There is a type of academic who can only get noticed by attacking the legacies of greater men and women, and a prime example was cited by Matthew Dennison in The Spectator in his essay “Don’t Cancel Beatrix Potter.” The beloved children’s author has become the target of “specialist in postcolonial literature” Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall, who hilariously claims that Potter failed “to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations” and that this contributes to “a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today.”

This is frivolous stuff, and Marshall’s claims are a parasitic attempt to gain fifteen minutes of fame by slandering a woman who cannot defend herself. Dennison handily rebuts Marshall, and I’m glad he did—but I can’t help but think that fortunately, some writers are uncancellable. Potter’s books have sold 250 million copies. Her legacy is just fine. Her characters will continue to be household names for countless children, while Dr. Whatserface will have to find a new target if she wants to trigger further discussion of her own work. People who take these accusations seriously should not be taken seriously.

I do, however, think that a study of Potter’s life has something to contribute to current cultural conversations—not in “postcolonial literature studies,” but in the discussions unfolding in traditionalist circles on how to respond to our civilizational moment, in which many things appear to be ending.

Paul Kingsnorth has been grappling with the question of how to live in this revolutionary age on his Substack “The Abbey of Misrule,” noting at the outset that: “The storm is here and an age is ending, but new and old hearts stay steadfast on the margins. God is not mocked, and reality bats last. In an age of Big Everything, small remains beautiful and shall, in the end, inherit the Earth.” In his concluding essays, he suggests that becoming rooted in “people, place, and prayer” are key parts of the answer.

Kingsnorth’s proposal reminded me of Potter, who was the sort of conservative who knew precisely what she wanted to conserve—and how. Potter was born in 1866 in Kensington, London, to Rupert and Helen Potter, joined six years later by a little brother, Walter Bertram. She spent her childhood cultivating a deep love of art and nature. She and Walter populated their home with a menagerie of pets, including rabbits, mice, frogs, lizards, snakes, salamanders, and a rotund hedgehog. Walter even had a pair of long-eared bats that he left with Beatrix when he went to boarding school. She painstakingly painted and sketched them all with astonishing skill.

Potter’s pets and artwork turned into tales for children and in 1901 at the age of 36 she self-published the first edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit after publishers turned her down due to her insistence that the price must be kept low to keep the story affordable for children. The following year, Warne & Co. published an abridged version to an enthusiastic public reception, and several sold out editions. They asked Potter for more, and a series of stories were published in swift succession. There would eventually be 33 in all, and Potter became one of the most famous children’s authors of all time.

Her success made Potter wealthy, and in 1905 she purchased Hill Top Farm in the Lake District village of Near Sawrey in the north of the country for £2,805. She planted a garden, continued painting and writing, and started farming. Potter took up residence in a beautiful two-story farm cottage built in the 17^th century with a pitched roof, two chimneys, and vines creeping up the stone walls. Hill Top Farm, the nearby village, and the surrounding countryside became her haven and her passion. She decided to do everything in her power to protect it, buying adjacent properties from struggling farmers to prevent industrialists from scooping it up and developing it. Her land holdings soon included ancient woodlands, open fells, watersheds, and more than a dozen working farms.

Once an urban girl from London, Potter became a locally renowned farmer and the simplest sort of conservationist—one who sought to conserve the things around her that she loved. As it turned out, that would come to include her adopted way of life. As Oxford professor Keith Thompson put it, Potter “helped save a crucial part of the English countryside”:

The authentic Lakes breed was, and is, the Herdwick Sheep, a cold-hardy animal adapted to graze the harsh uplands. Typically, each farmer has a small piece of his own lowland pasture for overwintering. The rest of the year, his flock grazes on a portion (a “heaf”) of the communal, open-range fells, which are inaccessible except on foot. Each year, new Herdwick lambs learn from their mothers the territories to which they will return the following year. “Heafed” lambs then stay on their territories without supervision—a useful trait unique to the breed. However, Herdwicks produce a coarse wool useful only for carpets. Crossing them with other breeds would have produced finer wool, but the less-hardy offspring would neither fend for themselves nor graze the fells evenly. Bracken fern would take over the grassland, for example. Preserving the tradition of hill farming, based on the Herdwick sheep, required constant attention to breeding and land management. But without this effort, a way of life and an entire landscape would have been lost.

When Potter died at the age of 77 in 1943, she bequeathed 14 farms and 4,000 acres of land valued at between $14 million and $35 million in today’s currency to Britian’s National Trust to ensure that the lands she loved would be permanently preserved. Potter’s former property is now part of the 855-square-mile Lake District National Park, England’s largest.

Obviously, few can afford to engage in this sort of conservation. But Potter’s example highlights the fact that at the most basic level, a conservative should seek to conserve the things he loves that are close, immediate, and local. Everybody wants to save the world, a pundit once joked—but nobody wants to pick up the trash. That applies to social conservatives, as well—activists, politicians, and writers cannot save “the family”—but individually, we can do our best to save our own by pouring our hearts into our spouses and our children and prioritizing hearth and home above all. In a world driven by the engines of social media, the big causes often drown out the little causes—our own villages, town; neighborhoods and families.

Potter didn’t try to save the world. She bought the land surrounding her farm and sought to protect a few local farming traditions—and she succeeded where the utopians of her century collectively failed. “One place suits one person, another place suits another person,” Potter wrote in one of her children’s books. That was all the reason she needed to conserve the place that suited her. “I remember every stone, every tree, the scent of heather,” she wrote later. “Even when the thunder growled in the distance, and the wind swept up the valley in fitful gusts, oh, it was beautiful, home sweet home.” And because of her, it is all still there.

This essay was first published in the print edition of The European Conservative

In just fifteen days, we have lost two of the great American writers of our time. On August 31, Wendell Berry passed away in Port Royal, Kentucky after finishing lunch with his wife Tanya. He went upstairs and, his daughter Mary said, “he fell, and was gone.” On September 15, Annie Dillard at the age of 81 died at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The papers say only that she died of “natural causes.” Berry was 92, but had been working in his writing cabin in the woods just months earlier. Dillard had not published in a decade.

I first read Annie Dillard in Grade 12 but didn’t know it was her. Our English teacher gave us a paragraph on a hand-out, and we read it aloud. The teacher beamed at us. “Isn’t that just fantastic?” she said. It was:

Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.

It was fifteen years before I found out who had written it. I was reading Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and there it was. The whole book is like that, a deeply religious and breathtaking meditation on Creation that took me months to get through not because it was long but because each page is packed with passages that stop you in your tracks.

Her 1992 novel The Living is magnificent; I think it is one of the best books of that decade. It is set in northeastern Washington State in an area I know well; I was born in Seattle, attended church for years in Lynden, and Dillard’s rendering of the Pacific Northwest is palpably recognizable to those who have lived there. Her one other novel is The Maytrees, published in 2007. The prose is just as good; the plot struck me as implausible. But Dillard always played by her own rules.

