Royal Big Scam

"Another big blow to their reputations." 


Beautiful! And what, prey, exactly was that "reputation"?

The idea that crises might be endemic to the system, or that malpractice, corruption, fraud, rent-seeking, imperfect competition and externalities describe the usual functioning of markets rather than being the exception is not something we want to think about too deeply-and certainly not something we should teach the students. No, God forbid! 

Two friends who worked in the City had alerted me to this over a year ago saying that LIBOR, in comparison, was small potatoes. Of course, it will pass and the opportunity for asking some fundamental questions will go begging largely because the desire to ask those questions is lacking. 

Systemic risk, and all that. Better the devil you know. 

A lot is made of "third-world" corruption-and rightly so (even if one puts to one side the fact that a lot of the dictators in those tin-pot countries are backed by 'the West'). But, seriously, if one looks at the amounts involved here (not to mention all the shady dealings of the military-industrial complex) then we might be able to put things in some proportion. 

But hang on a mo. We're the good guys, ain't we, freedom, democracy, freedom, Je suis..

I think Stiglitz and Marquand are onto something here. Vast economic inequalities translate, eventually, into political inequalities, the one re-inforcing the other.

And this is an old point from the old political economy: how can there be political democracy if there isn't economic democracy (J.S.Mill; Dahrendorf). 

No, no, let's stick to the simpler models...I have some wheat, you have some corn; I like corn...

~~

Meanwhile..while the Rohingya are dying the towel-heads, the sand niggahs have come up with this. Priceless. If you've ever seen the Beverly Hillbillies you'll have an idea what these fuckers are all about.

With Czech & Greek Regards

At the end of time, there is no time.

No time to say what we meant, no words left to say where you are, still are, after all these burned hours in our lives.

At the end of time, me & you, because in the beginning.

'Two parallels
always meet
when we draw them ourselves.'

A line-random, flung out from nowhere: a tree is a thousand years old. There are levels of space, so things return, and time marks many directions: absence, homelessness,..the homecoming of the heart. After a long time you return, to find, what you always knew, that you have crossed too many bridges, lost too many words and turns of phrases.

The gestures of your hand have nothing to do with your face.  

~

In the early morning, still only half-awake, you read some Merwin..or late at night, when the day is done and all are asleep, you let the words float back to you. Words and books, for all their thousand year strength and resilience are as fleeting as your breath on the dark glass...and then, only breath, the space of a poem, that no-one remembers or, if at all, then off by heart.

What shape a day takes is a mystery. Why, then, talk about a life? What condition is this-think of a Latin name, or Greek perhaps. Under the thousand year old tree the play of light and shadow, as old as time itself and we, too, partake of this dappled state of being; only the cool grey first narrow step of your house remains calm and collected in all this heat, untroubled and unchanged by the light, while glass, wind and wood bend, alter to another tune.

The moon is here tomorrow; the seed catches the light & is caught in it. The seed contains tomorrow and, therefore, all tomorrows. The world in a grain. Many small white butterflies in morning; a few tired wasps; in a flash morning is over. And in an hour nature gives way to a memory, a name. A woman with too much perfume on for this time of the day flits by you: lush black hair, strong (Czech) bones and high breasts. I dig my own grave. What seed is this that lives and dies, like Hardy's pariah, hereditary outcast, under the wrong, faithless southern sun?

''Those who won
shall be lost to memory.

In order that everything
can happen once again.'

Medusa-don't look now~

Was drawn to this by Tom (Tomclark.blogspot.com). The sheer desperation and hopelessness etched on people's faces is staggering. It does make you wonder if our time here on this planet is over and if it is whether that's necessarily such a bad thing. 

Yes, no more Bach and no more possibility of a Bach but if there is a balance, a weighing up, then you have to wonder. If you needed any convincing the twentieth century, with its astounding levels of violence and stupidity, is there for all to see.

Is there any space left to be human, simply human?

This, you think to yourself, is just the beginning if climate change really kicks in. Probably won't be around to see it but the scramble is on. It is not for no reason that many of the depictions of the post-apocalyptic scenario depict an elite fenced off in their little islands of comfort and security; the wretched of the earth are kept at bay, dying to get in. Why are utopias islands, fantasy islands? The modern day version, I suppose, is Ibiza, where you can escape any responsibility. The body, finally, free of guilt. And yet, at the same time, what we don't see, what we don't want to see, is Icarus, scrambling in the water, drowning..just another meaningless death.

