The Mahler Heartbuster

Stephen Colbert, ladies and gentlemen.

Listening to music was all fun and games until this slick guy came along. Listening to Mahler's (90-minute) symphonies is like watching action-romance flicks, some of which have nihilistic endings. You get thrilled and all emotional; sometimes you end up reeling, other times unsatisfied. He's made me cry thrice (more than any other composer). Listening to Mahler is a taxing investment, and I'm not sure if a few tears are worth the trouble.

Transcriptions are awesome.

Mahler's "Adagietto" on piano

T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot is by no means an easy author to read. (I should get the Cats book.) But he is undeniably brilliant. The content of The Waste Land is exactly what is described by the title: the bleak vista of modernity. "The Hollow Men" furthers the themes of The Waste Land, with its lines of the "dead land." "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" feels as if it were written by the great James Joyce, employing stream of consciousness to communicate a sense of lostness. A very moving piece is "The Journey of the Magi," an excerpt of which I include:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we lead all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods. 

I should be glad of another death.

So much for einmal ist keinmal.

I've been feeling a good deal of déjà vu lately.

"Everything comes in stories...."

"...But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight." 

.... He continued, "Do you see how this story works?..." (Eugene Peterson, The Message)

You can feel Hauerwas smiling.

A Song Himself

Christ was the king of all kings, Brendan said from MacLennin's knee. He was the wizard of all wizards. He turned water to beer easy as breathing. When he commanded the foaming waves to lay flat, they laid flat. He straightened the bent legs of cripples out and peeled the blue milky scales off the eyes of the blind. When he called out of the darkness the first light as ever was, the morning stars sang together at the sweet ring of it and all the sons of heaven shouted for joy. 

"Ah well, he was a bard then," MacLennin said. It was the part about Christ's voice that struck him hardest. 

"MacLennin, he was so mighty a bard his songs have ravished the hearts of men from that day on," Brendan said. "He was a song himself you might say. King Christ is a song on the lips of the true God." (Frederick Buechner, Brendan)

Commemorative Potpourri

I've decided to commemorate my birthday by revisiting some of my favorite books from my 16th year. Not every book will be included – some are in Davao (Chaim Potok's The Chosen and C.S. Lewis' God in the Dock and Space Trilogy, for example) and others I haven't highlighted at all. I wanted to include some snippets from James Smith's Desiring the Kingdom, but I can't find it. I also wanted to insert some lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," but I can't claim to understand it. It just feels like a poetic (no pun intended) middle finger to anybody who doesn't have an English degree. Quotes from Kristin Lavransdatter are a couple of blog posts down.
Anyway, here are the quotes:

 Quotes from G.K. Chesterton, the most quotable English author:

"My chief objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument."

"Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid." Orthodoxy

"The cross cannot be defeated, for it is Defeat." The Ball and the Cross

"Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."The Ball and the Cross

"Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." The Innocence of Father Brown

"'I am an atheist,' he said, in a stifled voice. 'I have always been an atheist. I am still an atheist.' Then, addressing the other's indolent and indifferent back, he cried: 'In God's name what do you mean?' 

And the other answered without turning round: 'I mean nothing in God's name.'" The Ball and the Cross

 "And he who will not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha." Saint Thomas Aquinas (which may be why some Christians have said that if they weren't Christians they would be Buddhists. I for one believe one of James Sire's implicit arguments in The Universe Next Door, that if I weren't a Christian, I would essentially be a nihilist.)

"The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music." Tremendous Trifles

"The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost." Tremendous Trifles ("You don't know about real loss, 'cause that only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much." - Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting)

"[I]f you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all." Tremendous Trifles

"'Man,' I said, 'who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?'" Tremendous Trifles

"Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it – because it is a fact." Tremendous Trifles

"Fairy tales... are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." Tremendous Trifles

"... he who has most most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.... though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say, "I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune," etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty.'" The Everlasting Man

"He did not talk about the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked about the books he had not written." Tremendous Trifles

"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it." Tremendous Trifles

"We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough strength for play." Tremendous Trifles

"I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot like a teetotum [a top] in the effort to find the world behind his beck which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look over its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yet without which it cannot be itself." Tremendous Trifles

Quotes from theological books: 

"It is completely forgotten that if Christ had been only a man and had been regarded only a man by Peter, Peter would not have denied him."- Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity

"[T]o be a Christian, to truly belong to Christ – when Christ truly is who he claims to be – to be a Christian must indeed be the highest. humanly speaking, for a human being. And then that truly to be a Christian is to mean, in the world, to human eyes, to be the abased one, that it is to mean suffering every possible evil, every mockery and insult, and finally to be punished as a criminal!" - Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity

"If the beauty of Christ and the beauty of the new creation is to be characterized as 'perfection,'...this must be... a perfection that can accommodate scars. The perfection of the kingdom of God is not the airbrushed sheen of the fashion magazine." - Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit

"Stories are lived before they are told–except in the case of fiction." Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"The first task of Christian social ethics... is not to make the 'world' better or more just, but to help Christian people form their community consistent with their conviction that the story of Christ is ta truthful account of our existence. For as H.R. Niebuhr argued, only when we know 'what is going on,' do we know 'what we should do,' and Christians believe that we learn most decisively 'what is going on' in the cross and resurrection of Christ." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"Jesus' cross... is not merely a general symbol of moral significance of self-sacrifice... that it is better to give than receive. Rather, the cross is Jesus' ultimate dispossession through which God has conquered the powers of this world. The cross is not just a symbol of God's kingdom; it is that kingdom come." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

"To be a disciple of Jesus is not enough to know the basic 'facts' of his life. It is not enough to know his story. Rather, to be a disciple of Jesus means that our lives must literally be taken up into the drama of God's redemption of this creation." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader 

Miscellaneous quotes:

"Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

 "It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning of the twentieth century, then to finish, then to find oneself at Reed's drugstore the next morning. A major problem... not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.  

It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart's Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come out at the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

"'This shall not be wasted,' he muttered, and hurled [a firkin of wine] against the nearest of his foes, crushing two of them and tripping up several others who fell over their bodies." - Frans G.Bengtsson, The Long Ships

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." - Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you sleep, what are you." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"My mother is a fish." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"I've studied now Philosophy/ And Jurisprudence, Medicine, - / And even, alas! Theology, -/ From end to end, with labor keen;/ And here, poor fool! with all my lore/ I stand, no wiser than before..." - Goethe, Faust (Faust's lament does not reflect my own thoughts. It just gave me a chuckle.)

"... [I]f we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called 'practical' men." - Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

"O, come all you Roman Catholics/ That never went to mass..."- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (O, come all you Protestants/ Who never knew Luther.)

"–Are you annoyed? he asked. 

–No, answered Stephen.

–Are you in bad humour?

–No.

–CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"–PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"–And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

–Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.

–I see, Cranly said.

...

–I fear many things: dogs, fire-arms, the sea, thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.

–But why do you fear a bit of bread?

–I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear." - James Joyce,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"'... I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?' 

The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. 'You'll have to shout,' he said. 'Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.' 

'What do you think of Joyce?' Asbury said louder. 

'Joyce? Joyce who?' asked the priest. 

'James Joyce,' Asbury said and laughed. 

