Ostrobogulous by Viz

As an optimist, I happily trust that Paden confines his extreme commitments to vegetarianism.

Taste is one thing; it is another thing to condemn meat eating as “evil” and permissible only “in rare and unfortunate circumstances.” Paden disagrees with no less an authority than God, Who forbids us to call any edible unworthy (Mark 7: 18-19), and Who enjoins St Peter to eat pork chops and lobster in one of my favorite revelations (Acts 10: 9-16). Does the Catholic Vegetarian Society think that our Lord was wrong to have served up fish to the 5,000, or should He have refrained from eating the Passover Lamb? When He rose from the dead and appeared in the Upper Room, He did not ask for a bowl of Cheerios, nor did He whip up a meatless omelette on the shore of Galilee.

Man was made to eat flesh (Genesis 1: 26-31; 9: 1-6), with the exception of human flesh. I stand on record against cannibalism, whether it be inflicted upon the Mbuti Pygmies by the Congolese Army or on larger people by a maniac in Milwaukee. But I am also grateful that the benevolent father in the parable did not welcome his prodigal son home with a bowl of radishes.

Vegetarians assume an unedifying posture of detachment from the sufferings of vegetables that are mashed, stewed, diced, and shredded. In expensive restaurants, cherries are publicly burned in brandy to the applause of diners. It is not uncommon for people to submerge olives in iced gin and twist the peels of lemons. Be indignant, vegetarian, but not so selectively indignant that the bleat of the lamb and the plaintive moo of the cow drown out the whine of our brother the bean and the quiet sigh of the cauliflower.

Vegetables have reactive impulses. Were we to confine our diet to creatures that lacked sense and do not even respond to light, we could only eat liturgists and liberal Democrats.

The Rev. George W. Rutler
New York City

[via Rod Dreher] 

If, when men sense a weight upon their minds
A trouble deep within that wearies them,
They could but recognize the source, and know
Why such huge misery masses in the heart,
They’d never lead their lives as we see now—
As men who never know what they want, who move
From place to place to lay their burden down.
Out of his mansion he’s got to go, that fool,
Home bores him to death, and yet he turns right back,
Finding that things are just as dull outside.
Swift, to the villa he spurs his galloping ponies,
Bringing relief—you’d think—to a house afire.
But soon as he touches the villa door, he yawns,
Tries to forget, falls heavily asleep,
Or hurries out to see the town again.
We flee ourselves, whom we can never flee.
Against our will the self we hate clings tight
For we are sick and do not grasp the cause.

[Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 3.1050-1067 (trans. Anthony Esolen)]

But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that aren’t. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words well and appropriately printed and bound ? If you can say Yes to these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of ‘book’ deserved. If Lamb were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did.

[…]

What would he have to say of [today’s] novels, for example? These commodities are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have no illusions as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings of sausages does not pretend that every individual sausage is in itself remarkable. He does not assure us that ‘this is a sausage that gives furiously to think,’ or ‘this is a singularly beautiful and human sausage,’ or ‘this is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.’ Why are such distinctions drawn by the publisher? When he publishes, as he sometimes does, a novel that is a book (or at any rate would be a book if it were decently printed and bound) then by all means let him proclaim its difference — even at the risk of scaring away the majority of readers.

[Max Beerbohm, “Books Within Books” (1914)]

In 1977 or 1978 — she can’t remember which — [Louise] Hay found out she had cervical cancer, and she concluded that its cause was her unwillingness to let go of resentment over her childhood abuse and rape. She refused medical treatment, she says, and with a regimen of forgiveness, therapy, nutrition, reflexology and occasional enemas, she claims she rid herself of cancer. There is, she says, no doctor left who can confirm this improbable story — “It was years ago!” — but she swears it is true.

In 1976, Hay wrote a small pamphlet, which soon came to be called “Heal Your Body.” It included what became her famous list: a chart of different ailments and their “probable” metaphysical causes. For example, Hay would claim, a probable cause of Alzheimer’s disease is “a desire to leave the planet. The inability to face life as it is.” A probable cause of “anorectal bleeding” is “anger and frustration.” A probable cause of leprosy is “inability to handle life at all.” By 1984, Hay had included her “Heal Your Body” list in her book “You Can Heal Your Life,” which also contained such affirmations as “it is essential that we stop worrying about money and stop resenting our bills.”

[here]

When I saw burials, corteges passing under the windows of the house where I lived, I asked my mother what it meant for someone to be dead. “Why is he dead?” “He’s dead because he was ill.” I ended up believing that one died because one had had an illness, or an accident, at any rate that death was accidental, and that, on taking care not to be ill, to be well-behaved, in wearing a scarf, in taking medicines properly, in paying attention to traffic, one would never die. That worried me, because I could see that one grew older. I said to myself, “Up till when can one continue to age? Where can it lead to?” I imagined a man growing older, I saw him growing up, becoming tall, his beard becoming white, that his beard growing whiter and whiter, and longer and longer and that it dragged in the street, that he himself was more and more bent over. I said to myself, “No, it must come to an end, it’s not possible for it to go on.” One day I asked my mother, “Are we all going to die? Tell me the truth.” She said, “Yes.” I must have been four, five years old, I was sitting on the ground, she was standing in front of me. I can still see her. When she saw me sob—because all of a sudden I started to cry—she looked at me, disarmed, powerless. I was very frightened. Above all, I thought it was certain that she would die one day, that haunted me.

[Eugène Ionesco, qtd. here]