Movie Review: Interstellar

Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2014.

*spoiler alert*

Christopher Nolan may be Hollywood's golden boy right now, but it still took guts to make Interstellar. First, it has for some time been out of vogue to make a science fiction film which is not also an action flick. Audiences don't want quibbling scientists, esoteric terminology, and the slow journey of experimentation. Second, the boundary between science fiction and other genres is so blurred that audiences don't know what to expect from sci-fi. Should it be sci-fi horror, like Frankenstein and Alien, highbrow like Bladerunner, lowbrow like Independence Day, or pure action like Aliens? Should it be funny like Men in Black, or gadgety like I, Robot? Should Will Smith be involved at all? If it's pure sci-fi, writers still seem pressured to veer into the extremely implausible, scientifically suspect, or downright fantastic to get one over on audiences which demand a surprise finale. Finally, the wake of landmark sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris and even lesser pictures like Jurassic Park is a tough channel for new movies to navigate. How much do you forage ahead and how much do you look back?

That leaves Interstellar in a tough situation, but the Nolans moderate a prudent course amongst their myriad options. Chief and most far reaching among these choices is Interstellar's balance between the impersonal, abstract mood of 2001 and the warm, intimate world of Solaris. Between these extremes we have Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a pilot-turned-farmer raising his family in the near future. Cooper's a former pilot but not a retired one, though, for in this future there is no more flight, spaceflight, or advanced technology of any kind. This future isn't one of whiz-bang gadgets and nightly leaps in technology, but one in which old technology is scavenged, where kids aren't encouraged to enrich themselves but to farm for survival because dust storms choke off crop after crop. This is no economic depression, but the death spiral of the human race. We see the depths of human despair when we learn that teachers and school text books teach that the moon landings were hoaxes, a lie born not out of conspiratorial theorizing but from an inability to reconcile present suffering with past greatness.

Cooper hasn't bought into the self-pity though, and for all his inability to provide more than a windswept farm for his kids, he's defiantly optimistic. He encourages his kids to learn, but most especially his daughter Murphy to read and follow scientific rigor. Nolan reinforces this theme of education by luxuriating in shots of books. Cooper's library–dusty from the storms but not from disuse–holds everything from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Stephen King, and we glimpse other familiar sights like Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein in the office of Cooper's mentor, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine.) The message is simple: mankind has to learn and struggle its way out of this. Brand is trying to do just that, and he and his underground NASA remnant have constructed a craft to seek worlds outside our solar system via a wormhole which has opened up near the locus classicus of sci-fi space phenomena: the rings of Saturn. The mission is simple too: find the habitable world, and in passing through the wormhole, gather the missing data Brand needs to send his space stations into orbit and save humanity.

By the time Cooper is ready to blast off, the stage is set. We've seen the hopelessness on earth so we can appreciate the sense of escape which flight will bring and we've seen enough dust and crops to marvel at the interstellar wonder of the spacecraft. We're in the hands of a prudent director setting up contrast and scale. Chiefly, though, Nolan sets up structure by giving us more than a teary farewell between Cooper and his daughter. Interstellar becomes a saga, a generational struggle, because it is Cooper's departure which drives Murphy's own research to save Earth: as Cooper seeks a new home, Murphy tries to get mankind a ticket there. The unfinished business between the two also sets up a simple tension whose resolution holds the rest of the movie together. It is also ultimately the endowment of the past which fuels Murphy's success.

The second act is structured with admirable simplicity: three heroic scientists have already been sent on one-way trips to three planets on the other side of the wormhole so they can report back on which is most habitable. Whoever lands on a hospitable planet will be contacted and rescued so colonization can begin. The other scientists will die alone. Cooper and his crew need to reconnoiter with those explorers who report back that their planets are habitable, but that's easier said than done since they orbit a black hole which Dr. Brand's team has named Gargantua. This celestial phenomenon brings me to two points: one of satisfaction, the other of irritation. First is my pleasure at the apt appellation Gargantua, a name which conveys not only enormity by onomatopoeia and its association with Rabelais' titular giant, but also means in Spanish throat–an appropriate name for a well devouring space and time. My irritation is with the ongoing phenomenon of astrophysicists in movies explaining basic laws to each other. Nothing takes me out of a movie with such speed as the suggestion that dialogue serves only to inform the audience and is otherwise redundant in the world of the narrative.

That minor quibble aside, this act is the broadening of the film to a scope which few achieve. It opens with a tense action scene of exciting brevity in which the team must visit one of the planets which is so close to the black hole that on it time passes more slowly. The result is that the crew, and everyone back on earth, will age years in what are mere hours to the away team. This could have seemed a gimmick, but the actors react with such honest horror when the mission goes overtime that we buy into the high stakes. We also buy into the tension because we are distracted by the exotic and hostile environment of crashing waves. The windswept Earth, for its dwindling bounty, seems to call us home from this inhospitable, waterlogged world. What really sets the alien tone, though, is a subtle and brilliant touch: the water is shallow enough that the crew can walk on it, yet there are around them giant waves. The mere incongruity of the sight, of its impossibility on Earth, tells us something is strange and amiss. This won't be our new home.

