Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

January 19, 2026

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
(Harper, 2021) [1927]
192 p.

Across a chasm in the mountains of Peru, a small footbridge, built long ago, stood. One day, without warning, it broke, sending five people plunging to their deaths. A Franciscan monk, Brother Junipero, convinced of God’s justice and providence, undertakes to study the lives of these five people in order to understand why it was those five, and not others, who were killed.

The novel therefore falls into specific sections in which the lives of specific individuals are presented. Their backgrounds are described, and their characters analyzed. The circumstances that led to their crossing that bridge on that day are given. We meet the Marquesa, Dona Maria, who became posthumously famous for the letters which she wrote to her daughter back in Spain. We meet Esteban, a man who, at the time of his sudden death, had assumed the identity of his twin brother. We meet Uncle Pio, an impresario who worked behind the scenes to cultivate the career of a talented young actress in Lima. The fourth and fifth people who fell into the chasm were the serving-woman of the Marquesa and a young boy accompanying Uncle Pio on the fateful day.

Each of the portraits is interesting in its own right. The lives of these individuals intersect in a variety of ways, and certain other characters, not present at the bridge when it broke, are common to all the stories, so we get to know them as well.

The book concludes with Brother Junipero’s attempts to make sense of what happened in the light of divine mercy and justice. We’re told that he found those who knew the people best were often his least valuable sources, presumably because the more they knew, the less black and white the picture became. (If God knows everything, is the implication that he is therefore the most confused?) Junipero draws up a scoring system whereby individuals, based on their actions and words, are given a kind of “salvation score”, but finds, to his dismay, that “the dead were five times more worth saving”. In the end,

“He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.”

In other words, he could not draw conclusions out of the stories he collected, but could only read his pre-existing assumptions into the stories. For his trouble, Junipero’s findings were condemned by Church authorities and both they and he were burned. The book amounts, it seems, to a rather scathing swipe at those who attempt to justify the ways of God to men.

But it has a coda that introduces a new theme. One of the background figures in all of these stories is the Abbess of the local convent, a woman who has laboured long to build up charitable works, but who fears that none of it will outlast her own life. We learn that some time after the tragic events that occasioned Br Junipero’s researches, several events occur, springing in one way or another from the tragedy itself, that suggest her good works will continue. There is here, perhaps, a hint of providence, of all man’s calculations being brought to naught, of a mysterious good being drawn out of evil. Perhaps. It’s hard to say.

For the most part I enjoyed the book. The individual portraits are very well-done; this is the first of Wilder’s novels that I have read, and he is a fine writer. I find the premise intriguing, and the structure pleasing. But I think it is fair to say that the book stands or falls by that final chapter, the synthesis or summation or interpretation of all that came before, and, on my reading at least, it falls rather lamely into a noncommittal or ambiguous posture, speaking out of both sides of its mouth.  I had rather it be cold or hot, not lukewarm. On closing the final pages, I don’t really know what to make of it.

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Stoppard: Rock ‘n’ Roll

January 15, 2026

Rock ‘n’ Roll
Tom Stoppard
(Faber & Faber, 2006)
144 p.

Stoppard wrote many plays dealing, in one way or another, with life in the Soviet Union and the contest between Communism and the West. Rock ‘n’ Roll revisits this theme, this time focusing on characters in Prague between 1968, the year of the “Prague Spring”, and 1990, when the Soviet system collapsed.

The central Czech character is Jan, a young man (at the beginning of the play) who resists the official line, not out of any political ambition — he would prefer just to be left alone — but whose resistance is expressed through a love of rebellious music, most of it coming from the United States and Britain. Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, and the Rolling Stones all have prominent places in the very prominent musical elements that accompany the play.

Contrasted with Jan is Max, a British professor who is, ideologically, a Marxist, and a believer in the possibilities of socialism, a commitment that not even many years of Soviet rule could quite shake out of him. He’s an attractive character, not bombastic or triumphalist, but disappointed and stubborn.

Between the two of them, they raise interesting questions — and it is a very talkative and argumentative play — about what is more powerful, cultural forces (like music) or economic forces (like socialist policies).

There are, also, numerous other characters — wives and daughters — whose relationships to the main characters fill out the drama and allow it to stretch out to about 3 hours in performance.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is one of Stoppard’s mature plays. Some of his plays might be condemned, or praised, for being based on high concepts or conceits, but Rock ‘n’ Roll is not like that. It’s a sober play, no tricks, that really tries to get at a central fissure in 20th century history by getting inside characters living it out. I did find it quite long, but if the opportunity arose to see it live I’d be eager to take it.

*

[Spoken by a Soviet interrogator]
“You’re not clever, you’re simple. And if you’re not simple you’re complicated. We’re supposed to know what’s going on inside people. That’s why it’s the Ministry of the Interior.”

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Theophrastus: Characters

January 12, 2026

Characters
Theophrastus
Translated from the Greek by Henry Gally
Edited by J. Robertson
(2023) [c.300 BC]
87 p.

Theophrastus was a student and friend of Aristotle, and in fact was the first to lead the Lyceum after Aristotle’s death. He was author of many works, few of which are read today. In this brief work, Characters, he gives us a very interesting set of about thirty character sketches. They are brief, but punchy, and often slyly funny. The characters he treats are types that are still recognizable today.

He begins each sketch with a definition of the primary characteristic under consideration. For “The Exquisite Man”, for instance, he begins by defining “Exquisiteness is a striving for honour in small things” (which, I note parenthetically, is a good definition), and, as an example of the sort of thing such a man does, he tells us “When he pays a mina of money he makes a point of offering a freshly minted piece.” That’s witty. The sketches are composed of concatenations of similar observations.

Other characters treated in the book include “The Tactless Man”, “The Flatterer”, “The Bore”, and “The Backbiter”. In each case his scalpel pen exposes the faults of each character.

As I read, I naturally was on the look-out, with some nervousness, for my own character. Would I recognize myself in any of these sketches? The closest I came was “The Affable Man”. “Affability, ” he says, “is a sort of demeanor that gives pleasure at the sacrifice of what is best.” Ouch. As an example of the sort of thing an affable man does, he says: “When summoned to court he wishes to please not merely the man in whose interest he appears, but his adversary too, that he may seem to be non-partisan.” But that would be a good thing to do, right? Right?!

I enjoyed the sketches overall. There’s nothing particularly deep here — he was definitely no match for Aristotle — but the sketches are sharp-witted and sometimes cunningly barbed, and the brief time it took to read them was well-spent. At least, that’s what an affable man would say.