What can scandalize us today except our own inhumanity?

Zadie Smith: find your beach! That perfect moment of tranquility, far from the madding crowd, inner enlightenment, untarnished by the vista of human suffering or any recognition of your causal part in it. Lone Rangers, Robinson Crusoes: me against the world, against nature. As the Americans are wont to say-and this perfectly encapsulates a lot of our sensibilities: fuck you!

If there was time for metaphors this would be it: here we are, adrift, all at sea, reduced to the basic thoughts of survival. Whether we're all in the same boat or not is a question that offers no solace whatsoever. There's some threadbare notion of family, human solidarity left, but by and large you're at the mercy of human capriciousness and the great random beast we call chance or nature. 

But there is no more time. This, to me, seems to be the most pertinent fact, something we're not thinking seriously enough about (Scheffler's wonderful Afterlife gets it right in so many ways). We're living in a time of singularity. The old idea of modernism- linear progress and all that jazz- has exhausted itself. 24/7 is what it's all about. Run down the clocks or make them face the wall (Endgame?). It's later than we think.

No-one believes it is happening now
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes
No other end of the world will there be
No other end of the world will there be.

---Milosz.

Losing my religion

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles ; and though we are 
rarely the centre
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous 
curve.

---Rilke, (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

~

A melancholic article in the Guardian about how some young Muslims in Britain drift from their faith and, eventually, feeling they can't go through with the double-life any more, renounce their religion. The social isolation that follows-not to mention the death threats-is truly saddening.  

Living in a country with a Muslim majority affords one the space for hypocrisy and an easy-going relation with one's faith (unless one is a minority, in which case only expect bigotry and fear). Here, there is no question of faith and old-world masks and duplicity are what keep the world going-if taken in the right proportion, that is. Knowing not what to ask, when to keep silent, is an art. All this relentless desire for "exposure", "frankness", the Truth as it is, unmediated, is, of course, the kind of mindset that animates the extremists and fundamentalists.

If one can survive today without questioning too much, without being questioned, that is saying a lot.

But what would it mean to lose one's faith, slowly, out of the limelight..with a whimper, not a bang? And what of a society that goes through those changes (Arnold's Dover Beach). You often think: one's faith can always falter (Augustine in his last days). It would only take a catastrophic event for it to shrivel and disappear. And political upheavals, too, can result in it being smothered (only to reassert itself in a conservative, backward-looking version, but then it's not really faith but something else).

Two prayers: please prevent this from happening; please don't make me religious.

If there is doubt, then it exists within the circle of faith. Even a broken circle is still a circle.

~

There is no depth to the world in the summer light. The shadows timid, small, like frightened animals. Everything is flattened out under the clear sky, a dimension taken away from our lives, and there is no place for second thoughts.

We do not see ourselves clearly in summer and our minds are reduced to waiting, to passing all these hours in our lives, hours that tell no story. In some sense, this is the unbeliever's version of Heaven.

~

W.S. Merwin writes of the elemental, the return of nature-the space and time of nature- where there are no more human beings any more; at best there is a thin trace of memory, a dim recollection of a quietened human life: memory, longing, crossed paths, the silence in our words, but the two are only parallel: we are neither before nor after nature. Instead, there are distances- that cannot or should not be closed-and distances and angles open up a way of love; the way an image's reflection and its object maintain a clear space between themselves reminds you of the word &. 

But if you think about it, you don't have a religious bone in your body (except your funny bone, perhaps). After a long, long time you went to a mosque: the open structure, the interplay of light and the water, always suggest that in Islam God (or, you'd like to say, the holy) is everywhere and nowhere. To miss it, to reach out after it..not this, not that, the Hindus would say.

I'm not even a 'cultural Muslim' since I don't follow any practices and have no connection to this land, but neither do I hold to an "idea" of religion. What, then?

In early morning, before anything is said or done, there is a clear wind, light and blue, that enters our lives for good. It passes, but always returns, whether we know it or not. Grey clouds fragment, scatter, lose their density. Without them, you think, there would be no yearning.