The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he were bothered by gnats. 'I haven't met him,' he said." - Flannery O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill"

"'... Ask [God] to send the Holy Ghost.' 

'The Holy Ghost?' Asbury said. 

'Are you so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy Ghost?' the priest asked. 

'Certainly I've heard of the Holy Ghost,' Asbury said furiously, 'and the Holy Ghost is the last thing I'm looking for!' 

'And He may be the last thing you get,' the priest said..." - O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill" (archetypal O'Connor)

"I purposed in spirit when I mounted the ocean,/ I determined to do or die." Beowulf  (quoted by an indecisive teenager)

"... gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." - Albert Camus, The Stranger (The only primer on existential nihilism you'll ever need to read.)

This whole essay.

"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that encahanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (I shed quite a few tears at the end of this book, many more than I did when I finished Winnie-the-Pooh. I felt a something similar at the end of Dead Poets Society, but Pooh Corner effects more a nostalgic longing.)

Quotes on stories, reading, and writing:

DONALD RAY POLLOCK: And so when I started out I also didn't know too much about how to begin, and so I would type out stories that I liked on a typewriter.

SCOTT SIMON: You mean type other stories out?

POLLOCK: Yes, type other writer's stories.You know, I'd never been in a writing workshop or anything and I–you know, it just seemed to be a way to get closer to figuring out how other writers did what they did. So I did that quite a bit.

...

SIMON: What would you learn by typing?

POLLOCK: I think one of the principal things I learned from typing the stories out was how dialog works. Also just, you know things about structure and you know, I could read a story, but I really wouldn't see how it worked until I got closer to it. (Dialogue quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit. I once tried to do this, typing out short stories by other authors.) 

"The poem is more something we find than something we make." - Mark Doty

"To read well, we must become as little children." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader" 

"Though fiction creates its own world, the book also is an objective presence in our world; the world becomes flesh and dwells among us, and the question must be asked whether this incarnate word is doing mischief or good." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader"

"The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think the search for perfection.... We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire....

Politics, medicine, ecology, and jurisprudence are our efforts to repair the damage.... When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy that we feel between ourselves and perfection.... 

... We are driven by who knows what -- maybe it's the Holy Ghost -- to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, and to transcend it.... Myth is one version of this effort." - Thomas Howard (brother of Elisabeth Elliot), "Myth: Flight to Reality"

"... we have decided (sometime in the Renaissance it was and we finished the job in the eighteenth century) to recreate the world. It's a very small one now, limited as it is by microscopes and telescopes and computers, and asphalts parking lots at MacDonald's hamburger stands. And it's a horror. It is, above all, boring, for mystery has fled from it. We have announced to anyone who cares to listen -- and somehow one imagines that angels and elves aren't that enthralled by the information -- that we can explain everything....

By the eighteenth century the myth became sovereign that the analytic and rational capacity is absolutely adequate for unscrambling the mystery of the universe. Somewhere in the process the gods fled. The irony is that in the very effort of modern art to disentangle human experience from the transcendent, human experience turned to ashes." - Thomas Howard, "Myth: Flight to Reality"

"Once upon a time" is no time.... In reality... it means "at all times, in all places." - Erik Christian Haugaard, "Portrait of a Poet: Hans Christian Andersen and His Fairy Tales"

"God... sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..." - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind 

"But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is." - the author of this blog post

Accende Lumen Sensibus

This morning I decided to listen to the Latin hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus." The hymn is a prayer to the Holy Spirit asking that He visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses. The melismatic Gregorian chant conveyed a warm, organic, spiritual feeling. Unbeknownst to me, "Veni" was a prelude to a greater piece of music, one which would fulfill the prayer of the hymn: Mahler's Symphony no. 5.

Yes, I listened to all 70 glorious minutes.

There is an ineffability about music; whatever I will say in this post will fall terribly short of what I intend to convey. In fact, this is the greatest difficulty of talking about music. There's a sort of cliche that music "says the unsayable," or that "music reveals to a man an unkown realm... a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing (E.T.A. Hoffman, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit)," or yet: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture"; or, in the words of composer Aaron Copland (who happened to be a good friend of conductor Leonard Bernstien): "Is there a meaning to music? My answer would be 'Yes.'... 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'" Nevertheless, this is a blog post, and I must use words  – I can't dance for the life of me.

What I wish to focus on is the fourth movement of the symphony, the famous Adagietto:

Watch the video. You won't ever regret it.

 This movement is unusual for a symphony, since it employs only the strings and a harp. Like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, the Adagietto is associated with sadness and death, Mahler's piece having been conducted by Bernstein during Robert Kennedy's funeral Mass and Barber's having been broadcast over and played at the funerals of such figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Princess Diana, and the two pieces also bear musical similarity. However, some recent studies indicate that Mahler never intended to convey feelings of melancholy. Rather, Mahler wrote the Adagietto as a love letter to his eventual wife, Alma Schindler. Mahler certainly didn't intend to have the movement push thirteen, fourteen minutes, since at the 1904 premiere of the symphony the Adagietto was played in seven minutes under his baton. Perhaps a reason for the gradual slowing of performances of the piece is that the piece, marked adagietto, a term which denotes a faster tempo than adagio, is also confusingly marked "Sehr langsam" (very slow) and in the score there are musical directions like "zurueckhaltend" (held back) and "zoegernd" (hesitantly).  (The difference between Elgar's 12-minute recording of his Serenade for Strings and the longer recordings of later conductors is a similar phenomenon, although Elgar's take on his famous Larghetto clocks in at the standard six minutes.)

But enough about the technical details. The Adagietto under Bernstein's baton is the most beautiful experience I've had with a piece of music in a long time. By the end of the video, I had experienced that "inexpressible longing" which music accomplishes in a musician or listener, and in the inevitable subsequent letdown I was walking as if in a trance, breathing heavily, shaking my head intermittently, and wiping tears that rimmed my eyes. The last time I had experienced something similar with a piece of music was when I listened to Eric Whitacre's "The Seal Lullaby"; the last concert piece that brought me to tears was the under-appreciated "Adagio di molto" from Sibelius' Violin Concerto. To be honest, I had listened to this piece multiple times before but was never greatly affected; in fact, the delayed effect of a music piece happens fairly often with me: Bach's solo violin sonatas and concertos, Brahms' Violin Concerto, Beethoven's late string quartets, and Shostakovich's quartets all took some time in affecting me (they aren't "cheap shots" like the banal Canon in D, the overly sentimental Meditation from "Thais," or the excessively bombastic finale of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I have to admit is still an awesome work regardless).The Adagietto has to be one of the closest copies of Plato's form of Beauty. The Adagietto conveys a greater sense of warmth, organicity, and spirituality than does "Veni Creator Spiritus," at least to my ears. Of course, they are two extremely different works – one is a concert piece, the other a sung prayer – but to me they related to each other by the Adagietto being the answer to the prayer that the Spirit  "visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses." Experiences like this are what make music worthwhile (or what makes life not "a mistake," as Nietzsche would have it). "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins says; I think Mahler's Fifth is charged with just a bit more of God's grandeur.

(As I wrote this, Mahler's Eighth was playing in the background. It may be charged with even more grandeur.)

