Daily Office: Thursday
¶ Matins: It’s impossible to be cynical about the story of Ivan Cameron, even if his death makes his father the next PM.
¶ Lauds: A show that’s as much about the history of taste as it is about “art”: Cast In Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution. In other words, a little bit of Mannerism and a lot of Bourbon. Quatorze and I went to a preview this evening, and found it all very haut de gamme. The number of objects on loan from HM the Queen was astonishing until we remembered what a fool the Prince Regent was about snapping up post-revolutionary bargains — and mounting them on gilt bronze.
¶ Prime: If Father Tony would just make a greeting card out of his fantastic bit of photoshopping (I’m sure that he uses some other software; hence the lower case), I’d buy boxes. I didn’t even watch the speech, but the photos in the Times made me feel the same.
¶ Tierce: I try to learn something new every day, but I don’t expect to be as surprised as I was by a story in the Times according to which
Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico. Mexican civilians must get approval from the military to buy guns and they cannot own large-caliber rifles or high-powered pistols, which are considered military weapons.
¶ Sext: The next time someone claims to have sighted a unicorn, don’t laugh.
¶ Nones: As if the situation in Pakistan weren’t godawful, Bangladesh is experiencing a mutiny among its “Rifles,” as the Border Guards are known.
¶ Vespers: A new algorithm not only identifies the oldest words in the English language, but predicts which ones are mostly likely to slip into obsolescence.
Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.
For example, “dirty” is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with “stick” and “guts”
¶ Compline: Is there ever a good time for the academic humanities? “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” An impossible demand; for studying the humanities is priceless.
Oremus…
§ Matins. The death of a child is the one thing that I can’t imagine. If I weren’t a father, I’d think I could. But I know better. It’s something that you find out about when imagination is no longer an option.
§ Lauds. In addition to not stealing any of the fantastic Pigalle busts — I’ll take Pigalle over Houdon any day — I walked away without the rather pricey catalogue.
§ Prime. As an older boomer, however, I do wish for some sort of counterinsurgency drag, so that nobody would mistake me for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi even though I look older and more encrusted than they do.
§ Tierce. Encountering the headline, “U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels ,” I instinctively moved to clean my reading glasses. Surely it’s the other way round? Not!
§ Sext. When meeting a merperson, it is rude to ask that knockout question from The Producers: “Where do you keep your wallet?
Mermaids are fine, but I draw the line at centaurs and minotaurs. Just because we can dream them up doesn’t mean that we ought to have them around!
§ Nones. But for something new and different, head to India, where an comments posted on an unmoderated social-network page have landed the page’s author in jail.
§ Vespers. Reading the story a few times over, I’m not convinced that the uncredited BBC journalist who wrote the story fully understood it.
§ Compline. Reluctantly enough, I agree with Yale’s Anthony Kronman:
As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.
That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for†— may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.â€
It’s not that “many” can’t afford to study the humanities, but only that they fear that it’s extravagant. The conundrum about this cheapest of all academic curricula — a pile of books to be read under attentive adult supervision — is that it generally takes a worldly sort of wealth to see its value.