Both Dillard and Berry were beloved of many of today’s Christian writers, as evidenced by the outpouring of tributes that greeted their deaths. Neither, however, identified as Christian writers per se. They were, rather, two of the last and greatest culturally Christian writers, in that what they wrote was indecipherable to those not literate in the Christian language and theological traditions of the West. Christianity was not just their context, but their frame of reference. Dillard and Berry saw their world through Christian eyes. If you removed the Christian elements from their work, there wouldn’t be much left.

When asked if he considered himself a Christian, Berry replied: “I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously.” When Annie Dillard was asked the same question, she stated in her last published article in 2020 that while she accepted the label, she could not assent to most of Christianity’s fundamental doctrines. “I know only one thing for certain: there is holiness,” she wrote. “Standing there, a person can sing myriad songs.” Those answers sum up, in so many words, what it means to be a cultural Christian.

Dillard and Berry were two of the last of a generation weaned on the King James Bible, which shaped the American social imaginary for centuries. As an adolescent, Dillard memorized long passages from the King James, absorbed its cadences, and wrote poems carefully emulating its rhythms. Those deeply familiar with the Bible that shaped the English language—and there are not many left—will immediately recognize its impact on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and her other work.

In reflecting on the advance of autumn creating “gaps” as the skeletal trees shed their garb: “The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God.” On paying attention to Creation: “The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price.” On grappling with it: “I am Jacob at Peniel wrestling with the angel.” On what it reveals: “Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song, and dance.” A concluding command: “Pray without ceasing.”

Berry’s novels are filled with the King James; his foundational concept of community “membership” was taken from 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.” Hannah Coulter describes the membership in the words of Act 17 as “those in whom we live and move and have our being.”

The culture that produced generations of Americans intimately familiar with the King James is dead and gone, but it is still a Rosetta Stone for much of literature. Over several years, I exchanged a handful of letters with Berry, and I asked if this worried him. “The Bible is important to me,” he told me. “The King James Version is important to me because of its beauty, and because it was the Bible for every English-speaking reader for over 400 years. Most people now don’t know the Bible in any version, nor will they recognize other references to work in our literary tradition. That is a worry, of course, but there is no reason that my writing should be influenced by the ignorance of readers.”

“One thing that makes me sad about the deaths of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard is that the deeply literate culture that allowed us all to know and love them simply no longer exists at scale, and so we will not, together, see their like again, at least not for many, many years,” Paul Pastor of Harper Collins wrote recently. He’s right, but the literate culture he is referring to was a Christian culture. Berry and Dillard, the ecumenically beloved American pilgrims, were two of the last great culturally Christian writers, and they were predeceased by the culture that produced them.

As usual, Annie Dillard put it best in one of her most chilling and brilliant lines, on the retreat of the sacred in our secular world: “We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.”

This essay was published in the 2024 print edition of The European Conservative magazine.

I met Jim Wight at The World of James Herriot visitor centre in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, better known to millions of readers as the Farnon-Herriot veterinary surgery of Darrowby. Eighty-one-year-old Jim Wight is the son of James Herriot—the pen name of Alf Wight—and worked as a vet with his father and Donald Sinclair (Siegfried Farnon in the books) as a vet for decades. Viewers of Channel 5’s widely acclaimed TV series “All Creatures Great and Small” saw him arrive as a baby in the recent Christmas Special of Series 4; Herriot readers will recall “Jimmy” making his appearance in All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977).

Wight, along with his sister Rosie, is the guardian of his father’s legacy; he wrote The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father in part to set the record straight after the publication of Graham Lord’s Herriot biography in 1997. Wight ushered me in through the red front door of the surgery. The surgery and the first Herriot home have been restored to the way things were described in the books, so much so that when Herriot’s wife Joan—Helen, in the books—saw the restoration for the first time in 1999, “she had a lump in her throat, because this is exactly how it used to be.” Wight would know—it was his home, too.

“These are the original tiles, well over 100 years old,” he told me in the foyer. Historic paintings hang in the front hall. Wellington at Waterloo, the death of Nelson. In the adjoining family room, set up with the chairs pointing towards the fireplace and the table scattered as if the Wights had just ducked out for a moment, a portion of Herriot’s book collection sits on bookshelves. Dickens, Walter Scott, Arthur Canon Doyle, and P.G. Wodehouse—who reduced Herriot to helpless laughter and clearly influenced his own work—were favourites. Across the hall is the large dining room, where a model of the famous Mrs. Pumphrey (real name: Marjorie Warner) and her Pekinese Tricki Woo sit on a chair.

“We worked like dogs,” Wight recalled. “There could be twenty or thirty visits a day.” He smiled with nostalgia as he pointed and talked; there was the black phone that would ring from some far-flung farm; the vets would race through the hallway, down the garden, and leap into the brakeless black 1938 Austin Seven, which had to be started with a crank, and then off through the dales to some hill farm, where more often than not the job would require stripping off on some wind-blasted pasture to assist a difficult lambing. Veterinary work in the 1940s and ‘50s was not for the faint of heart.

We spent an hour in The World of James Herriot, making our way through the surgery and the apothecary filled with potions. In the kitchen was a massive range oven that was, Wight noted, much smaller than many of the farmhouse ranges, which were used to cook food and warm the family and newborn lambs and piglets, too. Hanging next to the range was a needlework quote that summarized the attitude of many farm folk:

The Beauty of the House is Order

The Blessing of the House is Contentment

The Glory of the House is Hospitality

The Crown of the House is Godliness

Some of the stories Wight told me I recognize from the Herriot books; hearing the stories from him, in his wonderful Yorkshire accent, is a Herriot fan’s dream come true. At several points, walking through the surgery, other visitors realized who he was as they overheard his stories; their eyes grew large. He graciously answered all questions. At several points, Wight stopped, looked around, and shook his head. “It was just like that. Just like that.”

Alf Wight graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 and secured a job in Yorkshire in January of 1940. His boss, Donald Sinclair, owned the practice at 23 Kirkgate in Thirsk, and he needed a young vet to look after it while he took his Royal Air Force training. Alf soon met Joan Catherine Anderson Danbury (Helen); unlike most of those described in the books, Joan is least like her literary counterpart. She was the secretary at a corn mill in Thirsk, not a farmer’s daughter, and she was an excellent cook. She did, however, have a number of suitors and one broken engagement before meeting and marrying Alf on November 5, 1941.