The Gospel According to Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter is undoubtedly one of the best works of fiction I have ever read. It chronicles the life of a girl in middle-ages Norway from her childhood to her death. A pretty unappealing narrative prima facie, I know; but in the sprawling, sometimes dark storyline underlies a coherent tale of dramatis personae -- emphasis on dramatis. It's like Shakespeare in prose: that good, unless you dislike Shakespeare.
The Norway of Kristin Lavransdatter's time was a country of Catholicism, mingled with a bit of pagan superstition (having lived in the Philippines for the majority of my life, I find much to relate with), and the driving force of the story is (to over-simplify) sin. These lead to magnificent lines of dialogue about guilt and confession. Some lines induced those "chills-down-your-spine" that make reading worthwhile. And I quote (from Tina Nunally's wonderful translation):

"Kristin," the priest tried to lift her face, "you mustn't think about this now! Think about God, who sees your sorrow and your remorse. Turn to the gentle Virgin Mary, who takes pity on every sorrowful –"
"Don't you see? I drove another human being to take her own life!"
"Kristin," the priest said sternly. "Are you so arrogant that you think yourself capable of sinning so badly that God's mercy is not great enough?..." (page 381)

"Help me, Gunnulf," begged Kristin. She was white to the very edge of her lips. "I don't know my own will."
"Then say: Thy will be done," replied the priest softly.... (page 467)

"... I understood that the torment of God's love will never end as long as men and maidens are born on this earth.... And I was afraid of myself because I, an impure man, has served at his altar, said mass with impure lips, and held up the Host with impure hands. And I felt that I was like the man who led his beloved to a place of shame and betrayed her."
... "I can't, Gunnulf, I can't – when you talk like that, then I realize that I can never..."
...
"Kristin. You can never settle for anything less than the love that is between God and the soul." (page 472)

(Kristin's mother:) "What did you think... when you found out that Kristin and I – the two people you held dearest and loved the most faithfully – we had both betrayed you as much as we possibly could?"  

(Kristin's father:) "I don't think I thought much about it."

"But later on, when you kept thinking about it, as you say you did..."  

"I thought about all the times I had betrayed Christ." (page 578)

There are more, similar passages in the remaining 600 pages of the book. I also have to say that passages like these aren't the bulk of the book. There are narratives and dialogues of adventure, romance, humor, and  (what else?) politics. All part of a balanced diet.

Snapshot

I woke up this morning, picked up my phone, and on it read a bit of Chesterton's Saint Thomas Aquinas, after which I ate breakfast, and, while drinking coffee, read the first chapter of David E. Holwerda's Jesus and Israel, then started my application to UChicago, and to end the first half of the day I scrubbed the bathroom floor (for the first time in my life). My forearms are still throbbing.

I don't know why I wrote this down. Maybe it's because I excessively desire the life of the mind and so often get slapped in the face by the life of the body.

Thanks for nothing, Marcion.

Some Advice? from Screwtape

My family opened the first chapter of The Screwtape Letters last week for our daily morning read. I had read Screwtape before and didn't give my full attention to the read. At least, not until this part came up:

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life". But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modem investigation".

Well, that was timely. Economics is my first choice course at DLSU, and I really haven't read science (does attempting to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions count?). Lately, I've been wondering whether I should shift my interests to the sciences after realizing the apparently bleak situation of the liberal arts. Consequently, I've given economics, which still isn't a hard science, a high place among my preferred courses. (I've also finally decided to take up physics after a month of wondering whether I could escape high school without it.)

My mom was laughing for a good while, and I was shaking my head, shocked that Screwtape seemed to know my situation. (Perhaps that means another thing, too.)

And Other Etceteras

A friend shared an essay with me, and it's simply pure gold. It can be found here.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. The essay consists of various blunders written by college freshman the author taught. The collected malapropisms and misspellings are expertly paced, but I still found myself clutching my stomach.

If you don't have time for the whole thing, here are some hilarious highlights:

"During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged."

"Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras... Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. "

"Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients. Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic."

"The enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare wrote a book called Candy that got him into trouble with Frederick the Great."

"Among the goals of the chartists were universal suferage and an anal parliment. Voting was done by ballad."

"Germany invaded Poland, France invaded Belgium, and Russia invaded everybody."

The author, Anders Hendriksson, has also written a book Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students. A short article on Wikipedia gives some golden samples:

"Prehistoricle people spent all day banging rocks together so they could find food. This was the Stoned Age." 

"Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. The Nile was a river that had some water in it. Every year it would flood and irritate the land." 

"Magellan circumcised the globe." 

"John Calvin Klein translated the Bible into American so that the people of Geneva could read it." 

Hydra's Too Strong

Got rejected by UP. That was fast. Time for others.

I Begin Facing the Hydra

Just completed an application for the University of the Philippines College Admission Test. UP was never a first choice, but, hohoho, it's the first college I've applied to. We'll see how I do on the test (which, unlike most of the other admissions tests here, includes two sets of Filipino).
One down, but a lot more to follow. And the only fiery torch I have is to finish all the exams and applications. But it's exciting, nevertheless.

Updated Summer Reading List

I didn't anticipate the busyness of this summer, but, still, to have read about ten books over two months is pretty good, considering my abysmal reading rate at the moment. I added and subtracted from my last book list, and I very likely won't be adding any more, since school year starts next year.

Final list (unless nothing short of a miracle happens and I finish some other book before the end of the week):
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body?
3. John Currid - Against the Gods
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin
9. Truman Capote - In Cold Blood. If all nonfiction were written this well, my fiction books would lie dusty.
10. O. Henry - The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories. I read it sparingly, since twist endings lose effectiveness when taken in rapid doses.
EDIT: Miracle happened. I finished another book since this post. I bought a hardcover edition of Leif Enger's So Young, Brave, and Handsome at Booksale (along with the Capote book above).  It was an easy read, hence, my fast pace. The book itself was a disappointment, in light of Enger's first book, Peace Like a River. It felt forced and unbelievable, which Peace Like a River could easily have been. That said, it still is a better book than the usual trash paperback.

What I left unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. 62% through, about 600 pages. EDIT: If you consider Kristin as a trilogy, similar to LotR (this is how many publishers go on about publishing this work), then I've finished two more books: The Wreath and The Wife; but you may count that as a desperate attempt to look impressive.

Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I stopped when I had to read through the uncomfortable cross-dressing incident, but I've added it to my required reading this quarter.

Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories. I think I've read a bit more than half of the stories in here, but nearly all are worth rereading, and I've done that multiple times. Moved to required reading.

Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. No surprise that I didn't finish this. I enjoyed the quinque viae section, but it's only about 0.2% of the whole Prima Pars (First Part). It's the most daunting book I've ever picked up.

G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology. Kindle stopped reading PDFs, and so, I haven't made progress whatsoever, which is a pity, since the subject matter was becoming quite interesting.

(something I forgot to add to my list last time) Existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's Practice in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death. I started reading both on the same day; I initially enjoyed Sickness Unto Death, which deals with despair and, eventually, original sin, more than Practice, which, after a not short first part, deals with Kierkegaard's famous leap of faith (or leap to faith), but reading about despair is not as uplifting as discussions about belief and faith; hence, I've read more of Practice than Sickness.

