A meditation.

Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski is giving herself a sprain proclaiming in the wilderness about secrets squirreled out of Soviet archives and now freely available to the media, if only anyone gave a damn. Lamentable that she's wasting her breath.

I don't think there's real hope of turning back the steady slouch of things to that earlier politics of the manichee. Yes, it served us well until Vietnam and the New Left—or served, at least; there was a mechanism in place, and though it gave us the House Committee on Un-American Activities it also gave us moral purpose, that supreme fiction so dangerous and ennobling. (But we are deadly afraid of moral purpose; after all, the fascists had moral purpose, and the fascists still have their boot on 20th century thought—we're like those damaged twentysomethings who were harassed as children and now can think of nothing else.)

But of course it's only dangerous, not ennobling—well, at least that's where my mind goes with it, inevitably, but who knows? I grew up in a university.

Athens: not really democratic. (Corollary—Persia: not really so bad!)
Augustus: autocrat. (Maecenas: toady. Vergil: deeply morbid.)
Marcus Aurelius: platitudinous.
Crusades: brutal & unnecessary & genocidal.
Oliver Cromwell: autocrat.
Pilgrims: vicious & genocidal.
Settlers: genocidal.
The Raj: venal & brutal & racist.
Old Dominion: venal & racist & vicious & brutal & unnecessary but not genocidal.
Cold war: propaganda scheme (plus red scare).
President Bush: buffoonish & venal & racist.

Fine, you win, you win. I can't think at this point of a broad moral impetus that didn't go terribly wrong, at least if it wasn't disingenuous to begin with. My heroism, O sages and hierophants, is well broken. Mazal tov. But I don't believe you.

Crying out for the mos maiorum, that ever-receding Good Old Way—it's never really a puritanical exercise, I don't think. I don't buy into the very popular narrative of the power-hungry hypocrite, that famous and imaginary would-be tyrant with his fingers in other people's pastry (from theatrical to reproductive)—anything that easy and that convenient must be false. Reality is dense, and human beings are the densest part of it, swept around like seaweed in the wash of their own logos. After all, the mos maiorum recedes in front of you like Aeneas' Italy, nightmarishly further away the faster you chase it; go back in time and your reverend father's world is crumbling, too, and his father's father's. When a flippant person discovers this truth for himself he'll inevitably snigger about how, ah, clearly it's a question of disposition, or a kind of power-play, or just open delusion, or revanchist moaning: I've heard that enough times, G-d knows it.

But he's right in a sense—it is a question of disposition, but not in his terms. Conservatism, political and cultural, begins in human loneliness. It's not a question of forcing other people into virtue, or really even trying to slow a real civilizational decline; it's the terrible realization that other men are not like you, that your concerns are different, that you are wherever your thoughts are and that is very far indeed from the soul sitting next to you in the lecture hall—no, decline isn't a falling-away from an old gold standard but a declension from yourself, from the fragment of the mind of G-d you hope is in your breast, nominative to vocative: me, of me, apart from me, to me, Ah, O other, o hysterical man.

It's a longing for human companionship, for the impossible Zion of sharing your mind—really sharing it, sacred heart's longing finding answer—with your brothers. Conservatism is the agonized cry for that lost city of G-d where your worldview is not at issue, never part from your fellow man in the knowledge that no amount of argument could bridge the impossible gulf between you—for the city where no man goes out into the world alone.

But all this is true of the progressive mindset, too, only with different aims, different anxieties. The loneliness is the same, and so is the echo-chamber comfort of ideological purity. Think of the repulsiveness of commentators on Jihad Watch with their frog-chorus of agreement: you want that impossible unison with such an agony of wanting that you turn to vicious extremity and the party line, to a deranged ideological monomania that drives all things out of mind. Or think of greenpeace protesters, or raw foodists, or any other fragment of our ruined civilization—fellowship at the cost of penury, inertness, grimace. (But not ruined, I have to remind myself: Always the same, always the old balance, always the same mess. This is the truth, but I don't believe it. Yet, I mutter like Galileo, it declines.)

For a moment in American history we were confronted with such an unimaginable evil that it was possible to form a broad cultural coalition—and of course people were ruined by it, Jews, homosexuals, the innocent idealists of the left who didn't know any better because they loved the Idea and as such sinned in ignorance. But you can't go back, at least not now: no amount of journalism will save it, much to our dismay; the dog won't hunt, brother.

Down into the yellow-peeling onionskin of the dregs of time.

No, at heart we curmudgeons and antiquarians and other misplaced dreamers are waiting for Saul to die in his sin and the coming coronation our David, that cultural climax more beautiful and impossible than Michelangelo could have imagined. We want to see a society, a president, a king after G-d's own heart, and yet at this point in history—this postmodern hysteria, perpetual, nerve-wracking, labyrinthine—we could never acclaim the David of our heart's hunger.

Because we can't stop thinking of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines—even Amalek.

And it drives us to derangement.

Still yet more Simone Weil hagiography—a florilection.

Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.

Still more poignant—so painful is the contrast—is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.

Far from hot baths was he indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. (4)

By some trick of my neurology, anaphora reduces me to quivering emotional jelly. (Case in point, a completely banal and uninteresting poem of Edna Millay's, "The Bobolink," is the only work of art ever to reduce me to tears—and, if you can believe it, does so reliably, as if by witchcraft. The culprit? The mindnumbing, kitschy refrain "I shall never be sad again, / I shall never be sad again.") But never mind. Another:

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert. (10)

Weil's pithiness is a world wonder—the whole essay is like this.

Electric cabinets of unreal curiosities.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned his collection of asyndetic privative adjectives, a philological curio cabinet at this point not only marvelously expansive but—apparently—still growing. Bless G-d, said I, a collection, really? On the internet! Well, the whole notion transported me, as Noel Coward sang of the unleashed matron—

hot flushes of delight suffused her,

—changing my whole demeanor. Well, well, well. Here we are in the dregs of time, to be sure, but this is a really charming way to wait for the barbarians, isn't it? I can't explain the charm of this kind of Alexandrian hobbyism, but I spent a happy hour looking through that arbitrary and charming word-cabinet and was glad.

Partially I think it's a symptom of that nameless, quasi-postmodern delight in imaginary collections: I think of the preposterous and lovely books in Prospero's library according to the 1991 Peter Greenaway film or Borges' imaginary compendia. The endless, trackless, authorless noise of Web 2.0 gives us an opportunity to realize little fragments of this ur-fantasy, doesn't it? I mean, imagine.

This is a compendium of all the asyndetic privative adjective-series in Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit.

This is an anthology of 124 spurious fragments from Ennius' Annales, and arbitrary corruptions of them.

This is a collection of the last lines of verse published by every English poet 1914-1934, hyperlinked to deleted lines in the variorum of Tennyson's Idylls.

This, interpolated into the Homeric hymns, is a hidden cabinet of Theocritean hapax legomena.

This is a gallery of 400 famous images that include a eunuch.

It's only a half-formed thought, but I wonder if this fascination with fantastic pedantry might have something to do with the out-of-control vastness of the 21st century logos. There's so much written, so much available for recension, so much lost both through evanescence and human limitation—I think some of us must come to carry around the fantasy of stumbling over something immeasurably rare and immoderately specialized, some literary cabinet of curiosities that reflects the eternal-lifetime of abstraction we want but can never have.

Ankh ankh, en mitak:
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh.

Live life, thou shalt not die:
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years,
For millions of millions of years.

Well, it's the old longing, from Amenhotep to transhumanism. The text is from one of the best passages in one of Philip Glass' better operas, by the way.