A year after getting married, Alf also trained in the RAF, despite veterinary practice being an exempt profession. “His house was bombed in Glasgow, and he was infuriated by it,” Wight told me. He was discharged as a leading aircraftman for medical reasons in July 1943. He and Joan had two children: James (Jim) in 1943 and Rosemary in 1947. In the 1960s, he began to write short stories and “bombard publishers with them”; they were rejected. The first book he sent in was titled The Art and the Science, a reference to the way veterinary work in the 1940s and ‘50s was often show and guesswork. Wight still owns the original draft and says that it’s a good thing it was rejected. Alf got better with every rewrite.

If Only They Could Talk was published in the UK in 1970, followed by It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in 1972. The two books were combined into one volume and sold in the U.S. under the title All Creatures Great and Small. It was a runaway bestseller. He wrote eight books in all, selling over 80 million copies translated into 36 different languages. Despite his gruelling hours of veterinary work, Wight told me, Alf wasn’t financially stable until the books were published; at his silver wedding anniversary, “he only had twenty quid in the bank.” Alf had always wanted to build a nice home for his wife, and his success allowed him to do so. It cost him 2,000 pounds. Incidentally, that house has just gone up for sale.

The locals never made a big deal about Alf’s books, although they figured out that he was James Herriot almost immediately. Jim Wight had been sworn to secrecy, but in his memory, this lasted less than a month. He was at the market square shortly after publication, he told me, when a farmer came up to him.

“I’ve just read a book by a vet named Herriot,” the man informed him.

“Oh?” said Wight, who hadn’t said a word to anyone.

The farmer nodded. “It’s your dad, isn’t it?”

“What makes you think that?” Wight replied cagily.

“Come on,” the farmer replied. “The way he described Siegfried? That’s Donald Sinclair to a tee!”

Another farmer commented casually to Alf one day that he’d read one of his books. “Oh?” Alf replied cautiously. “What did you think?” The farmer replied: “Why, they’re about nowt!” (“Nowt” was Yorkshire slang for “nothing.”) It was a backhanded compliment that testified to how completely Alf, as Herriot, had captured life in the Yorkshire dales. “He never talked about his books,” Wight recalled. “He never changed. That was his secret. That’s why he’s popular around here. He was a proper gentleman, dead straight.”

“The only time he ever got castigated for his books was by a little man named Mr. Smedley,” Wight chuckled. “I can see him now—a customer from a nearby village, a little man with a club foot, he was. He berated my dad: I haven’t been in any of your books, Mr. Wight! When are you going to put me in one of your books? He was really upset about it.” Some characters were recognizable, but Alf ensured that others could not identify themselves by combining people, changing locations, and even switching the sexes of the people he was writing about. Despite that, Wight insists that nearly all of the stories in the books are true. He witnessed some himself and heard the others from his father long before they showed up in print.

Donald Sinclair was less pleased about his portrayal as Siegfried; he was simply too eccentric to recognize himself. Wight says that Alf actually hid the extent of Sinclair’s neuroticism. “Donald was virtually impossible to work with, but he was a decent man,” Wight chuckled. “He would never do you a bad turn. You got what you saw with him. There was no hidden agenda. I never heard Donald talk about somebody behind their back. I don’t think he’d survive the modern age. He was too erratic, but very well thought of because the overriding thing about him was his decency.” For generations of readers, Sinclair and his brother Brian—Tristan, in the books—were favourite characters.

There were stories that Alf wouldn’t tell, of course. In one instance, a lady’s dog had died, and they’d cremated it. She requested the dog’s ashes, which were long gone. Sinclair was determined to give her what she wanted and headed to the ash pile at the bottom of the garden. “Donald comes back with a palmful of ash, with a little velvet cushion,” Wight laughed. “The dog had been dead [for] six weeks, but the ashes were red hot [and] burnt a hole in the pillow. Dad never would’ve written that. He didn’t do black humour.” I asked how the story ended; Wight didn’t know. Mortified, Alf had bolted from the room.

Alf Wight achieved the singular distinction of becoming a literary icon while remaining a practicing vet. He became friends with crime novelist Dick Francis; he went on TV and met celebrities. The Queen herself was a fan. He was invited to meet her in 1980, and Wight told me that Alf “found her the most easy woman to talk to, with a very acute sense of humour. She told him that his were the only books that repeatedly made her laugh out loud.” Alf was a Tory, but when he met Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, he found that he preferred Wilson. “What a grand little man he is. He’s read my books. He loves dogs. He’s a big football fan. I could have spent all night with him.”

Despite his huge success, Alf never left Yorkshire. Most British writers did, and it is easy to see why—Alf was paying 83% income tax and 98% of investment income. Wight asked him once why he didn’t just go to one of the Channel Islands for a couple of years and save millions. Alf’s answer was simple. “I don’t want to do that. I like living here.” Wight chuckled. “He said to me, ‘How much money do you want? I don’t want a yacht in the Bahamas. I don’t want a helicopter. I don’t want a palace. I want to go to the same places I’ve always enjoyed: walking in the hills, going to the local football matches.’ I think he had his priorities right.”

Wight nodded reflectively. “Right? How much money do you want, Jonathon? It’s a good point, isn’t it? He could have left the dales and the practice … for what? A bigger bank account, away from the things that he loved?” He’s right, of course. A man who is content is already rich, and I’ve often thought that the gratitude James Herriot exuded made him the quintessential conservative; it is gratitude and love for our homes that drives the desire to conserve and protect. Alf could have gone anywhere or had anything, but he believed he already had everything a man could want. He worked as a vet for fifty years, almost right up until his death from cancer in 1995.

This, despite the fact that Alf struggled with depression. I asked Wight if the empathy and sensitivity on display in Herriot’s books were in part due to his own struggle with mental illness. “It could have done,” he replied thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought of that, actually. Right until he died, he had periods of melancholy.”

In the gift shop, Jim Wight laid out maps on the counter and advised us on the best route through the Yorkshire Dales. First, we took some time to walk around Thirsk. With a population of scarcely 7,000, it is still a small village; in 2023, the Sunday Times proclaimed Thirsk one of the best places to live in the North: “The heart of James Herriot country is Yorkshire at its traditional best, offering a hearty combination of class, countryside, and convenience.” That was certainly our experience; we stayed at the Fourways Guesthouse, a short walk from the cobbled town square, and the proprietor Mark—his family knew Alf’s daughter Rosie well—could not have been more hospitable.

Thirsk is a market town, and the square boasts a magnificent clock erected in 1896 to commemorate the 1893 wedding of the Duke of York to Princess Mary of Teck (later King George V and Queen Mary). It was crisp and sunny, and vendors were selling flowers and farm produce. On one side is the Golden Fleece Hotel, which opened in 1810 and boasts an enormous, oak-beamed fireplace dating from the 1500s. St. Mary’s Church is even older, dating from the 14th century. Alf and Joan got married there in 1941. Legend has it that the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, was murdered in the square in 1489.