I dropped a few books altogether. I hope to improve next summer, but that's not likely.

Gojira

I paid to see Godzilla and Heisenberg, and there isn't much of either. So much for that.


It wasn't bad. The last few scenes were quite good. The first full shot of Godzilla and the blast of his roar seemed worth the nearly hour-long wait, but action was lacking, to my mind.

I -- and, I'm sure, many others -- wanted something like Pacific Rim. We got some of it, but whenever the action started getting interesting, we have the puny little humans closing their windows or the scene shifting to somewhere else on the Pacific.

I'd give it something like a B.

But I really hope the next Gojira film will be like Pacific Rim. (Mechagodzilla?)

Summer Reading

Reading has more or less consistently been a major activity for me during summer. I remember when I was about nine or ten, spending about five hours or more on my bed, zipping through all seven Harry Potter, all seven Narnia books, and a few other inconsequential paperbacks. It was during that summer that I set a reading record for myself: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix's 800+ pages in three days. The closest I've come since to meeting that pace was the summer after Harry Potter: Paolini's 800-page Brisingr in four days. I remember being severely disappointed with not having broken or at least met the record. Now, it takes me about a week to finish a 200 page book. But that's really because I read many more books simultaneously now -- which may or may not be a good thing.

I've tried to keep my list a bit more varied than what is usual for me, but it's not much of an improvement. But there is improvement, nonetheless.

So far I've read:
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars. Agh, what a terrible way to start off summer reading for an antisocial homeschooler. But it was a pretty good book. Green seems much more honest in dealing with cancer than I think any other author would be.
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body? Peter Whimsey (and Bunter and the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Parker and the lot) gave me one particular impression: hey, look! it's Bertie Wooster (and Jeeves, etc.) walking around England solving crimes.
3. John Currid - Against the Gods. The first book really to give my list a sense of variety. Against the Gods is a short, recently-published book that introduces Currid's arguments for polemic in the Old Testament. It was a good read to interrupt all the New Testament reading I'd been doing.
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game. A rare time in my post-preadolescence (haha) in which I read through a book longer than 300 pages in roughly six hours. (You'll be shocked at how many times the characters use the word "fart".)
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness. I enjoyed this better than I did the first (Whose Body?). Yet more Wooster-Jeeves dynamic, except that Whimsey goes to America without Butler.
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner. A rare gem in modern fiction. To my mind, it transcends nearly everything wrong with contemporary lit.
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen. One of the two books I've finished today (yay!). I love it, especially since it tells the story of two boys from their late high school to immediate post-college life. Of course, following C.S. Lewis' advice, I really should read it again, maybe when I'm well past college, but for the moment, I love it.
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin. The other book that I've finished today. Finally, I can say that I've read a book of Norse mythology, and not just World Book and Wikipedia. (Of course not original text, but still.)

There still remain, started but unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (which really is a trilogy, of which I have finished the first book), G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology (about 80 pages into this 1000-page book), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I've defended Twain against those who would accuse him of racism, but I've never really read him, save through shameful *gasp* abridged versions, so this should be good. [And the explanatory note on Twain's "infamous" use of the n-word is deftly dealt with in the opening chapter. Vindicated.]), Beowulf (I've read an almost hilariously shortened version from my World Lit, but it does good to read the full. I think it's J. Hall's translation.), Veronica Roth's Divergent (snail's-pace reading, not horribly excited about it), Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories (I don't read it frequently, but when I do O'Connor never disappoints.), and Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica (or Theologiae, since I'm also trying to read it in Latin. I can read the original with some help from Wiktionary, and I can read the translation with relative ease, since I've read Chesterton's biography of the guy and multiple layman philosophical surveys. Not that I'll claim to completely understand what he's saying. [At least it isn't Talmud]).

I probably won't finish some of those books (Summa, in full, is about 3000 pages), and I'll definitely be reading others over the course of the summer.

(And, it really isn't as varied as I'd hoped for. Oh, well.)

Rereading Tolkien

"Who's watched the movies more than he or she's read the book?"
And, of course, I have to raise my hand.

(Not that the movie trilogy veers too far from the original content, at least not like the mutilated adaptation which is the Hobbit trilogy.)

Rereading The Return of the King has made me realize the richness of Tolkien's narrative, something which, when I was young, I missed.

Basically, it's awesome.

Ordinary Books

But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is.

Great Books

"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..."
~Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Well, rats.

Iced Tea

ICED TEA or IN MEMORY OF A MISERABLE ORDEAL

In a restaurant, the name of which I do not care to remember, I experienced what might be called the worst of my trials. I suppose I should have counted it joy, all of it, but I don’t think it was one of those “divers temptations”. (I think it was really waiters’ temptations, but that’s currently being debated by scholars.)  The prophets and priests might call it one of the seven deadly sins – gluttony, to be exact – but one cannot rightly say so. I do not consider myself guilty; I was a victim, not a perpetrator.

               

I was then about half my current age. It was a buffet. I had been to buffets before and never had any problems with eat-all-you-cans, but, up to this particular visit, I had never been told No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double. You know how easily these rules can latch on to and settle in the mind of a child, and I, despite my budding brilliance, was no exception to this phenomenon.

            I cannot recall what food was served at the buffet. What I can recall, with vivid horror, is the iced tea.

The Devil can use the good things of life to his own purposes. I considered and still do consider iced tea a good drink. If there isn’t coffee available, iced tea is a perfectly good second choice for me. But after visiting that restaurant I didn’t want any iced tea for a while.

There I was, having eaten all I could, and there was iced tea in a dewy, cold glass. I consumed the iced tea in rapid swigs.

           

There were now no leftovers on my plate, and I was perfectly content. But, lo and behold, there came a waiter, arms full with glasses and utensils and a pitcher or two of iced tea. Knowing that I could easily drink more, I wasn’t upset when he refilled my glass. And it was consumed, my second glass of the day, and once again, no leftovers.

            My parents were chatting, and I remained a content little kid. I sat there quietly, seen and not heard. Then the ordeal really began, for there swooped in, like a fallen angel, another waiter, and poured a generous serving of iced tea into my glass. My cup ran over. But No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double, and I drank it down, slower than I had previously done, with grave seriousness.

             Now I began to feel some discontent. Surely this was a trick that restaurant managers used to squeeze double pay out of poor unsuspecting customers, but I was proud and stoic. I wouldn’t complain to my parents.

             I was given a respite, but eventually another waiter, in no way less sadistic than the others, refilled that accursed glass. If I had been more brilliant, I would have said “Waiter! Thing of evil! – waiter still, if man or devil!” Sadly, I was not so poetic, but you can imagine my anguish.

             Nevertheless, I did drink, very, very slowly. My stomach began protesting, but what could I do? I was an innocent, helpless victim of the evil restaurant bureaucracy. If ever I felt like a martyr, it was then.

            But you can guess what happened next. Yes, that glass – the exact antipode of the sangréal! – was refilled. Tears rimmed my eyes, as icy dew rimmed the mouth of the glass.

            There sat my parents, my brother, and my sister. Nobody cared, but they really couldn’t be blamed for that; I was too proud to tell them about my trial.

           

Maybe one of the great bowls of wrath had been poured out, and most of it fell on me – or on my little glass – and the rest most definitely didn’t fall on the people around me.

