see (ears to hear). One example: we've been reintroduced to the magic of Hiroshi Yoshimura. And the digging has borne fruit in odd places. We can now hear a tape of electronic music that would have been pretty groundbreaking in its day, self-published by a Catholic music director in Chicago in 1990. If you have suggestions for good Misrule Music or Music Against the Machine, please share.
• − opinion#708

  Greetings all. In the beginning was God the Word. But numbers and equations can also hold great beauty and truth. What place do they have in the Orthodox way? Last week my priest spoke about regular spiritual reading, and how the "leaping of the heart" when reading certain passages can point to the edifying value and truth of those passages for our spiritual askesis (if I understood him right). For me, though, I've had "leaping of the heart" experiences for years when meeting beautiful equations in maths and physics, and those experiences led me to major in physics in college. But afterwards I grew disillusioned when I learned how some of my physics heroes, like Richard Feynman, helped build the atomic bomb in the Manhattan project. After some years of healing I'm finally going back to it. My ultimate goal is transdisciplinary work combining clinical psychology and physics. Returning to physics feels right, but I also know that beyond the technological risks, the deep pursuit of maths and physics has led some into what you could call spiritual delusion, with some ancient philosophers (the Pythagorean cult, say) and early-modern natural philosophers (Descartes, Galileo, etc.) declaring the universe essentially numerical/mathematical or reducible to measurable qualities. Despite all that, I find real beauty and truth in many equations. I just wonder what role they should have…

  • − opinion#720 2 likes at the source

    I think the answer is right here: "O Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things...."
  • − opinion#721

    Daniel, do you read Fr Stephen Freeman's blog? He posts the same on Substack, but I mention the blog because one of the regular commenters there, Dee of Sts Herman and Olga, is a physical chemist who actually came to Christ and Orthodoxy because of how she "saw death and resurrection" in her observations. It's a long and fascinating story. She would certainly understand what you're describing. If you wander over there, you might be able to reach her by email. She's in Alaska. Dana
• − opinion#709

  Greetings all! Writing today to share a recent head-knocking realization: how ironic that this machine-spirit, which so arrogantly claims the high ground of mastery over the material world, acts in that same material world so badly. So grossly, so inelegantly, so lacking in discretion, in art, in beauty, in compassion, in awareness of and respect for unintended consequences. I want to laugh (or shake my head) at the audacity. At once it's obvious that only a complete, creative, inspired, humble, loving, right-brained human must supervise the activities of her inexperienced emissary. Imagine you had an assistant who boasted of their great education and intelligence but routinely made an utter mess of everything except the most straightforwardly academic or scripted tasks. How would you manage that assistant going forward?
• − opinion#710

  Per the opening paragraph: "Everything is turning in strange directions ..." That's undeniable. For a while now I've had this feeling of déjà vu, like I must have seen or lived this before. Then it clicked: I am rereading A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the eerie recognition that we may be living in its last chapters.
• − opinion#711

  Here in San Diego I've had the exact same heat issues, but the upside of good tomatoes late into the season.... Thank you for carrying the flame for Wendell Berry. We need to think little more than ever...
• − opinion#712

  Hello Paul. So glad to see you getting back into your stride, though I hope you're not overdoing it. I'd love to hear your views on The Gospel of The Beloved Companion, said to be written by (or scribed on behalf of) Mary Magdalene. I've always felt the absence of the feminine in the New Testament; the text feels ironed out, at least in the English translation, and something seems missing. The Gospel of the Beloved Companion feels authentic, it's beautiful and inspiring, and it brings, for me at least, a sense of completeness.

  • − opinion#722 3 likes at the source

    I am taking it slowly! After this trip I'll be at home by the fire.