It's Been a Long Ride

On the 4th, it was ten years ago since I joined the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza. My cousin had made me aware of it; he was an early fan, as appears from the fact that he was still able to take the name ‘Denethor II’. I registered on the forum while my family had gone to church and I was left behind to take care of my baby sister. Some of the names I tried were taken, including ‘Turgon’, so I came up with a variant: Turgonian.

I owe a big debt of gratitude to the Plaza. It stimulated my curiosity, taught me to think in an interdisciplinary way, and awakened an interest in the history of ideas (a preoccupation that helped lead me home to the Catholic Church). Moreover, at the Plaza I was continually encouraged to keep writing poetry, knowing that people would read it and leave a potentially valuable review. Gerontian and Silendra in particular would write in-depth reviews that helped me to improve.

Another Plaza poet was Scea. At her blog At the Wicket Gate, she impresses on her readers that they should not get too complacent or stuck in a comfort zone. There is value, for instance, in travel that is accompanied by ‘uncertainty and discomfort’.

Because Saturday seemed to be an entirely free day, I decided to take Scea’s advice and do a bit of cycling. Before lunch, I looked up how to go from the seminary to Leiden, then to Alphen aan de Rijn, on to Aalsmeer and back again to the seminary. A trip of approximately 80 km, or 50 miles, through flat country. It was an excellent day, since the weather was mild for January and it wasn’t raining.

I had intended to go after lunch, before 2pm. Unfortunately, I got too involved in a game of Battle for Middle-earth, and therefore didn’t leave until almost 3.30pm, when the sky was already getting darker. Life Lesson One: don’t dawdle; favourable circumstances are not permanent.

Not very far along the way, the rain started and I sought shelter against a wooden shed. Thankfully, it lasted only a few minutes and did not return to trouble me further.

Because of the anniversary, I thought of a poem to post on the Plaza by way of commemoration. What came into my head, I jotted down on my Samsung mobile (the postmodern equivalent of the breast-pocket notebook). The poem automatically took the form of a sonnet; its familiarity makes it easy to write while you’re doing something else, such as cycling. I had one line before the rain started:

This womb, this playground of inquiring minds …

I remember sitting at our garden table in Summer, with a Tolkien book and a college notebook, writing down every question that popped into my mind for discussion on the Plaza. This was before I went to university. My mother said that if I would approach my future studies the same way, I’d be a good student. I never got so involved in my studies, though.

The path to Leiden stretched alongside a canal. Before the trains came, horse-drawn boats would use this passage to ferry between Haarlem and Leiden. To my left was a line of water, with the occasional boathouse or boat. Fields lay to my right. All very flat.

I arrived in Leiden around 4.45pm. When I got to Central Station, it was completely dark. It would have been easy to take the train back to Hillegom and ride home; this would have taken about twenty minutes. But I was not tired yet, only a little hungry, and I had decided to make a longer journey. As Gimli said, ‘Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.’ Besides, I only had three lines of my poem.

When I had visited the place in Leiden that holds special memories for me, my road turned east, towards Alphen. One long and curving high road lies between the two towns, a dyke built to contain the Rhine. Somewhere halfway, I got rather tired, slowed down and started huffing and puffing. As Alphen came closer, I regained my motivation and speed.

It felt good when I finally got there (about 6.15pm), and I took a detour into the town to get something to eat. At first it was difficult to find something; all I saw were big shops, closed and dark, that sold cars and furniture and other inedible things. After some more deviations, I finally hit upon a Subway. Joy! I devoured a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips. Then I asked for a coffee. The girls behind the counter were talking about how dark it was outside, ‘as if it’s night’. I sat back, stretched my legs, enjoyed the coffee and wrote another stanza for my poem. Halfway there.

But I could not linger forever at this Lothlórien Subway; I had to go on to Aalsmeer. It’s a place where I’d never been before and which I knew nothing about, except that a community of Benedictine sisters had recently taken up residence there. Mounting my bike again, I felt a certain soreness in my saddle parts, not having much of a natural cushion there.