The second planet holds a different surprise, for the scientist sent here, Dr. Mann (played by the dependable and underrated Matt Damon) was the purported best of the one-way explorers, an inspiration by the bravery of his one-way journey of sacrifice. He was also privy to and supportive of Dr. Brand's secret: the planetary scouting mission was a sham and a cover. Knowing his research to be a failure, Dr. Brand's real bet on humanity rested in the frozen embryos stored on Cooper's ship. There would be no rescue for the people on Earth, but mankind would go on, in some way. Mann's descent into madness sets a new vista for the movie though, for his inability to cope with his own death and dead-end on his barren planet conflicts with his matter-of-fact indifference to the deaths of Earth's population. So afraid of his lonely frigid death, Mann faked the data he sent to Earth so that in their expectation of visiting a fertile new home for humanity, the team would visit Mann's planet and rescue him, when if he had reported the truth about its destitution, he would have died alone. Aside from the tragedy of foregoing a magnanimous, heroic sacrifice, Mann demonstrates the incongruity of being willing to put the abstract cause of humanity's future ahead of the lives on Earth, but not ahead of his own.

Beyond this heinous flaw, Mann's sabotaging of Cooper's intended return trip, leaving Cooper for dead on the planet, and reckless endangerment of the ship housing the embryos all show him to lack the mettle for the mission to save humanity. Still, Mann thinks he's the one to do it and launches into a soliloquy about the future which is promptly cut off by his deadly and disastrous docking with the ship. The damage leaves Cooper and Amelia, Dr. Brand's daughter, in a quandary: return home in failure or find a way to make their own one-way trip to the final planet. Cooper is driven to return home and fulfill that promise to his daughter, while Amelia is drawn to the final planet, where she hopes to find not only a habitable world but her love, the scientist sent to scout the planet. The contrast between their motives, love, and the impersonal, empirical quest to save humanity represented by Mann is the final and ultimately greatest contrast of the movie.

Earlier in expressing her desire to visit her love's planet first, Amelia waxes philosophical about love and it being "the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." It's not Plato, but it voices the ancient conception of love as a force which acts upon and through us. It is a conception of understanding rooted in receptivity and affirmation of life, not discursive fact-crunching rooted in empiricism. This contrast between ratio and intellectus becomes the core of the movie.

Unwilling to return home to death and in defeat, Cooper hatches a plan to use the gravitational pull of Gargantua as a slingshot to send Amelia to her lover and his hopefully fertile planet and himself through the black hole to gather Dr. Brand's data. Love and an unwillingness to endure the death of loved ones removed the impossibility of these tasks which proved impossible for Dr. Mann, whose stony-hearted ratio, willing to sacrifice the human race, was able to calculate only his own life.
What was for Dr. Mann a mere Herculean effort, and a failure, was a superhuman struggle yet possible for Cooper and Amelia.

Cooper's fate takes him farther and further, though, for besides his sacrifice he has not given up on the scientific facts which are needed to save Earth. Unlike Dr. Brand who lost faith in his theory, and therefore himself, Cooper has faith in both. His motive, though, is not the rage at the dying of the light which motivated and ultimately failed Brand, but love for the light. It is a love which demands in addition to reason, faith, sacrifice, and wonder, all of which we find in Cooper as he enters Gargantua, the black hole swallowing up the light for which he struggles.

When in the black hole the secret of the gravity waves, which will send Brand's space stations into orbit, is revealed to Cooper, we see the ratio penetrated by intellectus: fuller understanding through reason magnified by faith and wonder. Cyclical too is the manner in which Cooper is able to communicate via those waves the information to his daughter, earlier in time of course, the existence of the waves, mankind's hope and survival. As reason has gone through wonder into greater understanding, man has gone through suffering not to Herculean apotheosis, but back to man. Like 2001, the end is not in sight, only the journey. The sense of hope and wonder achieved by 2001's final image of extraterrestrial rebirth is mirrored here by man's rebirth in life on the space station in the very same orbit as Kubrick's star child. The best of Interstellar's movie posters hints at this thread to the heavens.

Man's fragile skein through time and space is joined by Cooper through libraries which bookend the film. When Cooper reaches the black hole's tesseract of space and time from which he can communicate with Earth, he finds the portal to his daughter reaches to their library. From the tesseract, then, a shape which seems in progressing out of itself to recede into itself, man reaches back into himself, the same and yet progressed and enduring. Cooper does not remain in the seemingly perfected vita contemplativa implied by the nexus of space and time in the tesseract, but returns back home, having glimpsed the wisdom which plays throughout the universe.