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Musical anniversaries in 2026

January 8, 2026

There are a few notable musical anniversaries to celebrate this year. I usually like to structure my listening for the year around these anniversaries, at least in part. From a thorough list (Thanks again, Osbert) I have assembled the following set for 2026:

Memorials

  • 10 years:
    • Einojuhani Rautavaara
    • Peter Maxwell Davies
  • 50 years:
    • Benjamin Britten
    • Walter Piston
  • 200 years:
    • Carl Maria von Weber
  • 400 years:
    • John Dowland

Birthdays

  • 100 years:
    • Morton Feldman
    • György Kurtág
  • 150 years:
    • Manuel de Falla
    • Havergal Brian
    • Ernanno Wolf-Ferrari
  • 450 years:
    • Thomas Weelkes

All things considered, it’s a pretty lightweight year. Wolf-Ferrari? I’m stretching.

I am most excited about listening to Britten, Dowland, and Feldman. Havergal Brian can be a gas, so that should be fun. The others, honestly, feel kind of dutiful. Time to exercise my inner Kant.

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Favourites in 2025: Film

January 6, 2026

To conclude my 2025 year-in-review, I offer a few thoughts today on my favourite films from 2025. As with the other categories, these are not films that were in theatres in 2025 (for the most part), but films I happened to see this year. I shall begin at the top, and proceed in a rough descending order of favourite-ness.

***

A Tale of Winter
(Eric Rohmer, 1992)

I toss my hat in the air. A triumph! Rohmer gives us a portrait of a young woman who fell in love, but lost touch with the young man and no longer knows where he is. She lives under the shadow of that loss, all attempts to begin new relationships with new men thwarted, at least in part, by an implicit comparison.

In some respects it’s a wonderfully subtle comedy. I was inclined to sympathize with her difficulties in love, but after a while the suspicion that she’s partly the author of her own miseries begins to grow. “I can’t love a man who X”. It’s a versatile idea. But even when her apparent foolishness is becoming incontestable, I wanted to remain at her side, quietly hoping for the best. She’s never an object of fun. Affection rules the day, and perhaps she knows more than I know.

But, in retrospect, there’s a kind of providence at work, maybe. At key moments, in key settings, she sees things clearly. She’s sensitive to premonitions. She knows more than she knows.

The Shakespearean connection isn’t a mere coincidence or a nuisance; it’s appropriated. Dead things, things lost but for their representations, can be restored to us.

A Tale of Winter was a terrific way to launch a survey of all four of Rohmer’s “Tales of the Seasons”. I did watch the others as the seasons rolled. They didn’t quite live up to the promise of this one, but that does not efface the lingering joy in my heart.

*****

A Complete Unknown
(James Mangold, 2024)

Within the first ten minutes I was in the bag, my critical faculties more or less disarmed. Bob Dylan is my polestar, my comfortable sweater, my boon companion. I was just happy to relive this period in his life (especially as I was listening to Through the Open Window at the same time). I knew what was coming, and it didn’t matter.

A big part of that enjoyment is Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. I’ve been something of a Chalamet skeptic, but I must admit that in this film he’s uncannily good — nearly as good, I dare say, as that guy who played Dylan in Don’t Look Back. The verbal mannerisms, the voice, the posture — awfully close. And the amazing thing is that he does this imitation without tipping into parody, a fine line that would be oh-so-easy to cross with this very-parodiable character.

Even more remarkable is the claim, apparently true, that Chalamet played and sang himself. There were moments of music-making in this film that I wanted to go on forever. Like that duet between Johnny Cash and June Carter in Walk the Line, James Mangold succeeded, a few times, in catching lightning in a bottle. I would have been happy to sit through 2 hours and 20 minutes of songs.

I liked also that the film didn’t stick only with the big hits. “I Was Young When I Left Home” and “All Over You” are pretty obscure, not officially released until a few years ago.

It was fun to see all the other characters around him: Woody, Pete, Joan, Suze. (I did miss seeing Llewyn Davis though.)

I’m not claiming it’s a great film by the usual measures. It’s less complicated than Don’t Look Back, less probing than I’m Not There, and less funny than Rolling Thunder Revue. At the end of the day, it’s probably pretty conventional. But I did love it, pined for it when I had to pause it, laughed and smiled, and enjoyed pretty much every minute.

*****

Summer with Monika
(Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

For the lips of a loose woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
but in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.

There’s something elemental in this story of a young couple, mad with love, who abandon family and work for a summer sojourn together, a summer of sexual liberation and freedom from responsibility, only to find their utopian dream turning sick and sour under the press of circumstances and of their own flawed characters. Consider it a shot across the bow of 1968.

This kind of freedom, Bergman seems to be showing us, is fools’ gold. It leads to degradation and chaos. It also shows us very clearly, by a studied contrast, how our lives spring from our moral character. These two lovers are both dissolute and irresponsible, for a time, but when they hit bottom, one finds the inner resources to claw a way back, and the other does not.

It’s a hideously harrowing portrait of an unhappy marriage, and yet, at the same time, a lovely portrayal of a father who shoulders his responsibilities in order to care for his family. Really excellent. My favourite Bergman thus far.

*****

Sinners
(Ryan Coogler, 2025)

At the level of filmmaking craft, this is top shelf. Every frame looks like a million bucks. I loved the big, bold vision: the bravura tracking shots, the fantastic music. There are sequences in this film where the picture and sound and editing are so beautifully integrated that the result can be described as symphonic. It’s a rare thing, and I was thoroughly impressed.

Yes, it’s a horror film, but I didn’t know that going in, and I loved that it took its time to set its stage and develop its characters. The idea of marrying a dustbowl-gangster film with a horror thriller is a good one, and carried off, in most respects, very well indeed.

Two reservations. First, it’s got some crass sexual material, which is, almost needless to say, gratuitous.  Second, the film is pushing an obvious racial politics agenda; it’s pretty simplistic and pretty nasty. Reverse the skin colours and we’re in Birth of a Nation territory. Is this really the sort of thing we want to celebrate?

But, those reservations aside, I can recognize talent when I see it, and this is an exciting film from a filmmaker whom, as of now, I am keeping an eye on.

*****

Léon Morin, Priest
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)

Here is a subtle, thoughtful exploration of a pastoral relationship between a young priest and a wayward Catholic, and of how a slow conversion unfolds in a soul.

The priest is a man, and the wayward Catholic is a woman, and the film is perhaps especially remarkable for the way in which it folds this sexual difference, and potential attraction, into the dynamics of the evolving relationship. It could be quite dangerous, salacious territory, especially as, on my reading, both characters make missteps rooted in the possibility of love between them, but the film seems to ride a sharp, honest line that respects both the nature of consecrated life and the natural attractions that can spring up between men and women who spend time with one another.

About halfway through the film the female lead has a religious experience in what is, in its simplicity, among the best portrayals of such an experience known to me. The wind blows where it will.

Is Morin a good priest? It’s a difficult question to answer, because the character is nuanced. Certainly he has many admirable qualities. He is courageous and dedicated. He is intelligent and caring. He takes his vocation seriously and understands its nature. Yet in his pastoral care he says things that slightly off. Justifiable elision of the truth, or a misguided attempt to win a convert?  (I found it interesting that the film was made in 1961, just before the Second Vatican Council; Morin sometimes sounds very much like what has latterly been called a “Spirit of Vatican II priest”.)