I went on and got lost. At least, I could not find my way. Since I knew that part of the path lay between the Aarkanaal and the Zegerplas, however, it seemed safe to follow the signs to Ter Aar and Zegersloot. Later it turned out that this was a roundabout way, but at least the cyclist path ran parallel to the main road; the shortcut might have been a bit dodgy after dark, though no doubt beautiful by day.

At one crossroads, I did not know what to do. Here my breast-pocket notebook became my guide, as I connected to the Internet with my Samsung mobile. It was the first time I used it without WiFi; my brother had disabled the data connection for me to prevent me from accidentally spending a lot of money. To tell you the truth, I was astounded that it worked: there was a sudden awareness that there were all sorts of invisible powers and signals in the air around me. Life Lesson Two: even in solitude, we are never out of the range of the Great Network.

After a few kilometres, I was able to consult a map. It turned out that I had taken the East Canal Road rather than its Western counterpart. I was going north, in the right direction, and the next town would be Papenveer (Papists’ Ferry).

Between Papenveer and Kudelstaart, the path veered away from the highway and got very dark. It was nice and quiet and I was able to think of a few more lines for the poem. In Kudelstaart I stopped to write them down. It was very still; I heard only distant airplanes, flowing water and a faint ticking noise. A couple of silent ducks floated on the canal.

The most beautiful part of the Dutch countryside, by the way, are the old houses. They seem to say: ‘Here is a broad space to live the good life.’ With gardens, fences, little stone steps, pools and a proper distance from the road, they are a pleasure to behold.

Finally: Aalsmeer! I rode into its shopping centre, brightly lit with Christmas decorations, and out of it again. It was around 10pm; time to go home.

But that was not so easy. For what seemed the longest time, I rode on the Aalsmeerderdijk, with a growing fear that I’d missed the only road that would take me home in a straight line. Finally I came to its end, where the Aalsmeerderdijk became the Leimuiderdijk at a T-intersection. Neither of those was the road I was looking for.

For some moments I was at a profound loss, until my eyes fell on an inobtrusive sign that bore the saving name: the third road of the T-intersection was the Bennebroekerweg I wanted. Excellent! I had no stomach left for a long detour, and thankfully the architect who planned this road had no sense of the beauty of curves. We’ll do your ‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion’ some other time, Coleridge.

Straight though it was, it was also very long – long enough to finish the poem. I stopped halfway to write the last lines down, pleased with the Milton quote that sounded like a Tolkien allusion. When I got back on the bike, the saddle soreness was more evident. If John Keats could have seen me, he might have remarked that I made sweet moan.

Through Hoofddorp and Zwaanshoek I went, on to Bennebroek – almost home! Vogelenzang … the last curve … the last yard … and thankfully I got home before midnight, around 11.30pm: just in time to post the finished poem on the Plaza. Here it is:

Ten years Plaza

This womb, this playground of inquiring minds,

I found ten years ago: much did it teach

Of dialogue and wordcraft of all kinds,

Applied to lands safely beyond the reach

Of felt perplexity and direct fear.

Wise and good friends I found in these abodes

Gave aid to shape my soul in words, and here

Began some truly unexpected roads.

And on these roads I came on something strange:

Some of the icons vanished into faces,

Revealing greater depth and further range,

Beauty and kindness in the widening spaces.

To Tolkien and the Plaza, friends. Be blessed!

Let’s go our ways; our circuit meets full West.

(P.S. The very same night I found my old ‘Plaza sister’ again on Facebook!)

The Desolation of Jackson

‘You don’t normally think of Dr. Rozema as fierce,’ said the husband of the aforementioned Nebraskan couple, ‘but…’

I don’t normally think of Dr. Rozema as fierce. He is a patient, smiling man, always trying to get his students to understand why philosophical questions are asked and what happens between the asking of the question and the giving of the answer. But rumour has it that he was seen fierce on one occasion: while publicly debating the merits of the Lord of the Rings movies with the English department.

After seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug for the first time, I could understand why. I have now seen it two times (due to circumstances) and the initial disappointment has lessened. Yes, it is a visually superb movie. Yes, the dragon is very satisfying. Yes, some parts are hilarious (though usually not very Tolkienesque). And the use of Elvish and Black Speech was very nice, I thought. (Although they should really have made more of an attempt to pronounce Thráin and Dáin correctly.)