~~

Habermas:

ain't over till the fat tail sings

They argue that current policies are leading to a substantial chance (perhaps one in ten) that global temperatures will rise by at least six degrees centigrade. This will be..."the end of the human adventure on this planet as we know it."

--Nordhuas in the NYRB. 

Have to say here that Weitzman is recognized as a leading thinker on uncertainty and climate change. Nordhaus (and Weitzman, for different reasons) have criticized my old teacher, Stern, for his estimates of the discount rate (and/or the way in which it is derived). Based on the low discount rate (which means giving relatively more weight to future generations) Stern calls for a more immediate response. The discount rate is-at least in part-an "ethical parameter" and something that can not just be proxied by the market interest rate. 

Also, as far as I understand it, these are global averages. If so, some countries may see in the intervening period (i.e. before stabilization) much higher temperatures. 

The main point, though, is clear. A one in ten chance of acatastrophic increases in temperatures! (Also note the word 'perhaps'). I'm not a betting man, but I don't like those odds.  

(From memory). In an earlier paper Weitzman says there is a 5% chance that temperatures will stabilize at ten degrees warmer; and a 1% chance that it will be twenty degrees hotter. The "tails" of the distribution are "fat"-which mans that the chances of an extreme or catastrophic change occurring are not insignificant. If someone said to you: there's a 1/20 chance this plane will crash would you board it?

~~

Uneven Development

'We should consider it a universal responsibility of human beings to learn to turn their capacity for directing our attention away from ourselves-this permanent orientation towards new possibilities, towards new ventures-back in the direction of the vast, balance-sustaining rhythm of the natural order.'

---Gadamer.

_________________

The imbalance, the one-sidedness of the modern world, the topsy-turvy world that doesn't just lead to an inversion of our usual orientation, our "up" and "down", but to a forgetting of these distinctions. In the friction-less world of late capitalism everything can be traded for something else; commoditification is preceded by the process of things being made commensurable. 

'Formal equality,' our abstract models of exchange maintain. But old Edgeworth didn't take into account money, credit, time or uncertainty. Aren't we really in an asymmetric world where those with the time, (better) information and capital (itself accumulated over time) are in an unequal situation with regards the rest? 

Debt, and the structure of property that sustains it, means there will always be fundamental disparities, uneven developments, the damned and the saved. Ruskin saw this back in 1862: the rich are rich because they can command labour, wealth is a form of control. The tide will raise all boats? Really? It's more likely that the coming Tsunami will sink us all. 

From Russia, with love

‘But still, the question is, what should we remain alive for? Man is not a rock, he can’t exist just for his own sake. There’s always the “what for.” I understand that here, in the West, I won’t find the answer. Because when I look around, I don’t understand what people live for. My impression is that they live for the sake of shopping. That human life exists for the sake of shopping. The only solution is to stay on the margins, to not get too involved—in shopping, I mean. If I had grown up here, I don’t know what I would have become. This is a very disorienting feeling. I just don’t understand what it’s all for.’

---(another J.B.)

This reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's insightful and acerbic Harvard address, way back when. 

'The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life.. imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression..Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.'

'Wherever the tissue of life is woven out of legalistic relations, here is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.'

[The tone isn't quite right, but he does sound a bit like an Old Testament prophet. Is that because he's touching on issues that relate to our fundamental human condition, rather than simply america in the third quarter of the twentieth century?].

Continue.

'Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space...It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.'

'"everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era...People have 'the right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century...'

[He goes on to say how the press/media is actually very uniform and here he is on the money since the views expressed, the shattering of attentiveness, reinforce the dominant "fashions" and "common corporate interests".]

What is not fashionable will 'hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.'

[Too right! Freedom is a thousand channels on your television; ten thousand songs on your music system, free downloads, the choice of any number of yoghurts, the ability to taste food from anywhere in the world at any time, google's infinite library...]

'Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being.'

[This chimed with Asad's reflections on just coming back after four months in Berkeley, California. It's a beautiful place but, ultimately, there's something not quite right about it..there's a kind of superficiality to it that makes it unreal. So speaketh the East London kid!]