There are also several Methodist churches in the village; Wight told me that the area was very religious and primarily Methodist, “especially up in the dales.” Fifty years ago, all of the churches were packed each Sunday. The great Methodist revivalist John Wesley preached in the square in 1763, recording in his diary: “At six I began preaching in the street at Thirsk. The congregation was exceedingly large. Just as I named my text, ‘What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ a man on horseback, who had stopped to see what was the matter, changed colour and trembled. Probably he might have resolved to save his soul had not his drunken companion dragged him away.”

We left Thirsk and headed for Wensleydale, winding through pastureland and heading up into the dales, where low stone walls with moss effortlessly climbed steep slopes. We pulled into the village shortly after passing Bolton Castle, where Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned for six months. The walled roads were so narrow that it was impossible to stop for photographs, and the ancient stone bridges over clear, burbling creeks only allowed one car at a time. Squat gray drystone cowsheds dotted the landscape. Many of them were centuries old; most of them were still in use. Ring-necked pheasants frequently fanned out from the road as we drove by. Out in the countryside, it felt as if nothing had changed. In the dales, it is still Herriot’s Yorkshire.

We had lunch at the Wheatsheaf Inn, where Alf and Joan spent their short honeymoon in 1941 as war loomed. It is a snug, traditional pub unmarred by interior designers; the front door opens into a cozy sitting room with a massive stone fireplace. Next to our table, the old guest book was displayed in a showcase, open to the page where Mr. and Mrs. Alf Wight had signed more than 80 years ago; a few lines down the page was the signature of Greta Garbo, who had stayed there for one night in January 1942 after entertaining troops at Catterick Garrison. Wensleydale is one of dozens of little villages and hamlets strung along the dale valleys, each with its own ancient stone church, cluster of little shops, and chimneyed rowhouses.

In between are the farms, some of them perched impossibly high up in the dales, where James Herriot spent his adult life.

There are still some small farms, but the agrarian life of Herriot’s era has vanished. “The animals all used to be named—Snowdrop and Bluebell, and so on,” Wight recalled. “Now, they’ve got numbers. Farming is a numbers game. That’s all gone. It’s all gone, Jonathon. It’s in the past. That’s my dad’s legacy—he’s left us a terrifically readable record of the way life was.” Farmers are still Herriot’s most loyal audience. “The farming community has read his books inside out. One of the countries that’s very big on him is Ireland,” Wight said. While speaking at a farmer’s meeting in Ireland once, he expressed surprise that Irish farmers were so interested in Yorkshire farmers.

One of them looked at him, taken aback. “’We’re all the same, you know. Yorkshire farmers, Irish farmers, Scottish farmers … They have the same outlook on life, don’t they?”

Wight worries about the survival of farm life. “The small farmers are being dictated to by the supermarket,” he told me. “I don’t know how they keep going, to be honest. I think a lot of them farm because they love it, and what else can they do if they live up in the Yorkshire dales? Tourism or farming. I certainly worry about it. I don’t think they get a fair crack. People overlook the fact that farmers are not just there to produce food. They are the guardians of the countryside. All these tourists come up to the Yorkshire dales and say, What a wonderful place! Why? Because of the farmers! Who is mowing that field? Who has repaired that wall? Who is taking care of those sheep? The cattle?”

“Some idiots in this country—the rewilders, they call them—‘let’s get back to rewilding; we don’t want any cows because they damage the environment; let’s bring back wolves and lynx,” Wight went on. “I saw a bit of rewilding during hoof and mouth disease in 2000, up near the Lake District, where for several months there was no stock because they’d been slaughtered. You should have seen the state of those fields. Thistles, nettles, brambles—what a sight! The farmers look after the countryside. People forget this. Farmers don’t get credit for this.”

A key reason, in Wight’s view, is that many of the people pushing the environmental policies are city folk with little real experience of the countryside. “Just Stop Oil!” he scoffed. “How am I going to heat my house? I haven’t got any gas. There’s no gas up to these places. You know why they don’t say ‘Just Stop Gas’? Because that’s the urban method of heating. But it’s a fossil fuel, just like oil. Why don’t they march against gas? Oil is all we can use—or logs and wood, like I do. I don’t know who actually looks out for small farmers.” King Charles III, Wight observed, is a defender of the countryside—the hedgerows, stone walls, and natural beauty. “He speaks for the countryside. He’s also very much into the environment—the Net Zero 2030. Come on. That’s not going to happen.”

With the changes in the countryside, of course, came changes to the veterinary practices. “My father would be turning in his grave,” Wight reflected as we talked in the old surgery. “His old practice does no farm work at all. We’ve been taken over in this country by big corporate organizations; all the practices have. It’s sad. In my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of older vets, the priority is profit now. With my dad and Donald Sinclair, it wasn’t profit. It was the welfare of the patient.”

With the launch of the new Channel 5 series, James Herriot’s books have been released with new covers, and there has been a renewed interest in all things Yorkshire. “The Herriot books have definitely had a bit of a resurgence,” Wight told me. “It’s incredible that we’re still signing contracts for the books in places like Hungary and the Czech Republic—all over the world, they’re selling. The digital age goes too far sometimes, and it’s nice to speak to human beings and get back to basic things. I think that’s why the Herriot books still appeal to people. We’re talking about, in some respects, a better time. Herriot’s books are therapeutic.”

The first All Creatures Great and Small TV adaptation was the BBC series of 90 episodes that ran from 1978 to 1990, and it is still close to Wight’s heart because it stuck so close to the original Herriot books—at Alf’s insistence. The new show, he says, is brilliantly acted, filmed, and produced, but it has changed many of the stories. “We accept it,” he said. “They contact us all the time, my sister and myself, to make sure there’s nothing we disapprove of. There was one episode where he had to conjure some figures to pass a beast for tuberculosis that actually had it. My dad would never, ever have done that. He was totally honest. He once fell out with one of his best friends because he wouldn’t pass a pig with tuberculosis.”

“We appreciate the producers, who keep us in the loop, but we can’t do anything about the extra stuff they put in. In fact, I said to Sam West—who plays Siegfried brilliantly well—what I’m going to say to him when I see him soon is that I’d love to hear him acting James Herriot’s dialogue from the books,” Wight added. “The Tristan-Siegfried dynamic.” The series is now Channel 5’s most popular show ever—no sex scenes, no killing, no intrigue—just the high drama of ordinary life in the Yorkshire dales some eighty years ago. As it turns out, for many people, it was just what the doctor ordered.

As Wight launches into another story I’ve never read in Herriot’s books or in his own memoir, I ask him if he has considered writing another book. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “There’s all sorts of things I could write about.” His wife, as it turns out, keeps telling him that he should. There are many stories left to tell—about Siegfried, for example, or the Yorkshire farmers. If he did do it—and Wight is deliberately non-committal—that’s what he would write it about. “I’d probably call it With James Herriot and Friends. I’ve thought about it. That’s all I can say.”