As a portrait of a parish priest the film might profitably be compared with The Diary of a Country Priest. By that measure, Morin is more cerebral, less mystical, less assured, and — though the judgement is not up to me — less saintly. He is more like a priest that you or I might know, if we knew a good priest (which I trust we do).

Toward the end, however, Morin prays a prayer that exposes his inner life in a particularly intimate way. Perhaps he is a saint after all.

I’m rather surprised that I’d never heard of this film until I encountered a discussion of it at the Criteria podcast. It is a wonderful discovery. Is it one of the great Catholic films? I’m not ready to say so, but neither am I ruling it out. I believe this one will merit another look.

*****

Killers of the Flower Moon
(Martin Scorsese, 2023)

A sweeping, spacious historical epic set in Oklahoma in the 1920s, Killers of the Flower Moon depicts the exploitation of the Osage tribe by rapacious and unscrupulous politicians. It marries many of the motifs of Scorsese’s mafia films to a wild west setting, and it works extremely well. In one long (emphasis on long) arc, we see the rise and, gratifyingly, the fall of a kingpin.

Obviously there’s a high political valence to this story, but what interests me is the personal angle: the soul of Ernest (Leonardo Dicaprio), the nephew of the film’s principal villain. Initially he seems a naif, but when circumstances cure him of his ignorance, a deeper reality is revealed: he’s a weak man, willing to serve someone more powerful than himself, and to damn himself in the process.

The place the film ends up is harrowing: we are always told that to receive absolution a penitent’s confession has to be complete, nothing held back. This film shows us why. What do you do when you can’t bring yourself to admit that you’ve done a thing? I daresay there’s a deep wisdom at work in this one.

*****

Paisan
(Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

Six vignettes from the dying days of World War II, as American and British troops were driving the Germans up and out of Italy. In each one, we see some aspect of the interactions between the Allied soldiers and the Italian people: a young woman offers to guide soldiers through a difficult landscape, an American soldier befriends a young Italian boy, a group of American chaplains take lodgings in a monastery, and so on. The vignettes are disconnected, but the film still coheres thematically.

I very much liked that the focus was always on how the Italian people received the liberators. I expect that the film was made as a way of thanking the soldiers; it played that way for me, anyway.

Rossellini made it in the aftermath of Rome, Open City, and while it doesn’t have the power of that film, this still feels very close to the war. I wonder about the circumstances under which it was filmed. All that rubble was real.

*****

Warfare
(Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, 2025)

Alex Garland’s name is attached to this as co-director, so a comparison to Civil War feels natural: Warfare is a much better film. Stripped down, focused, and far less manipulative, it tells its simple story, about a unit of US Navy Seals holed up in a house in Iraq, in a way that I found gripping.

Part of my interest is professional. I’ve talked to soldiers, I’ve taken notes on what they do and how they do it, I’ve watched them train, and I’ve even dressed up as one and tried to do it myself. This film gave me an opportunity to sit and watch them carefully, and all indications are that the actors and directors took the nuts-and-bolts aspects of being an infantryman in a modern war seriously.

The movie doesn’t give us much context. We don’t know who this group is, where they’ve been, or why. We don’t know if what they are trying to do matters in the grand scheme. They don’t know that. With only a very few exceptions, the film does a good job of keeping us locked in their own frame of reference. We just see what happens to them and how they respond. It’s not swinging to make any big points. It’s just being what it is: a tight, closely-observed, textured portrait of a very bad day in a soldier’s life.

*****

Juror #2
(Clint Eastwood, 2024)

I like a film that puts an ordinary person into a difficult situation and makes them figure it out. The situation here is a corker, cooked up as plausibly as could plausibly be hoped, and I was really drawn in. What will he do? Perhaps he should have devoted some time to reading Les Miserables.

I’ll not claim that it’s a great film, but it is a solid entertainment, with good writing and competent execution, and it has a conscience. I don’t think I’ve liked a Clint Eastwood film as much as I liked this one. Extra points for the superbly written ending; the last two shots are fantastic. After enjoying the film myself, I screened it later in the year for a group of teenagers, and the ending drew a tremendously gratifying roar.

*****

My Dinner with Andre
(Louis Malle, 1981)

In a sense, nothing could be simpler. Two men, Andre and Wally, sit together and talk for the better part of two hours. In another sense, what could be more complex than two people having an honest conversation about matters of substance?

They talk about everything under the sun. Andre is full of tales. He’s been everywhere, man, seen things, and come back to tell about them.

Andre is a searcher, a restless spiritualist; Wally is a creature of comfort, a hard-headed rationalist whose commitment to science alienates him from the sorts of things Andre describes: ecstatic states, visions, rites.

Perhaps what most impressed me about the film was its portrait of friendship in action. It’s not like Andre and Wally are best friends; they haven’t seen one another in years, and Wally didn’t even want to come to the dinner, expecting it to be uncomfortable or boring. But these reservations gradually drift away as the conversation is carried forward. I get the sense that they have enough distance from one another to really be honest with each other.

Kierkegaard said that “to understand and to understand are two different things”. We can know things — things about the world, things accessible to the sciences, public truths — but there’s another kind of knowledge, tacit and personal, that only comes through experience. Andre is interested mainly in the latter, Wally mainly in the former. But it is Wally who gets a taste of what Andre means when he travels home. Here, and maybe only here, the film gently takes a side.

It’s quite a fascinating experiment, although it also could be seen, I think, as a kind of anti-cinema. It might have worked just as well as a radio play. Or maybe not. But it is definitely working hard against what we expect from a movie.

*****

Also excellent: Floating Weeds (1959), L’Eclisse (1962), The Conformist (1970), The Elephant Man (1980), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), A Summer’s Tale (1996), Millennium Actress (2001), Volver (2006), The Wind Rises (2013), Nebraska (2013), Dune (2021-24), The Phoenician Scheme (2025), One Battle After Another (2025).
Disappointments: Sword of the Valiant (1984), Wild at Heart (1990), Train to Busan (2016), The Boy and the Heron (2023), The Return (2024), Mickey 17 (2025).
Watched again: This is Spinal Tap (1984), Jackie Brown (1997), Talk to Her (2002), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (2003), Burn After Reading (2008), A Serious Man (2009), The Tree of Life (2011), Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), The Green Knight (2021).
Longest films: The Brutalist [215m]; Killers of the Flower Moon [208m]; Dune: Part Two [167m].
Shortest films: The Rat Catcher [17m]; The Swan [17m]; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [25m]
Oldest films: A Man There Was (1917); He Who Gets Slapped (1924); Sons of the Desert (1933).
Newest films: One Battle After Another (Sep); The Phoenician Scheme (May); Sinners (April).
Multiple films by a single director: Eric Rohmer (4), Wes Anderson (4), Victor Sjöström (2), Coen Brothers (2), Pedro Almodóvar (2), Roberto Rossellini (2), Quentin Tarantino (2), Terrence Malick (2), Wim Wenders (2), David Lynch (2), Michelangelo Antonioni (2), Denis Villeneuve (2), Hiyao Miyazaki (2).
Quod linguam dicent?: Japanese (7), French (6), Italian (4), ….