            I cannot imagine how I managed to gulp the iced tea down, but I have immense respect for my younger self. I’m sure it took me at least five minutes, and I don’t recall ever going to the comfort room.

Immense respect.

I’ve never since felt the weight of five glasses of iced tea plus a buffet lunch in my stomach, although I’m sure my gastrointestinal capacity is just as capable today.

It was at this point that my mother remarked at how many glasses of iced tea I was able to drink, and the dawn of a horrible feeling of realization crept into the horizon. I told her that Of-course-I-had-to-finish-all-the-glasses-of-iced-tea-because-No-Leftovers-or-Else-You-Pay-Double.

And she laughed.

The buffet principle apparently didn’t apply to drinks.

Everyone else had joined in the laughing by now, except my brother, who was too young to understand.

And I was compelled to laugh along. What else could I do?

After calling a taxi and getting in it, we continued laughing. I was laughing with one hand on my stomach and half my posterior off the seat because of the unbearable nausea.

               

It didn’t apply to drinks. Oh, what needless pain I bore, all because I wasn’t told that it didn’t apply to drinks. I blame my mother.

On the Profanity of Pilate

It is a beautiful thing that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane. And it is even more beautiful that even the profane can be used towards the sacred.

Pilate found it funny to mock the Jews through their king -- put a crown, dress him up in robes, nail a "sign ... over his head [saying 'This is the Jesus, the King of the Jews'] where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh (Buechner, Frederick, The Gospel as Fairy Tale)," and, ultimately, kill him. Profanity in its ugliest form.

But, haha, it was not the will of God to let Pilate's verdict stand. The profanity of the Son of God was overturned. And there's, perhaps, the most sacred thing we can read of -- nay, partake of.

On the Reading of the Bible

"I'm particularly grateful that I was allowed to read the Bible as I read my other books, to read it as story, that story which is a revelation of truth. People are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they are taught about it, and I'm grateful that I was able to read the Book with the same wonder and joy with which I read The Ice Princess or The Tempest."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking On Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

In Praise of O'Connor

Gene Edward Veith, Jr. calls her "a writer of uncompromising theological orthodoxy" yet "unorthodox in her fictional style." Indeed, I must blame Veith for introducing me to the southern gothic writer Flannery O'Connor in the first place -- and for adding another entry to my favorite authors list. (You might as well blame Veith for "making" me read a lot of what I've read in the past three, four years.)
According to Robert Drake, O'Connor's "overriding strategy is always to shock, embarrass, even outrage rationalist readers." (Haha, I must be a rationalist.) My first read of A Good Man is Hard to Find honestly disgruntled me, and ever since, she has never failed to leave me dissatisfied with the way things are, and that, to my mind, is where the beauty of her writing lies.
When Paul Engle, her teacher at the University of Iowa, first met her, he could not understand a word she said, on account of her native Georgian dialect. I felt the same as Mr. Engle. I couldn't grasp what she was saying, but I knew it was something profound. A read through her first collection of short stories gave me a better picture of what she was saying, and it was an ugly, grotesque, and utterly beautiful picture.
Her stories, as Veith says, are "both funny and shocking." They will easily off-put an immature or uncritical reader, because each story is quite dark, but because of that darkness, the glorious light that flows from her pen is made all the more striking. Her characters will make readers uncomfortable (they have often made me uncomfortable), but that is simply because she is willing, unlike so many modern and contemporary Christian authors, to portray human nature and sin in all of its ugliness. The landscape she paints isn't that of bright, sunny optimism, but that of fallen humanity, and it's just about the most grotesque landscape one can find in Christian literature
But what is much more striking -- although this aspect is often under, but never far from, the surface -- is how she accomplishes the portrayal of God's grace into her writing. She leaves readers "reeling."
An example might be her profound use of irony through profanity. It is no secret that godless people are very likely to invoke God, and O'Connor exploits this brilliantly. In her novel Wise Blood, a character tries to run away from God and goes about seeking the most evil people to hang out with, but he finds himself with a boy who incessantly curses: "Sweet Jesus." And the character finds himself reminded again and again of the reality of God. The "where can I flee from your presence?" reimagined and made much more striking.
Another example is her masterful use of racial tension, for which she has sadly been called racist. In one short story, a man and his grandson go to a big nearby town. The grandfather constantly warns the boy against "niggers," but the boy is much more sensible than that. When they get lost in the town, the boy asks help from a Negro lady, whom he finds utterly beautiful, earning his grandfather's teasing. Eventually, a conflict arises in which the grandfather denies that the boy is his grandson. The grandfather is unable to fix the mess, and the boy doesn't want to. It isn't until they get to a white neighborhood with a lone statue of a black boy that they are reconciled, as they see how they have mutually rejected each other.

O'Connor isn't a Christian author in the sense that one usually thinks of. She was a Christian, in but not of the world. (She once stated: "I write the way I do because and only because I am Catholic." Her faith might not be obvious at first read, but you eventually realize that if she hadn't that faith she would never have written so.) It must be admitted, though, that she has had a much more secular readership than Christian. That really shouldn't be the case. We need more writers like her who remind us of human depravity, and we need more readers who are willing to be reminded of it. Even during her lifetime, she knew this, saying that "most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal." I believe they're just absolutely beautiful.

Short Story

This story was my entry to the University of the Philippines Literary Society's Creative Writing Competition last February. It won first place for fiction.
Aside from fixes of a few clerical errors which were pointed out to me, the story is unedited. (Unless someone has tampered with it behind my back.) 
(This was my first shot at serious writing after about two years. I'm quite happy with how it turned out.)

THE LAST PAGAN

“Who is it? What do you want?”

“Uh… I have a message for Professor H–”

“I am he. Just wait; I shall open the door.”

The Professor rose from his bed, unlocked the door, and stared, amazed, for outside stood one like the messenger of the gods. His hair curled wildly, and his face was firm like stone. He wore nothing but a cloak – which the Professor recognized to be a chlamys – and a petasus, a sun cap, and on his left arm rested a short wooden staff around which two serpents entwined. On the staff’s top was a pair of wings. The Professor immediately recognized the staff as Hermes’ caduceus, which was often confused with the rod of Asclepius – but he knew so much better. Excited, the Professor lowered his gaze, but was disappointed: the man was barefooted; there were no winged sandals.

“Are you Hermes? Are you sent from Olympus?” the Professor asked.

“Here’s the message.” The man gave the Professor an envelope. “Good day, sir.” He quickly left the hall outside the Professor’s room, the folds of the chlamys rippling, his bare feet making barely making a sound.

The dumbstruck Professor remained at his door. He eventually found the sense to follow the emissary god, but found no trace of him when he exited the hall. He examined the envelope and found nothing written on it. He opened it with a fingernail. He found a small note inside. “Administrator’s office. 3 PM,” he read, and inhaled deeply when he saw the signature: “Zeus, Lord of Olympus.”

“Shall my faith indeed become sight?” he mumbled to himself, as was his habit. “Shall I finally be vindicated?” The village’s clock tower told him that the time was about nine in the morning. “Phoebus Apollo has set forth, and his chariot burns strong,” he muttered. He suddenly realized that he was wearing only jogging pants, which he wore only when he felt very lazy – hence the pants were the legwear which he wore most often. The Professor returned to his room and dressed himself properly.

