Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

‘Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!’ he said. ‘How you have increased my sorrow, you two strange wanderers from a far country, bearing the peril of Men! But you are less judges of Men than I of Halflings. We are truth-speakers, we men of Gondor. We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt. Not if I found it on the highway would I take it I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.
‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee.’

RJ took my aside on Asatru more seriously than I expected. At the time, I thought it was just another tiny Internet sect, but now I’ve done a real search and discovered that Asatru is everywhere:

• Asatru.org
• Asatru 101 from the website I linked in the original post
• Asatru Beginner’s Course
• The Asatru Alliance
• The Asatru Folk Assembly
• The Irminsul Ættir
• Asatru Etc., a personal page that also links the Belief System Selector
• A Yahoo group for Asatru education
• Asatru contrasted with other Neo-Pagan religions
• Northvegr: The Northern Way, which hosts that anti-slavery page to which many of the others link

(I took the religion selector and found it highly accurate, or at least highly transparent. Asatru wasn’t in my result list, though I suppose it’s covered by Neo-Pagan at #19 - rather low, considering my belief in honor, but the quiz was not subtle enough to pick up on that pagan virtue. Twenty questions only get you so far.)

I mentioned Asatru in relation to The Lord of the Rings purely for its moral content. Neo-paganism doesn’t interest (or disturb) me because, in my opinion and experience, modern people are incapable of belief in past gods. Dead religions cannot be revived, no matter how moral or attractive they might be. It takes a certain mindset to believe in the hosts of Valhalla or Olympus, and that mindset, like Tolkien’s elves, has passed out of the world (or at least the West) and is no more.

So, back to honor. I said,

Honor means, among other things, doing good not because it is good but because you are good. It is an entirely irreligious motive.

RJ replied,

That true honor is “irreligious” in the sense of “not motivated by an external religious code of behaviour”, I would agree with. And I would even agree that honor, like every virtue, must spring from the heart of the individual rather than being an act of outward conformity.

By irreligious I meant what irreligious actually means, neglectful of religion; indicating lack of religion. By religion I mean the service and worship of God or the supernatural, and not any peculiarly Christian definition under which other religions are religions but Christianity is not. Religion is a synonym of faith for my purposes.

The concept of personal honor is irreligious because it rests in the person and not in the deity. A Christian who is honest because of his faith is therefore not honest because of his honor. You cannot have both motives - or rather, you can, but most religions frown upon the latter and their adherents battle the sort of pride that inspires pagan honor. RJ knows this, as is clear later on:

As a result, the genuine child of God is motivated not by external strictures or threats but by an internal reality — his new God-given nature. He serves God and does God’s will not out of craven fear or selfish ambition, but out of gratitude and a sincere desire to be like his heavenly Father.

On the other hand, the genuine man of honor (as opposed to the man of faith) does good, and perhaps even serves God, not out of gratitude or love for the deity but out of his own personal integrity, his honor. This is a difficult distinction to make within a Christian context because the possession of good motives apart from Christ may not even be considered possible (due to the fallen nature of man or original sin). It’s easier to see the distinction in Judaism, where there is a question about the status of a person who obeys certain laws not because God gave them but because he, philosophically, believes that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, etc. (If I recall correctly, it’s not enough to obey because you believe it’s right; you’re supposed to do it because God said so. The point, anyway, is that there is a distinction here.)

I think most monotheistic religions come down against honor in this sense, despite a history of toleration, in practice, even for extreme manifestations of personal honor. Consider, for example, the toleration of family honor killings in Islamic countries, though in most, if not all, cases they violate Islamic law. Practices like duelling that once highlighted the conflict between honor and Christianity are long-dead in the West. Perhaps that is a victory for Christ, and perhaps it is a victory for Time. Rare now is the person who can look back and feel the sentiments of another age, even partially and syncretistically.

We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt.

Tolkien shows us the mores of Asatru without the gods. If Boromir believes in Asatru’s notion of honor, Faramir does him one better - he achieves it. The Valar are far off in The Lord of the Rings, and if anyone is doing good for Elbereth’s sake, they do not say so. Faramir speaks the language of honor, not the language of religion, and I for one will take him at his word.

