The message is loud and clear. Your actions have no more significance than those of a cockroach. Furthermore, like a cockroach, you are in no position to make moral choices of your own free will. When you commit some hideous brutality, it is not that you decided to do so. No, on the contrary, external [...]
This note is written in memory of David Lachterman, who was an alumnus—using the term in its fullest significance—of St. John's College, Class of 1965, when I was a young tutor. He was in my classes only in his junior year: in a preceptorial entitled "The Fragments of Parmenides and Heraclitus," and in the mathematics [...]
It is our duty to understand and self-consciously conserve a natural process of imagination that has proceeded for an extraordinarily long time. This process has not been uniform nor is its continued emergence inevitable. It has changed its properties markedly since the origin of consciousness, which is a property characterized best by us. Its conservation [...]
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty. The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight [...]
Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not “Nature,” and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it. – J. R. R. Tolkien Many of my essays for The Imaginative [...]
You see one every day on the streets of Kathmandu, what a friend calls D3 meaning the Daily Dead Dog. Stiller and flatter than before, sometimes the canine corpses are hauled away by the city, at other times unceremoniously chucked off the road into a ditch or the bushes. Then Nepal’s kites—handsome, eaglesque, carrion-eating birds—do [...]
When I bring up the subject of “place” to fellow scholars and administrators, I often encounter blank stares and gentle skepticism. Why, I’m asked, would people want to talk about…place? Why would anyone want to write, or read, or hear about such an abstract, ineffable, ethereal concept? But when I talk to students about place, [...]
It was the late Stratford Caldecott who first struck up my interest in Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World by Charles, the Prince of Wales. Caldecott described the book as the coffee table manifesto of traditionalism. After my own reading, I can only concur with his description. For the traditionalist, this book’s [...]
Will the world end with a bang, or just a whimper, as T.S. Eliot predicted? Or will nobody notice at all? An eerie silence, as everyone listens to an endless stream of digital music on their iPods. Gradually, step by step, with the advance of computer technology, real things are being replaced by images of [...]
Some thirty years ago, around the time I converted to the Catholic faith, I had one of those dreams which stay with you for years, unpacking their significance over time. I was in the garden of a house—not my own—with a group of people. I had become aware of some impending disaster, but was unable [...]
Imagine a world where a brave array of new technologies has proliferated to meet our human needs by taming nature—yielding a vast increase in wealth, leisure and education. Instead of scrimping like our ancestors at the mercy of forces beyond their ken, we have attained a noble’s sovereignty. Vast swathes of our lives are planted [...]
So I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I like granola. But since when did getting a little closer to nature make you a hippie? There’s probably a better word—but hippie just works for me. They’ve won by the way—the hippies I mean. Not the unkemptness thankfully, but the outlook. You can see [...]
“At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially–as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago–and fall [...]