Orientalism

You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned.

The "you" in that quote is interesting. Kakuzo Okakura, writing 1906, is telling us that some Japanese have done to western culture what we have done to their culture. This is perspective very different from Edward Said who sees distortion of other cultures as a one way crime that only western nations are guilty of.

I wonder if it's true? My first temptation is to say yes but I have been conditioned to think that way by academics. It strikes me that there are two problems with that. The first is that it tends to make us distrust any history that makes for a good story.

The second, and I think much more important problem, is that the vanity of seeking virtue to refined to be envied and committing crimes to picturesque to be condemned is pretty common. Even the most sordid little affair starts off as some combination of these two.

And that raises a final question: Is seeking these things in the exotic evil? Perhaps it isn't.

House of Bamboo

Things that make you feel nostalgic even though you never experienced them. This song is from a few months before I was born. I'd never ehard it before today.

Commonplace Book

An image from John and Willian Atkins' Book of Boats.

That's a type of boat called a Canoe Yawl. These started off as sort-of canoes. A Scotsman named John MacGregor went back to Britain from North America and described a kayak to a local boatbuilder who built his best approximation*. It wasn't anything like a kayak and nothing like a typical canoe used by North American aboriginal people but it became incredibly popular. The original one built for MacGregor was powered by paddle and was under 15 feet long. But others experimented with the type and added sails. And then they started to make them bigger. Eventually they became yachts.

* Something similar happened with the loafer which is a European shoemaker's effort at making something from a description given him of a moccasin.

A rum thing

In this we are victims of our own antihistorical bias. The dizzying pace of change in the last hundred years has left us stranded. We somehow think that the way things are is the way they have always been; that the Present is the same as the Natural Order. 

And yet our culture knows better. Buried in the way things are is a long chain of used-to-be's. If we get out the shovels and go below the surface a bit, we find five parallel stories that tell us why X matters.

The X, for which the above was written is rum. The book I quote here is a Short Course in Rum: A Guide to Tasting and Talking About Rum by Lynn Hoffman. His point, however, could applied to a lot of things, not the least of which is Catholicism. Much of what people declare to be the "unchanged teaching of the church going back two thousand years" is really the product of the last few centuries.

Virtue signalling (1)

From On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society, 1840

By Thomas Carlyle

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. 

By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. 

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. 

Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? 

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Violet-le-Duc on restoration

Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish in a completed state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.

Violet-le-Duc is a controversial figure, a fact that wouldn't bother him at all. What impresses me about that quote is the courage it shows. Courage that the man demonstrated in the work he did.

It seems to me that this attitude applies to more than just restoring buildings. To restore anything at all means to take the risk of creating something new in the process. To think that anything else is possible is delusional and the risk of paralysis is very real.