"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Wrote C.S. Lewis, quoted by David French, in "Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being 'Never Trump'" (NYT).

That's a free-access link, so you can see for yourself what 4 lessons French learned.

But I liked the C.S. Lewis quote in the abstract. It's so abstract! The "highest reality," eh?

And now, this blog has a theme today: reality. This is only the second post of the day, but the first post was about a NYT column called "Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality?"

Is there a sense — at the NYT and elsewhere — that reality is at stake, that it's out there, eluding us, and we need to struggle to get a grip on it, and we are losing?

I am reminded of Trump's saying — on the Joe Rogan podcast — that when he became President, "it was very surreal." But: "When I got shot, it wasn't surreal. That should have been surreal. When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew exactly where I was hit.... I knew exactly what happened.... With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience.... And all of a sudden I'm standing in the White House, and it was very, very surreal...."

I am reminded of Elon Musk's "There's no truer test than courage under fire."

And: "Reality, what a concept!"

"[T]he idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently..."

"... where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning 'postrationalist,' where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn. The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point...."

Writes Ross Douthat in "This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023" (NYT)(the novel is "That Hideous Strength").

"Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department.... They are the dumbest part of every college...."

"You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.... If you read a book called ‘Abolition of Man’ by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. …"

Said Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, quoted in "Teachers go to the ‘dumbest colleges' — who said it and why it matters," a WaPo column by Valerie Strauss.

But what's really bothering Strauss isn't the outrage of insulting education departments.

"In his classic essay, 'The Inner Ring,' C.S. Lewis warned about 'the delicious knowledge that we — we four or five all huddled beside this stove — are the people who know.'"

"Lewis lectured rising British university students that 'from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care,' that they would be driven by the desire to be within the Inner Ring. It is, of course, a fallacy; there is no special knowledge that emanates from such bonfires. Lewis went on to describe the perilous dangers such an illusion carried, dangers to the soul if not necessarily someone’s career. 'It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school,' he argued. 'But you will be a scoundrel.' 'Of all the passions,' he added, 'the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.'"

From "Opinion: The sad self-importance of journalists" by Hugh Hewitt (WaPo).

The C.S. Lewis material is good, but Hewitt doesn't do enough with it, and it's hard not to laugh along with the top-rated comment: "Self-important 'journalist' writes about self-importance of journalists..."

"The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, 'smooth' and 'hairy,' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers."

"Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of 'The Lives of Lucian Freud'... exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo.... Lucian and his furious id would have made an interesting case study for his grandfather. The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous.... He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself 'one of the great absentee fathers of the age.' Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money. Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. 'They make it all right for me to paint them,' he said. 'My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.' Freud had a mean word for everyone.... If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors."

From "The Devilish Life and Art of Lucian Freud, in Full Detail" by Dwight Garner (NYT).

The biography is a 2-volume thing, and Volume 2 just came out. In posing this question about whether you could just start with Volume 2, Garner reveals a shocking ignorance of the power of Google: 

When "Clement" suddenly appears in Volume Two, with no surname attached, will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother? 

Who capable of reading a big hairy biography wouldn't just google the words Lucian Freud Clement? It gets you right to a Wikipedia article on Clement Freud.

The grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Lucian Freud, he moved to the United Kingdom from Germany as a child.... He worked at the Nuremberg Trials and in 1947...  He married June Flewett (the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie in C. S. Lewis's children's series The Chronicles of Narnia).... Freud was one of Britain's first "celebrity chefs"... He appeared in a series of dog food advertisements (at first Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels) in which he co-starred with a bloodhound called Henry (played by a number of dogs) which shared his trademark "hangdog" expression. 

Too much information, if anything. Bark, and Google scoops it into your bowl. Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels indeed! Not only will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother. Every reader will know that the dogfood Chunky Meat was rechristened Chunky Minced Morsels.

"C.S. Lewis once wrote that if you’d never met a human and suddenly encountered one, you’d be inclined to worship this creature."

"Every human being is a miracle, and your superior in some way. The people who have great conversations walk into the room expecting to be delighted by you and make you feel the beam of their affection and respect. Lady Randolph Churchill once said that when sitting next to the statesman William Gladstone she thought him the cleverest person in England, but when she sat next to Benjamin Disraeli she thought she was the cleverest person in England." 

From "Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations/The art of making connection even in a time of dislocation" by David Brooks (NYT).

The word "mere" doesn't need to be dismissive. It can refer "to something pure, something without admixture, something foundational."

"There is... more than a hint here of the way in which C.S. Lewis spoke in his wartime BBC radio lectures of 'mere Christianity'.... ... William Butler Yeats wrote ominously of an approaching Second Coming in which the promise of redemption will be replaced by an onslaught of barbarity, and 'Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'...  It doesn’t overpraise, it doesn’t underpraise, it merely tells the truth, and gets to the essence of the matter. Would it not be a vast improvement if we learned to calibrate our language so that it described merely the way things are, and appreciated them for that?"