Three hours later, he ate at the village’s Common Hall. Its facade was held up by beautiful stone columns, in the style of 18^th-century neoclassical architecture, and little expense – so he was told – was spared with what was under its roof. Such were most of the structures of the village, and they delighted the Professor when he first moved into the village three months before. Initially he had conversed with friendly, welcoming people at the Hall, but, having found no other person who had even the faintest notion of the ancient gods, he now sat at a table which had been recommended to him as a place where one could eat in silence.

Afterwards, he usually rested on a wooden bench reading a book in the village’s huge, immaculate field for the afternoon’s length. The field was so beautiful that the Professor, upon his first sight of it, exclaimed, “Surely this is Elysium on earth!” Stone-paved paths cut through it. There was a grove in which many relaxed during hot days, and there were four fountains (godless, sadly). Birds flew freely, and many field animals which were not considered pests skittered on the grounds. After some time, the Professor would doze off, wake up after a few hours, and return to his room to prepare for dinner. Such was his daily routine, which was broken only on one day each week; on that day he would meet with a representative from the village’s administration to talk – mostly about life in the village and occasionally about the gods – and these conversations would be recorded. He disliked these sessions immensely.

Today, the Professor sat on a bench near the field’s lake, or the basin in the ground which had been a lake. The village’s administration had reckoned too many drowning incidents and had had it emptied of water. The village was quiet, as it nearly always was; its population was less than two hundred. The Professor found that he had not brought a book and decided to idle while waiting eagerly for 3 PM. A man was standing at the basin’s edge, holding a fishing rod. At length, another man, the much-disliked village doctor, walked up to him, saying, “Hey, John. Caught any fish?”

The would-be fisherman glared at the doctor. “Seriously, doc, sometimes I think you’re crazy. And I’m not John.”

The Professor, tired from impatient excitement, eventually slept. When he woke, the great clock read 3 PM flat, and he immediately made for the village’s main office. The Professor could not understand why the administration called its buildings and officers by terms unsuited for municipalities. He thought that the main office would have been much more aptly called “town hall”, and that the Administrator should have been dubbed the “mayor”, but he had never bothered to ask about the matter.

 The main office was built in the style of ancient Greek temples, and its portico was coated so as to give the impression of a marble-like sheen. The Professor ascended the stairs to the pillared doorway.  He was not greeted by the receptionist upon entering, or it might be better said that the receptionist was not able to greet him. She snored instead. “Her mouth looks like a cave,” the Professor mumbled. Seeing nobody else, he treaded on. The walls of the hall leading to the Administrator’s office were lined with carved pillars. “They try so desperately to imitate the pagans,” Professor mused as he approached the sanctum sanctorum. “They’ll build the forums, the temples, the shrines, but they’ll do it without the gods.” He added, with heavy sadness: “The gods are neither welcome nor able to come back.”

He reached the door of the most holy place and, breathing in anticipation, opened it. In front of him was a large desk, and behind it was a huge man – or god. He seemed to the Professor to be the exact likeness of the great Phidian Zeus at Olympia. His skin was like ivory. He wore an unshaven beard, and his unkempt hair coiled madly, just like Hermes. His eyes gazed at – and, perhaps, into – the Professor with an unsettling yet unfrightening stone-like firmness, again like Hermes. (Perhaps all the gods are like that.) His colossal frame rested majestically on a great throne-like chair with a wide window behind it.

The Professor stared silently at the figure before him, holding his breath in awe. At length, he realized that he was not doing the proper thing and immediately bowed down, stuttering, “Oh, great Zeus, Lord of Olympus, I – I beg you: forgive me of my foolishness. I wa – I was overcome by sheer wonder. You – you truly are as great as the… as the image-smiths of old portrayed you.”

The other responded in a voice like deep, rumbling thunder, quiet and intense: “I cannot forgive you.”

The Professor prostrated himself even more, clamped his eyes shut in fear, and remained in that humble position for a minute. Had he looked up, he would have seen a dark thunderhead approaching outside the window.

Suddenly, the huge man began to laugh thunderously, and Professor imagined that the room shook. The Professor looked up, confused.

After a long laugh, the other said, “I cannot forgive you, for there is not one fault in your actions.”

The Professor, still prostrate in obeisance, stared stupidly as the god’s laughter waned to chuckling.

“Come, get up,” said Zeus, having ceased from laughter. He stood up slightly from his throne and pointed to a chair in front of the desk. “Have a seat.”

The Professor rose and walked slowly to the seat.

As soon as the Professor sat, the god sank back into his chair and said, “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

The Professor did not reply. He was still giddy with wonder.

“Did you watch the news last night?” asked Zeus. When the other did not reply, the god tried again to start a conversation: “What do you think our chances are next game?”

Still the Professor was, except for loud, conspicuous breathing, silent.

“Would you like anything? Beer perhaps?” the god asked.

The Professor disregarded the offer. Finally regaining composure, he said, “It shocks me that the Administrator of this village is the King of the Gods.”

The other sank deeper into his throne-chair and was silent.

“That the Lord of Olympus was sitting and is sitting on a throne in my very village – this is too great a thing for me to comprehend. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, for the village’s architecture declares the glory of the gods,” mumbled the Professor happily.

Zeus began chuckling, a soft gurgle which swelled and blasted into thunderous laughter. “Man, this is better than I imagined.”

“What?”

“I – hahaha – ain’t the – heeheehee – Administrator.”

            “But – but this is his office – the Administrator’s, I mean.”

“Course it is.” His laughter softened. “It’s the best place to meet in this dump – privacy and all that shit.”

At this, the Professor, displeased with the god’s use of the expletive (for had never so much as used “crap” in his life), frowned slightly; he had always expected the gods to be of a better class, one which employed his idea of a refined manner of speech. “O Zeus, be not angry, but it would gladden me that you refrain from using such words during our conversation.”

“I’m sorry,” he said unapologetically, and his laughter resurged.

Off-put by the faux apology, Professor asked, “Where is he then, the Administrator?”

Zeus (or the person who claims to be Zeus, the Professor thought as doubts entered his mind) snorted, and it pealed across the room like a loud, rude fart. “The Administrator ain’t here. He’s gone, and he won’t ever come back.”

“What do you mean?” cried the Professor. “Have you done something to him?”

“Sure as hell I done something to him.”

“What did you do to him?”

The god got off the throne-chair, and the Professor saw how tall he was: nearly seven feet. The man sank to his knees, as if he were in a confession box, his chest still well above the desk. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he confessed mockingly. “I have just killed a man. Took his gun, put it to his head. I pulled the trigger; now he’s dead.” There was no a tone of remorse in his voice; it bore the insane pride of a madman. Lightning flashed dramatically in the sky outside the window.

“What?”

“Said I couldn’t do what I wanted to do; against the rules, he said. Well, sod the rules. He took out his gun – beautiful little thing – and pointed at me, but I’m too quick. Wonder what he has to say about the rules now. Haha.”

“You cannot be serious!”

The man stood up quickly and shouted, “Damm straight I’m serious!” His stone-firm eyes glared. Thunder pealed.

