Elise > Recent Status Updates

After a whole bit talking about how Americans don’t know anything about the world and geography outside America and she’s made an effort not to be that, author gives herself away by not knowing the difference between Switzerland and Sweden.

Unfortunate.

Huh. New context on the character of Mrs Bennet. 🤔

“…Enlightenment doctors had genuine sympathy for their patients, not least because they were gleaned from the rich and famous […], the ‘victims of an interestingly delicate nervous system buckling under the pressures of civilisation.’ […] Madness was still a personal failing, but hysteria was a sign of accomplishment.

In naming hysteria a disease of civilisation, what Sydenham meant was the richer a person was, the more demanding life was, and so the more likely they were to become hysterical. He believed the social conditions that enslaved women caused inner turmoil that resulted in physical illness—an observation ahead of its time.

Postmodern man, with no direction, destiny or purpose, can only follow arbitrary impulses while he passes the time, waiting for death. An aimless, impulsive life isn’t very pretty.

A refined palate […], requires cultivation. Children initially have undeveloped tastes in food & drink, just as they initially have undeveloped tastes in literature, music & art. For them to appreciate good food generally requires education & maturity (some psychiatrists report that adults who suffer from arrested emotional development often display a correspondingly childish palate).

You have to choose between a consumerist lifestyle and a life of beauty. You can’t have both. Beauty will require a lot of sacrifices. But the alternative is banality and boredom, punctuated by guilty pleasures in the disordered. We can do better than that.

It’s no coincidence that faith communities that ignore beauty are also lukewarm and poorly catechised. They don’t know their Faith, and they’ve reduced the entire Gospel message about love for God and neighbour to a crushingly familiar cliche about fellowshipping and social activism—even though, ironically, there isn’t even much community or volunteer work happening.

Chapter 23 was an oddly beautiful and bittersweet chapter.

“The evil that is in Man comes of sluggish minds[…] for sluggards cannot think, and will not.”

Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They mae you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.

To have pens, and pencils, and the tools of writing all your own, to see them and feel them in your fingers ready to do anything you tell them, to have them in a little house fit for them as good friends of yours, such is sweet pleasure, indeed, and never ending. […] God bless the craftsmen who give their fellow men such feelings even out of pieces of wood.

Blethyn Llywarch was a good size and fair looking, with a broken nose from fighting and black hair in a mop that got in his eyes when he was excited. He was shy at first, and blushing when he was near Ceridwen, but she was cool as a stream up the mountain, pushing his tie, and patting his handkerchief and putting the flaps straight on his pockets, but his hair was too high for her to reach.

🥹 these kids ❤️

“Sweetheart mine,” said my father. I had never heard him call my mother that before. There is pretty it did sound. She did think so, too. There is a blush, indeed, and white hair.

🥹

“Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.”

For us, thank God, it was the former, but the experience has shown us that we can 100% see how the latter happens.

“Yet it struck me that being a woman was akin to a performance, with its cues and lines that had to be learned. I knew how I was supposed to act and what I was supposed to say, I just wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to.”

Amen, sister!

Why do you make confession to the Saints and to one another? Isn’t it sufficient to confess them to God? This practice is based upon Scripture. In James 5:16 we read: “Confess therefore your sins to one another: and pray one for another that you may be saved. For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much.”