'Your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?'

'A total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.'

[Well, we've got good latte now, haven't we? And thanks to the internet and facebook I have at least 500 friends].

'All the technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty.'

[One can imagine the students shifting uneasily in their seats at this point. When will this blasted fool bring an end to this rant. Enough, already. I toldya we shouldna invited a god-damned, sonofabitch Commie.]

'Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.'

  

fusion of horizons

'The task of learning is to be at home in the distance within which we live.'

---Gadamer (more or less)

Excited by the prospect of the Pope's new encyclical on the role of ethics in thinking about the environment and climate change.

~~

There are some beautiful thoughts in Gadamer's Enigma. The simple words that come to an old man, perhaps, from a lifetime's distillation of sound thought-or maybe it is a sound living? Or is it the overlapping, the fusion between these two, one open to the other, the notion of balance, equilibrium, so central to religious thinking and a religious way of life? 

'One learns to keep house with the means, energy and time available.' The house is neither internal not external: the dihliz.

After a week you cease to live as a stranger in your own house. There is still space there on the landing steps, between the two levels, for you to read, listen to the cricket. 

To discover and preserve what is most appropriate for us, a sense of the right measure of things is not an 'external' measurement but an internal 'measuring up to' (metrion, not metron). 

What is the form of goodness? A face that is beautiful doesn't really change, or only changes slightly, and yet the eye doesn't tire of it.

The nihilism of the moderns: the self is everything; the world is nothing. This is, precisely, the meaning of 'worldliness'..the desert within expands (the Israelis would say: there were no people here, only a desert which we made bloom).

Hannah: we want to escape earth, gravity-not to find God, but to escape from ourselves. 

~

Anyone who has reflected on life is drawn to the conclusion not that life is absurd or meaningless, since that is preposterous...particular lives may be so, and any part of our own life may indeed fall under this dark spell at some point in time or the other, but life in general-unless one has given up hope or been driven to give up hope- cannot present itself on the whole as absurd for the simple reason that absurdity is one of many (and temporary) possibilities. To say that evil is a privation of the good is not to infer that all limitation is to be looked on in a similar fashion. 

Life and thought by their very nature are limited and finitude is, to paraphrase Jonas, both a curse and a blessing.

We look backwards and forward! We look to find faith under the left nipple, we look to find home here on earth knowing deep down that we are never fully alive to the moment, never able, finally, to quietly accept that this is the only existence or reality we can know or experience. I am never completely the space I occupy. 

There is a kind of arrogance in believing we can get on without mirrors (Simone's 'bridges'). And that belief sometimes manifests itself in a destructive tendency (mimicking the "frenzy" of God, Tawney would say). Point to note: the death of God did not lead to a displacement of our love towards the earth; quite the opposite in fact.  

Life

Is it possible to fall in love with a film on the basis of a few scenes? Can a few 'stills' be so chiseled, so jewel-like that the failings of life can be overlooked? (An old religious problem: to what extent do representations take us way from life; to what degree do they throw light on it?)

This is not a commentary on post-war Japan and its interminably complicated bureaucracy. The main purpose of the film is certainly not to convey the horrors of a world that is over-run by functionaries and the impersonal. Perhaps only a modern European imagination could really talk seriously about organization and a really old one (Greek) about Labyrinths. No, the portrait of the obfuscations and willed deafness are light and almost comical-perhaps even superficial- to our eyes.

The film's central preoccupation is elsewhere. But how to make a film about life, the living...except by talking about death. There is no heroic striving for immortality against this inevitability but nor is there a passive acceptance of Necessity. Death is, and can only be, something that is ambiguous: Thanatos and Eros.

The film starts off with a depiction of a life that is not lived but simply passed.
(Back in my school days there were the following categories: distinction, merit, pass, good fail, and fail). Everyone goes through the motions and this is what qualifies as doing just enough. A good fail. The whole aim of such a life is to avoid life, to look busy and run down time. What would we do without our clocks and watches! To do nothing 'is' to be nothing. Already, one wonders how deep rooted these ideas -of death and nothingness-are in the Japanese spirit.

