Thoughts Before Work Tonight

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)

I had a fine day today. I went to Tim Hortons, had Chocolate milk, listened to a good lecture by a genius historian (Prof. Sainsbury) and then had an actually good Latin class! craziness. Then I had a great lunch, and when I came home I decided I needed my Simon Schama fix so I lay down on the couch and watched him compare Ireland and India. He even talked about Thomas Babington Macaulay whom I had researched without remembering Schama talked about him.

Now I'm just waiting to go to work. It's been a good day, but it's weird having the fear of work and prospective essays looming over you. Then I realized: this is my life. I'm only viewing it on a daily cycle though. Like why should I relax the day before I work if I just have to work the next day? ANd I'll have to work my entire life, so really this, "just get through it" attitude is really the bane of my existence. What's the point in toughing out your entire life?

When I think about History and Schama and the job of a Historian I constantly think about how many people have gone before me. The Romans had a phrase we translated in Latin the other day. It was "to go to the majority", and it meant 'to die'. They saw the majority as those already dead. Schama said 1 million Irish died in the potato famine of the 1840s and 5 million people starved in India during one famine. 6 million people, dead.

...

What were their lives like? What did they think of God? What did they love and hope for?

I guess we'll never know. And one day I will 'go to the majority'. And people like Simon Schama (and myself) will write essays about me as one of the beleagured multitude. They'll try to place me into a group that all sought one clear goal, that fit somewhere. Whether I'm a proletarian wage slave who died working in a grocery store, or one of the many morbidly obese Canadians of the post-modern period who died from heart faillure due to excess, or one of the 'faithful departed' in a liturgy (better than unfaithful departed).

...

What kind of an account will I give for my life? I can picture it now: "Hi... I'm (name), I was of the (religion) faith, does that mean I'm in? ....Yes that's correct, mhmm glutton, lustful, etc yep. ... Ya I guess I was a Capitalist? is that bad comrade? ...oh I see...well I only shopped at Walmart because it was so cheap, though I guess that doesn't count... alright ... Ya I only did that with one girlfriend ..." and then the questions get even weirder "... well ya, I preferred Charles I to Oliver Cromwell ...but you do remember what he did to Ireland... oh you saw that on my facebook" It's so unimaginable to think of such an epic ending to such a transitory life.

So little of life is epic, so much of it just the drab everyday. So much isn't about Ideals, but rather endless compromise.

...

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted. I know that's kind of against the point, but seriously, it'd be like being invincible. It reminds me of when the Romans had trouble fighting the Germanic tribes because they believed in the immortality of the soul so strongly, they had no fear of death.

...

Plato makes a pretty good argument for the immortality of the soul.

...

well I guess I'll get ready for work.

A Parable For You

Imagine a place called "normal". In this strange village everyone would wake up earlier than they desired, to prepare to journey to places they didn't want to go. For each prospective journey they would all dress in clothes they didn't actually find comfortable or functional, but rather they would select vestments from a spectrum of rigid conformity known as "Fashion". Then imagine they paid to translocate themselves in a manner horrifically destructive to their own environment so that they could go to work in a place they didn't want to, for longer than they wanted, with no one that they liked. Their twenty-somethings would go to the 'school' where they would pay to be forced to do things they didn't want to do, and occassionally learn, if only, by accident. Their overlords would yell at them but were no longer able to hit them, and so only psychologically degraded them. The establishment that had instituted these 'schools', "the kirk", was hated and derided in them. There had been a great rebellion against it called 'the enlightenment' and so at the basis of all they were forced to go through, there was no underlying purpose anymore.

Basically, I hate the way the world functions. ... I miss the Middle Ages & Renaissance... then you could go to cities and have a lively urban environment, or you could choose to be a rural farmer. You could get one coherent education which was actually based on LEARNING rather than getting a piece of paper or doing homework (an American invention I hear). I would've lived in an italian city-state given another shot. Been like the people in the merchant of Venice, forcibly baptizing Jews, and living the high life.