Illustration of the day: “Icebergs on the Sea of Ymn” (for Marriage is Irrelevant)

Tonight’s topic is that most misunderstood of virtues, honor. I mentioned it back in the comments as a non-Christian value in The Lord of the Rings, with the example of Faramir holding himself bound by the statement that he wouldn’t take the Ring if he found it lying in a crossroads. RJ related this to “let your ‘yea’ be ‘yea’ and your ‘nay’ be ‘nay’” — in effect to be so honorable and truthful that a simple “yes” was as binding to them as any sworn oath. The biblical passage, however, is about simple honesty and in some quarters is even considered to be a prohibition against taking oaths.

Honor is not about honesty or courage or chastity or any of the other virtues which it encourages. Honor is about the actor, not the acts. Consider, for example, The Rape of Lucrece. (Read it now if you haven’t; there are spoilers coming.) (Don’t make me say I told you so…)

Lucretia pays the ultimate price; she chooses honor over life itself, because she values honor more than life. One can therefore be a martyr to honor. During the Spanish Inquisition, some of the accused refused to recant their heresy and thus save their lives, not because they still believed in the heresy but because they never had. Honor did not permit them to lie to save their lives. There was some question (among the genuine heretics) of whether these martyrs should be counted towards their God or condemned as suicides.

Honor means, among other things, doing good not because it is good but because you are good. It is an entirely irreligious motive. Similarly, C.G.J. Jacobi cites honor in explaining the purpose of mathematics: C’est pour l’honneur de l’esprit humain. A more religious mathematician should have said the glory of God rather than the honor of Man.

It’s getting late and I haven’t been all that coherent. Here’s the Asatru perspective on why honor and Christianity conflict. Asatru is a Nordic pagan revival religion, bringing us back to the (other) underlying spirit of The Lord of the Rings.

It’s that time of year and everybody knows the meme:

1. Sleep (for the muse)
2. Write 1,000 words a day
3. Get published (for money)
4. Finish revising Colony
5. Make serious inroads into the Seven Saga
6. Do all those little things I keep putting off, like the sewing and the cleaning
7. Reclaim a hobby lost to writing (I’m thinking cross-stitch)
8. Work 9 to 5 instead of 10 to 6 (or get laid off)
9. Use my health insurance before I get laid off

That’s a lot of new leaves to turn over, but if you don’t make resolutions, you’ll never break any. The depressing ones at the end are in honor of the worst December stock market showings since 1931.

The snow was a bit of a bust, in white Christmas terms. It stayed warm and rainy much longer than predicted by the frenzied weathermen, and we won’t reach that lower limit of 6 inches they started out predicting for the Massachusetts coast. I’ve been spending my day off writing that J/P fic I didn’t finish in time for TomKat 2002, with a short break to brave the rain and be disappointed by Two Weeks Notice.

As a comedy, it was hilarious. The script was great, Hugh Grant was his usual shallow yet lovable self, and Sandra Bullock was good, especially with her liberal parents. Veronica embarrassed me by laughing out loud more than once.

As a romance, however, it was a flop. The lead couple had no chemistry together - I’m not sure I could say what chemistry is, but when it’s not there it’s as plain as day. The script didn’t help on that account, either - the first hint of a romantic scene, a hug in the men’s bathroom, was undermined by a slapstick scene of one character getting her hair stuck on the other’s belt buckle. The most romantic thing the shallow millionaire lead did for his true love was carry her through traffic to a Winnebagos’s loo. Potty humor doesn’t do it for me.

Although the leads never clicked, the movie was interesting enough until when the plot finally came around to the standard themes of romantic comedy - the misunderstanding involving a half-naked woman rival, the catfight, the public confession of Twue Love, and the interminable final kiss - the plot was not enough to pull it off.

Maybe someone will remake it in a few years, with fewer bathroom scenes and more chemistry.

Here’s a seasonal recipe from my lovely sister Veronica, former chocolatier:

Dark Chocolate Peppermints

2 7oz bars Hershey’s Legendary Dark
6 candy canes
9×9 square pan lined with foil
candy thermometer

Crush candy canes in heavy duty plastic bag with a rolling pin, or on pulse in a food processor until it resembles coffee grounds. Set aside.

