Light On Dark Water

Why I Love Ross Macdonald

She turned uphill , her head thrust forward on her heavy neck, like an irresistible force searching for an immovable object. 

--from The Ivory Grin (1952)

It's only when we try not to experience our special suffering that it can really break us.

—Carryl Houselander, from Maisie Ward's biography of her

The Pop-Psych Rand

Part of my routine when I arrive at work every morning involves downloading some data from the web site of a company we work with. They always have a quotation on the login page, and they change it every day. Sometimes it's humorous, more often it's vaguely inspirational in a pop-psychology self-help you-can-do-it sort of way. Today it's from Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged:

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won.

Since this is a technology company in the urban northeast, odds are slim that the management is terribly right-wing. This is an example of what I think a lot of people take from Rand, especially if they only read Atlas: not so much the hard-edged ethic of selfishness, but the follow-your-dreams, fulfill-your-potential sort of stuff. Not that there isn't some overlap between those two. And both are very American.

Sunday Night Journal — April 1, 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey

This is depressing: it seems that there is a pornographic novel called Fifty Shades of Grey which is extremely popular among women, and that its plot involves a young woman who gives herself as a masochistic sex slave to a billionaire. Here is one of several commentaries on it which I’ve run across recently. I wouldn’t be surprised at such a book coming from a man, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it came from a woman, because I have long since accepted, though very unwillingly, that money and power are extremely attractive to at least some large proportion of the female sex. In my younger and more conventionally liberal days, quick to defend woman as an oppressed minority—and, more fundamentally, naturally chivalrous and a bit idealistic about God’s most beautiful creation—I objected to this. Observation proved me wrong.

It’s not the novel itself but its popularity that depresses. Every man who reads a news story like this must  surely wonder, at least for a moment, if his own wife or girlfriend would drop him in an instant for the first billionaire who expressed an interest in tying her up. And reportedly it is especially popular among married women. 

Also depressing, though simultaneously amusing, is the view of the two women who wrote the commentary linked to above. With that grim and superficial ideological blindness typical of academic feminism, they deplore the novel’s “reactionary gender politics,” though not of course the fact that it’s pornographic. They think its appeal stems from the fact that women have not attained the imagined level of socio-economic power which would make them indifferent to the promise of attaining it by association with a rich and powerful man. What a silly delusion. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is something elemental in desires of this sort, something that can’t be  explained away with socio-economic arguments (even if they’re plausible, which I don’t think these are). Even at its best feminism was never more than a very incomplete account of what women really think and, as Freud wondered, what they really want.

Is it arrogant of me, as a man, to say that? Too bad; I am only proceeding according to the common-sense maxim watch what they do, not what they say. If nothing else has emerged clearly from the gender debates of the past forty years, it is that the presence of “reactionary gender politics” does not in the least deter most women from liking some piece of art or entertainment that otherwise appeals to them. The career of Madonna alone is proof of that (no matter how such sexual exhibitionism is dressed up as “empowerment”).

I suspect, and hope, that women having good relationships with men and a grounding in faith are less susceptible to the likes of this novel. It’s almost an axiom in many intellectual circles—and nowadays not only there, but in decidedly non-intellectual circles, as a result of ideas being propagated into fashion and popular culture—that religion is frequently the expression of a repressed sexual impulse. But I think it’s more often the other way around, that erotic obsessions and perversions are frequently misplaced religious longings. The desire to surrender oneself to a sadist is a perversion of the desire to surrender oneself to God. And, on the earthly level, no matter how reactionary it is to say so, it seems pretty clear that most women want their husbands to be, in a sense, and most certainly a non-abusive sense, in some degree of authority over them—this is only another way of describing the oft-stated preference of women for men who are “confident,” “in command,” etc.