The Professor sat quietly, avoiding the other’s intense gaze. The thought entered his mind that the huge person could easily do the same thing to him. He scanned the room for traces of the murder. Peeking behind the god, he saw that the head of the throne-like chair was splattered with some blood. After some time, he asked in a low tone, “Where is the body?”

The man pointed at the open window behind his chair.

“You pushed him out of it – defenestrated him,” the Professor stated, breathing heavily.

The other grinned slightly. “Take a look,” he said, and led the Professor to the window.

The Professor peered nervously out the window. Just outside lay the dead, sprawled body of the Administrator lying face down. A puddle of blood trickled from the head, staining his disheveled black hair. “You have not taken away anything from him – his clothing or anything else – have you?” asked the Professor. He hastily added: “Aside from his life.”

The other shook his head. “I ain’t a thief.”

The Professor was disgusted. After five seconds, he withdrew from the window and returned to his chair. He stared at the floor in silent, breathless revulsion.

The other viewed the person he had murdered for a little longer, closed the window, and returned to his throne. “The guy was loud,” he said, as if this were a perfectly acceptable explanation. His voice, at least to the Professor’s ears, had become unlike rich thunder and, instead, was now horridly nasal, like an old, rusty guitar.

The Professor was now sure that this could not be the King of the Gods; this man (for he was now certain that he was a man) was absolutely mad. He demanded: “Who are you?”

The other man laughed again. “It’s a joke.”

“What?”

“A joke. I ain’t Zeus.”

“You surely aren’t him, for God’s sake!” the Professor furiously bellowed, now standing. “A guilty conscience needs no accuser, so they say, but you carry not one ounce of guilt; therefore I shall be your accuser! You are nothing like Zeus! You are a mess! You are an utterly detestable madman! You are a shameless blackguard! You have murdered a man who was done you no great harm. Your offense is rank; it stinks to heaven and to Hades! Cursed is the day you were born!” The Professor stopped for breath.

The other seemed indifferent towards the tirade. “Here, this is me.” He reached for his hair and removed it off his head; it was a wig. “Old mop, haha. Just did some stuff with it.” He was bald underneath. He did not remove the beard.

The Professor vaguely recognized him as one of the village custodians and did not know what to say.

The other man asked, “Want a beer?”

The Professor’s brows relaxed, and his mouth fell in astonishment. “Did you not hear me?”

The man loudly replied, “Sure as hell I heard you! What the hell, man? My mother ain’t got nothin’ on you.”

 “The guy has a fridge here,” muttered the man. “Keeps some beer.”

The Professor’s tongue loosened. “What was the joke that you were talking about?”

The other man opened a small refrigerator at the near corner. “What? Sorry, wasn’t listening.”

“The joke, what was it?”

“Oh, that. Heck, man, I’m not Zeus.”

“Is that it?”

“What?”

“You had me come here to adore you, and my doing so was amusing because you are not Zeus. Is that the joke?”

“Uh… well, that and the guy who dressed in the shit-ugly blanket – the Hermes guy.” He pulled out two crystalline bottles steaming from cold.

“Where is he, your accomplice?”

“What? Oh – dunno, rottin’ in hell, I guess.”

“Did you…?”

“Yes, Father, he’s dead, too.”

The Professor panted.

 “The Administrator wasn’t expected though. Apparently it’s against house rules to play jokes on patients. He wasn’t a nice guy anyway.”

“What?”

“I… uh… got your file and you were the craziest nut I’ve ever read about. I read a lot of patient files, but you take the cake. Just thought I’d have a good laugh. A good joke, you know. Sorry if it bothered yah, but I guess it isn’t too bad. Nobody seems to do shit here anyway – oh, sorry, you don’t like that word.

“Anyway, you got in here because you done the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen. Not just the usual. Your sacrifice thing at – where was it? – Greece? Damm! You crazy, man.” He placed the two beers on the table, after which he cursed and muttered, “Where’s the bottle opener?”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean by my getting in this place? I moved in here because I wished to.”

The man, finding the opener, asked, “You know what this place is, don’t yah?”

“It’s a village.”

The man’s face expressed disbelief for a moment, and he laughed, shaking his head. “You crazier than everybody else here, you know that? Heck, man, your brain’s a lost cause. They can’t do much with it no more.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a nuthouse, genius.”

The Professor blinked. “Do you mean a mental institution?”

The man, still laughing, nodded.

A terrible feeling of realization crept into the Professor, and it quickly engulfed and overcame him. He fell onto his chair and buried his head in his hands.

The other man opened one of the beers and took a swig.

“It’s a madhouse,” the Professor mumbled bitterly. Then, oblivious to everything else, he recounted, mumbling: “Last summer, I was enjoying a break that professors really should have, but don’t in reality. I went to Greece, to a temple, and I sacrificed, but I wasn’t able to complete it. Authorities arrived. Vandalism, they called it, or something of that sort. I wanted to defend myself, but nobody else wanted to – or some were willing, but not in the manner that I wished to be defended. Deportation came after a time. How terrible, isn’t it? I was the only man alive who had the sense – who’s sane enough – to use the temple for its original purpose, and they had me plea insanity. Authorities, indeed. I had sensed that there was something rotten in the state of the world, and these people confirmed it. For reasons I do not know – or cannot remember – I ended up here, in a madhouse. I recall that I moved in here of my own free will, thinking that this institution was something else, but I suppose they’ve done something to me – or I’ve done something to myself. It’s a madhouse. I’m in a madhouse.” After a few seconds, he added: “Because I am the only sane person in the world.”

The other man sniggered mid-drink, and beer spurt out of his nose. Then he laughed harder.

“Ridicule me, if you wish,” the Professor murmured. “The scoundrels did the same to me – nay, the world.” After a while, he understood another thing and mumbled, to himself and not to the other man, “Oh, that’s why he was called the Administrator.”

 “Here, man.” He opened the other beer and handed it to the Professor with his long arm. “C’mon, take it.”

Without looking up, the Professor received the beer. He immediately forgot his wretchedness, for he was fascinated with the sparkling, steaming bottle. The silvery glass was mostly opaque, and the brownness of the beer was barely visible. On it was engraved a peacock feather stretching from the neck to the bottom. Around it were flowing vines and more abstract designs, like old French Art Nouveau. There was no brand name. He rotated it, examining the artistry which was so rare and unexpected for a beer bottle. “It’s beautiful,” he muttered. He looked at the other man’s bottle, and it was just like his. The Professor put it to his lips and sipped.

The beer was revolting.

“By Olympus, what is this?” exclaimed the Professor, jerking the bottle away from his gagging mouth and spitting out what he could. “It’s horrible! Never in my life have I tasted something like it! It tastes like – like…” It tasted utterly like crap, but the Professor would not use such a word.

The other man understood and mercifully refrained from finishing the Professor’s sentence. “Takes a while to get used to, ’s all.”

The Professor saw that the man’s beer was nearly consumed. “You – you are able… to stomach it,” he said, astonished. “How?”

“Heck, man, it ain’t that bad.”

“I suppose you can only drink it because it’s just like everything inside you – rubbish.”

The other man scoffed.

