In 1789 George Washington prayed in St. Paul’s Church, on what we now call lower Broadway, on the day of his inauguration as the first president of the United States. The churchyard was already old. On September 11, 2001, several new corpses were lying on the old graves. Then quickly a temporary morgue was set … Read more
By a delicate symmetry, the parable of the mustard seed takes up just two verses of the Scriptures (Matthew 13: 31-32). In the 18th century “the smallest of all the seeds” was such a convenient metaphor for next-to-nothingness that land was sometimes rented for the symbolic fee of one peppercorn, its minuteness a sign of … Read more
I remember with special affection a certain professor of mine who once said to a prolific rival: “I see you’ve written another book. What are you calling it this time?” In the same way, commentators often lump Christ’s parable of the tares in the field (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) with His parable of the fishing net … Read more
The voice of Christ narrating the parable of the Sower resounds in Matthew 13, Mark 4, and Luke 8. Mark and Luke depict Him escaping the crush of the crowd. Given my estimation of the mass media, I relish the King James Bible’s word for that throng of people: Our Lord avoids “the press.” Matthew … Read more
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field…There was a landowner who planted a vineyard…The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop… There was a rich man who was accused of wasting his possessions… A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…” These familiar lines open the … Read more
This is my last “Coincidentally” Column. And so, as at the end of a dinner party, I am gathering up the crumbs. What follows are items that I have been unable to organize around a particular theme, as in my past columns, but which, when put together, make their own loaf of synchrony and concomitance. … Read more
Among the things hidden from the learned and the clever are the glories of heaven. There are glories of human intelligence and design on this earth, but the eternal glories of heaven are revealed to children, who have no desire to outwit God. The child expects God to be God. God’s heaven is no stranger … Read more
In October 1883 the poet and critic Matthew Arnold arrived in New York on the Cunarder Servia to begin a lecture tour. The Sudanese revolutionary who called himself the Mandi was annihilating the army of his country’s Egyptian rulers. Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary had formed the Triple Alliance against France the year before. And Prince … Read more
Lenten days bring two images immediately to mind, at least to my own idle mind. The first is of the bishops’ gathering that first established Lent in 325 during the great ecumenical council in the Turkish town of Isnik—then called Nicaea. Some of the bishops there had been mutilated in the persecutions of the emperors … Read more
Different hemispheres of the brain govern intuitive artistry and inductive science. Atrophy of one of the lobes can cause either effete aestheticism or nerdish scientism. One dead lobe creates the National Endowment for the Arts, and another dead one creates Planned Parenthood. The ancients did not distinguish between parts of the brain—or the separate realms … Read more
The Civil War was raging, and a Confederate sentry heard the sound of a voice coming from marshland behind enemy lines—or so the story goes. The sentry aimed his rifle at a Union soldier who was singing. The tune was possibly John Bacchus Dykes’s Hillingside, first published in 1861 but already quite well-known. More likely, … Read more
Facing me every morning on the wall of the room where I take my coffee and cast a cold eye on the New York Times is a small engraving of Edward Law, the first Baron Ellenborough (1750-1818), British governor-general of India until his death. By pure coincidence, he hangs next to an engraving of Clement … Read more
The Anglo-Irish critic Robert Wilson Lynd observed that only in literature does coincidence seem unnatural. The literary Detection Club, whose members included Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and G.K. Chesterton, denied their fictitious sleuths access to coincidences, along with divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, and an act of God. Synchronicity and other forms of coincidence … Read more
The former mayor Marion Barry said of conditions in Washington, D.C., that “the crime rate isn’t so bad if you don’t count murder.” This was an awkward account of the situation in our nation’s capital, especially since the mayor personally increased the crimerate. By the encoded logic of its own illogic, any atomistic denial of … Read more
Dr. Martin Routh, president of Magdalen College for 63 years, was the last Oxford don to wear a wig in the 18th- century style, and this he did until he died in his 100th year in 1854. He had been born on the 25th anniversary of the death of Peter the Great, who banned beards … Read more
I shall always be grateful to the neighbor of my parents who some years ago gave me a copy of Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Splendid as were the illustrative plates, they could not overwhelm the verses of the laureled poet whom Cowper, slightly provincially, called the Milton of Rome. The average pedestrian need not … Read more
By an instinct common to all youth who have not had pacifism violently hammered into them, the inventive child will turn any toy into a weapon. War is in the blood, and among the sons of Cain, every cradle is Crécy. In his nursery of toy soldiers, the typical toddler calls his playpen Marathon and … Read more
In a recent motion picture, computer technology shows the monster Godzilla toppling the Chrysler Building onto my bedroom. Special effects in the film King Kong of 1933, which ended on the nearby Empire State Building, were crude by comparison, but the script had memorable lines, the finest of which was the last: “Oh no, it … Read more
The promise to “build a bridge to the future” has become a mantra in recent politics. It is less cogent than Longfellow’s maxim in The Golden Legend about not crossing a bridge until you come to it. The future needs no bridge. One cannot go out to it the way you can go from the … Read more
Felicitous arrangements allowed me as a student to repair weekly to practice the piano in a house by the Folly Bridge on the site in Oxford where Roger Bacon had conducted scientific experiments in the 13th century. His philosophy and theology (he having introduced the schema of Aristotle to the University of Paris) had tough … Read more