In fact—and this is pure speculation—I wouldn’t be surprised if women who, as a matter of principle and perhaps as an effect of anger, are in the habit of pushing aggressively against the men in their lives are more susceptible to the pornography of submission than those who are at ease with...how do I say this without using words that carrying implications I don’t intend?...in some fundamental psychological way looking up to their husbands? Nature will have the penultimate, though not the last, word in these things.

Smart Kids in Small Towns

I found this post by Pentimento an interesting twist on a phenomenon I’ve noticed more than once, first of all in myself. She describes her reaction to moving from the life of an artist and intellectual in New York (City) to the life of a wife and mother in a much smaller city in the same state:

I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my ...specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

This is exactly what I and no doubt millions of others have felt while growing up in places like the one to which Pentimento has moved. If you’re one of the bright kids, interested in art and ideas and other things which are not generally high on the list of concerns for most people in such places, you almost inevitably start thinking of yourself as special, by which of course you mean superior.

The usual or classic pattern is that this smart kid escapes from the country or the small town to the metropolis (or perhaps only to the university) and there suffers the humiliating passage from big fish in small pond to very ordinary fish in big pond. This may, but doesn’t necessarily, lead to some degree of humility. I would expect that to go in the opposite direction—from the intellectual life of the metropolis to the dullness of the provinces—would provoke a strong impulse to hold oneself forever above the natives, and it speaks well of Pentimento that she wants to choose otherwise.

Sometimes, whether or not he leaves the small town behind, the smart kid’s sense of superiority hardens into lasting contempt. I think of an Alabama native who used to write for a newspaper here and who, on leaving to take a job in the northeast, bade farewell to the state with a sneer that he was happy to be leaving a place he’d never liked anyway and which was notable only for football and racism. I wonder how he fared in his new place. If he found appreciation there for the abilities that went under-praised at home, it has not achieved enough notice to reach us here.

That person was very proud of being a liberal in this heavily right-wing state. The path of the smart kid often leads to conventional liberalism. The provinces tend to be conservative in an instinctive and unreflective way. The smart kid looks beyond that, criticizes the simplistic and conventional views he encounters all around him, reads books and magazines that present him with other and more well-thought-out opinions, and decides that if his townspeople are conservatives, then he must be a liberal. And that’s perfectly understandable. But if he escapes to the metropolis (perhaps only in his mind—with modern communications one may mentally escape while remaining physically in place), he may find himself again among people who all think alike; only now he may not recognize the force of convention and fashion in maintaining the prevailing opinions, and so become as locked in to a set of received ideas as the people back home.

As one of those smart kids, the thing I had to learn, first, was that I was  not special in the way that I thought I was. Later, I learned that everyone else is special, that those people I thought were dumbbells are every bit as complex and interesting as I thought I was, and often also smarter in some ways than me and my intellectual heroes and friends. And then I could come back around to seeing myself as special, but this time without pride: special not because I am superior to others but because I’m just like them: unique and important in God’s eyes, a fact in which everyone’s sense of being special originates and is objectively justified.

April Fool’s Day

I was planning what I thought would be an amusing April Fool’s Day post, but when I realized that April 1 would fall on Palm Sunday decided it would be inappropriate. Check back next year.

Speaking of Palm Sunday, I’ve always been a little puzzled by the fact that we have a Passion narrative on this day. It seems out of place. Shouldn’t we celebrate the entry into Jerusalem today, the better to acknowledge our perfidy on Thursday?

Getting Started with Kierkegaard

This is probably not a good time to be asking this question, with some people offline for Lent, and Palm Sunday and Holy Week coming up, but while I'm thinking about it: I've never read Kierkegaard, and I think the time has come for me to give him a try. Would anyone like to suggest a good book to start with?

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

--Flannery O'Connor

Sunday Night Journal — March 11, 2011

David Horowitz: A Point In Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next

The only reason I was not surprised that this book came from the hand of David Horowitz was that I had read his Radical Son, and already gotten over my surprise that such a ferocious political combatant would write so sensitively and reflectively—and so well. I reviewed that book here last October (link). Horowitz ran across the review, thought I might be interested in A Point in Time, and graciously sent me a copy.