From "Mere/Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued" by Wilfred M. McClay (in The Hedgehog Review), looking at a book titled "Mere Civility," by Teresa Bejan.

McClay goes off on the subtleties of "mere," but the book is about the subtleties of "civility" which endeavors to clarify civility:

Bejan’s understanding of civility is not the politeness sought by today’s self-appointed arbiters of public manners and speech... In fact, as Bejan acutely points out, the term civility is often used as a genteel-sounding pretext for the suppression of disfavored views.

My line is: Calls for civility are always bullshit. I don't have a problem conceding that the essential idea, separated from the people who call for it, is good, and Bejan's book might be a worthy meditation. McClay turns the spotlight on "mere." I like that.

IN THE COMMENTS: JAORE said: "Too early to think this through. I'll just sit here drinking coffee and petting my mere cat."

50 years ago today, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died.

One might imagine them encountering John F. Kennedy in the antechamber of the afterlife.

I've been planning for a while to write this as the first post today, but I'm pleased to see that there are many news stories this morning honoring the 3 men who shared a death date. You may have noticed who entered the world on the same day as you. (Perhaps I had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh in the antechamber to life.) But will you know who passes through the departure gate alongside you?

ADDED: In The Guardian: , the author Laura Miller writes:

Apart from the Narnia books, the work of Lewis's I most cherish, "An Experiment in Criticism," makes the almost postmodern – and at the very least radically humble – proposition that we might best judge the literary merit of a book not by how it is written, but by how it is read. If "we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." That is a faith I am happy to share.

And Nicholas Murray writes:

The FBI kept a fat file on [Aldous Huxley] but failed utterly to find anything damning (as his biographer I was sorely disappointed when it slid out of the jiffy bag). He was nevertheless refused US citizenship...

He has survived his detractors and remains an eloquent critical voice, warning against our tendency to "love our slavery" – Brave New World's dystopian idea of manipulation and conformity and our tendency to submit to soft power, so clearly vindicated by the extraordinary complacency with which the public seems to have greeted the Snowden revelations of illegitimate surveillance. A free democrat to the core of his being, at war through words with "the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom," he shows that heroism can exist away from the noisy battlefield.

AND: "Yes, 'Everybody’s happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way." Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1167-1169).

ALSO: Kindle Locations 2729-2737:

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.

How is your carapace of thick stupidity today? Mine is chafing. I'm struggling not to concoct a joke out "little pill-boxes of soma tablets," Jackie's iconic pink hat, and my favorite Bob Dylan song. I need some rage to make me fluent.

"You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him."

Advice from the devil in "The Screwtape Letters," which I found doing a search in my ebook, looking for boredom, which I did after this outburst of mine on the topic of boredom and the devil.

In "The Screwtape Letters," the devil tells of a man who arrives in hell and says: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." He was damned not because of indulgence in "sweet sins" but because he spent his time "in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

What Justice Scalia really means when he says he believes in the Devil.

About halfway her wonderful interview with Justice Scalia, after some discussion of homosexuality in legal and in Catholic doctrine, Jennifer Senior pushes the old judge to worry about how history will look back on his era of the Court. The first prompt — "Justice ­Kennedy is now the Thurgood Marshall of gay rights" — gets merely a nod. She tries again, with another non-question: "I don’t know how, by your lights, that’s going to be regarded in 50 years." He says doesn't know and he doesn't care:

Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. 

Some might hear "standing athwart" homosexual rights and get an amusingly unintentionally sexual picture of Scalia straddling gay men. But I assume it's an allusion to William F. Buckley's famous 1955 mission statement for The National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The topic was history, you know. And who else says "standing athwart"?

Purchase of the day.

Three days, actually.

From the February 26 through February 28, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"The Great Divorce" CD [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD] C. S. Lewis (Author), Robert Whitfield (Reader)(Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.36)

... and 251 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Thanks to all who chose to choose supporting this blog materially and in spirit.

"Palin is still talking about how much she loves C. S. Lewis."

"What is up with this? Chunky Bobo is always talking about C. S. Lewis too. Is he the new Edmund Burke? I read a bunch of C. S. Lewis books when I was a kid and I don’t see what makes them so conservative, aside from all the Jeebus stuff."

Sayeth DougJ. For a couple of seconds, I was all "who's Chunky Bobo?" but I figured it out.

***

Here's there underlying story about Palin. (She's on Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2010." Ah, but how influential is she in Madison ?)

Here's a really nice — giftable — book collecting the works of C.S. Lewis. And here's a "daily readings" collection. And here's "The Portable Edmund Burke."

Rush Limbaugh "blew his nose in his napkin."

"He talked about Chopin's Polonaise No. 6, C.S. Lewis and how much he loved the end of the movie 'Love Story.'"

That was some years ago, when he had a 4-hour dinner with Maureen Dowd, who is currently displeased that the radio man called Barack Obama a big narcissist.

***

Bonus link: Chopin's Polonaise No. 6.