I dreamed my late brother was here in Houston, a city he never visited. He was phobic about flying and traveled by air only twice in his life, when very young. We were seated across from each other, on the couches by the front window. What I remember of the dream is brief, little more than an image without duration. He looked as he always looked – plaid shirt, blue jeans, Whitmanesque beard. The atmosphere was mundane, free of revelations. We didn’t talk though I sensed I had unformed questions. He offered no reassurance or profound knowledge from beyond.  When I woke the dream mingled with Montaigne, the writer we often talked about during his final weeks last August in the hospital and hospice. Montaigne’s father became ill with kidney stones in 1561 and died seven years later. The essayist’s closest friend, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, died of dysentery in 1563 at age thirty-two. His brother Arnaud died in his twenties. His firstborn died at two months, the second survived but the subsequent four also died as infants. In “Of Judging the Death of Others,” Montaigne writes:   “When we judge of the assurance of other men in dying, which is without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life, we must be mindful of one thing: that people do not easily believe that they have reached that point. Few men die convinced that it is their last hour; and there is no place where the deception of hope deludes us more. It never stops trumpeting into our ears: ‘Others have certainly been sicker without dying; the case is not as desperate as they think; and at worst, God has certainly worked other miracles.’”   For almost a week preceding his death, my brother was unconscious. The only sound he made was softly moaning when the nurses moved him. Before that, he never seemed frightened. I’ll never know what he knew or when.   [The quotation is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

The post 0 Percent Chance appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence has commented on my March 1 post:  “One of my worst apprehensions about my son’s college education came true in his freshman English class. The professor brought up Lamb only to highlight something he said that would strike modern progressives as racist. Such a great language stylist, and my son’s likely only exposure to him was in the villains’ gallery of his college’s CRT indoctrination. Grrr!”   By now, a familiar story. That Lamb of all writers should be Zhdanov-ized is a bitter joke. Yes, he is “a great language stylist,” but also one of the funniest writers in the language. His sense of humor, spanning the spectrum from nonsense to erudite wit, is distinctly modern. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” English profs tend today to be humorless and puritanical, at least about other people's beliefs, disapproving of the pleasure we are meant to take in literature.   In Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (2021), Robert Alter reflects on a visit he made to the Soviet Union in the final year of its existence. He was there to attend a Nabokov conference, contrasting it with “the never-never land that American academia has become.” He writes:   "Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture.”   Let’s ask the basic question: why do academics, some of whom are intelligent and well-educated, behave this way? It seems to boil down to two things: a hunger for power (always the highest value on campus), a withered aesthetic sense and and a peculiar form of laziness. You don’t have to bother reading a book if you know in advanced you want to disapprove of it. Such descendants of the kids in grade school who complained about reading a book are now in a position to get their way. Alter bluntly states the reality for many of us: “There is something irrepressibly celebratory about Nabokov’s writing . . .”

A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core. Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly… read article