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Favourites in 2025: Books

January 4, 2026

It seems I may have reached an age (or fallen into a rut) where the very finest things I am reading I am re-reading, but nonetheless there was a nice batch of good books which I read for the first time in 2025, and today I’d like to say a few words about them.

Before doing so, though, let me give a brief overview of my year in books. I’m a reader who likes to organize little reading projects, and this year I made progress, sometimes halting, in a few of them.

I undertook at the beginning of 2025 to read the entire Bible in one year. I found a daily reading plan, and was actually moving somewhat faster than scheduled; I completed the plan in late October. It was then that I realized, however, that I had only read the Protestant Bible, and had missed the deuterocanonical books! So I picked those up as well and finished the entire project in early December.

Obviously, reading Scripture is never going to be a bad thing to do, but I found reading the Bible in one year was much too fast; it was simply too much to get through every day, and, perhaps because of a character fault that, ironically, a slower reading might have helped to alleviate, I devolved into reading for information rather than reading devotionally. I became convinced, at any rate, that reading small sections of Scripture each day (as in, say, the Daily Office) is a much preferable practice. It was also forcibly carried home to me that the Bible is a big, clamouring, confusing collection of books, one which I have little confidence that I could interpret sensibly on my own. I was confirmed, in other words, in the wisdom of simply being a Catholic who reads the Scriptures within the Church’s own tradition. I was glad that my spiritual home is where it is.

Other reading projects suffered in comparison. My now-years-long trek through Greek history and literature made relatively little progress in 2025; I completed only a handful of books from the time, plus a few modern books about the Greeks. Those I read were good, but there were not many of them. I’ve also been, for some years now, reading plays from the early modern period, usually one each month; this year I fell off the wagon for several months and, in the end, managed only four. However, I did complete my reading of all of Tom Stoppard’s plays, which felt great, and then, hard upon, I heard that he had died, which felt terrible. Finally, I’ve been trying to set aside blocks of time — usually 3-4 months — to marinate in the work of individual poets; in 2025 I marinated all year, usually quite lightly, in Richard Wilbur; he is a good poet, but my attention to him was honoured largely in the breach.

**

Having said all that, let me proceed to a few words about the ten books which I read for the first time in 2025 and which I most enjoyed. I’ll begin with non-fiction, in no particular order:

Before reading Peter Green’s biography Alexander of Macedon, I had only a vague outline of Alexander’s life: born in rough Macedon, tutored by Aristotle (maybe), conqueror of Persia, dead young. Green fills in the whole picture. We see Philip II’s own near-Alexandrian ambitions, the murky intrigues surrounding his assassination, and Alexander’s swift, ruthless rise. Green traces the breathtaking speed of Alexander’s eastern campaign—from the Granicus and Issus to the horrors of Tyre, the grandeur of Egypt, and the decisive victory at Gaugamela against Darius, the High King of Persia—along with the growing megalomania, paranoia, and cruelty that accompanied his successes. His push into Afghanistan and India revealed his audacity and pushed his men to their breaking point. Alexander died suddenly at 32, leaving an empire that soon fell apart, which perhaps suited a man interested in conquest, not consolidation. Green sees him as a violent megalomaniac of unmatched military genius, and tells the story with colour, clarity, and life.

*

 

Wendy Stein’s lovely book, Divine Light: The Art of Mosaic in Rome, 300-1300, surveys Rome’s major mosaics from the fourth to the thirteenth century, beginning with Santa Costanza and continuing all the way to the glories of San Clemente and Santa Maria in Trastevere. Stein traces the gradual shift from pagan Roman mosaic traditions to distinctly Christian art, providing brief but informative introductions to each site and guiding the reader through their iconography, political context, and artistic lineage. The prose is competent if not inspired, but the real riches are the abundant photographs, which reward slow, careful attention. I was in Rome this year, after reading the book, and I went to see several of them again in person. These mosaics—dazzling, solemn, intimate, and foundational for Catholic art—remind me why Rome’s churches remain among my heart’s treasures.

*

Hugh Kenner’s Paradox in Chesterton is one of the finest books I’ve read on Chesterton. Kenner offers a judicious appraisal: Chesterton is “not a great literary artist,” yet unquestionably a great mind who “cannot be praised too highly so long as praise is confined to what is praiseworthy.” Kenner argues that Chesterton’s special gift was a metaphysical intuition of being, and his triumph was expressing that intuition through paradox—both the verbal paradoxes that jolt his readers and the deeper, metaphysical paradoxes rooted in reality itself. He traces Chesterton’s sense of wonder, his analogical vision, and his love of the great Christian paradoxes, above all the God who dies for man. Rich, perceptive, and wide-ranging, the book is a genuine delight—well worth the long, meandering path it took me to finish it.

*

When the new Pope took the name Leo in 2025, it gave me the last push I needed to finally spend some time with his most immediate namesake. Reading Rerum Novarum at last, I see why it stands at the foundation of Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII treats the rights and duties of capital and labour with admirable clarity, insisting that the State is servant, not master, charged with defending natural rights given by God. These include the right to work, to private property, to form associations—and, above all, the prior and inviolable rights of the family, the basic social unit that precedes the State itself. Much of the encyclical concerns the demands of justice in economic life: employers must not profit from workers’ desperation, and wages must support a worker and his family—the famous “just wage.” Leo is critical of both capitalist excess and socialist abolition of property. He defends voluntary charity over coercive taxation and redistribution. His tone throughout is bracingly forthright: anti-utopian and strikingly confident. I’m eager to read more from this pontiff.

***

The finest of the fictional works I read this year were the following:

Doctor Thorne, the third volume in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, centers on a classic Trollopean dilemma: in England’s monied class, marriage is entangled with finance, and the indebted Greshams insist that “Frank must marry money.” Unfortunately for their hopes, Frank loves Mary Thorne—affectionate, sincere, but poor and of mysterious parentage. The novel’s conflict turns on duty versus desire: Frank’s conviction that love should rule his choice, the family’s counter-arguments, and Mary’s own doubts about whether her love harms rather than helps him. Trollope heightens the drama with delicious irony, and the plot slowly but surely builds upon it, like a moral Rube Goldberg machine. Mary is the true center, though her uncle—Doctor Thorne—presides. Warm, charming, and cozy, Doctor Thorne delivers its inevitable happy ending with a quiet joy. I thought it was excellent.

