The ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Russell Kirk to extend his own sense of awe-filled wonder to a wider audience. He was keenly aware of the need for romance and mystery in everyday life—and how hard it was to achieve it in America. He created for his readers one of those places [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is highly personal, uniquely-fashioned religious poetry. This wordless realm into which Eliot takes us is the region of dreams, the numinous, the collective unconscious. He wishes us to plunge into the experience instead of simply pondering the meaning. I first read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as an undergraduate and was [...]
Ricky Jay was born in 1948 and died last Saturday. He was the greatest magician in America for more than a generation and a character whose like we will not see again. He combined the all-American love of wonder, which he understood to fixate on European aristocracy, and the all-American passion for science. He was [...]
Despite their obscurity, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early 1980s she and her husband attended a [...]
Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And they lay upon us the heavy but joyous [...]
The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight... The Thirty-Nine Steps. A novel. Then a film: The 39 Steps. In the end, that [...]
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s “Miserere” and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn’t stop the teenaged Mozart… The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, [...]
Relentless Rationalism burns up the “life, mind, morality and reason” of man, seeing in the ashes the only true liberation of humanity… “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” —Jules Verne, The Journey to [...]
We can approach the miracles and mysteries of the Bible, accepting the possibility of their essential historicity while allowing for elaboration, exaggeration, and the misunderstandings of the pre-scientific mind… I have had a terrific time researching and writing my new book The Mystery of the Magi—The Quest for the True Identity of the Three [...]
To link spiritualism, political philosophy, and play together is, at first sight, rash. What could they possibly have in common, since they clearly are not the same?… Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems [...]
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House revolves around three intrepid explorers who accept Professor Montague’s invitation to spend a summer living there, getting to know one another and getting to know—intimately—the workings of the house… Though she never made it past the young age of forty-eight, Shirley Jackson was known for two important [...]
In the murder mystery, the portrayal of an apparent Eden is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored… There’s a wonderful moment in one of the old Inspector Morse shows—the [...]
I was an Anglican curate when I saw the sun spin. It happened like this. One of the teenagers in the parish had been to Medjugorje and suddenly got keen on the Blessed Virgin Mary. He joined a Medjugorje prayer group and twisted my arm to go with them on a visit to the [...]
A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. These need not be full-scale epiphanies or blasts of revelation. As instances of what I mean, I may mention two incidents in my own life that were not hard to explain, in a way, [...]