The Professor slammed the bottle on the desk. “It’s a shame that such a beautiful work of craftsmanship should be used to hold such a vile thing. What evil things reside in the minds of crafty men! I am glad that I am not a deft man, lest I should find myself in league with these blackguards. Then again, I always find myself in league with no one else.”

The other man finished his beer with quick, rude gulps.

Examining the bottle again, the Professor said, “It’s rather like a whited sepulcher, isn’t it?”

“Huh… I’ve heard that expression before, whited sepulcher.” The other man, eyes shut tight, reaching into the deepest chambers of his insane mind to recall. After a few seconds of strenuous brainwork, he gave up. “Jesus, I can’t remember.”

The door was unexpectedly opened, and a girl, about first-grade age, hopped and skipped inside. “Hey! Who are you guys? Where’s daddy?” she demanded with the matter-of-fact demeanor common to all women.

Both men did not reply immediately, perhaps on account of the embarrassment common to all men when faced with a woman’s matter-of-fact-ness.

“Where is daddy?” the girl asked again. “Are you guys crinimals?” When neither responded, she said, “I saw some crinimals on the news last night, but Daddy doesn’t want me to watch news. He says it’s bad; too many bad people on the news. Are you crinimals? Did you do something to Daddy?”

The huge man found his voice first: “Do you wanna see Daddy, girl?”

The girl nodded, matter-of-fact-ness still on her face.

“For God’s sake, don’t bring her to the window,” the Professor whispered urgently.

“Come here, girl,” the other man said, ignoring the Professor’s plea.

The girl shook her head. “No, I don’t know if you’re a crinimal o’ not, but Daddy and Mommy and my teacher and my aunt and every growmup I knows says not trust strangers. You’re a stranger, and I think all strangers are crinimals.”

The man sighed and opened a drawer on his side of the desk, pulling something out. “I know where Daddy is. I can take you to him,” he said.

The girl stamped her foot. “No! You bring Daddy to me.” Then her face lit. “Or maybe I can just ask Miz Linda where he is. She always knows where Daddy is. She’s his… uh… sercet… uh… sercetrery.”

The Professor heard a click. “Good lord, no.”

“Oh wait, never mind. She’s busy,” the girl continued. “She’s always busy, so I don’t get to talk to her much. Maybe somebody else knows.”

“I know where he is, girl,” muttered the other man, and pop went the silenced gunshot.

As the girl fell, the Professor clutched his head, horrified.

The other man returned the gun, walked over to the girl, and picked her up, her blood dripping, and she was defenestrated. The man inexplicably sang “Ring-a-round the Rosie” in his horrible, nasal voice. The thick thunderhead now covered the sky, and rain began falling, washing the bloody bodies outside the window.

“What devil did you make a pact with? To which demon did you sell your soul?” The Professor’s voice seethed with grief, disgust, and loathing. He was mourning for her, a girl whose only dirge was a nursery rhyme, although he had only known of her three minutes before. No one else was around to grieve. His head was downcast, and tears rimmed his eyes.

Returning to his chair, the other man scoffed and asked, “Do you know them? Demons?”

The Professor was silent, still suffering.

“You much more psycho than I thought.” The man chuckled. “Hell, you know gods, you know demons. What else do you know?”

“I know a man who has tried to be both these things, both god and demon. He has failed in masquerading as one, and he has utterly succeeded in being the other.”

“Are you finishing that?” asked the other, pointing to the Professor’s unfinished beer.

“Oh, how I would that the gods had not fled!” the Professor lamented. “How great the loss of man because of his rejection of them, of their watchful eyes! They that sat on Olympus thought us fools, and we confirmed that.”

“I’m taking the beer; you ain’t listening.”

“That girl – I wonder where she is now.”

The man poured a mouthful of the awful beer into his mouth and gulped without a grimace. “You know, man,” he said. “You damm crazy.”

“I suppose I am damned to be crazy, and I am glad, if you and everyone else are the sane people in this world.”

The man shook his head, sniggering. “You really should hear yourself, man.”

The Professor could smell the man’s vile beer-tainted breath. “I do. What I wish is that I could hear nobody else.” He paused and then valiantly declared, “I wish to fly to the gods – to Elysium, if they be there; or to whichever realm they now rest.”

“Wait, wait. You sayin’ you wanna die?”

“What other way is there to flee?”

The man whistled loudly. “You crazy.”

“I would say the same to you.” He breathed deeply, knowing that he would be soon be unable to do so in body. “The gun, please.”

The man picked up the gun and offered it solemnly to the Professor. “You sure?” asked the man queasily. “Is there… uh… anything I can do to make you change your mind?”

“What? Would you like to convert me to the Church of the Good Joke?”

“I just think being in a nuthouse is better than being dead.”

“I have been in a madhouse my entire life, for the world is madhouse, and I am utterly sick of it. All the sane people aren’t in it – or they aren’t part of it.

“For more than half a century, I have been the only believer of the old gods, although I must confess to being a poor practitioner of my faith. The gods have done me neither wrong nor good, – or what people would say to be good –, but it has been a great deal better than believing in the gods of this age.

“Is the fault in man or is it in his gods? I do not know, and I do not care. What I do care about is flight: whether flight to the Meadows of Asphodel and the Lethe or to the happy rest of the Fields of Elysium, I do not know; it is for the sons of Asterion to judge.”

“You crazy.”

Both were silent for a time. The Professor recollected the events of his sad life.

After an eternity, the man asked, “Do you wanna do it yourself or should I?”

The Professor hesitated. “I wish to be noble enough to die by my own hand, as the noblest of men have done, but I have not the courage.”

“Shoulda drunk your beer,” the man muttered. The Professor’s bottle was now half empty – nobody in the room would have called it half full. “There’s still some more in the fridge if you…” The man’s voice remarkably died and left the sentence unfinished. The moment was much too grave, and even he knew that.

After a minute, the Professor sighed and said, “Fire the gun when I signal you to.”

The man grimly nodded.

The Professor stood and turned his face from the man. Like a stoic martyr, he walked to the spot where the girl was killed; the holy ground was marked where the trail of blood started. He heard the gun click. The rain had now swelled into a loud thunderstorm. “I hear the summons; the Lord of Olympus calls me.” He breathed deeply. “By Zeus and the Olympians and all that I hold dear beyond the walls of this wretched world!” He made a gesture with his hand, and so fell the last of the pagans.

The man walked to the body. “You crazy, man. You crazy.” The Professor’s face was one of a tired man to whom rest had been given – whether this was the good or bad kind of rest, the man could not tell. He picked up the body. “He’s crazy.” He dropped the Professor, and the body landed awkwardly sprawled on top of the Administrator and his daughter. The bodies of the three were washed, and there flowed a beautiful crimson-blue stream of blood and rainwater, but the man did not notice this. He closed the window and sank back into the throne-chair. He consumed what remained of the Profess­­or’s beer. “He’s damm crazy,” he muttered, shaking his head.

The man brought the gun with him as he left the office. The receptionist had now woken up due to the storm, and the man shot her. He exited the building and was drenched almost instantly. The cold, hostile rain pierced his skin, his bones, and his very soul, as if it carried a vindictive purpose, and, perhaps defiantly, he laughed.

And for the first time in decades, in centuries, in millennia, Olympus had risen to strike, in fire and water and lightning.

Ashes, ashes, they all fall down.