I hope that he does. I’d like to spend more time with James Herriot and friends. The proposed title reminds me of something Alf wrote in one of his books, about a visit with farm folk. “You don’t find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television, and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places, so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else,” he wrote. “There are still a few left, of course—old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers, and when I come across any of them, I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk with them and listen to the old Yorkshire words and expressions which have almost disappeared.”

Some months ago, two of my brothers and I were sitting around a bonfire, and a question arose: which public figures, now living, do we admire? Simply admire. We were, all three of us, stumped. Who, indeed?

After a too-lengthy pause, one name occurred to me, and in that moment I knew that the riddle - thank God! - had a solution. Wendell Berry. Yes, there was a man, still living, whom I simply admired.

So much for that. A few days ago, at the ripe age of 92, Wendell Berry departed this earth. And with that the United States has lost one of its greatest writers, and what I am tempted – mischievously, perhaps, but with a degree of true feeling – to call The Last Decent Man in America.

Certainly, it has been some comfort to know, this past disorientating decade, that Wendell Berry was out there, somewhere, in his off-the-grid writing cabin, scribbling away with his pencil about soil and trees, of birth and death, of labour and leisure, and upholding unpopular beliefs such as the beatitudes - without a doubt entirely oblivious to anything that anybody has written on Twitter, ever. Or, perhaps, that there even exists such a thing called Twitter. Oh, to have such a mind as that!

As the New York Times neatly summarized in the first paragraph of their obituary:

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92.

This is all a bit too cute, as is the rest of the obituary. One comes away with the sense that Berry was little more than a loveable, but kooky, and safely (for the Times) progressive environmentalist Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. But this is all a lamentable reduction of Berry’s work: necessary, perhaps, to squeeze it into a 1000 word obituary suitable for urbane New Yorkers, but hardly representative of the scope of his thought or personality.

One of Berry’s extraordinary peculiarities was his facility in defying political categorization: not because he refused to take a stand and choose sides, or because he sought to defy political categorization, but rather because he practiced the forgotten art of choosing his politics entirely based upon principles: not to mention the adjacent, and even rarer art, of living by his principles – Belgian draft horses and all.

Some of his positions, such as his anti- war, anti-big business, anti-death penalty, idiosyncratically pro-gay marriage, and pro-environment stances neatly pigeon-holed him for some as just another progressive leftist. On the other hand, his suspicion of big government, anti-abortion stance, and celebration of localism, the nuclear family, the sacred, inherited wisdom, and moral virtue, pigeon-holed him for others as just another conservative nut clinging to his religion (his pacifism precludes his being accused of clinging to guns).

But if there were those on left and right who wanted to claim him as their own, there were others who took heart in the fact that a man like Berry, who would not be pinned, wriggling on the page, could still exist in our hyper-partisan age. Certainly, I know of some conservatives who, realizing some years ago that conservatism was going to take an extended hiatus from the national stage, actively took refuge in the writings of Berry, and their message - implicit and explicit - that the most important things don’t take place in the public eye in any case.

Indeed, although it seems to be a forgotten point, conservatism, in its proper sense, has always had an uneasy relationship with power, and finds its richest and most natural expression in families and communities, and in all quiet acts of fecundity. As Berry wrote in an essay titled “Think Little,” “A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word.”

Berry’s wife Tanya once joked that Berry’s chief literary calling was "to repeat himself for seventy years." And what did he repeat? Well, to borrow the title of a book that he did not write, that “small is beautiful,” and that all deep and lasting change begins at the level of all natural, human-sized communities, of which the family is the microcosm and model.

But, one might well ask, is this true? Sometimes, in witnessing the way power so easily remakes the face of the earth, one is tempted to wonder. But however one answers the question in theory, Berry’s staunchness on the point, and the way he modelled it in his life, gave ordinary folk some measure of hope, and agency, in an age when the political powers seem to have adopted madness as policy, and to have erected insuperable barriers to decent people attaining power, or staying there.

There are a handful of writers whose writings have much the same effect upon the mind as does the airing of a long-shut-up room on that first, warm April morning. The darkness and claustrophobia of winter are behind, the outside world beckons. We breathe air: bracing, nourishing, purifying. Robert Frost is one of these, perhaps the greatest. Another is James Herriot. And then, without a doubt, Wendell Berry.

Jonathon, who also writes for this Substack, has often reminded me of something that I once said. At the time, we were both devouring Berry’s novels. “Berry,” I said, “makes me want to love the things that I know I should love, and to hate the things that I know I should hate.” The aphorism rings true, and so I will own it. I feel I also added something along the lines of, “This is the highest compliment that I can pay a writer.” And if I did not add it then, let me add it now. It is the highest compliment that I can pay to a writer. Or, for that matter, to a human. It is a compliment that, in another article on this Substack, I paid to my late friend Will. And it is certainly a thought I have thought, or sentiment I have felt, while reading Berry.

And what, you may ask, did Berry make me want to love? Well: kindness, generosity, humility, peace, goodness, simplicity, silence, solitude, wisdom, fortitude, love, tenderness, understanding, neighborliness, contemplation, faith, work, love, nature, presence. And what did he make me want to hate? Selfishness, greed, war, hypocrisy, superficiality, restlessness, distraction, reductionism, technocracy, power, pride, doubt, anger, and hate.

To read the list of abstractions, one might think that in his writings Berry did like the good preacher: eulogizing, with eyes cast upwards to heaven, on beauty, truth and goodness, and fulminating, forefinger pointed at his pale congregation, against hatred, lies and the devil. But, this was not his way. Or rather, not as a rule.

Berry had a profoundly sensitive conscience. And like anyone with a sensitive conscience, he was capable of anger, even great anger. But unlike most of us, he never allowed anger to metastasize into his message. He was capable of penning a jeremiad worthy of the name, and sometimes did. But he never became a pundit, and certainly not an influencer. It is as if there was within him a sensitive governing limiter, that knew when righteous anger might well turn on the very righteousness of his cause, and ultimately on himself.

At which point he took refuge in silence, and in contemplation of all good, decent, lovely, human, lasting, real things. All of which comes through most powerfully, and convincingly, and (for the most part) non-didactically in his novels: peopled as they are with good, decent, sinful, ordinary, and very real and very sacred human beings, living ordinary and very sacred lives.

A few months ago, I received a letter from Berry (written in pencil, naturally), in response to a piece of fan mail I’d written to him. In it, he took me to task (a little to my discomfiture) for praising him for writing from a place of “rest.” He wrote on his farm, he said. And he worked his farm, he insisted. And farming was hard work, he noted. This was not “rest.”