Sub Corde

Inset of Mercury exhorting Aeneas
Tiepolo, 1757

Of all the wisdom in antiquity which we find in science and philosophy, of all the treatises and speeches, sometimes the most potent lies in the simplest expressions. Latin in particular, with its literal and visceral expressions, seems to cut to the heart of meanings which are in English buried in metaphor and, especially today, analysis. A recent occasion brought reminiscence of Vergil.

As every man in every dispute, I sat certain of my rightness. On the throne of moral superiority–it is a crown hard won and easily ceded–I was poised to let lose a torrent of self-righteous complaint. Why should I not? One reason is that while man's desire for justice may have deep roots in indignation, a sense of righteous reaction to the undeserved has probably toppled more friendships than empires. How often, even when there is indeed injustice, is our displeasure at being aggrieved stronger than any sense of inequity? Any honest man would admit his pride is more easily wounded than his sense of social justice, else he would be up in arms all the time and not just most of it. In fact Aristotle writes that the worst evils–of injustice and folly–are the least felt since their presence causes no pain. Worse than the self-deception, though, is how quickly indignation gives way to anger, if there was any honest indignation in the first place.

Most among the emotions does anger affect man's judgment. I can feel its creeping presence like a shadow shading over my mind as my control recedes. There is to the experience of growing enraged truly a sense of encroaching otherness, as if one is being forced from one's mind. Greek and Latin have ἔκφρων, exanima, and insania, which all convey the sense of being out of oneself, out of one's wits or out of one's mind as we sometimes in English say. Yet the advancing darkness of anger is never new and alone, it seems, but bringing with it every other slight you have ever experienced, as if anger itself has a memory. Too we once had commonly in English the phrase cherish wrath, a reminder like μῆνιν and memorem iram that we cultivate our anger lest it grow soft. We don't really want to forget.

Yet when we put down our desire, the feeling is equally physical. On this one occasion of my frequent displeasure I managed silence. Something in the eyes and voice of my interlocutor brought upon me an instantaneous wave of pity and with a gulp I kept an uncharacteristic silence over my tongue. The immediate effect was a feeling deep in my chest and I thought of my Vergil: curam sub corde premebat. In Book IV of the Aeneid, Aeneas suppresses his desire to stay with Dido and pushes his care under his heart. It's so literal and clear, so Latin, and Roman. There is no obfuscating explanation or psychologizing. It is not a metaphor for overcoming one's emotion but a description of what it feels like to do it. We often think ourselves superior to the ancients, but it is no small bit of wisdom to call a thing what it is.

Of course in subsequent days I fell back to mortal stature, indulging my inclinations as do we all when uninhibited. When I do so indulge, though, there is a faint sense of defeat and a reminder of how heroic it felt to swallow my pride, however miniature was my success. We are not encouraged today to look at the ancient heroes as role models. The literature in which they reside is to be admired and their world studied and remembered, of course. Praised even. Too their deeds should, scholars admit, provoke discussions and debate, but I do not recall anyone ever suggesting their lessons should inspire action. Maybe we are reluctant to apply the lessons of their grand stories to our small lives, or perhaps heroes wait to be invoked and emulated until dark times.

Vergil's contemporary in his troubled time, Titus Livy said the purpose of his history was to furnish examples for imitation and avoidance. He added that he hoped to show

by what kind of men, and by what sort of conduct, in peace and war, the empire has been both acquired and extended: then, as discipline gradually declined, let him follow in his thoughts the structure of ancient morals, at first, as it were, leaning aside, then sinking farther and farther, then beginning to fall precipitate, until he arrives at the present times, when our vices have attained to such a height of enormity, that we can no longer endure either the burden of them, or the sharpness of the necessary remedies.

Perhaps in an age when the word self is appended with approbation to every activity, discipline, and occasion, and when the marketplace and government seem set to satisfy every whim, Aeneas of all the heroes should be welcome.

Things I Don't Get #4: Cruises

The possibility of an Ebola outbreak on a ship is, among other things, nature's way of reminding us that it can perfect anything which we design. In this case, the reprisal is that even the most dreadful place to which people voluntarily locate can be rendered more insufferable. Bah on me, some say, for disdaining this popular vacationing practice. Let me count the ways of their error.

The most obvious source of discontentment with the cruise is what it lacks. What ought a literate individual think of a place with no library and where the only repository of knowledge is the instruction to log onto the wifi and locate the lifeboat? What of a place where you can't get live music that doesn't feature an electric guitar or a has-been third-rate pop singer? Live shows abound, some say, to which I reply that while I've always wanted to see Agamemnon performed on the Lido deck, it's surprisingly hard to find on these boats a show devoid of feathers, tassels, and dancing animals. Pindar writes in Pythian 10 that the happy Hyperboreans of legend live indeed without work and battle, (πόνων δὲ καὶ μαχᾶν ἄτερ) but also that their ways never lacked the Muse, (Μοῖσα δ᾽ οὐκ ἀποδαμεῖ τρόποις ἐπὶ σφετέροισι.) It is no vacation without them. Yet even if the Muses don't travel the high seas in search of vessels, surely I may be lured aboard by the sumptuous amenities of our floating paradises?