Although I'm sure I'd find things to hate about that era too. ...

C.S. Lewis said that we always thing the light is on the other side of the hill or just around the corner, just not where we are, and so we live in the Shadowlands.



Rant over.

Sadness, The Chartists, and Isaiah

Since last night, things have been going terrible. I feel like my breath was. Last night I ate cheddar flavoured chips and orange juice, and a hot dog, when I woke up, my breath was so terrible I could taste it. That’s how life feels right now. So what could I do? I tried reading some Christian books but it felt hypocritical because I was in sin. I had very little sleep (I was up till 4am) and so I decided to lay down and watch Simon Schama.

Simon Schama is like a father figure to me. He’s a famous historian, very well read in the bible (he alludes to it every few minutes), and his modern liberalism makes me envious of his beliefs which I cannot share but in some ways admire, as a Conservative Pre-Modernist living in the modern liberal world.

Anyway, he was talking about Victorian England and the Chartists, they were middle-class and poor people who sought to make England a Democracy, and to go back to the rural world of medieval england. MP Fergus O’Conner was a leader of them, who after being turned down by the British Government decided that they would compile their money to buy plots of farmland and to move out of the cities into the countryside.
So they moved to Great Dodford, and farmed even though they had no experience. Their motto was “do or die” and some of them managed it. Schama says summing up this movement:

“what seemed to count for most was making a home not a revolution”



It was about taking back a proper life, not necessarily changing the world. There’s a verse in Revelation that tells us to “come out” of Babylon (the world). The Chartists remind me of that. Their dream to quit being ‘machines’ in industrial Manchester is something I understand after seeing Manchester. My Cottrill ancestors moved from Manchester in the mid 19th century as well to Hamilton (which I think is about the same if not worse). But it’s funny to think as I wait to go to work, that this same dream seems to reappear over and over again in us Anglo-Saxons. The desire to farm the land, to get away from the cities and machines. It’s a dream I see in every page of Tolkien. And come to think about it, it’s the image of the perfect New Earth in Isaiah, and it’s something that maybe one day I’ll get to partake in, if God has mercy on my soul...



“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
in what I am creating;
...
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
...
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.” – Isaiah 65: 17-25

I'd really like to have my own vineyard where I enjoy the work, and where God answers before we ask questions.

I still feel sad today, and I'm sure tonight will be terrible at work, but maybe I'm a bit more hopeful now. Maybe one day that vain hope will materialize into a New Zealand adventure, I was looking at schools and jobs and religious vocations there last week...



This is a New Zealand Vineyard, perhaps I may have one on the New Earth...

Integrity and St. Thomas More - A Man For All Seasons

After finishing an essay last night, I picked up a book my mom gave me to read. It was a play by Robert Bolt called "A Man For All Seasons" and tells the story of Sir/St. Thomas More, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor who remained a devout Catholic and refused to take the Act of Supremacy (http://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-henry-text.htm). The oath means admitting that Henry's marriage to Anne Bolynne is valid and that Henry is the Supreme Head of the Church in England. More refuses because the Pope and Christian law state the contrary ('what God has brought together let no man separate', etc).

~

The whole theme of the play was "everyone has a price" and you gradually see every character get bought off into either submitting to the king and saying the oath, while not really believing it, or betraying their friends for money. In the end the story revolves around Thomas who refuses to say anything at all about the marriage or the Church of England and uses his silence as his legal defence.

It's interesting that the play mentions how even though More is silent, his morality and firm conviction and refusal to sell out, actually bring pain to King Henry VIII and he orders him to be dragged to the tower until he officially committs treason. But More is a master of English law and gets out of it every time until finally with no evidence, they have a trial and sentence him to execution anyway. His own friends who he was helping out in the beginning of the play end up being those who witness against him and sentence him to death. It's interesting in the end because Thomas was so committed to following his conscience that everyone thought he was a fool and should just give in. At one point, his friend the Duke of Norfolk, shows up and displays a list of all his friends and everyone in England who've all signed the Act of Supremacy and Norfolk urges him to sign it, and I love how More responds:

Norfolk: I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas look at those names... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

More (moved): And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?