I don’t doubt it. Berry wrote about farming with the specificity that only a working farmer could. But, no disrespect to Berry, I think he mistook my meaning. Perhaps it is because he never owned a computer that he did mistake my meaning. Farming may well be hard work, but could Berry even begin to fathom the exhausted restlessness of the masses of us who work on the computers he spurned? When I wrote “rest,” I did not mean ease, or leisure. I meant, that he did not write whilst tippling the witches’ brew of anxiety, distraction, fear, cruelty, and avarice on which so many of us are now drunk, or at a minimum under the influence, if only because we read the news and log on to social media.

There was rest on his farm. It shows in practically every sentence he wrote. He famously constructed a small writing cabin and it was in there, with sheets of foolscap, and pencils, that he wrote some fifty books, including some twenty-five books of poetry, twenty volumes of essays, and a dozen novels and collections of short stories. He did not, to put it mildly, write the way many of us do: with one eye on Twitter and our e-mail, and the other on Drudge Report or the New York Times, and the occasional glance at the manuscript.

After Harper’s ran Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” the magazine received, and published, a series of letters from readers who upbraided Berry for being a Luddite and a scold. Like practically everyone, I own a computer, and am writing on it now. But still, I cannot side with the letter writers, and it is with a certain awed wistfulness that I read this sentence of Berry’s:

When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

That is a hell of a thing to say, and a hell of a bar to set. But then again, do not the dozens of novels, poetry, sociology and philosophy speak for themselves? And, indeed, what writer among us has not sometimes wondered if all those novels and poems that we felt stirring in our brains in those turbulent teenage years when the aspiration of becoming “a writer” first appeared before us in the guise of calling and mission, might not have attained conception and birth were it not for the flood of distractions that has served as prophylactic to our muse?

What if, like Berry, we had habitually enclosed ourselves in a cabin, with nothing but a pencil and paper, and nothing to do but think and dream and, if the mood took us, to write? Indeed, have we not, all of us, tasted a little taste of what miracles can occur when we find it within ourselves to close the dozens of tabs in our browser, and to simply write? Writing has never been easy, but it has a habit of becoming easier, when the small, still voice of the muse has a chance of being hard.

Farming is hard work. Writing is hard. But not everything hard is unrestful. Berry did, indeed, write from a place of rest, even as he worked hard.

Was Berry the Last Decent Man in America? No, the epithet cannot be defended utterly. No doubt you brushed elbows with half a dozen decent men at the supermarket just the other day. But these past 10 years, the sickly spirit of le nouveau regime has snaked through the halls of power, defiling all it touches. The quantity of petty tyrants, lusting after the influence and riches that the cosmos has seen fit to heap on the head of their mentor and master in recompense for his egoisms, multiplies by the minute. Even the Church, at times, has seemed little insulated from the atmosphere of the age, descending into a set of puerile factions lobbing invective to “own” the opposition.

Granted: scratch the skin of a politician, pundit or prelate, in any age whatsoever, and you have as like as not discovered a mewling ego craving self-expression. But one can still remember a time when we at least knew that this wasn’t the ideal, and ought to be moderated to whatever degree possible, and certainly didn’t preach egoism and call it Christianity.

Berry seemingly never, for a moment, allowed himself to be lured by these distortions. Like any prophet, he was a radical. And like any radical, he could be infuriating in the extremity and steadfastness of his convictions. But, say what you will, he was no hypocrite. Indeed, if he was infuriating (as to the letter writers to Harper’s magazine), might it not only be because, by the way he lived his life, he held up a mirror to our own faces, wherein, Dorian Gray-like, we saw the marks of misspent time?

As for myself, methinks it is time to begin re-reading Berry’s novels – starting with Jayber Crow. Who knows? Maybe he might once again help me want to love the things I know I should love, and to hate the things I know I should hate, and so to bring the far-too scattered parts of myself back into a state of integration.

Author’s note: This post isn’t typical Utopian Idiots fare. However, it explains where I’ve been, and some of what I intend to do. Some of the writing I will be doing in coming days (as this post explains) will suit Utopian Idiots and will be published here. Some will not, and will only be published on my personal Substack. If you want to be sure to get all my writing, subscribe to my personal Substack here. There will be some duplication, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

On the evening of November 25, 1914, the English writer G.K. Chesterton was delivering a lecture at Oxford on the question of the English involvement in World War I. Suddenly, he felt dizzy. Chesterton cut the lecture short, staggered off the platform, and returned home. Once there, he sat down at his writing desk and began to pen a letter to his friend and intellectual sparring partner, George Bernard Shaw, disagreeing with Shaw on his pacifism. However, he soon gave up the effort, got up from the desk and collapsed in bed.

Chesterton was not to get up from that bed for the next six months. Within a few weeks, he sank into a coma. For awhile, it seemed likely that he would die. The cause of his illness has never been satisfactorily explained. At the time, it was variously attributed to his heart and his kidneys. What seems certain is that overwork played a role. For years, Chesterton had maintained a notoriously furious pace of work, matched only by the lack of care he gave to his physical health.

Some six months later, Chesterton was showing clear signs of recovery. As soon as he was able, he picked up his pen, and resumed where he had broken off, writing a letter to Shaw. Shaw replied quickly, expressing his delight at his friend’s improvement. Shaw added the following: “You have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, nature’s object being to make him go to bed for several months.”

Over the past year, I have taken a grim sort of satisfaction from these words of Shaw’s. A little over a year ago, I turned 40. I celebrated the occasion by staggering out of my own bed for a few hours, and pretending to enjoy the birthday singing, presents and cake. After that, things deteriorated. I spent the next several months largely confined to bed, often in a degree of physical pain that was so extreme that I can scarcely stand to recall it to memory. For months, the slightest attempt at physical exertion brought on days of agony. Climbing a flight of stairs was a trial, and left me breathless. I lost nearly 40 pounds. During this time, I rarely slept more than two or three hours in a night, waking between 11:00 and midnight, with the sinking realization that this would be it, and that another long, lonely, painful vigil lay ahead of me.

Batteries of tests revealed a few anomalies: some more or less severe hormonal and vitamin deficiencies, some of which are known to produce acute illnesses. But nothing grave, in the sense of terminal. From being a high-performing, A-type personality, who preached the power of gratitude, dabbled in power-lifting, routinely ran 10 kilometres, and practiced cold-plunging in the nearby creek throughout the Canadian winter, I was reduced to an extended period of survival, and plunged into a state of profound depression. This was an embarassing impasse for a man who liked to talk (only half-jokingly, I’m afraid) about his life’s ambition of becoming the uber-mensch.

Perhaps the uber-mensching was the problem. Probably, in fact. In the few years prior to my illness I finished a PhD, started an (extremely) demanding job as a headmaster of a private school, lost my best friend to cancer, welcomed my seventh child, experienced all the myriad stressors of Covid-time, and watched with an admittedly unhealthily excessive dismay as the political and social movement to which I had devoted my professional life increasingly exposed itself as a cesspool of crackpots, cranks, grifters, conspiracy theorists, and worse. Not to put too fine of a point on it.