Chop up both chocolate bars until they are chocolate chip size. Place 2/3 in a microwave proof bowl and melt on low 1 minute at a time until almost all melted (will probably take about 3 minutes - stir every minute).

Add remaining 1/3 and stir until dissolved. Keep stirring until melted chocolate reaches 88 degrees.

Add crushed candy canes and pour into 9×9 pan. Place in refrigerator for 4-5 minutes. Remove and score chocolate into squares. (The chocolate will break on score marks.)

Place back in refrigerator for another 10 minutes. Remove and let sit until room tempetature.

Break apart.

Pretty site of the day: Creative Commons

I’ve been meaning to blog about extreme veterinary medicine for a long time now. The ‘net is dead for the holidays, so here goes…

It all began with the iguana hysterectomy. I didn’t even know iguanas had hysters, or that you could pay someone to remove them. My only concept of iguana finance was put down your nickel, take home a five-inch iguana. Apparently, once it’s grown to four feet long, a mysterious bond forms between the iguana and the designated food provider - a bond capable of making the employed party shell out $600 to have part of the iguana removed, rather than another five cents for a fresh, fully-functional iguanalet.

I figured iguana owners were a breed apart, but extreme measures in veterinary medicine don’t stop at iguana hysterectomies anymore. Page back through Mustang Sally’s blog and you can get the full tale of her medical adventures with her diabetic cat. Dr. Deb, my consulting physicist, had her cat on feline chemotherapy before he was finally allowed to pass away in peace. And my own lovely sister Veronica, having gotten all the pet appreciation genes in the family, subjected her mad cat Kitty to a procedure I cannot even describe here because of the severe squick factor.

Yes, it’s the pet owner’s money to burn as she wishes, and it keeps the vets employed, but the whole thing disturbs me. I wouldn’t mind so much if the average patients at Angel Memorial Animal Hospital were endangered birds or prize cattle, but we’re not even eating the cats afterwards, and more are born every minute. What’s the point of torturing the ones we have?

There are people dying in Africa because they cannot afford hysterectomies, insulin, or chemotherapy. (They do seem to have a grasp of amputation, however, so Kitty is at no appreciable medical advantage here in Boston.) Sure, we have the resources here to do iguana hysterectomies and pump life-saving chemicals into our housepets, but is it right? I think it’s grotesque to save feline lives while humans are dying for lack of the same medical care. I’m not the sort of person who usually worries about people dying in Africa, but there’s something egregious about an iguana hysterectomy.

Nor do I consider it fair to the animals. Once upon a time, it was considered cruel to let an animal suffer. Human beings undergo painful and prolonged medical treatments because we want to live even at that price. Animals have no notion of future benefits - the only motive in making them suffer is our own. It’s one thing to hurt an animal in order to save lives or fend off starvation, but it’s another to do it because Fluffy is cute and you can’t bear to be parted from her.

So if you ever need someone to pull the plug on Fluffy, just give me a call.

Lori passed along a link to the secret life of non-readers, so I thought I’d blog about reading guilt.

I think I was born with book guilt - even when I was reading The Cat in the Hat I felt that I ought to be up to Pippi Longstocking already. Book guilt led me to voluntarily read Paradise Lost in high school. I still have a healthy guilt about the classics, but I’ve never felt the need to read the new mainstream literature. My book guilt ends at WWI with Goodbye to All That, which has saved me no end of guilt over the years.

I’ve read about 70 books this year, most of them science fiction or fantasy. In a way that’s reading for work - I started back into sci-fi with such literary devotion not because I thought I’d missed gems like LMB (though I had), but because I wanted to write in the genre. My muse needs a constant supply of good examples to keep her fresh.

I’ve found that writing is a great reliever of book guilt - I’d read Robert Browning, I can say to myself with a straight face, if only I weren’t so busy revising this fanfic novel. I’m a producer, not a consumer. That excuse also covers a multitude of unread fanfic.

So, how about a book guilt meme? Feel free to up the numbers if you’re guiltier than I am.