“I think you’ll find it challenging,” he wrote to me. And although I did not find it so in the way that I think he meant, I understand why he thought I might. It is a rich and hopeless book, the most affecting attempt I can remember to quiet the human longing for eternity in the face of mortality, individual and collective, and the absence of any hope beyond extinction; to make a sort of meaning out of the acknowledgment of unmeaning. 

I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator. I wish I could look in my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot. And so I am left to ponder the pointlessness of our strivings on this earth and to ask impossible questions, and receive no answers.

The book is structured as a series of three meditations, each bearing a date—October 2006, November 2008, December 2010—in which are interwoven, like currents from several streams meeting in a larger one, the personal, the philosophical, the literary, the political, and the history and fate of the Jewish people. It opens with a scene very familiar to me, one in which I play my role twice a day: a man taking his two dogs for a walk, on the same route each time. It is a peaceful routine for the man, a thrill as exciting each day as it was on the last for the dogs:

As though life were an endless horizon always met for the first time. How their excitement when I put on my cap at the onset of our rituals never fades. How they do not contend with their fates but devour them as if their days will go on forever. But I, who do not have the luxury of their comity with nature, see the silence coming, and look on the brief turn of their lives with bittersweet regret, and mourn them before they are gone.

Which situation holds greater pathos: the dogs unaware of death, or the man all too aware? In any case only the man foresees the end, and feels the impact of knowing it. The man experiences this point in time, but also knows that others came before and will come after it, that even a man's lifetime is only a somewhat longer span of time than the daily walk: longer, but no less decisively bounded.

From here Horowitz moves to a theme which recurs throughout the book, and which was also prominent in Radical Son: the sad waste of his father’s gifts on an unworthy object, the dream of a communist utopia. Perhaps even more than in the earlier book he focuses on the hopelessness of this dream, though now more in sadness than anger, and maybe more sympathetic to the longing that produces the delusion: the longing to find a meaning in history, and to see the fulfillment of its apparent movement. He might have added the word “futile” before “search” in his subtitle, with no redemption in the next life, and the quest for it in this life not only hopeless, but often the engine of enormous evil.

The creed of the revolutionary divides the world into forces of good and evil—on the one side enemies of the people, on the other the social redeemers. The passion to create a new world is really a passion to destroy the old one, transforming the love of humanity into a hatred of the human beings who stand in its way.

I think this is the reason why the Church’s zeal for purging heresy when it was the dominant cultural influence did not generally result in the same level of carnage that the revolutions of the 20^th century did. I don’t think the effectiveness of modern technology accounts entirely for the difference. The Church insisted that every Christian affirm its theological and moral teachings, and was often intolerant of non-Christians, but it never believed that it could or should create a perfect world on earth, and destroy those who could not or would not be perfected, or who stood in the way of the program of perfection.

In this context Horowitz refers often to Dostoevsky, to that writer’s experience of the revolutionary dream and witness to the demonic turn it took. He looks closely at the famous Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamazov, and its description of the potency of the human longing for a fulfillment of history. But Dostoevsky—and I didn’t know this about him—apparently succumbed to a dream which was at least semi-utopian: that of a Russian-led Christendom which would be “the fulfillment of the destinies of humans on earth.”  Even for a Christian whose theology more or less explicitly denies the possibility, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that the fulfillment of history will arrive within history.

Similarly, Horowitz spends a good bit of time with Marcus Aurelius: “Be not troubled, for all things are according to nature and in a little while you will be no one and nowhere.” But—and this also I did not know, having read Marcus Aurelius only in brief excerpts—the great Stoic also succumbed to the difficulty of living without purpose, and toward the end of his meditations declares his belief in a kind of God.