In other words, the bill came due.

But, if Shaw’s words gave me a rare moment of mirth when I first read them in the first stages of my illness, unfortunately I know my logic too well. Just because it is true that men of genius suffer a health crisis at the age of 40, it is not therefore true that every man who suffers a health crisis at the age of 40 is a genius. Sometimes, a collapse is just a collapse. Quotidian, unremarkable. Over the past year, I have heard of many men in their 40s experiencing a similar thing. I had no idea how conclusive the data on this is: the 40s are a tough decade on men. As a friend remarked to me recently, “I used to think that as a parent I needed to be worried about the teens. Now I know it’s really the 40s I have to keep an eye on.”

Nevertheless, rational or not, I have found some solace in the idea that in my crisis I have been in such august company. As Shaw noted in his letter to Chesterton, Schiller and Mozart both died at 40, while Goethe, like Chesterton, managed to do the thing right, and recover.

For as long as I can remember, writing has been for me, as Robert Frost memorably put it, a “momentary stay against confusion.” Frost was speaking specifically about poetry. But almost any writer of any genre intuitively understands the sentiment. Writers, more than most, it seems, are disturbed by the Heraclitean flux of the universe. And some part of their soul feels urgently the need to lasso one or two of the flying fragments of being, and to pull them in and pin them, wriggling, on the page: to keep something, anything, still(ish) for a few moments, be it nothing more meaningful than a method that the writer has discovered for how best to grow tomatoes.

In the early stages of my illness, I wrote. It was instinctual. Here was material. But at some point, all my efforts to find, or create, points of stillness in the maelstrom could not withstand the force of the gale. Besides, I increasingly saw nothing worth preserving. “Beauty is truth and truth beauty,” wrote Keats. And so what are ugliness, pain, and suffering, such as I was experiencing? Lies? Non-being? So it seemed to me. And so has it seemed to the metaphysicians. Personally, I have always sought to devote my pen in the service of goodness, hope, gratitude, beauty, and grace. With these things increasingly elusive, I found less and less worth cataloguing.

Much is still chaotic. The experience of this past year has shaken most of my certainties, which were few and tenuous to begin with, and deepened most of my uncertainties, which have been myriad and profound for as long as I can recall. I won’t go into any of this now. It is likely to emerge organically, and non-confessionally, in the topics I choose to write about moving forward. And, I do intend to write. This is the first foray. That is the point of this first post. To get the gears turning.

My wife, who is wise, tells me that this confirmation in uncertainty is a gift. If only because it is who I always have been. As the words of a song by Young Galaxy, which I have adopted as something of an epithet, put it, “I was born blown-minded.” And where’s the point in pretending otherwise? My therapists, who have also consistently struck me as wiser than I have any right to expect them to be, have independently and strongly validated this viewpoint.

One of my problems, I have been told more times than I can count, is that a part of me craves - nay, needs - certainty. Whereas, the world (it will come as no surprise) is anything but certain. Mystery is the norm, not the exception. And if our philosophies and our creeds have somehow made us forget this, and have seemed to promise something else, then either our philosophies and our creeds have strayed from their purpose, or we have misunderstood them. Or both.

The universe, I have had cause to ponder over the past year, is a vast, terrifying and unpredictable place. Anything can happen, at any time. Including a midlife health crisis that might, without appropriate medical care, have done what it did to Mozart and Schiller. And what right would I have had to complain? I would have enjoyed more, and richer, life than the overwhelming majority of humans before me.

Here, however, is a curious thought: Having the jet engine of an airliner fall into your bedroom, ala Donnie Darko, is assuredly not likely. But neither is it impossible. Such improbable things have happened to people. For instance, the couple I recently heard about, friends of a friend, who woke up one morning on the ground, dozens of yards from their house..or rather, what was left of the house. In the middle of the night their house had exploded, and sent their bed flying over the nearby garage. A gasleak. And somehow, they survived. I have seen photos of the scene. Nothing of the house is left: just a mess of scattered debris.

We live in a world, in other words, in which it is possible for your house to explode, and to send you and your bed flying through the air. I have often thought of that bed, soaring through the air. It is not a thing that beds are designed to do. The manufacturers, I am quite sure, never gave a moment’s thought to the aerodynamic properties of their bed, nor, for that matter, its capacity to withstand natural gas explosions.

But since you can’t possibly know that you will be the one in a billion to whom such a thing will happen, you can’t possibly prepare yourself for this specific eventuality. All you can do is enjoy the ride, should it happen, and, should you survive, the lifetime’s free beers at the bar, in exchange for the story. If your PTSD isn’t too bad.

So, the question isn’t whether the world is unpredictable, and whether we possess any reliable power over the progression of events. It is, and we don’t. The real question is: What are we going to do about it?

I have been thinking a very great deal about faith. For many, the word faith is associated exclusively with religion, and the thing itself, in its purest form, marks the furthest point on one end of an epistemological spectrum. On the opposite end is reason. And there is little doubt about on which end of the spectrum you ought to strive to be. As a devout Catholic, Chesterton’s view, you will not be surprised to hear, was different. But the thing worth noting, is that his most focused defense of faith, found in his masterpiece Orthodoxy, is presented primarily as a defense of reason. And oddly enough, contemporary science, philosophy and psychology agree.

I won’t go into the theoretical arguments here: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and all that. What I’m interested in here is the pragmatic. In addressing the psychological side of my sufferings over the past year, I have had cause to dive deeply into a great deal of the contemporary psychological literature. And I have been surprised (though perhaps I should not have been) at the frequency with which faith comes up. Sometimes there is a religious angle. But most often not. Rather, faith is advocated primarily as a psychological necessity, a first principle of psychological health.

If I could have a nickel for every time I have read about, or had a therapist advocate “radical acceptance,” I might not be a wealthy man, but I could certainly afford more regular trips to Starbucks. I used to mock people who spoke of “trusting the universe.” I see now that the space between trusting God and trusting the universe is not so wide as I once thought. Jordan Peterson has described faith in God not so much as an intellectual assent to a proposition, but rather a sort of stance or attitude towards life and the cosmos. “To believe in God,” he has said, “is to act as if God exists.” Similarly, to “trust the universe” is, in a certain sense, to act as if the universe is good, even if you might not know this with intellectual certitude. Even if, in fact, the sense data seems to contradict it. And what else is goodness but God? So, to “trust in the universe” might be, in some meaningful sense, to believe in God.

Oh, I get it. It’s more complicated than that. If it weren’t, how would the theologians earn their living? However, there is one thing that nearly all theologians agree on, and that is that if God exists he is so radically other that even our most careful theology only has value if we understand that its every positive statement about God is infinitely remote from God as he is. That is, God is all mystery. And when it comes down to it, the universe, too, is all mystery. Read a little about quantum theory, or philosophy of mind, and you will be struck at just how thin our supposed knowledge of everything is.