The food, it's always the food people talk about, as if the mainland lacks sufficient quantity and variety. This might be understandable since the sea air does seem to whet the appetite, but why does it have to be a buffet, the non plus ultra of engorgement? You can do little more to render food unappetizing than to present it in large quantities, so what kind of man salivates at the sight of trays of chicken legs, hundreds of cupcakes, and pounds of scrambled eggs? I pass over the hideous sight of people, queued up for their hourly feeding, ladling gobs of food onto their plates. If there is a grosser display of herd mentality than the sight of people flocking to the faintest whiff of food and grazing upon it simply because it's available, then I prefer ignorance. To those who champion the thought of fine dining at sea, it surely does not need to be noted that nothing is fresh on a boat which doesn't catch anything.

To this floating asylum, which is to me but a few roasting heretics short of a stop on Dante's infernal tour, we can add the criticism that the sheer scale of the vessel deprives you of the joy of sailing and the sea. It is in fact only on the perimeter of the decks that you might even notice you're on a boat. Is one's decadence such that he needs all the things which enjoys–and we won't criticize him again for his tastelessness–to be added to a boat so that he might occasionally choose just to take sight of the water? This is my chief criticism: the cruise has managed to render further indolent even the act of vacationing. It's not convenient enough to be relieved from the stress of work and pleasant enough to enjoy some special treat, but the cruise promises to spoon feed us from a floating smorgasbord.

Is it such a terrible crime, though, to gather one's favorites in one place? Surely I would enjoy a seaside, if not seafaring, symposium of classical music and languages. Perhaps my criticism of cruises, then, is one of economics: they are perfectly catered to the most vulgar tastes.

On Entertainment

Amidst my morning routine yesterday I happened in a spare moment between tooth brushing and showering to spy the humble hamper tucked in its corner. Within, interspersed with the inane accouterments–socks, undershirts, and so forth–I saw neatly layered each day's dress shirt: Monday's blue pinstripe, Tuesday's red checks, the crisp white one from Wednesday that fits just so well. Like a core sample of ancient Arctic ice the hamper told the story of my week. So under the steamy cascade I thought what a curious record the hamper was. It's not quite so flattering as to say how many students I taught, but far so more than revealing how many times I tied my shoe or swore at errant drivers. The question remains: how do we measure our time?

Alas the reckoning is going to comprise much time spent on tasks which do not flatter our species. Namely, we must concede that we spend an abysmal quantity of time sleeping. If slumber truly is the half-brother of death, then the dormitive part of our existence has robbed us of a great deal. Adding to the reckoning the other corporal indignities of feeding and cleaning ourselves reveals no further cause for celebration, either. I don't suspect we would boast of the time we spend showering and eating.

It is not just the care of our bodies, though, which troubles us, but too we are absorbed by preparations for that care. We must work, for as Hesiod wrote, κρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ βίον ἀνθρώποισιν, the gods hide from men the means of life. Either we acquire or trade to acquire the essentials, yet in either case this is mere sustenance. Keeping oneself healthy is certainly necessary, but it is not the making of a fulfilling life. Yet what does one acquire beyond essentials save what we call luxury? How commendable or significant is it to spend on what is by definition excess?

We can now see in these differences that the spending of our time is split into three groups: that which we do out of necessity, what we do for the sake of something else, and what we do for its own sake. It is this last category which interests me insofar as it is a small one for which little time remains. What should we do with what time we are at the liberty to use at our pleasure? One phenomena seems to take pride of place in the modern west: entertainment.

It's a rather ignoble word for an ignoble status, merely being held by something. Entertainment maintains our attention in some minimally agreeable way. It satiates, but does not satisfy. We used to have more precise words than entertainment, words which have the slightly negative wring they ought to. Take pastime. It's not offensive, but there is the ring of decadence to it which puts us off: who truly has so much time that he can simply pass on some of it? We all have a little to waste, I think, but not much. The point of the slight is that we ought not overindulge, lest too much time pass us by wasted on slight matters. Another useful term is diversion, best exemplified by the musical form of the divertimento, a light and pleasant piece. Diversions take you away from the cares of the world for a little while. They are but little respites and in this light there is a Stoic dimension to them: we only rest as much as we need to so that we might be more fully devoted to serious matters. Finally, we once used frivolous to concede that something was trifling but could be spared some time for the brief pleasure it would bring.

In place of these precise words we have fun, by which we usually mean anything which catches the fancy of an individual. The subjectivity implies legitimacy. Don't bother Jon, he's having fun on his unicycle. Who am I to judge John's fun? Too we must assent to the wisdom of recreation, by which people do not mean refreshment in the Stoic sense we mentioned above, but rather anything which one likes, preferably that which is fun.