Cranmer: So those of us whose names are there are damned, Sir Thomas?

More: I don't know, Your Grace. I have no window to look into another man's conscience. I condemn no one

~~

I like that More doesn't even play the saintly moral high ground card here, he just says that he refuses to go against his conscience. He says later when his daughter asks why he stays in the Tower of London (jail) instead of just mindlessly signing the Act of Supremacy and coming home. She doesn't understand why he must suffer to be a hero. More responds:

~~~

"If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly, And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes" (p 84)

~~~~

In the end of his trial, once he knows it's been rigged, Sir Thomas says:

"What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road" (p 95)

The movie V for Vendetta describes Integrity as that last inch which no one can take from you. Even though the play isn't literally true, the events are and I hope that I might one day have the conscience and integrity that St. Thomas More had.

I wrote to a friend the other day "I would pray that God lets you know what's right, in my case my conscience has always been clear, I've never had to pray to know right from wrong, I've only had to pray for the grace to do what is right, and rarely have I chosen it". I think the conscience is an immense gift from God and I need to rule myself more by it than I do currently.

For the scene from the Tudors see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-DYiJfw6g&feature=related

The Fall and Decline of Andrew's Christmas by Edward Gibbon

The other day I was complaining about how bad Christmas was last year because I was in the States and I only got 1 terrible present that my brother bought for himself. It appears my ingratitude has tipped my karmic imbalance toward samsara even further and the gods seek vengence on me. I'm working every day now till Christmas (minus sunday) and all day on Christmas Eve. ... I was so enraged. Last night at work I also had a terrible set of jobs to do that sucked so much a fellow worker looked at me and said 'man you got screwed over more than anyone'.

I'm so angry with work, I think my Ukrainian and Manchester genes and lineage must be riddled with people as abject, lazy, depraved, and self-centred as I am because I hate work in any form.

Today I threw on one of my all time favourite movies "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise, and of course since it is one of my favourite movies, that means that everyone in the world universally recognizes it as one of the worst movies ever.

Everytime I watch the movie I feel so inspired, like my life has this intrinsic value and that I could be everything I always dream of. That I could be some kind of Tom Cruise look-alike who can beat up people and master Buddhist concentration and control myself so greatly that they would write "Discipline" on my tombstone. But then I realize I'm just an obese Canadian reprobate who has to go to his degrading minimum wage job in less than a half an hour.

But I love the movie because it has so much in it about how life should be structured and deals with the fact that man has had such different pursuits all around the world but the central tenants of life are the same. Virtue, honor, reason, and decapitation. These are the ways humanity has excelled.

As I awoke this morning I looked at the clock and wondered what I should do with my fleeting hours of Freedom. I felt like reading, but I was tired of theology and I was feeling deistic as God had blighted me with all this work, so I picked up "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon a fellow convert to the Church of Rome (for a while at least) and cynical deist enlightenment historian. I read these words with which he described Rome as it began to decline:

"The minds of the Romans were ... Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption"

I underlined the quote in pencil. Gibbon is trying to describe how the Romans fall behind in their virtue they desperately try to preserve their cherished ideals of justice, wisdom, temperance, and fortitude. But eventually they can't keep going, and it becomes painfully obvious that unlike the idyllic Roman Republic this Empire built for the liberty and justice of the world was actually now based on slave labour and oppression. Rome tried to work for good intention but ended up distracted and became exactly that which they sought to destroy.

No modern/post-modern/current historian would describe the Fall of Rome in Gibbon's terminology. His theory was the immorality led to it's destruction. Modern academics don't agree about immorality and if it even exists. That's why I like Gibbon, he just tells it in this beautiful way. I haven't read enough about Rome to know if it's true, but I know that most of the hardship in my life has come from my own immorality. God is just as the phrase goes, and he punishes me most justly of all. Now I'm off to work. Hoping to live to complain another day.