*

Beginning Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the seventh entry in my “one long book per newborn” tradition felt fitting: a seven-volume mountain for a seventh child. This first volume, Swann’s Way, opens with the famous madeleine episode, in which a taste unlocks a vast panorama of memory. The long Combray section is, for me, the most marvelous—Proust’s evocation of childhood nights, family walks, the hawthorn blossoms throbbing with hidden meaning, and young Marcel’s first love for Gilberte, who appears to him as a kind of holy radiance.

The central section, “Swann in Love,” recounts Charles Swann’s obsessive affair with Odette—intricate, painful, and ultimately disillusioning—an adult echo of the boy’s own awakening. And the final pages return to Marcel’s unrequited longing for Gilberte, beautifully capturing how places and memories change as we do.

Proust’s famously long, fluid sentences form a kind of music, which carried me along. I was thoroughly charmed. Over the course of the year I managed to complete almost 5 of the 7 volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but this first remains my favourite thus far.

*

Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo—a great Canadian ghost story written, perhaps fittingly, by an Englishman—follows a small hunting party deep into the northern wilderness, where they encounter a mysterious spirit. Blackwood, an author new to me, is superb at conjuring the vastness and uncanny solitude of the Canadian wild, “depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden.” Strange signs mount slowly: hints, whispers, unsettling impressions, until the Wendigo itself—bodiless, swift, with a voice like wind and rain—edges into view. I’m astonished I’d never heard of this story until an American friend mentioned it; Canada would have more character if the Wendigo still haunted our imagination. Some politically incorrect language likely contributes to its neglect. I read it by flashlight in a tent in the Canadian wild—a perfect reading experience.

*

Racine’s Athalie surprised me at once by drawing its plot not from classical myth but from an obscure Old Testament episode (2 Kings 11; 2 Chronicles 22–23). Set in the 9th century BC after the division of Israel and Judah, the play centers on Athalie—daughter of Jezebel, widow of Judah’s king, and an apostate who worships Baal—and on young Joash, the rightful heir she believes dead. In fact he lives, hidden in the Temple under the High Priest’s protection. When the priest reveals Joash’s identity, a tense struggle for the throne ignites, rendered by Racine with stately eloquence and brisk dramatic power.

I found the play superb: engaging, beautifully translated, and far stronger than I expected. Voltaire and Flaubert praised it, and Handel used it as the basis for his oratorio Athalia. It may be the finest Biblical stage drama I know.

*

Marilynne Robinson’s Jack, the fourth of her Gilead novels, fills in the hidden years of Jack Boughton—the prodigal son from Home—by tracing his fragile, improbable romance with Della, a Black schoolteacher in 1950s St. Louis. Their love unfolds under immense pressure: anti-miscegenation laws make marriage illegal, white society condemns them, and even Della’s distinguished family opposes the match. Yet they bind themselves to one another in intention and act, without any church or state willing to bless them.

Jack himself is a finely drawn tangle of intelligence, shame, and self-sabotage. Homeless and unmoored—estranged from family, faith, and purpose—he speaks of a “doom” within him, a compulsion to ruin what he loves. Della alone sees something in him that he cannot see in himself, and her steadfastness becomes a kind of grace. Their relationship is beautifully rendered, tender yet shadowed. For me, it’s the second finest of the Gilead novels.

*

The title of P.G. Wodehouse’s short story collection, Young Men in Spats, likely refers not to quarrels but to the fashionable footwear once favored by the Drones Club set—fitting, since the ten stories here revolve around that tribe and its associates at their most amiably hapless. Several tales feature Freddie Widgeon, a character new to me, whose efforts to win various young ladies are uniformly doomed. In “Trouble Down in Tudsleigh,” his feigned love of Tennyson leads to a climax so perfectly staged that I was in stitches; in “Goodbye to All Cats,” his misadventures in a feline-infested country house are gloriously ill-judged. The Mr Mulliner stories are standouts: “The Code of the Mulliners,” with its hero trying to engineer the implosion of his own engagement, is classic Wodehouse, while “The Fiery Wooing of Mordred” gleefully inverts the usual marital obstacles. This volume also includes the first (and only) Uncle Fred short story. A mixed bag, perhaps, but consistently delightful.

***

Read again: Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Jane Austen, Emma; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy; Homer, Odyssey; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Plato, Apology, Symposium, Gorgias; William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Tempest; Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Tom Stoppard, The Hard Problem.

Multiple things by the same author: Richard Wilbur (9), Tom Stoppard (8), Marcel Proust (4), Plato (3), Aristotle (3), P.G. Wodehouse (3), William Shakespeare (2), John Vanbrugh (2), Pope Leo XIII (2), Marilynne Robinson (2).

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Favourites in 2025: Music

January 2, 2026

I listened to a lot of good music this year. Unfortunately, I had a mishap near the end of the year in which all of my records about what I had listened to, and what I had particularly liked, were lost. So while putting this retrospective together I have had to go strictly on memory. Rather than the usual ten favourite albums, I’ve come up with eight. I’ll begin with classical music, moving through history in rough chronological order, and conclude with some notes on my favourite popular music of the year.

***

Beauty Farm, a European vocal ensemble specializing in Renaissance polyphony, devotes this album to masses by Alexander Agricola (c. 1456–1506), one of the most intricate Franco-Flemish composers of the late 15th century. Agricola’s mass settings are plump with rhythmic complexity, dense counterpoint, unexpected syncopations, and long-spun melodic lines, all of which demand exceptional precision from performers. Beauty Farm sings two complete masses over two discs (Missa In Myne Zyn and  Missa Malheur me bat) using all-male forces with a craggy, unusually unrefined vocal texture. It is not pretty in a conventional sense, but the small number of voices — one to a part — gives the music a pleasing clarity, allowing Agricola’s elaborate textures to emerge with surprising transparency. Recordings of these masses don’t come along every day (or even every year), so it is wonderful to have almost two hours of music devoted to what is certainly among the most challenging sacred polyphony of the Renaissance.

Here is the opening of the Agnus Dei of Missa Malheur me bat:

*

This unusual project reimagines Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by presenting selected preludes and fugues in vocal-instrumental arrangements created by pianist Natalya Pasichnyk in collaboration with the Calmus Ensemble, a German a cappella group. She plays, and they sing motifs and melodies from Bach’s cantatas over the music. Some years ago the Hilliard Ensemble collaborated with Christoph Poppen on a similar project. I loved that one, and I loved this one too. I have no idea if this kind of thing is plausibly grounded in anything beyond its intrinsic aesthetic satisfaction, but that’s enough for me. Pasichnyk has organized the arrangements into a sequence of pieces structured around the life of Christ: his birth, his teaching, his passion, and so on. Again, I don’t know what a musicologist would say, but I thought it was terrific. The arrangements cover two full discs, and then there are two more discs in which Bach’s preludes and fugues are played straight, but the big draw for me was the vocal/piano arrangements.