If even Marcus Aurelius was, in the end, unable to face the idea that life has no meaning, and if Dostoevsky couldn’t resist the idea that Russia would bring about the nearest thing possible to a perfect Christian society, what is to be expected of the rest of us, who generally have not explored the questions at hand as deeply as they did?

I have some doubt as to whether anyone can truly dispose of the belief that life has no purpose. Even one who comes to that conclusion can’t leave it alone. This book is witness to that fact, an attempt to find out and confront the meaning of non-meaning. I suspect that only someone well on his way to being damned could truly leave it alone—that is, truly ignore it,  not even think about it, not be aware of the problem it poses—because doing so would entail an almost complete insensibility not just to the idea of God but to good and evil, truth and falsehood. I have known any number of people who professed to believe that life has no meaning, but not one who was genuinely indifferent to the idea. They betray themselves by their strenuous insistence upon it, clearly driven by strong emotion, which would not exist if they were truly reconciled.

For me, at least, there is a greater obstacle to the belief that life has a meaning than the absence of proof that it does: the question of evil. Horowitz uses a couple of horrifying stories to bring this home; no more are needed.

I mentioned earlier that I did not find this book challenging in the sense that I took Horowitz to mean it, that is, in the sense that it challenged my convictions as a Catholic. That’s not because it isn’t in fact a challenge, but because it is one to which I am accustomed. I deal with these questions every day. Whatever my faith is, it is not knowledge that was given to me, as it was given to St. Paul—not knowledge of a fact. And it is not a sense of God’s presence, or a consciousness of his love. And it is definitely not a certainty; I am never without some awareness of the possibility that I may be wrong. And I never see a news story about a murder or a war or a natural catastrophe, or even pass by a dead dog on the road, dead only because it was too innocent to fear properly an oncoming automobile, without wondering why the God in whom I place my trust permits such things to happen. My faith is a conscious decision, renewed every day, to accept the Christian revelation and to order my life according to it, or at least make a persistent effort to do so.

The intellect cannot make this decision for me, cannot force it upon me as an indubitable certainty. The heart wants it, but the heart often wants what it should not have. Does it want what it cannot have, not just practically but in the very nature of things? Of course it can and does in the immediate course of life, but can its ultimate longing be for something that does not exist? The idea that it can is a deeper puzzle than is generally recognized.

Is the longing for heaven like a dog dreaming of a bowl which is never empty of hamburger? Well, suppose it is; suppose that is the best a dog might think to ask of heaven. It doesn’t matter. The important question is not what sort of heaven the dog might want, but whether he can want it at all, whether he can have the self-awareness and the ability to step outside the moment necessary for him to have the dream, and to know he is having it. And, after all, hamburger does exist; we assume the dog can't long for something that he can’t imagine. And I’m not convinced that we can, either, though the intensity of our longing and our difficulty in naming its object leads us to use words like sehnsucht. Like the dog with his hamburger, we have tasted it, if only briefly. We have imagined that there is something better than we can imagine.

But back to the book. I don’t think I’ve conveyed just how enjoyable it is: its graceful writing, its contemplative tone, its recourse to the inconceivably precious texture—and, one must say, the meaning—of ordinary life. In spite of the fact that the conclusion it draws are the opposite of my own, I’ll return to it, for the way it faces the problems it raises.

I have sometimes distinguished between deep and shallow atheism: the former understands the seriousness of the question, the latter does not, and thinks a shallow materialism answers all. I don’t think Horowitz describes himself as an atheist—if I’m not mistaken he uses the word agnostic a few times—but like most agnostics he takes the assumption of the absence of God as the outcome of his doubt. At any rate, his unbelief is definitely of the deep variety. And I always suspect that those who hold it are closer to the Kingdom than they realize, or is apparent to us.

Horowitz blames his own people for helping to fuel the expectation that history will arrive somewhere: 

Deep in the millenial past, Jews were the original progressives and invented the idea that we are on our way toward a brighter future, which perhaps is why our history is so filled with tragedy and defeat.