The main protagonist of the film devotes himself to his work (which is really making sure that no work gets done). A singular dedication to an ideal, replete with the bourgeois markers of respectability: a hat, a certificate in honour of all those of years of service, are what bind a life and its serial moments together. Otherwise, as Watana-be says in a moment of reflection, I can't remember a single day . After the death of his wife he decides to live a solitary life-ostensibly for the sake of his child , but in reality we learn that this too is a farce, an excuse. For how long can we blame external circumstances for our choices? When all is said and done we are what we choose to be. He is given the nickname of 'the mummy' and this is highly appropriate for one of the world's living dead, for someone who has tried to freeze time.

To escape from the inevitable by creating a routine for oneself. Perhaps the whole of human culture is nothing more than this. Work, too, is one such social construction, as are our intellectual endeavours. As long as one is active one is alive. But in work the aim is not just to feed the stomach. Man shall not live by bread alone. Gradually, he realises that he is being eaten up from within. He has a disease that everyone knows of, but which no-one has to courage to name...

The first sparkling moment comes when he is torn between telling his son about his stomach cancer and patiently keeping it to himself, as he has with everything else. Then in a moment of utter decisiveness (or is it desperation) he rushes up the near vertical flight of stairs, clambering on his hands and feet. But in the dark he comes to an abrupt stop. How to speak the unspeakable? Can the father ever initiate the son into the inevitable? Would it help either of them? If one has to stop to think about an emotion was it a true one in the first place? As he halts the light dramatically fades away and he is rooted to the spot, half way between different worlds, as it were, hesitant and unsure of himself. Can one unwrap the cloth that has bound a soul for so long and then expect love to still flourish? In that moment-which lasts for an eternity- he is made acutely aware of the infinite distance between himself and his own flesh and blood. It is not death but life itself that alienates us from the life of others.

He thinks back to those early years with his son. Has his life with him been anything but a catalogue of unforeseen and unpredictable departures (the death of his wife, the son going off to war, him having to miss his son's operation)? Is life itself anything but a series of departures ? Even the only moment he can remember with any pride soon turns into a reflection on his helplessness before the uncertainties that his son faces. He can, like a mummy, provide security but not love. Later, when he recalls the distance between himself and his son, he says it is like drowning, sinking in sheer darkness, reaching out to cling on to something. We fall into love and we fall out of it.

The next magical scene occurs when he is told by a co-worker over lunch that despite all of his denials he still loves his son. This is, perhaps, the most amazing shot in the whole film. He looks up, shyly, almost embarrassed, and then his face radiates with a smile as he comes to recognize the truth of this. It comes to him like a revelation, a light shone on the dark corner of his musty soul moves to the surface, illuminating the old man's face. This is the beginning of his redemption. The earlier attempt-which had seen him abandoning himself to a night of pure pleasure-was utterly futile and he had known it to be so as well. For what value can there be in fleeting sensations that live for a day then die? He may change his hat, temporarily adopt a new personality, but none of this will do: The reality of poetry is nothing if not lived. One can never drown out the pain and a life without thinking about, working for, others eventually ends up in the intoxication of the self. Melancholy, Kirk Douglas once said, is another name for egotism.

The solution-if it is as solution-comes to him at a restaurant where someone else's birthday is begin celebrated. And we are not surprised by this for we are really witnessing a new birth.

There are other stylistically interesting features-like the way in which the siren goes off at precisely the last time that we see Watana alive. Perhaps the most memorable scene , though, is when after a few frenetic songs have been played and danced to in a night cub Watana starts to sing an old song from the 1910's. Everyone stops what they are doing, at once fascinated and repelled by his hauntingly tragic voice that seems to be coming to them from elsewhere. They are transfixed by his unearthly voice but the song itself is really about the earth and life. A few people move away from him, unable to bear the telling of it. There are some truths that not even song can carry.

It is as if Death himself is singing but a death that is tired of dying and that wants to remind people of life. Up to that moment the people in the nightclub had been dancing crazily to a music that was not their own. When the real beauty of life is in accepting its transience and being finely aware of it, not an overcoming of it or a forgetting of it. But Watana also knows that the bitter-sweetness of life is that life is blind to its own end, that only death can remember what life really is....

broken circles

It is somewhat of a platitude to say that our understanding of something can be heightened by its absence; not it's absolute disappearance, mind you, since the continued existence of its trace must always be there or thereabouts, offering the distinct possibility of a restoration.