Nonetheless, the movie is just not the book. I know that movies and books are two different genres, but it seems to me that the makers of the movie have simply failed to grasp or capture some essential elements of Middle-earth. Like the following (in no particular order):

1) The Free Kingdoms are worth fighting for. In The Hobbit, places like Rivendell and especially the Halls of Mirkwood appear as semi-deserted military bases. They are decors for action scenes, not places with their own vibrant life. True, there are references to a Feast of Starlight going on while the Dwarves are imprisoned at Mirkwood, but nothing is shown of this feast. Beorn, too, is not a jovial bear fellow (in the etymological sense of the word ‘jovial’), but a tortured skinchanger. Laughter appears as something incidental in Jackson’s Middle-earth.

2) Heroes are vulnerable, not demi-gods who remain completely unscathed while torrents of fire rage about them, or while they are sailing down a river of molten gold. Oh, and talking of demi-gods: the contest between high powers is intellectual, not an exchange of conjurors’ tricks. Compare the battle of Gandalf and Sauron, as depicted by Jackson, with that of Finrod and Sauron, as poetically described in The Silmarillion.

3) Fate, and something more elusive, governs the course of history. In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the intention of the Creator and of other higher powers remains firmly between brackets. The Dwarf-king’s inference that the possession of the Arkenstone betokens a ‘divine right to rule’ (as the first movie says) runs counter to the Free Peoples’ reserve in speaking too freely of the One’s intentions.

4) Beauty, not power, is the prime mover of events in Middle-earth. In the book, Thorin’s longing for the Arkenstone is a natural Dwarvish response to the gem’s beauty. This response is a fundamental recognition that can be shared by other races: in The Lord of the Rings, Gimli takes a rather airy Legolas into the Caves of Aglarond, and the Elf comes out unexpectedly impressed by the halls of stone. In the movie, however, Thorin’s desire for the Arkenstone is mostly extrinsic: he wants it to bolster his claim to lordship.

5) Elven-lords, even those less wise, are not vampires. They do not sinuously coil around their captives or show off their plastic surgery. Nor is heartless elegance an Elvish trait; there are Elven-lords who become rather heartless, but they are not very elegant (Thingol Greymantle). Moreover, they would never promise a captive freedom, then decapitate him and resort to equivocation in order to justify themselves.

6) Vice and insanity are two different things. Thorin Oakenshield is arguably too attached to the treasure beneath the Mountain, the Arkenstone in particular, but that does not mean he would force a frightened Hobbit at swordpoint to go back to a waking dragon. In the book, even when Bilbo gives the Arkenstone to Thorin’s enemies, Thorin does not lose his mind (though he is understandably enraged).
(Edit: While we’re on the subject of vice, I should add something that I forgot earlier, but that did bother me a lot in the movie. This is the degree to which Bilbo is affected by the Ring in The Hobbit. He fights for it like mad, and takes it out to look at it addictively. For some reason, Smaug senses that Bilbo has the Ring; he mentions the word ‘precious’, at which point the Eye of Sauron flashes on the screen and Bilbo takes off the Ring. If all this could happen in a year, how is it credible that Bilbo keeps the Ring for decades and still remains the same? Not to mention that the movie rather detracts from the theme of Hobbit innocence.)

7) The seventh judgment is the climax and summation of all dooms: Tauriel. Tauriel feels like a character that could have been invented by a teenager writing LotR fan fiction. An attractive, invincible warrior, a self-made she-Elf who attracts the prince’s attention but develops an independent interest in someone from another race, and runs across wild country to save her newfound beloved – I mean, really? Really?

