One

Chapter Nine of Peace Like a River — the best novel of the first quarter century of the millennia and yes, I know there are 3 to 4 years left of that range, depending on one’s counting to 100 — is when the Land family hears they now own an Airstream trailer, courtesy of the last and only will and testament of Tin Lurvy, to whom the family, well, Jeremiah anyway, had showed kindness, which, we see immediately bec it hits so close to home, the children thought absurd given Lurvy was corpulent, insistent, and verbose.

It’s also where Swede tells Reuben a story of the outlaw Cole Younger asked to rat on his friends in exchange for sparing his life responds

Be true to your friends, though the heavens fall.

The two are intimately related by the one.

+

The one is not the One, tho it was His notion when he thought of each of us first. The one is here the individual — the single soul, the man, the woman, the child. Lurvy was one, as was Younger, as were each Land, and all, singly, of Cole’s friends, and as are we.

Lurvy on a prior visit had eaten for three, at least, of a seafood stew, that mirabile dictu, kept replenishing, after which, patriarch Jeremiah, paenitet dicere, having acquired an headache, found it necessary to rest for three, at least. During the meal — Jeremiah gracious as host and Lurvy less so as guest — the traveling salesman compared all his bowls to Ivar’s in Seattle [an actual place in our world as well], finding them wanting

Ivar knows his mollusks.

This is more Hanlon’s Razor [or Heinlein’s, or Goethe’s] than anything else but it made Lurvy and his loquaciousness unwelcome in the hearts of Jeremiah’s kids as much as he offered that hearth he had to the doomed Upper Midwest Democrat.

+

In Cole’s case there’s much going on as well.

Swede is generous with boundaries of mere fact so one might assert Mr. Younger never said any such thing, tho of course how could anyone even know that. Really, ‘she made it up’ is weak tea, minus the tea, given that none of us can say it didn’t happen just that way, and we do know it is a riff on

Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum

which gives justice primacy of place over mass destruction. I dunno but think wd prefer — when loving and not thinking firstly of me, which is to say how I’d like it to be, tho sometimes it feels a bit too late — have the friends.

+

God wd too, I think, tho I also think he doesn’t have to choose, as Frances the Badger’s mother puts it in one of the books, ‘between being friends and being careful’. We won’t hafta either tho we’ve rather much to remember, first.

+

Certainly, too, there is this.

+

Anna Schmidt in The Third Man wd as well. She loves scoundrel and murderer Harry Lime and nothing Holly Martins, the weight of the Civilized World or the deadly dangers of an uncivilized one, can do or even wish wd change this.

She loves an individual in fact [and truth] even when that individual loves only the same one as she, and no one else. He loves himself and money and tells lies even about the Borgias to justify it all

You’re just a little mixed up about things in general.

He tells Martins.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings.

He says, to his friend [and shall we live as if we believe even he has such things?] in the famous scene atop the grinding wheel, and says Martins himself wldnt care if a few random folk ceased to exist, and tho a’course they aren’t random a’tall — all the hospital ward beds are filled by one — this, too, strikes us hard and close.

Yet Anna passes the wounded Martins by in a scene easily 3% of the entire film and which from one angle is the entire film.

+

A responsible opposing view from Aristotle

Dear to me is Plato, dearer still the truth

What lies wd we tell for our friends?

What compassions might we claim.

And cd they, as Flannery said and a Percy character quotes, lead to the concentration camps.

+

My granddaughter is more important than President Joe Biden.

She isn’t more important than Joe Biden, tho of course is to me.

+

Blum and Hochschild

[M]odern mass culture feels like a condition in which human beings are treated
as something other than authentic agents. The bureaucratic mind-set, the therapeutic
mind-set, the consumerist mind-set: all, in their own ways, are descriptions of cultural
patterns in which people are treated as objects to be manipulated, rather than persons.

and a thousand fill-in-the-blank types of Twitter [Catholic, Keto, Television, Libertarian].

+

But the One thought of us first.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

Read More »

Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

Read More »

Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service? I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them. Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on

Read More »

Dark Eyed Life

According to @CitizenScreen, doing yeoman’s* work daily on Twitter* relative to the Golden Age of film, today is the birth date of Mabel Normand, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Dandridge — Normand: New York, 1892 Lamarr: Vienna, 1914 Dandridge: Cleveland, 1922 — which makes for coupla at least interesting, if not compelling or fascinating at the

Read More »

Random

Trusting Taylor Sheridan

Yellowstone sucks. Och! — but you knew that. Wait … umm … we can agree on that right? + Prolly not — else why this blog post and the recent headline that its ‘creator’, Taylor Sheridan, said Season 4 is in the can. + I tried to get through Season 1 again. Had bought it a

Read More »

Didn’t Graduate

Hadda a girl once, this was during college. Darkest, longest hair, biggest brownest eyes … Not that kind of story, whatever kind you thought. Being stupid (I said this was during college, yes?) I’d no idea … none. Not what it was nor what it cd be and thus not that one though it set

Read More »

In The Heart of the Drunkard

And away he went, to drink the value of his cross … I have been listening to Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Idiot on the iPhone, from Audible.com. It’s incredible. I just know I’ll have to read it as soon as I’m done with the audio. [I do irk myself somewhat on having become such a fan

Read More »

You Da Man

   A Good Friday And petulant Pilate as if triumphant — What I have written, I have written! Finally a decision.    

Read More »

Related

No Words

Silence is faith. Before God Before others When I was quiet with G___ and B___ and J___ — that was faith. When I am silent it is that. Silence before M___ or D___ on C___. Contentment in solitude Acceptance of opposition Okayness in life going ‘other’ No wife or woman Prayer. These are faith. + Faith not:

Read More »

Semi Stuff

Here’s a way to say it — I pay attention, I notice things, I remember, I make connections; my mind moves fast — and long, on the connections. Draw the well deep, carry far the water. [The semi-colon technically ‘replaces’ the period but artfully between the two a difference wd be how a semi-colon can

Read More »

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Read More »

Ensamples

Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via

Read More »