Etherized under the surgeons of progress and commerce waits an old word, amusement. Not the frivolities of "amusement" parks, not bendy mirrors and clowns, but the powers of the Muses are our a-musement, our leave taking of the ordinary for the delight of art with the daughters of Zeus and Memory. We may run afoul of Pope's pun that poets are bemused, but better poked by a pun than stuck in the torpor of entertainment.

Our free time is not meant for trifles, refreshment, or consumption, but inspiration. In the creation of song and dance and poetry we can find the elevation, the elation of ourselves more satisfying than the satiation of earthly appetite. Our holidays are not for vacations to the Caribbean, but to Parnassus.

Moderation demands I make an enervating caveat, which is that there exists some time for entertainment. A slight amount for slight things, and perhaps ulterior purposes, on occasion. Likewise, one cannot dwell too long on great matters without a loss of perspective. We must strike a balance between the quotidian and the eternal, as I don't imagine anyone would want the record of his life to show only dissipating trifles or ponderous severity.

The Face

One of the fascinating parts about life in the metropolis of New York City is how seldom people look you in the eye. Everyone walks about with face glued to phone or pointed at the ground. If you walk about with head held up, as I do out of equal parts propriety, pride, curiosity, and contrarianism, the moment you lock eyes with someone will be a moment of revelation. Some people immediately look away, a few smile, and some ignore or pretend to ignore you. There's always that sense, though, that when you see someone's face that you've truly seen them, that is, some essential aspect of them.

For example, if two people walk down a hallway, the only two present, each can ignore the other in full and obvious knowledge of that other's presence. Yet should they meet face-to-face, some acknowledgement is required. Similarly, a celebrity whom everyone knows by a thousand movies will shield his face from a candid shot and a defendant in a trial about which everyone has read will hide his face coming out of the courthouse. This is of course illogical, for everyone can put the preexisting image of face together with other knowledge, and yet we hide ourselves. What does the face reveal which we hide out of shame?

Something about the human visage is rife with meaning and truth. It can store in the mind of the viewer seemingly every memory of that person. One glance and all thoughts rush forth, hence both the affection and aversion which a face can elicit. I can languor over one image in my mind forever and yet be so soured by the sight of someone that I avoid seeing even the tiniest little picture of that individual. This dual capacity to trigger both good and bad always reminds me of a line from Cicero's De Officiis, Book I, in which he reflects on the sad sight of a lesser owner dwelling in a house once owned by a great man:

O domus antiqua, heu quam dispari dominare domino!

What a sadness it is, how pitiful, to look at a face and think of how good a person used to be. It is not only discomfiting, but odiosus as Cicero says, to look upon someone, or oneself, and hold in your mind some thought of their or one's own failing. How much more does the deed, whether a mere misdemeanor or dastardly offense, seem to have wounded none more than the doer himself. The wrong seems to cling to and mortify the face as Socrates said it did the soul.

A fable tells the story of a lion who, chasing another, stumbled upon a well. Gazing in he saw his reflection, dove in, and died.

Saepe furiosi plus sibi quam aliis nocent.

How vulnerable, too, the face. How easily can a smile vanish, or wide-eyed joy turn to fear. Philosophers have often wondered just what makes something beautiful and I wonder whether fragility plays perhaps a small part in our estimation of the beautiful. Delicate objects seem to welcome us as they trust our presence not to hurt them, and for that trust we are rewarded with some deeper insight. The affinity is such that we hope authentic the suspected origin of our word delicate in Latin's delicere, to entice, and delico, to reveal. In contrast, who is not put off by a poker face or a concrete facade?

It is beauty alone which seems to reveal to us a nature which otherwise prefers to hide. How fortunate then that it is something we can see in each other.

On Tourism

Giving voice to unrestrained scorn is one of the chief pleasures of life. No need to moderate or burnish one's arguments and no caveats, no exceptions are required. It's with no mild excitement then that I can express my extreme disdain for what is today called tourism.

What a waste of a good word, though. The Greek τορν- stem revolves around woodworking and lathing, like Latin's tornare. With their extended definitions of fashioning and finely finishing off, you couldn't seek a better metaphor for cura pursonalis. Yet this has nothing to do with tourism, which involves no philosophy of betterment or understanding but borrows a baser meaning from its linguistic roots, namely that of going in circles.

Now by tourism I don't mean mere travel, for clearly there are many reasons which necessitate a change of locale, so many and obvious we need not discuss them. Nor by tourism do I even mean mere sight-seeing. Foolish as I think sight-seeing may be, there is much in the world worth seeing firsthand. True, people don't prepare themselves by study to appreciate these sights, but it's not inconceivable that the sight of a great work of art or a natural wonder might prompt appreciation and insight which mere study did not. Ever the generous optimist, I pass over these practices.