Here is an example: the prelude in G minor (BWV 861) married to the vocal music for Christ Lag in Todesbanden:

 

*

Magic Mozart is a concept album devised by conductor Laurence Equilbey and the Insula Orchestra to illuminate the fantastical, theatrical, and supernatural dimensions of Mozart’s music. The disc contains overtures, choruses, instrumental interludes, and arias featuring a stupefyingly good group of soloists, including Sandrine Piau, Jodie Devos, and Lea Desandre (!!). Insula Orchestra’s historically informed performance practice emphasizes transparency and vivid orchestral colour. It’s sometimes weird, but always wonderful.

Maybe the weirdest thing on it is Nun, liebes Weibchen, the so-called “Cat Duet”, sung — if that is the right word — by Florian Sempey and Lea Desandre. This is K.625, which, if you’re counting K numbers, makes it one of the last things Mozart ever wrote, but people never talk about it!

*

Quintet Imaginaire pairs star French soprano Sandrine Piau (again) with the Psophos Quartet in a programme of Schubert works arranged for voice and string quartet, creating an imagined “quintet” texture. I tend to like new arrangements of familiar music, and this one is so well done, and in particular so beautifully sung, that I fell in love with it. The Psophos Quartet provides historically informed yet warm, modern readings, and Piau’s lovely lyric soprano shines through.

*

This recording by Jan Łukaszewski and the Polish Chamber Choir (Polski Chór Kameralny) presents Henryk Górecki’s Church Songs, Op. 84—choral settings of traditional Polish sacred melodies composed in the 1980s. Scored largely for unaccompanied mixed choir, these pieces draw on medieval and folk hymnody while employing Górecki’s characteristic minimalism, modal harmony, and meditative repetition. The texts ramge from Marian devotions to penitential prayers. They show Gorecki working in a liturgical style, combining austerity with intense spiritual expression. I’d never heard these songs before, and I found them incredibly beautiful.

Here is one of the songs, Veni, O Mater Terrae:

*

I didn’t get to many live concerts this year, but I did have the joy to see Marc-André Hamelin in a small hall, playing a programme of very strange piano music. Later in the year, this new record, Found Objects / Sound Objects, was released, and the contents substantially match that concert programme. It serves for me, therefore, as something like a souvenir of that evening. The album is a curated survey of 20th- and 21st-century piano writing that explores the sonic possibilities of the instrument. The programme includes works by composers such as John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Salvatore Martirano, John Oswald, and Yehudi Wyner, alongside Hamelin’s own composition Hexensabbat. Even Frank Zappa makes an appearance. Many pieces explore unconventional pianistic textures—prepared piano, percussive sonorities, and extended techniques—creating a sequence of contrasting “sound objects.” My favourite piece, both at the concert and on the disc, is John Oswald’s TIP, an enchanting collage of piano pieces drawn from across the tradition, classical, jazz, and pop. (The composer was in attendance at the concert I attended.) Here it is:

*

Andrew Rangell’s Fun with Intervals is a characteristically imaginative recital by the American pianist, who is known for his eclectic programming. As the title suggests, the recording explores musical intervals as expressive and structural motifs, presenting a sequence of short pieces linked by intervallic play, contrast, and dialogue. Rangell begins and ends with Bach, and in between plays little-known pieces by Stepan Wolfe and Luigi Dallapiccola. For me the greatest pleasure, however, came from hearing 13 Canons at Each Interval by Richard Atkinson (who runs a delightful YouTube channel that I’ve enjoyed for years). I’m not much of a musical theorist at all, but this record is pedagogical in the best sense, and it really is fun. Rangell’s dry wit, clarity of articulation, and taste for the whimsical give the album its distinctive flavour.

As a brief example, consider Atkinson’s Augmentation Canon at the Major Seventh:

***

On the popular music side, the highlight of my year, by a good margin, was the release of  Through the Open Window, Volume 18 in Dylan’s Bootleg Series. This new set focuses on the beginnings of Dylan’s musical life, with recordings made in the mid-to-late 1950s, when he was a teenager living in Minnesota, up through his famous Carnegie Hall debut in 1963. There are two different versions of this installment of the Bootleg Series, a 2-CD set of highlights, and an 8-CD set in which everything is thrown in. Naturally, I’ve been listening to the latter.

It’s a wonderful collection of music. This is Dylan at his freshest and, in some ways, most inspired. The influence of Woody Guthrie is still strong, as is the folk and blues tradition that was Dylan’s early inspiration. He was starting to write his own songs, and it’s often not easy to tell them from the traditional songs he was playing alongside. His early attempts at the blues are, for me, the weakest part of this collection; I find that his vocal style in songs like “Fixin’ to Die” and “Quit Your Lowdown Ways” is just too abrasive and strained. But for the most part, it’s the most delicious serving of dustbowl music that you’re likely to find.

Highlights for me include a haunting version of “Barbara Allen”, a jaw-dropping rendition of “Moonshiner”, a fine rendition of the rarely heard “John Brown”, a stupendous live recording with Joan Baez of “I’m Troubled and I Don’t Know Why” (a song that was new to me), and several versions of “Tomorrow is a Long Time” that show how the song evolved. The set closes with a full recording, covering two discs, of his 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, in which many of the songs from The Times They Are A-Changin’ made their debut. Imagine hearing the title song, or “Boots of Spanish Leather”, or “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, or “With God on Our Side” as they premiered. (The album wasn’t released until 3 or 4 months later.) Another highlight of the concert is a really marvellous version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”.

This material isn’t entirely new to the Bootleg Series; the very first volume, released way back in 1991, covers the same period, and several of the tracks from that volume are reproduced here, and Volume 9, The Witmark Demos, partially overlaps in time with this set as well, although only one track, a demo of “Oxford Town”, is duplicated.

Taken together, Through the Open Window is a landmark overview of a very important period for Dylan, and a treasure trove of songs and singing. Highly recommended to all those who love the man.

*

Finally, my “Vocal Performance of the Year” goes to Tom Waits, who came out of semi-retirement, looking suitably old and cragged, to sit at the piano and sing “Tom Troubert’s Blues”. There’s nobody like him.

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Jerome: Three Men in a Boat

December 15, 2025

Three Men in a Boat
(To Say Nothing of the Dog)
Jerome K. Jerome
(Reginald Saunders, 1942) [1889]
230 p.

Call it the ultimate hang-out novel, the tale of a lackadaisical journey down the Thames in which nothing much happens. Three friends drift along. The prose, like the travelers, is prone to daydreaming. Things appear when the river bends, and disappear when it bends again. Thoughts occur, are pursued for a while, and then drift away. It’s a book about a certain conception of the good life, one in which ambition and struggle are retired, and life is taken as it comes.

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him—all those that are going his way. This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson against ambition and uppishness.

This same sublime equanimity is the characteristic note the novel strikes. I had been told that the book was a comedy, and it is often funny, and the situations are funny, but it’s considerably more than a farce. I found it sometimes quite eloquent and musical, written with a lush pen, possessed of a fine wit, and charming, and comfortable, rather unlike a little boat on the river.