There is no romantic interest whatsoever between Tolkien’s Dwarves and Elves. None. In rare circumstances, however, something different blossoms between them: a seed of mutual reverence. To indicate the chasm that ultimately yawns between Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s gang, consider the difference between the following dialogues, and contemplate the Tree that has died and the Jewel that has been lost:

Jackson:
(Fili is searched by an Elvish guard and relieved of his last knife)
Kili: ‘Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my pants.’
Tauriel: ‘Or nothing.’ (Locks the door)

Tolkien:
(Galadriel is giving parting gifts to the Company)
‘And what gift would a Dwarf ask of the Elves?’ said Galadriel, turning to Gimli.
‘None, Lady,’ said Gimli. ‘It is enough for me to have seen the Lady of the Galadhrim, and to have heard her gentle words.’
‘Hear all ye Elves!’ she cried to those about her. ‘Let none say again that Dwarves are grasping and ungracious! Yet surely, Gimli son of Glóin, you desire something that I could give? Name it, I bid you! You shall not be the only guest without a gift.’
‘There is nothing, Lady Galadriel,’ said Gimli, bowing low and stammering. ‘Nothing, unless it might be – unless it is permitted to ask, nay, to name a single strand of your hair, which surpasses the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine. I do not ask for such a gift. But you commanded me to name my desire.’
The Elves stirred and murmured with astonishment, and Celeborn gazed at the Dwarf in wonder, but the Lady smiled. ‘It is said that the skill of the Dwarves is in their hands rather than in their tongues,’ she said; ‘yet that is not true of Gimli. For none have ever made to me a request so bold and yet so courteous. And how shall I refuse, since I commanded him to speak? But tell me, what would you do with such a gift?’
‘Treasure it, Lady,’ he answered, ‘in memory of your words to me at our first meeting. And if ever I return to the smithies of my home, it shall be set in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of my house, and a pledge of good will between the Mountain and the Wood until the end of days.’
Then the Lady unbraided one of her long tresses, and cut off three golden hairs, and laid them in Gimli’s hand. ‘These words shall go with the gift,’ she said. ‘I do not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness, and on the other only hope. But if hope should not fail, then I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion.’
(The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Ch. VIII)

Free Will

Sometime in November, I went visiting a Nebraskan couple in Utrecht. They are both very good people and philosophically inclined, he from a background in medical studies, she with a creative and literary bent of mind. They looked exceedingly happy together, and it was very good to be there; of necessity I must summarize this part briefly, for, as Tolkien remarked, it is much easier to tell a story about bad times than about good times (I paraphrase).

At table, we talked about our lives and our studies. I mentioned my desire to investigate, at some point or other, our capacity of making free decisions. This has become problematic in light of neurological discoveries (of which I admittedly know little). It is all very well to say that the human person is capable of self-determination, but our physical infrastructure seems externally determined through and through.

The lady from Nebraska said that she believed in free will, and that her stories involved people making truly momentous ethical decisions that changed their lives. Some universitarians (those gowned cogs in the 21st-century machine) considered her too much a Romantic. I cordially sympathized with her outlook, myself undergoing enthusiasm; then went home and tried to make the best case I could make against free will, so that a more skilful philosopher could blow it to bits and perpetually reroute the depraved neurons responsible for this intellectual atrocity.

Consider yourself invited.

The argument:

1. Every act of the will has a mental and a material component.

2. The mental and the material components are in proportion to each other.

3. The material component follows the laws of matter.

4. At the molecular level, the motion of matter does not deviate from Newtonian patterns.

5. The material component of the act of the will occurs in the brain at the molecular level. (*)

6. The motion of the material component does not deviate from Newtonian patterns. (from 3, 4 and 5)

7. The mental component is in proportion to a material component that does not deviate from Newtonian patterns. (from 2 and 6)

8. One and the same material component is in proportion to one mental component only. (**)

9. The mental component cannot deviate from a pattern that stands in proportion to the Newtonian pattern governing the material component of the act of the will. (from 7 and 8)

10. A will that cannot deviate from a pattern is not a free will.

11. Hence, there is no free will. (from 9 and 10)

Clarifications:

(*) Though the act of the will involves more than a motion of the brain, yet that motion is decisive for human movement.

(**) There is a certain indeterminacy to the material component, but I find it difficult to believe that one motion of the brain would correspond to multiple essentially different acts of the will (e.g. to repay an insult with another, or to suppress one's anger; to take a walk, or to read a book).