By tourism I mean the crass acquisitiveness with which some people idiotically prance around foreign lands–any place not their home–and locust-like desiccate the environment of its natural splendor. Tourism uses the native land and people for entertainment, for mere amusement. It seeks to suck and siphon the experience of the denizen and citizen without contributing to the society of which it is visitor. Tourism merely tosses off those coveted, crisp dollars to the shopkeepers and guides so the tourist can play native for a while in a counterfeit experience calculated to sell a lifestyle as a commodity. This is to say nothing of the endless kitsch stamped to bottle and sell every virtue of the land.

As if this vulgar imbecility were not offensive enough, consider the degree to which the tourist is untutored and unprepared for his travel. He is ignorant of customs, geography, transportation, and far too often, of his host's language. Preparations not withstanding, the tourist invariably mocks its hosts, either by mimicry, presuming he's mastered his host's manners, or by the effrontery of refusing the customs of the land.

The heinous combination of ignorance, arrogance, and abuse we find in the tourist is the antithesis being a guest. This much preferable title descends  from Latin's hostis, meaning both foreigner and enemy, and the Indo European ghosti-, meaning strange. How kind is it of a guest to concede his status as stranger and walk with some humility among his hosts. How gentlemanly is he to regard his presence as a favor from his hosts. What a humane concern, his desire to contribute, thank, and reciprocate. If the contrasts sounds harsh or extreme consider this:

While a guest stays at your house he helps wash dishes, listens to grandpa tell stories, follows your manners without being obsequious, thanks you, and departs with gratitude. The tourist pays you a fee and demands tours and that you speak his language, and before he departs photographs all of your most valuable possessions. The guest walks as a gentleman, in gratitude, and the tourist with head held high as a conqueror. He peers over the visited lands and peoples, mere trophies bagged by peregrinate, pecunious huntsmen.

I'm Back, This Time With Metaphor

In a post from last month I dared to offer some advice to the youth and led that counsel with this same picture to the right, which I neglected to explain. The lack of explanation is ironic and perhaps telling insofar as I've failed at least once at following all of those choice tips I offered since I wrote them. True, I enjoyed modest success, but my failure was such that the post became a chastening reminder both to strive and forgive. Notwithstanding or perhaps because of my failures, it seems a good time to explain this picture, which is as good as any representation of life that I can name.

Keep your boxes of chocolates, uncoiling threads, chess games, and even your trees: life is balancing spinning plates on sticks. Putting aside the obvious analogy of balancing responsibilities, there are a number of features which delight me about this representation.

First is the fact that you can only spin one plate at a time. This is consonant with my experience that I can either make tests or grade tests, scan articles or wash my car, shop for dinner or take a rest. One can balance multiple projects, but at any given moment only one gets your attention.

Second, each plate will only spin for so long. Nothing in life is ever done. Plates will still need filling and washing, quizzes will need grading, and essays will need to be written. Most of all, you've never done enough for your loved ones.

Next, you can't stop when you're in mid-spin. When you commit to something, you're committed, and if you let it fall you ought to be prepared to pick up the pieces. Worse, one falling plate tends to take others with it. If you're done with something, end your commitment with as much grace as you can manage.

Fourth, you can't see all the plates at once. You just have to trust that once something has been set up it'll go on for at least a little while. If you start to give everything a second guess, you're doomed. Still, look out from the corners of your eyes now and then.

Fifth, it's not at all impossible, but it's a separate skill to accept and work with help. The two parties need to delegate, commit, support, and leave each other space. They also need to trust each other. Also, sometimes competition is healthy, sometimes not.

Sixth, you can only manage so many plates. Even if you are an extraordinary talent, when you're spinning a lot of plates, you're not spending a lot of time on each one. True, they're all spinning, but that's not necessarily satisfying for you or the plate.

Finally, success is possible, and rewarding. Look at his face as he spins that last plate. He's about to enjoy one moment where he can just sit and take in all the spinning grandeur of his handiwork, right before he hurries back to that first wobbling plate.

Speaking of which...

Heard at Holy Innocents

Since the Archdiocese of New York's parish consolidation initiative spurred speculation about the closing of Holy Innocents, much has been written in praise of the parish. Least numerous and most necessary among this esteem is the appreciation for the priests who come from throughout the boroughs to say mass there in the Extraordinary Form. These are not idle priests who pop in from next door to say mass, but busy clergy who make time for the Holy Innocents community. They come with good spirit, prepared and thoughtful sermons, and full voices to offer not just a beautiful, but a consistently beautiful liturgy from week-to-week. Such praise doesn't diminish the work of the resident priests at Holy Innocents, who beside the work of their visiting brothers offer the indispensable before every EF mass, confession.

I'll pass over the uncommon grace and decorum of the altar servers to mention what is for me the most extraordinary offering of the parish, its music. From the small, dedicated schola flows week-after-week of glorious polyphony and chant. It's such a mainstay that even I began to take it for granted until, perusing the mass journal which I began a few months ago, I saw just how many pieces I'd noted in the margins.

