Impressions

After watching The Hobbit, I thought it would be worth watching some more of Rankin/Bass’s films, and initially planned on moving on to The Return of the King next (on my own schedule, which some would call extremely slow but which I prefer to think of as simply a stately pace). At a friend’s insistence, though, I skipped ahead a bit and watched The Last Unicorn, their adaptation of Peter Beagle’s novel of the same title from 1982. Since a couple of people have expressed interest in hearing about it, I figured I’d go ahead and share a few brief thoughts on the movie here.

After writing about Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, an acquaintance recommended that I also check out another of O’Brien’s novels, Going After Cacciato. That sounded like a good idea to me, so I got a copy of the audiobook edition expecting another war novel along the lines of The Things They Carried.

I was about half-right. It’s partly a war novel, and partly a modern version of Around the World in Eighty Days. Once again, we follow a company of soldiers in the Vietnam War, and roughly half the chapters, interspersed between those about the main narrative, are anecdotes about protagonist Paul Berlin’s experience as a new soldier, much like The Things They Carried. The other half, and the primary narrative of the book, is about one member of the company, Cacciato, going AWOL. Cacciato seems to be not quite retarded, but certainly not too bright, either, and he’s decided to leave the war for Paris. He’s not a coward or a pacifist or anything like that, it’s just that he’s apparently not clever enough to see the consequences of what is, in fact, desertion, and the impossibility of traveling all the way from Vietnam overland to France.

It may be hard to tell since I didn’t really review it, but I loved Anabasis enough that I was eager to read more from Xenophon right after finishing it. He’s one of the fortunate Classical authors to have had many of his works survive to the present day, so there’s plenty to choose from. His Socratic dialogues seemed like an obvious next step, but I’ve decided to put that on hold until I finish Plato’s. In the meantime, I noticed that Robin Waterfield, who did the excellent translations for Anabasis, The Histories, and The First Philosophers, has translated a collection of his shorter works, published by Penguin Books as Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises.

I don’t read as much theology as I perhaps should, but every Catholic should have some familiarity with the Church’s teachings, and work constantly to deepen our understanding of the Faith. I was fortunate to be better catechised than most in high school, but revisiting the basics once in a while doesn’t hurt, so I decided to pick up Doctrina Christiana, a catechism written by St. Robert Bellarmine, whose work is becoming a staple of my reading habits after the excellent De Laicis and the extraordinarily in-depth De Romano Pontifice.

Though I’ve been interested in Confucianism for much of my life, I’ve only relatively recently begun seriously working through the Confucian canon, namely the Four Books and Five Classics. Now, working through the canon seems like a logical start to understanding the philosophy, much like working through Scripture to understand Christianity, but there is a drawback. That is, the canon by itself does not tell us how Confucianism was understood and put into practice within China. For me it’s still more-or-less an abstraction, and I fear reading my own ideas into the texts too much and ending up like a Confucian equivalent of SWPL “Buddhists,” who refashion that faith in their own image with no concept of what the religion actually involves.

Mencius Moldbug once wrote that the Right is fundamentally oriented towards order. That’s not a rigorous definition, obviously, but it does have more than a grain of truth to it. The modern, Liberal mind may instinctively leap from “order” to an image of a totalitarian, regimented society, but order essentially means, simply, each aspect of a society working as it ought.  In book XII, chapter 11 of the _Analects _Confucius is asked about government, and he says, “Let the prince be a prince, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son.”  Interestingly, though not the goal, increased order also leads to increased liberty, but you can find more about Reaction and liberty from Moldbug or a more recent article by Doug Smythe.

A while back I wrote about Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. I seem to be one of the brave few who actually did enjoy the movie, but mostly because of the few things it got right. Overall, the best I can say about it is that it’s not as bad as people say, but when that’s the best defense of a film one can offer, well, it’s probably not a good movie.

Like any bibliophile, I have stack of books that I plan on reading eventually, so it’s fairly common for a book to hang out on the shelf for months, even years before I get around to it. As soon as I heard about From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, though, I knew I had to make it priority. So, after only, well, a year or so, I got right to it. After all, it features many saints and Fathers of the Church, as well as other luminaries like Origen, William of Ockham, and John of Paris. Unfortunately, it suffers the same weakness as almost all anthologies, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Honestly, in a way, it feels superfluous to review G. K. Chesterton’s non-fiction. It seems that most everyone who might be interested in his work has already read something, and as I’ve said elsewhere, he’s nothing if not consistent. If you’ve read one of Chesterton’s books, you already know exactly what to expect from the others, and if you’ve read my review of either Heretics or Orthodoxy, you already know what I think of them.

Those of use who’ve been around the Right for very long are well aware of that there is no shortage of blogs out there. Social Matter’s weekly reviews link to hours worth of reading material, and that just covers Neoreaction and its immediate neighbours; if you venture into the Alt Right, and especially if you include the Alt Lite, you’ll never have time for anything else if you try to keep up with everything. A lot of that material is valuable for several reasons, but unfortunately, the web logging format has some limitations. Though it works for occasional commentary or introductions to larger topics, there’s just not room to go into depth in any one subject, at least not comfortably. So, speaking for myself, the blogging format has grown rather stale. I’ll still occasionally find a new writer with some worthwhile archives, but at this point I only follow a handful of them and Social Matter’s weekly round-up.