Not that it matters greatly, but they started the journey just outside London, at Kingston upon Thames, and went as far as Oxford. It took a fortnight. I don’t think it’s an account of a real journey, but I wish it were.

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Wodehouse: Young Men in Spats

December 10, 2025

Young Men in Spats
P.G. Wodehouse
(Overlook, 2002) [1936]
259 p.

I’m in some doubt as to the meaning of the book’s title: is it “spats” as in “quarrels”, or is the reference to spats, the footwear that ceased to be popular in the 1920s? I’m guessing the latter, for although there are a good many quarrels in these pages, the protagonists of the stories are all Drones Club members, or relatives thereof, and so probably likely to be wearing fashionable shoes.

Of the ten stories in this volume, I’ll highlight a few that I most enjoyed.

A number of the stories are about Freddie Widgeon — a character who, incidentally, I don’t think I’ve come across before — and in “Trouble Down in Tudsleigh” we hear about an episode in which Freddie assumed a love of Tennyson in order to win the affection of a poetry-loving young lady. Through a series of mischances and ill-advised decisions the story culminates in a scene so perfectly judged that I was in stitches. Truly delightful. Freddie didn’t get the girl.

In “Goodbye to All Cats” — no doubt a comical reference to Robert Graves’ autobiography — Freddie sojourns at a country estate in a quest to win the affections of another young lady. For some reason the estate is populated by a large number of cats, and Freddie, in his bumbling way, keeps running afoul of them. Several cats are flung from windows, with dire results. The story would not please the folks at PETA, but I confess it pleased me. Freddie didn’t get the girl.

Even better was “The Code of the Mulliners”, in which Mr Mulliner relates a story about his nephew who, on hilariously slender and ultimately spurious grounds, believes he must break off his engagement to a young lady in order to save her from an unsuitable union. The trouble is that he also believes that he must uphold the Code of the Mulliners, viz. to never break off an engagement. His solution to his quandary? He must convince her to break off the engagement, and this he proceeds to do by a sequence of steadily more outrageous behaviours that all backfire, increasing rather than decreasing her affection for him. It’s a classic Wodehousian premise, and a well-constructed plot. Bravo!

Another Mr Mulliner story is “The Fiery Wooing of Mordred”, in which the title character, delighted to be invited to the country house of the girl with whom he has just fallen in love, is, upon arrival, crestfallen to discover the house full of many eligible bachelors, all of them handsomer and more accomplished than himself. With a wonderfully wacky precision, however, all of the obstacles to the burgeoning love fall away, and the two not only desire to marry, but are encouraged to do so by the girl’s parents. It’s almost the opposite of a typical Wodehouse story. However, before the marriage can be celebrated, she and her family are adamant that Mordred must smoke in his bedroom, hoping that his bad habit of throwing cigarettes into wastepaper baskets will burn down their estate and allow them to move to London on the insurance money. Ha!

Finally, I’ll note that this volume contains the first published story about Uncle Fred — indeed, it’s the only short story about him, his other appearances in Wodehouse’s menagerie all being in full-length novels. The character isn’t fully formed yet at this first appearance; he is portrayed as a man of excess and bold troublemaking, rather than (as later) a talented un-doer of knotty situations.

There are several other stories, too, including a wonderfully absurd one called “The Amazing Hat Mystery” in which two Drones Club members relate fantastic tales about hats that change size, when all the while it’s perfectly obvious to us as readers that they’re just mixing up their hats. Considered as a whole, I suppose this collection, with stories about the Drones Club, about Uncle Fred, and about Mr Mulliner, is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but it’s a good time throughout.

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Kenner: Paradox in Chesterton

December 3, 2025

Paradox in Chesterton
Hugh Kenner
(Sheed & Ward, 1948)
157 p.

I’ll put the conclusion up front: Of all the books about Chesterton I’ve read over the years, this is easily among the best. Hugh Kenner was a mid-century literary critic who focused most of his energies on high modernism, with well-regarded books on Eliot, Pound, and Joyce to his credit, but in this early work, written when he was in his 20s, he gives us a perceptive and delightful book about a perceptive and delightful man.

It is a sign of Kenner’s judicious approach that he is careful in his praise of Chesterton, who deserves, he says “a homage less indiscriminate than [he] has yet been accorded.” Kenner considers him, rightly I think, “not a great literary artist”, but still a great man, and a great mind, worthy of our consideration. “He cannot be praised too highly so long as praise is confined to what is praiseworthy,” is Kenner’s rather Chestertonian way of putting the matter.

And what is it about Chesterton that “cannot be praised too highly”? Kenner argues that it is twofold: a gift and an achievement. “His especial gift was the metaphysical intuition of being; his especial triumph was his exploitation of paradox to embody that intuition.” A way of seeing, and a way of expressing what he saw. What he saw was best expressed in paradox.

*

What is a paradox? Kenner argues that a paradox is a certain kind of analogy. Analogy is “the principle of which paradox is the child”. An analogy has to do with comparison; paradox has to do with the special kind of comparison called contradiction.

A paradox is a contradiction, but contradictions can occur at different levels, and this gives rise to a few different types, or tiers, of paradox. A rhetorical paradox is merely verbal, and arises from the complexity of the world, the confusion of our minds, and the inadequacy of words to things. Verbal paradoxes might be resolved by more careful statements. A deeper kind of paradox, however, is metaphysical, and arises from something “inherently intractable in being itself”.

It is not always easy to tell the two types apart. Doing so reliably requires what Kenner calls “the intuition of being,” a sense for the true nature of reality. He argues that Chesterton rivals St. Thomas Aquinas, the great philosopher of being, in the immediacy and sure-footedness of his intuition of being.

“Paradoxical stuff … is for Chesterton the raw material of thought; and the paradoxes arise either out of our own confusion, which thinking can more and more nearly resolve, or from the nature of Being which is unresolvable. When you have dissipated all the mists of the mind, there remains the fundamental paradox that cannot be resolved and can only be contemplated.”

*

Verbal paradox is the first and most superficial kind of paradox. Though it is just a matter of phrasing, it can be artfully and strategically used, and Kenner argues that Chesterton used it to startle his readers into seeing a truth more clearly:

“The special rhetorical purpose of Chesterton is to overcome the mental inertia of human beings, which mental inertia is constantly landing them in the strange predicament of both seeing a thing and not seeing it. When people’s perceptions are in this condition, they must, in the strictest sense of the words, be made to renew their acquaintance with things. They must be made to see them anew, as if for the first time. Now a man’s acquaintance with truth is likely to be renewed by the violent shock of being told a thundering and obvious lie.”

A paradox of this kind might consist in a flat contradiction of a popular opinion or nostrum. “If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly” is a favourite of mine, but Chesterton’s writing is replete with examples:

“The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant”

or

“There is nothing that fails like success”

or

“Companionate marriage is so-called because the people involved are not married and will very soon cease to be companions”

or

“Blasphemy is in its nature prosaic. It consists in regarding in a commonplace manner something which other and happier people regard in a rapturous and imaginative manner.”