Classical settings, renaissance polyphony, plainchant, homophony, preludes, fugues, motets, the choices are both varied and complementary, consistent and prudent. This is no small feat, finding such a wide variety of excellent music, rehearsing, and then performing it at the most appropriate mass. To praise just that is even to overlook the sung propers each week, with which I'll occasionally follow with my gradual. And they are indeed sung every week, never skipped because they're particularly florid one Sunday.

Nothing is ever skimped on or supplemented with inferior efforts. There's nothing added and there's nothing taken away, there's just the mass. Its loving, lively, traditional celebration at Holy Innocents makes it feel as it should, the most important thing in the world.

I list just a small sampling of what has been sung at Holy Innocents in the past two months. Again, this is putting aside all of the chant both ordinary and proper.

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1. Vorspiel in D minor. Anton Bruckner [YouTube]
2. Missa Quarti Toni. Tomas Luis de Victoria [YouTube]
3. Tantum Ergo. Tomas Luis de Victoria [YouTube]
4. Ave Verum Corpus. William Byrd [YouTube]
5. Fugue in A, BWV.536. J.S. Bach [YouTube]
6. Missa de Virgine. Christobal de Morales [YouTube]
7. Panis Angelicus. Claudio Casciolini [YouTube]
8. O Crux Benedicta. Francisco Guerrero [YouTube]
9. Messa da Capella a quattro voci. Claudio Monteverdi. [YouTube]
10. Plein Jeu. Louis Marchand. [YouTube]

A Man and His Honor

If it is true that the best citizen is he who shares most fully in the honors of society, then today Americans are in quite a pickle. If it is also true that he who has no share in the government, cannot be a loyal citizen (Politics, 1268a), then we have a bona fide problem. I would talk about each in turn.

First, in a liberal democracy it is not hard to find, as Plato said we would, a variety of constitutions. There as many ways of life as there are men and it's not difficult to find someone with whom you share your esoteric ways. Yet is it satisfying or satisfying enough for a man to share those values with only a small set of people? Does he perhaps wish for some broader consensus, an accord on universal principles, however few? One the one hand external validation seems superfluous to morality. Socrates and Jesus are the most famous examples, but it's not hard to think of people who didn't get along with the majority. Surely objective morality is indifferent to the vicissitudes of popular opinion. Likewise, adhering to morality does satisfy the conscience. The good man can sleep at night and look at himself in the mirror on the morning, but how does he look at others?

It seems naive to suggest that anyone truly, deeply enjoys a plurality of opinions. Perhaps you think you are correct or you can admit your opponent is correct or you can admit you both are wrong, but it seems a fancy to think that anyone happily wallows in a muddy plurality of contradictory ideas. The variety might even be fertile, but man requires more than excitement. Chiefly, he desires to live up to a vision, an ideal of man, fulfilling his his duties and obligations and consequently receiving honors. When there is a variety of values in society and everyone is equally praised, man is left to find his own inspiration for and satisfaction in pursuing the good.

Such is possible, but not preferable in extremity. Absent a consensus on virtue, many will still adhere to the path of the good, but without recognition many will not. Moreover, without the reward of honors the virtuous man will develop resentment for his society. The man who saves his money, pays his bills, and spends within his means will learn to resent the society which excuses and rescues profligate men. The bachelor who keeps his hands off women and the husband who remains faithful will find anger in his heart for the fellow men who use women and the women who excuse them. The man who cultivates restraint will feel the fool when boors go without chastise. Whoever devotes himself to serious and genuine study bill begrudge the fame bestowed on fools and false scholars by the unstudied. And so on and on, the good man will resent his fellow citizens.

The good man in a society which does not recognize his virtue will wonder whether he is Aeneas or Don Quixote. Is he passing on the torch of virtue and tradition or is he following bygone ideals? He will question himself and his sanity, wondering whether his courage is foolishness. Denied honor he will either seek to reform society or he will retreat from it. A man with agency will turn toward reform. If he has charisma he may turn to politics, if he has artistic skill he may attempt to persuade by art, if wealth, by influence. A man with little agency in society will retreat to the sanctity of the next social circle in which he shares both duty and honor. Some men will turn to violence, against themselves or others whom they blame.

What, then, will prevent this dissolution? What will unite the plurality? Aristotle wrote (Politics, 1263b) that education would do this, but the education of Greek παιδεία is not of text books and standardized tests. It is a reconciliation of the individual to society, a stepping into society and ideals. Education then, Highet wrote (Paideia, I.xxii) is no adornment, but, "deliberately moulding human character in accordance with an ideal." To have a culture which is not merely a collection of traits or a main idea requires the nexus of its ideals in a vision of man which is fervently sought and when found, praised.

Top Ten: Advice for Young People

So I'm twenty-nine now, and while that number doesn't mean much of anything, I feel more acutely that I can look back and forward with equal clarity. Too I can say with some certainty what has worked for me and what has not, so with humility and no philosophical pretensions I'd like to share the fruits of my reflections. Subject them to your own scrutiny and common sense and shun them sooner than do anything barbarous, but I hope you will consider them. These observations are not hierarchical, alas, so you'll need to be prudent about their application, that is, which is more important when.

