In candor, that was a rather difficult evening.
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Dawn chorus in the blizzard:
What came to mind when the coffeehouse opened, and I took my first sips of a bit of civilization was that the Allman Brothers regularly played the theatre down the block. So perhaps I trust more in rock, and in the things of the South, than my usual classical listening habits and northerly addresses might indicate. What's bred in the bone.
Quiet inviatory and lauds in the light snowfall and heavy wind outside the progressive congregation's church beforehand. Still averse to complicity. The best among their parishioners are looking to the sacraments in the same way that I do, and I wouldn't want to betray them by signing on to the articles. The best thing you could ever tell a priest, especially when you see the splinters in his eye most clearly: preserve the sacraments. The reactionary chapter at the cathedral provokes the opposite reaction, so I'm back to between the worlds, I suppose.
It would, of course, be better to have a few more of the things of civilization, but I haven't gratuitously sacrificed any of my economic strength, as it were. Like Luther, I couldn't do otherwise in those situations, so I calmly took up my ruck and walked into the cold. In the Balkans, I looked with envy at their abundant housing stocks, imagining walls filled with shelves of paperback Hegel, but I was also realistic enough to realize that the shelves of the folks who lived there (understandably, for historical reasons) were likely bare of philosophy. Even, and perhaps especially, the scholars -- and this was borne out when I rented apartments from scholars, though perhaps they had taken them with them.
But this also means: as I have been purified, the things that I have need to be purified. If I do manage to secure some station, in the yin--yang for the years in which I knew adversity, in that it is connected to me, it must be as focused. Lockean theory of property, ironically. When I've had interludes of sufficiency, it has almost always been the Wittgenstein setup of camp bed and table. A child of the wars. In fairness, it was also said that he had no books on the shelves, but I have it on good authority that he had a stash in the closet, hurriedly hid before tutorials. A puritan, as opposed to a mystifier, should be candid about his sources. Apparently he had quite the cult at Cantab., many of them Catholic. And, like Cromwell, he never visited Oxford during the war, I think.
My books are waiting for me at the research library, the gym is waiting as well with some weights for a solid workout (I realized when I was in the Pirin mountains that the present trials would require physical strength, so I started lifting then, after a few years of just running before dawn.)
It is a bit like optics -- I'm focused on a certain thing, but if the mechanism gets hit too hard, it's as if that thing never existed. When my understanding vanishes, my cause vanishes. And without the external validation that politics and corruption have blocked, I have only my understanding against the claim that I have no cause. And reason is the demonstration of understanding. (Hegel/Wolff)
Lot, I suspect, kept his faith due to his belief that God transcended circumstance. This much is anodyne and uncontroversial. But parse that term of transcendence. The intuitive hearing might be that God is a sort of aqua regia, dissolving all else, but that's not the case or the claim. In holiness, the world isn't dissolved. The claim is that (not quite in a pantheistic sense) God is within things as they are, and above things as they are. So we need idealism: we're always inside our own head, as it were, without any penetration of the world as the world to calibrate the mechanism. To say that God is transcendent means that all differentiation in things and all differentiation within myself does not divide his existence. My notions are subordinated to his presence, as the day is subordinated to the sunlight. And it would be illogical to blame the sun for the evils under the sun, even though the evils under the sun are the substance of our understanding.
Much of it does come down to physical strength and a willingness to press on, which is why I abruptly started lifting weights in the mountains, knowing the nature of the times to come. Pressing on amid the evils, and against the principal evil: the claim that there is nothing above the substance of the world.