Books - Roland in Moonlight, Papers and Letters from Prison, The Brothers Karamazov, Dominion, The Art of War
On Monday 24th January in the afternoon, I sat outside my house under the small front porch watching my two sons perambulate on various small bikes and scooters. When I wasn’t responding to their cries for attention or my one year-old daughter’s (which came in the form of her pressing her index finger against the inside of the sitting-room window and screaming with pleasure), I was reading Roland in Moonlight by David Bentley Hart. It seemed like a particularly apt read for that cold, late-January afternoon underneath one of the dismal yet ubiquitous monochrome off-white skies that we become so familiar with living in this North Atlantic climate, a relentless dome of unbreakable monotony. Eventually my son Rafe got cold hands and went inside. Rupert, the younger one, who was four last week, carried on scooting around singing a happy song about “buses and planes are not quite the same as a big old train” or something like that.
Roland in Moonlight is really about the way that modernity has strangulated our ability to see the world as anything but a lifeless machine: all magic, all sense of the spirituality that inheres within things has been lost, and we are left with the impression of inert matter that produces the illusion of consciousness as a by-product. Hart’s suggestion here (actually it is his dog Roland’s suggestion) is that we need to find a way to see the world differently, to reject that metaphysical moroseness and to cultivate a vision that enables us to truly see what is already there: namely, God in all things. I think Hart is way off sometimes, and he often comes across as a boorish and arrogant twit, but I think this is because he is aware of how gifted he really is. To read him is to sit at the feet of an intellectual giant and a great stylist whose writing is not only deep and readable but also very funny.
And all of this stimulated something in me, which was to think that I haven’t really had an enjoyable intellectual experience for some time. And, in fact, the last two years, in taking my attention and fixating it so intensely on immanent political dangers, has actually denuded my personality in a quite significant way. I finished my doctorate during the lockdown periods, which was great, but really it was only about editing. The swashbuckling intellectual challenge was already completed by that stage. No, my intellect has died a bit over the last two years. I’m not saying I haven’t been using my intelligence, but I’ve been using it in a fairly lateral way, not in a way that has brought me greater levels of depths or mastery of any subject that I find stimulating and fulfilling personally. I wonder if this is something that you’ve experienced also: this sense that politics has invaded your life, and not only your life but your mind and your heart, and has taken something away from you? This is why we must resist totalitarianism: not just because it is foul and evil, but because it arrogates to itself all of our attention as though it is a remorselessly petulant child who must have a total monopoly over everybody in the vicinity of it: everything must be about politics. There can be nothing outside of the state and its priorities. Well, to hell with that. I’m enjoying having my intellect stimulated once again by the great David Bentley Hart and his dog Roland. And I can’t tell you the sense of freedom that it brings to my soul just to be preoccupied with something that is NOT POLITICS!1
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