Finally, I've not perfected doing or avoiding what I advocate here, and that seems like a good place to start.

1. You're a Work in Progress

Plato and Aristotle argued–so much for avoiding philosophical pretensions–that the gods must be unchangeable because they are perfect. You don't tinker with perfection, right? Well, unless you've joined the Olympian ranks, you should probably be changing. Not everything, mind you, but some things. Like a shrubbery, some parts need to be trimmed and some cultivated.

Unfortunately, I can't say much more. The art of curating your character is the art of knowing what you like about yourself and what you don't. It also requires–again shrubbery-like–patience. You can't change everything at once. You should probably look at some models to discover whom you admire. Speaking of which...

2. Get to Know People

It's hard to get your head around the fact that you need to know others to know yourself. Not only will you learn by knowing them whom to emulate and whom to avoid, but you'll develop relationships which will make demands of you. They'll want things from you and also for you, and you'll have to consider who you are when deciding how to react. What will what they want you to do make you? You'll also see yourself from their perspective and be able to ask whether you like the person that they see. Do you like how you act around them, or how you make them feel?

This doesn't mean that you use people to learn about yourself, but that your fulfillment is interwoven with the lives of others.

3. Reconcile Yourself to Tradition

This is a tough one, because no one is fully progressive, contemporary, or traditional. Everyone cherry picks what they like, and that's fine up to a point. There are good traditions and bad ones, but I would make two provisions.

First, decide what traditionalism is to you. Do you actually find beauty in doing things the way your ancestors did? Is there authority in precedent? If so, those imperatives have far-reaching implications, i.e. you can't choose which traditions to follow unless you think they're immoral. Maybe tradition is for you just a love of things which happen to be out of style at the moment. Perhaps you follow tradition to pay honor to the past or your parents. In any event, what you think traditionalism is has a lot to do with how you fulfill the name.

Second, understand the traditions. Study the history of everything and don't rely on caricatures or summaries. To put it another way: know your alternatives. It's alright to like rock and roll music–sort of–but not if you don't know what you're missing in Mozart and Bach. This study also applies to your family. Study its history–and that includes getting to know its living members–and decide what it means to you. Comprehend what your actions will do to the thing called your family.

4. Honor Your Parents

Yes, there is such a thing as a collective. Liberally-minded people–libertarians, liberals, progressives, and broadly independent people–have a hard time with this one. I'm not saying the culture, ethos, zeitgeist or whatever you call it has will or authority, but it exists. You contribute to it, and most immediately you contribute to your family, and most immediately that means your actions with your parents make a special little world among you. Honor them.

I don't mean that you should let them dominate you or that you should be obsequious to their whims, but you should consider their desires for you as legitimate ones. Those desires may be illogical or wrong-headed, but ponder them with care. If they're immoral, then you have a bona fide moral dilemma between piety and some other virtue: Good luck.

Short of that, try to please them. Let them help you in ways that they like. Keep them apprised of your whereabouts and comings-and-goings. If they're not traditionalists, you're off the hook. If they are, see #3. Do well for yourself, for them. They'll worry no matter what, but be successful enough at life that they don't predominately worry. Above all, don't make them ashamed. Don't make them want to hide you, themselves, or the family. Look into the eyes of an ashamed parent and the pity you'll know will set you straight.

Their hopes for you extend ad infinitum. Of what they ask of you, you'll have to decide what's reasonable, moral, necessary, and desirable to accommodate. Not all requests are all of the above, and some will be contradictory.

5. Play Devil's Advocate

You'll need to weigh those choices, then, won't you? This means you'll need to look at all sides equally. Such requires the use of logic which, alas, requires a great deal of effort.

Unfortunately, thinking logically isn't the hardest part. What's harder than thinking clearly?

First, arguing with yourself. You need to be able to argue both sides equally, that is, be able to argue against what you think is correct. It's desirable always to argue against the best objection to your case, but you'll often need to argue your opponent's case better then they are able

Second, dealing with people who aren't logical is a distinct challenge. Disagreement usually gets somewhat heated, and it's hard for people to accept logical propositions when you've made them feel vulnerable.

Third, be humble. Remember that you can be completely logical and also completely wrong if you're missing the tiniest variable. Never lose sight of what you're trying to prove or accomplish and make sure what you're arguing both supports your premise and doesn't support anything unexpected.

Fourth, avoiding the use of reason as a weapon. Don't let the fact that you're right about something go to your head and cloud your judgment. In an abstract, academic debate that might be fine, but in life your main goal or at least a goal which you cannot ignore is getting along with people. If there is a moral imperative at stake, proceed in argument, but with caution.

Also, people like to make up their own minds, so at least give them the illusion of choice. On that note...