Negation, and Running

In mid-October, a discussion evening took place, attended by five seminarians and eight others of varying backgrounds and religious beliefs. The topic was the origin and development of man, whether Darwinian evolutionary theory offered the best explanation for it. Like most Catholics, I’m not an opponent of physical evolution per se (Pope John Paul II called it ‘more than a hypothesis’), but I do think that the breakthrough of humanity is not adequately explained by Darwinism. The minor differences in DNA between humans and chimpanzees do not account for the vast difference in rational capacities.

In the course of the discussion, I brought up a point that has fascinated me for some time: negation. This seems to be a phenomenon beyond the reach of animals. They have signals to indicate that something is edible or dangerous, but they cannot express that something is ‘not-dangerous’.

The point was missed by people who argued that animals were quite capable of designating something as not dangerous, or indicating that they themselves posed no threat. The point is that animals have no negative particles or prefixes. The debaters seemed to think this a matter purely of symbolic conventions, but I think it goes deeper than that. Human reason is capable of understanding that something can be or not be: this is pure abstraction. They understand that a thing can have properties or lack them – which is different from the manipulation of the properties of things, which animals do every day.

Animals make boundaries for their territories, but only man can conceive the un-bounded, the in-finite. Man reaches up to God not only through his imagination or his memory (remembering divine interventions, supposed or real), but also very powerfully through his capacity of negation.

This capacity is powerfully exercised by anyone who reads the Summa theologiae, First Part, Questions 3-13, with comprehension. For me, a time of sustained wonderment, a revelation – with the emphasis on ‘revel’.

On Saturday, I went running with a priest and a friend of his. We started at 6.30am with a cup of coffee, then ran just over 8 km (5 miles) in 50 minutes, not without conversation.

The priest in question found it difficult to remain hopeful about the Church’s future. Whole dioceses were being reorganized, but very little was done to bring lost sheep back into the fold. There were (almost) no vocations, and the priests whom he had seen coming out of seminary were remarkably unproductive and stressed out after five or ten years. He had hoped that the new generation of priests would forge a new connection with the youth, because the young, including young priests, are naturally approachable and non-threatening (oh our capacity for negation!). Besides, they were the peers of the youth, they came out of the same world.

(I thought: me, out of the same world as today’s youth? Really? Of the seminarians who actually were in touch with youth culture, almost all were dismissed or ran into problems towards the end of their studies.)

Part of the problem he blamed on seminary formation. We were still being prepared for an orderly situation, for parishes as they existed a few decades ago. Instead of learning to administer the sacraments and preach the Gospel to ever-dwindling communities, much more focus should be on establishing relationships (of the ‘mustard seed’ type: no poorly-disguised, result-oriented ‘conversion projects’, but actual friendships). Our missionary drive, though patient, should be urgent.

He gave me food for thought, and for breakfast he baked us an egg. When I got up to make tea, my legs hurt. I limped for the rest of the day. Next week I might go again, but pay more attention to the cooling-down.

Physical exercise is actually good for the spirit. It gives one renewed vigour.

Later in the day I went to Confession. Also known as the Sacrament of Truth. The truth makes us free indeed.

No Safe Place

There are many sex sites on the Internet. This is a well-known fact. A lesser-known fact is that over a quarter of these sites are hosted in a tiny corner of northwestern Europe called the Netherlands: about 187 million, or eleven for every inhabitant. In this remarkable enterprise we are surpassed only by the United States, which, as all will agree, is no fair competition.

We seem to have taken somewhat of a fancy to libertinism. The theme of our film festival this year was ‘Nude’. It was on the journal.

Talking about journal: Facebook alerted me to something called the ‘SchoolTV weekly journal’, which seems to be a program aimed at children aged 10-12 and watched every week in many schools. They have added an element to it: an excited nurse lecturing children about sexuality. In the first four episodes, she has already given a demonstration of French kissing with a classroom skeleton, and declared anyone abnormal who does not consider homosexuality normal. When she did the latter, she seemed to be in quite a temper. So schoolchildren had better prepare to face the Authority’s outbursts of wrath if they have inherited ungood opinions.