The ageing of one's hands is astonishing; the experience of an individual's life (fundamental gestures, what has slipped though the fingers) is something to behold. The ancient affinity between hand and eye (Lowell: finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the heart follows its trackless way). For hundreds of thousands of years the repetition of something in our lives leads to a form of understanding.

The hands, that in the final hour, bear witness to all we were. 

~

'Their eyelids were always downcast; and, if now and then they were raised, no treacherous glint appeared, nothing but a sedulously cultivated  calmness, withdrawal and mansuetude and occasionally an expression of remote and burnt-out melancholy. The muted light...'

--Fermor.

~

What remarkable simplicity there is the faces of those who have lived a life of hardship: bare and elemental. Theisger's 'Visions' offers a wonderful glimpse of this. By contrast, our faces cannot belie a fundamental set of anxieties that stalk us, not the least of them being the impression of lost chances that forms in pools of shadows under our eyes. 

Fermor, it is said, is a great stylist but in our own day and age this is increasingly understood to mean a person's outward character or skills do not refer to a substantive notion of the self or to an unruffled centre. Style, in this sense, is superficial, incidental, a tangent away from our true focus. And this disjunction is, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the marginalisation of an older way of thinking about taste; for taste now is the most rudimentary of our senses, and not the vehicle of a specifically human quality that allows us to meld the general and the particular, principle and expediency, desire and thought in the form of judgement. And, it should be added, judgement itself suggests an openness to our approach: we often say 'in our better judgement', thus allowing for the possibility of second spaces, re-vision, the entry of other considerations over time. A judgement is decisive, but very rarely final. Our hands, too, retain something of this ultimate ambiguity and mystery. 

A way of life

British higher education has developed an elaborate auditing culture that has led academics to devoting themselves to gaming the system, distorting their output – such as publishing essentially the same article in different venues, the devaluation of books, creating and attracting academic celebrities to boost RAE ratings. Perhaps the most debilitating consequence has been the shortening of time horizons of research, so that it becomes ever more superficial.

--Michael Burawoy.

~~

A very disappointing and almost fanatical post by Pierre (over at Nomadics).

"Where I am in total agreement with the magazine is that all organized religions, & more specifically the three monotheisms, need to be caricatured, attacked, shown up for the ideological con jobs  & strangleholds they are. The right to blaspheme is essential for our mental health."

The rant continues:

"To show that the emperor has no clothes is important: just think of the core regions where our world is going up in flames, or where someone is holding or selling the flamethrowers that do this job — & centrally present & involved in them you’ll find the 3 core religions,.."

Of course, no-one wants to face the uncomfortable fact that these rabid factions of lunatics are actually supported by state powers (Saudi, Pakistan Qatar). And the equally disturbing fact that "our world" has been going up in flames for some time and it's largely been a result of the violence inflicted by state powers (think: Colonialism; the Trenches; the Gulags, the Camps, the Bomb) is not really worth considering-unless you want a dose of reality.

Pascal: two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason. 

There's something rather extreme and shrill in this (Gallic?) style of writing and thought. It's important to show religion up, to unveil it, to destroy the secrets of the Red Indian etc., etc... debunk everything, expose the whole curs-ed thing and the dupes that followed it as naive dimwits-and all the time one presumes that we, we moderns have escaped all this stupidity and superstition with the help of the light of Reason. 

The right to blaspheme is essential for our mental health. One is perfectly prepared to accept that if by "our" the author is referring to his own mental health then this may be a reasonable enough claim; but if by that word it is being maintained that all of us need this right then you have to indeed wonder about the arrogance and shallowness of the thought expressed in that statement.

~~

Fermor:

These men really lived as if each day were their last, at peace with the world, shriven, fortified by the sacraments...

a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which since Donne, Herbert and Vaughan wrote their poetry, has drained away from life in England.

The Trappist abbeys are placed in flat landscapes because their monotony, like the repetitive dunes of the Thebaid, impels the mind to the contemplation of last things...

the unbroken cycle of contemplation, prayer and back-breaking toil..

a completely unintellectual simplicity.