I can't help seeing a trace of ironical Jewish humor here: in other words, the Jews invented a system for making themselves miserable for all time. But did they invent it? Or was it given to them?

I neglected to mark the passage, and may not be quoting it perfectly, but Horowitz says something to the effect that we comfort ourselves by imagining that we inhabit stories that have no end. After I had written most of this review, I ran across the last lines of the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia:

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no man on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Sunday Night Journal — March 4, 2012

A Little GKC

Chief among my complaints last week about the treatment of Chesterton by Christopher Hitchens was the fact that he passed over Chesterton’s spiritual vision while in the end dismissing him for certain of his political views. I wanted then to describe or summarize that vision, by way of justifying the importance I give it, but found myself at a loss for words. Nothing but reading Chesterton (or any writer) can give one a real sense of what he’s like at his best. No sentence or two that I could come up with in haste seemed anything but conventional and inadequate, and I didn’t have time to go searching for excerpts that might serve, so I let it go. But the only real defense one can make of Chesterton’s faults is to give examples of his virtues, so I spent a little time this morning with Orthodoxy, discovering that I had marked quite a few passages on an earlier reading. The first two are from the “Ethics of Elfland” chapter and although not adjacent are related. The third is from the last chapter, "The Romance of Orthodoxy."

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

***

The one thing [modern thought] loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. [Herbert Spencer] popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God.... It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.

***

I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the country. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

***

And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God for an instant seemed to be an atheist.

BergFest 2012

I mentioned last week that my wife was out of town. I took the occasion to watch some movies that I knew she was not much interested in. Last Saturday night it was Bergman’s Shame, which I have been wanting to see for several years now, because it belongs to the same agonized late 1960s period that produced Persona and Hour of the Wolf, both of which fascinate me, and which were its immediate predecessors. (I had actually seen it as a college student in 1968, but remembered only the opening and closing scenes.) Caught up again in Bergman’s world, I decided that the rest of the coming week would be my private Bergman Festival, and that I would watch one Bergman film every night till my wife’s return on Friday. In the end I had to make time for some other things, and only watched four over the six nights. That was enough for now, though I'm eager to see Wild Strawberries and Winter Light again. Here are some brief reactions.

Shame

Part of me wants to say that this is a great film; another part says it is too relentlessly brutal and grim to qualify. Persona and Hour of the Wolf were disturbing psychological studies, the former decidedly strange, and enigmatic if not incomprehensible, the latter mixed with something seemingly supernatural (and evil). Shame is straightforward in comparison: a portrait of two people pushed to psychological extremes—to destruction, maybe—by war. Johan and Eva (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, as in Hour of the Wolf) are a married couple without children, living on an island which is invaded by a foreign army. Wishing only to be left alone, and in the end only to survive, but caught between the invaders and the defenders, they are driven to various forms of betrayal and brutality. The atmosphere is constricted, anxious, and menacing, and watching the film, especially its last half or so, is not what you would call a pleasant experience. As with all Bergman’s work of this period, it’s full of powerful black-and-white imagery, often very beautiful in spite of the subject matter. I’ll watch it again for that, and for the last haunting sequence, with its hint of...not redemption, exactly, but a sort of awareness that hell is not all there is.

A Passion

This was and still is distributed in the US as The Passion of Anna. I don’t know why; perhaps someone thought the suggestion of sex would make it more appealing. If so, I doubt it worked, and anyone who did pay to see it expecting a lot of sex would have asked for his money back. A Passion is certainly the better title, as the characters are suffering on the cross of truth itself, fearing the knowledge of what they really are. This is another Sydow vs. Ullman piece, with a couple, Andreas and Anna, locked in the combat of a destructive relationship. It’s one of the first if not the first of Bergman’s movies to be shot in color. I don’t think it’s as good as some of the other work of this period, but still, it shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves Bergman. Again in this film certain important facts are left ambiguous, or at least they seemed so to me, but in this case it seemed to me less acceptable not to know them. One wants to know which is the really crazy one, Anna or Andreas. Perhaps it’s supposed to be clear, and it’s my fault that I didn’t see it. I’d like to read some other opinions.