Then there was the action taken by the environmental party’s youth movement (‘Dwars’, which can mean ‘Athwart’ or ‘Defiant’), not too long ago. They put up rather graphic and provocative billboards not only in some major cities, but also in some towns in our Bible belt. The billboards all bared bore the message ‘Sex is nice – Let’s talk about it.’ In an interview, the initiator explained that he specifically targeted the Christian towns because homosexuality was not accepted there and people avoided talking about sex generally, so he wanted to get the conversation going. It’s interesting to see how homosexuality is mentioned in connection with an apparently unrelated issue. Perhaps there is truth in R.R. Reno’s argument that it is the symbol of libertinism in general.

What does this all mean? And how do you protect children from this moral toxicity in the air? In a world where young ones at the threshold of puberty can browse YouTube and stumble on Miley Cyrus?

Once in a while there is a gleam of dawn. Mr. Van der Staaij, the surprisingly sympathetic leader of the Dutch Reformed party, has started a conversation of his own. He suggested that advertisements for the site Second Love, a dating site for people desirous of adulterous affairs, should be accompanied by a warning that cheating damages kids. And he walked into the lion’s mouth – a secular TV debate show – to defend it. With honour and integrity.

Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one.

Songs

This morning I was driving home from Mass and listening to the radio. They played a song by a Dutch songwriter, Herman van Veen, born in 1945. He sang about a little girl overtaking him on a bicycle. It was a simple song, touching somehow.

There are more such songs, about children just born, the village of one’s youth, the familiar town pub where everyone had fun together. Good songs about memories that allow for some healthy nostalgia, for looking back with gratitude. But such songs seem to be fading from the cultural landscape. We are fast replacing them by an incessant harping on the same theme: romance, love found or lost or hunted for at a party.

Have we lost interest in everything else? That would be bad. The world is full of interesting things which welcome our attention, though without clamoring for it. Songs indicate what is meaningful to us, and if we cannot find meaning or value in the ordinary things, they become indifferent or even hostile. In that cold world, we look all the more for refuge, for warmth – which, the songs tell us, can be found in romance.

But Eros is a volatile and unstable thing, a flighty sort of love, a boy god with wings more fluttery than Apollo’s. We cannot burden him with the whole load of our longing; he cannot carry it, and he has no place to put it. Eros does not build houses.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis juxtaposes Eros with Affection. ‘Affection,’ he writes, ‘is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.’ True! So when simple affection goes out of our songs, nine-tenths of our solid and durable happiness goes with it.

Nevertheless, as the poet sings, ‘I’m in if you’re down to get down tonight’. ’Coz it’s always a good time. So says the poet. And the poet never lies.

Old Treasures and New

In living (though aging) memory, Catholic children in the Netherlands were afraid to receive Communion if they had accidentally swallowed something. I remember refreshments still being consumed just before the Bishop arrived (late) to celebrate Mass at a formation centre for priests, deacons and pastoral workers.

After the Second World War, Catholics declined to rent cheap apartments because it would entail living under one roof with people of the opposite sex and not of the same family. More recently, a cohabitating man with two children approached the Bishop to ask about becoming a deacon, and was surprised to hear that he should marry (though quite ready to do so). No one had ever told him.

Casuistry, according to Fr. Cessario O.P., ‘came to a screeching (though unpublicized) end about fifty years ago’. Many strictures went with it. Few people would want all of them back. On the other hand, to what degree can a priest rely on the old moral theology, if so much of it was too narrow to be applicable now? To what degree can he rely on pre-Tridentine moral theology? What thoughtful person will sort out overly lax and overly fussy from right judgments about human choices – not merely as a series of judgments ad hoc, but referring back to first principles about the human person, virtue, intellect and will? Speaking not only about the recognizable human virtues, but also the resilient-yet-fragile divine secrets which we call the supernatural virtues?

And equally importantly: now the supporting institutions and mindsets have all collapsed, who will be brave, wise and loud enough to proclaim to all God’s people where the kingdom of charity draws its outer boundaries?

Every scribe who has been trained (instructed) for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.