I think it’s worth noting that paradoxes of this kind, in Chesterton’s hands, are not merely verbal; there is an insight, sometimes a piercing insight, behind them. That a thing, if worth doing, is worth doing badly is an artful way of emphasizing that the truly worthwhile things in life, like having children or becoming a saint, are worth doing even if we don’t do them perfectly. That a big-city sophisticate might be living in a smaller world than a small-town farmer points up the way we can narrow our own worlds when we have the choice to do so. None of these are what I would call empty verbal paradoxes.

Chesterton did sometimes, it is true, decorate his writing with less substantial paradoxes. Kenner notes, in particular, his fondness for puns, calling it “strictly speaking a major blemish on his literary style”, but not a blemish on his thinking, because his arguments don’t depend on the puns. Kenner compares Chesterton’s love of wordplay, his interest in the words themselves, their sounds and appearances, to a similar fascination evident in the work of modernists like T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. And he grants Chesterton his own witty defence of the punning vice: “To decorate an argument with puns and verbal tricks may be a superficial folly. But it is better than the sort of folly that is not superficial.”

Chesterton’s liberal use of paradoxes to enliven his prose and to add punch to his arguments mustn’t be taken as an end in itself; the reader can enjoy the little shocks, but must try to keep an eye on the main point.

“Chesterton and his reader are like two men locked in each other’s arms, rocking back and forth in an effort to regain balance. The reader must remember, as Chesterton does, that the object of the game is balance and not rocking.”

**

A deeper kind of paradox, he argues, lies not just in how things are said, but in how they are. When we recall that paradox is a species of analogy, we are immediately thrown into deep waters, for a central thread of metaphysical reasoning, traceable from Aristotle through Aquinas, speaks of the analogia entis, the analogy of being. If we could understand what this means, we might be tantalizingly close to understanding how paradox could be a feature of being.

Sadly for us, understanding the analogia entis is not straightforward. The claim is that being is intrinsically analogical. I suspect, though am not certain, that the claim is closely allied to the theological principle that we can speak of God not univocally nor equivocally, but analogically.

Kenner makes this suggestive remark:

“The beginning of the metaphysical vision … is to see things: to see, and to see things, and accept them with their inherent mystery: which process may roughly be called seeing them with surprise.”

In one of his poems, Chesterton describes the things of this world as “the things that cannot be and that are”, a phrase that Kenner calls “the starkest paradoxical statement of the analogical perception.” The intuition is, perhaps, that finite things, which ought to be as nothing, particularly in comparison with an infinite Creator, nonetheless do, astonishingly, exist. Chesterton was always open to that astonishment, filled with wonder not just at conventionally wonderful things, like space travel or bacon, but also at conventionally mundane things. He was amazed at their existence.

“His whole habit of thought … impelled him to see not lampposts but limited beings participating in All Being; he was accustomed to looking at grass and seeing God.”

These are beautiful thoughts, but I’m not sure they are getting us closer to the analogy of being. Analogy, as we said earlier, involves a comparison. Is the pertinent comparison that being non-being and being? Is it between likeness and difference? It is, after all, paradoxical that things must be in certain respects alike in order for them to be different. At the very least, they must be alike in having being, being part of the same one reality, while being distinct from one another. “Everything,” Kenner says, “is itself and yet a reflection of something more than itself.” That is paradoxical, and in fact Chesterton himself called it “the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth”.

If it is true — and I’m not confident we’ve clearly established the fact — that paradox is intrinsic to being, we can also point to other, less general, paradoxical features of reality. Chesterton was fond of highlighting the paradoxical nature of man: the ape with his head in the heavens. He delighted at the deep humour of a man sitting down on a hat; a being of intrinsic dignity startled to rest his bottom on a thing designed to decorate his top. Paradox is part of our nature. “Man is comforted by paradoxes because they remind him of his dignity.” We humans are creatures of earth, finite and limited, subject to sickness and circumstance, but nonetheless not at home with that finitude, yearning for the highest things and unable to be truly happy without them. As he wrote in Heretics:

“If we are to be truly gay, we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things. We cannot enjoy even a pas de quatre at a subscription dance unless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune… Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except the nature of things. Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion.”

*

The mention of religion provides a segue to Chesterton’s views on paradox in religion. Given that he thought paradox was a fundamental feature of reality, paradox in religion would be a good sign of a religion in contact with reality, and one of the principal appeals which Christianity made to Chesterton was precisely its paradoxical claims. God is also a man. This man is fully a man but also fully God. God is one but also three. The infinite and perfect God loves finite and imperfect people. Most centrally, and most paradoxically, he was fascinated by the Christian proclamation that God suffered and died. For him it was the deepest and most powerful paradox imaginable:

“The Fall of God is the centre and the climax: the dying God slaying Himself with His own hand for the love of men. That is the central dogma upon which Chesterton insists, in the long tradition of Christian paradox, as the source of the duality of the world, so that everything is itself and yet a reflection of something more than itself; that is the source of the analogical duality of man, mighty enough to have been worth the death of God, mean enough to have doomed his God to die.”

Because of the centrality of this theological claim to his thought and his writing, Kenner argues that Chesterton is properly classed not with Christian artists, but with “the Fathers, philosophers, and Doctors of the Church”.

*

A final section of the book deals with Chesterton’s use of paradoxes from the point of view of literary art. We have said that some paradoxes are a matter of words and expressions, and some are intrinsic to the world. A literary artist faces the challenge of describing the latter with the former, and Kenner devotes space to an analysis of how Chesterton constructs his paradoxes. He argues that Chesterton rarely used paradoxes to advance an argument, but rather to show truths to his reader, to illuminate a vision rather than to discursively reach a conclusion. He makes comparisons between Chesterton’s way of using paradox and the ways characteristic of Joyce, Blake, and Eliot. It’s a very interesting bit of literary criticism.

*

Overall, I found the book fascinating, rich, and rewarding. Kenner’s reading is immensely wide; I don’t know how many of Chesterton’s works he cites, but it is certainly very impressive, more so considering how young he was when he wrote the book. He even writes in a somewhat Chestertonian style from time to time, which perhaps is what happens when you’ve so immersed yourself in a writer’s work. I appreciated his readiness to distinguish in Chesterton what is great from what is only good or even mediocre. Everybody talks about how Chesterton thrived on paradox, but never before have I seen an analysis of just what he’s doing, and why.

The introduction to the book is by Marshall McLuhan, and it’s also wonderful. I almost feel as though I ought to write another long post about it. I’ll resist.

Despite the book’s brevity, it took me nearly two years to read it! This was partly owing to a comedy of errors in which the book was misplaced numerous times, and to how I tried to read it, too often, in inauspicious circumstances, but, whatever those trials may have been, the book was not spoiled, and I’m very grateful to have read it.

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