The Seventh Seal

As Beethoven’s 5th is to the symphony, or the Mona Lisa to the portrait, so this movie is to the art film: the familiar example which serves as an emblem of the entire field. Being so familiar (relatively), it may similarly be taken for granted. That’s a mistake, because it is a great work. I believe this was the fourth time I’ve seen it, but the last time was at least ten years ago, and it had faded somewhat in my memory. I devoted one of my festival nights to it because it hasn’t been long since I saw Winter Light and the other works which deal with the question of faith, and I wanted to refresh my memory about it.

It’s at least as good as I remembered, as a work of art. It can be seen as an anguished 20th-century version of a medieval mystery play. The characters represent a wide range of possible responses to the problem of meaning: tormented questioning (the Knight), innocent acceptance (the traveling players), honorable cynicism (the Squire), dishonorable cynicism (the spoiled theologian), decent stolid earthliness (the smith), delusional or fanatical faith (the witch and the flagellants). Lay them out that way, and you see what’s missing: fully conscious Christian faith. The question, then, is framed in a way that more or less excludes the answer that would in fact have been all around an actual medieval knight, and I was left a little dissatisfied on that score.

But the intensity of the Knight’s search testifies to the seriousness of Bergman’s treatment of the questions. And whether one believes that death is the end or the beginning—which is to say, whether one takes the final vision as an actual release into an actual world where “the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears,” or as a symbol for accepting oblivion as the resolution of all questions, which seems more likely—the end of the film is a magnificent moment.

I don’t remember grasping, on earlier viewings, that the Knight’s upsetting of the chessboard is not to give himself a reprieve but to allow the young couple and their child to escape—I mean, as opposed to their simply taking advantage of the moment. That’s a pretty important point, and really perfects the story.

Smiles of a Summer Night

It’s been a long time since I saw or heard Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, but I remember its atmosphere as being something like this. It’s a complex romantic intrigue in which a set of unhappy people floundering around in unsatisfactory and mostly immoral situations get shaken up and re-sorted in the course of a Swedish summer night, in which darkness never really falls. Some end up happy, some at least less unhappy, one sadder but wiser. It’s light, witty, poignant, and, well, Mozartean. It was Bergman’s first international success, and gave him the credibility he needed to get approval for his next project: The Seventh Seal. I wonder how the film company liked the result. It must have seemed as if Mozart had followed Figaro with Wozzeck.

 

Chesterton, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism

I started to link to this in a comment on the previous Chesterton post, but it merits a post of its own: an excellent treatment of the subject by Stratford Caldecott. He quotes Chesterton in a 1932 interview: 

...the Hitlerite atrocities...[are] quite obviously the expedient of a man who, not knowing quite what to do to carry out his wild promises to a sorely-tried people, has been driven to finding a scapegoat, and has found, with relief, the most famous scapegoat in European history - the Jewish people. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and myself will die defending the last Jew inEurope. 

If he was saying that as early as 1932, I don't think he can reasonably be accused of Nazi sympathies. Once again Hitchens appears sloppy at best. As I said in comments on that post, Chesterton did say some things that can only be construed as anti-Semitic, but they're not Nazi-level, though it is the legacy of the Holocaust that any negative statement about Jews inevitably seems to us now of the same ilk as Hitler's. As Caldecott quotes a Jewish source as saying, "With Chesterton we’ve never thought of a man who was seriously anti-Semitic." 

For Everyone Who Ever Wished He Could Go Live in the Library

Janet sent me this several days ago and I forgot about till this afternoon. It's about fifteen minutes long, so you have to set aside a bit of time for it, but it's very much worth it.