Name three classics mouldering on your shelves:

1. Os Lusíadas, Luís Vaz de Camões, the epic work of Portuguese literature, by the Portuguese Shakespeare - also an example of foreign language guilt
2. The Faerie Qveen, Spenser
3. The Divine Comedy - true guilt extends beyond Dante’s Inferno, not that I’ve read even that much

Name three works of modern literature you managed to avoid:

1. Anything by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
3. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Name three novels you read but wish you hadn’t:

1. Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
3. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Name three books you skimmed your way through or never finished:

1. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
2. The Golden Bough, abridged edition, Sir James George Frazer
3. Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley

Name three famous fanfics you’ve always meant to read:

1. Iolokus (XF)
2. The rest of Talking Stick/Circle (VOY)
3. The Glory Days series (VOY)

Word count: 38,000

I know it’s two weeks late, but because it’s still November and sinat hinam never goes out of style, here are some links about Kristallnacht and related topics:

• A historical overview of Kristallnacht
• A map of the destruction
• More Kristallnacht links
• Goebbels accuses Churchill of using the big lie technique

Lori and Seema led me to some cool links. Check out i used to believe - it has a lovely clean site design, on top of the inspired theme. I added my own weird childhood belief to the language - speaking section: until a few years ago, I believed this was a doggy dog world, rather than a dog-eat-dog world.

Seema found the cool Advertising Slogan Generator; here are some results for various words:

• We Do Jemima Right.
• Because Jemima Can’t Drive.
• Wouldn’t You Rather Be Jemima?
• Say It With Jemima.
• Just Like Jemima Used To Make.
• Mama Mia, That’sa One Spicy Jemima!
• Watch Out, There’s a Jemima About.

• Don’t You Just Love Being In Fanfic?
• Reach for the Fanfic.
• Good To The Last Fanfic.
• We’re Serious About Fanfic.
• You Deserve A Fanfic Today.
• We Do Fanfic Right.
• Nothing Sucks Like A Fanfic.

• Pure Muse.
• Come Fly The Friendly Muse.
• Muse - The Freshmaker!
• A Muse Works Wonders.
• If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Muse.
• It’s That Muse Feeling.
• This Is Not Your Father’s Muse.
• Ding-Dong! Muse Calling!

Must. Stop. Now.

Word count: 10192

The friend I’m visiting has a child. Let’s call him “Rob,” since that was almost his name and it’s the name of my novel’s villain. Rob is at that age where he can’t get enough attention. It’s always, “Look at this, Mommy,” when the Tommy the Tank Engine is driving off the side of Sodor Island, or “Look at this, Jemi,” when he’s dug out the battery-powered train and wants to get it into a wreck at the elevated crossroads. The mere mention of naptime or bedtime makes him teary-eyed.

That’s when Rob fires his best ammunition. The daily emergency that is bedtime brings out his inner nutritionist like nothing else can. I quickly identified “I want a glass of milk” as a subtle ploy for attention. Rob’s parents, however, are completely taken in by this sudden interest in cow juice from a child whose beverage of choice is, of course, soda. You know how parents are - they want to believe their child is following in their earthy-crunchy barefoot footsteps when really he’s following in their devious, staying out late teenage footsteps. Now it’s a glass of milk; soon it will be an hour past curfew.

Rob is a cute and, fortunately, cheery child. That’s his excuse for behavior that society does not tolerate from adults. Occasionally he can even occupy himself with Tommy the Tank Engine for some time without interrupting my novel or mommy’s AIM session. As he gets older, one hopes the duration for which he can amuse himself without pestering others will increase. Perhaps by the age of, say, twelve, he will even have something of interest to share with others.

For now, he’s not unlike a cat. Cats can tell when you’re not paying attention to them. The feline mind finds it insulting that you have your own amusements which do not include it; thus the feline body parks itself on your newspaper. A cat, however, does not bawl loudly when pushed off the newspaper. Rob can get quite whiney, as the “I want a cookie” incident proved. Mommy put her foot down for that one and gave him a time-out. I suspect that this time-out concept, so alien to my own childhood experience, works so well because, again, it deprives the child of the attention that makes the little “me me me” engine go.

Then again, it seems very unwise to me to impress upon a young mind that sitting still and being quiet with your own thoughts is a punishment, rather than an ideal. Maybe that’s why he hates bedtime so much - it’s the eight-hour time-out.