The philosophers say that philosophy begins in wonder, and ends in wonder. Begins in wonder, because in the beginning we first awaken to the fact that the universe is vast and mysterious, and that the gap between our knowledge of what is, and what actually is, is practically infinite. Because what is, is combinatorially explosive, to use a mathematician’s term. And ends in wonder, because even after all our investigations and thinking and arguing, it somehow seems as if the original, infinite gap between our knowledge about what is, and what actually is, has paradoxically grown in magnitude.

Faith says, this is ok. It says, accept that you are a flea afloat in an infinite sea of mystery. Doing so does not mean that you will attain any new power over the waves. You won’t. But, you might be empowered to enjoy the ride. You might even become wise. A wise flea. Like Socrates was wise. Like Thomas Aquinas became wise, in the final days of his life, when he saw some unknown vision of what is, and began to throw his works into the fire, declaring them to be “straw”. And then, like St. John the Evangelist, he began telling the disciples gathered around his death bed about love.

This is peak intellectual prowess. You don’t have to like it. Most of the time, I don’t. But, there are moments when it feels that perhaps I am being invited into something more exciting, and truer, than my previous, unwarranted certitudes.

There are two writers who have seemed to point a path forward, and about whom I intend to write. The first, is Annie Dillard. Shortly before my illness struck, my wife and I read Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book won Dillard the Pulitzer when she was in her 20s. My wife liked it more than I did. Dillard’s prose struck me as occasionally overwrought and performative. And yet, in recent months certain passages and phrases have taken on an almost talismanic power. I wield them in my thoughts as another “momentary stay against confusion.” I’m not sure that I have ever found a writer who so perfectly articulates the nature and necessity and power of faith, in its rawest, most primitive, most stripped-down form, as a necessary and life-giving stance towards the cosmos.

And then there is Iain McGilchrist: the psychiatrist, neuroscientist, literary critic, philosopher par excellence: easily one of the freshest, most exciting figures in the history of modern thought. McGilchrist’s devotees tend to verge on the fanatical. I may well be one of them, or am certainly in danger of it, though discipleship does not come naturally to me.

From early on, I began to think of McGilchrist as a new, updated Chesterton: steeped in the latest neuroscience, physics, and philosophy, and using it to extol the sheer wonder of being. The more I read, the more I think there is to this. If Chesterton loved paradox a little too much for his own good, but also used paradox effectively to approach some of the most mysterious truths about the cosmos, McGilchrist has articulated an astonishingly rich neuroscientific and metaphysical defense of paradox as fundamental and necessary to our understanding the nature of things. Chesterton would, I think, approve, even as he would probably argue with McGilchrist’s conclusions on numerous things.

I intend to do both in coming days.

The tiny town of Burr Oak, Iowa, (population: 170) is easy to miss. One main street, a few small subdivisions, and a graveyard nearly as big as the land of the living, and you’re back on the road again. It has one claim to fame: for a year, between 1876 and 1877, Laura Ingalls lived here with her family. Unlike the many Ingalls sites strung out across the American Midwest, Burr Oak does not have immediate name recognition—but it is the missing chapter between On the Banks of Plum Creek (Walnut Grove, Minnesota) and By the Shores of Silver Lake (De Smet, South Dakota).

In 1876, the Masters Hotel was owned by William Steadman, a friend of the Ingallses. After two years of Rocky Mountain locust plagues had wiped out their crops, Steadman offered Pa the management of the small hotel. The hotel, built in 1851, still stands—the only childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder that remains on its original site. The white frame building is still in good shape after over a century-and-a-half. Only the roof sags a little. Our family headed to the Burr Oak Savings Bank just down the street to book a tour.

The bank is now a Little House gift shop; the Masters Hotel has been turned into a museum (it was purchased by Laura Ingalls Wilder Park, Inc. in 1973). It was hot inside; it must have been much worse when the Ingalls family lived there. The Steadmans—all five of them—stayed in one bedroom. The Ingallses—Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, and Carrie—all likely slept in a single bedroom, just below the tavern, which would have been extremely loud. A little boy, Freddie, had died in August 1876 either shortly before or during the move to Burr Oak; Grace was born there on May 23, 1877.

My children, who are under the impression that the Ingallses spent their lives going on enviable extended field trips, were horrified by a display listing the various chores expected of children in the 1870s. For girls: “Help with food preservation, help prepare meals, haul water, laundry, wash dishes, set the table, make beds, collect ashes for soap making, help plant crops and gardens, gather eggs, churn butter.” For boys: “Feed & water livestock, pick fruit and berries, weed gardens, sew, collect firewood, help clean fish, birds, and game, take care of young siblings, help with milking, remove stones from fields, help harvest, beat rugs.”

For children who believe that cleaning up their own toys is a form of cruel slavery, this lesson from the days of yore was briefly absorbed and promptly rejected. They were much more enthused by the opportunity to clang “Laura’s Bell,” the bell that “called the Ingalls to the Burr Oak Congregational Church,” in the backyard.

Later in our road trip, we stopped in Pepin, Winsconsin, the site of the “Little House in the Big Woods.” Since 1996, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum has been the official starting point of the Laura Ingalls Wilder History Highway, which links the Wilder sites across America. It is a one-story building with a General Store-style front, featuring a gift shop and a wide range of interesting exhibits about both the Ingallses and the history of the region. The kids were particularly taken with a display featuring Ma accidentally whacking a black bear, thinking it was their stubborn cow.

Twenty minutes down some winding country backroads flanked by split-rail fences is the Little House Wayside, a log cabin built on the site where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born—the “Little House in the Big Woods.” The memorial plaque, erected in 1978, reads: “Laura was born here on February 7, 1867. Late in 1868 or in the spring of 1869, the Ingalls family left Wisconsin and traveled by covered wagon to Kansas. They found Kansas to be Indian country, so shortly after Carrie was born in August of 1870, Charles Ingalls brought his family back to the little house near Pepin. In 1871 Mary and Laura enrolled in the Barry Corner School near here. They sold this farm in 1873 and moved to Minnesota.”

Now, it is a beautiful, snug little cabin built in a grassy clearing surrounded by massive trees with perfect branches for climbing, cornfields, and beyond them, forests. As the plaque indicates, the stories Laura tells in Little House in the Big Woods actually occurred after those in Little House in the Prairie; she scrambled the chronology to make the chaotic narrative of their frontier lives unfold a little easier. Pa only stopped for good in De Smet because Ma refused to go further; if he’d had his way, the family would have hit the Oregon Trail.

The day after the 4^th of July, we were driving toward home across the Midwest. The evening was humid, and as the sun sank and the gloaming descended, fireworks rose above the farms and fields, leftovers from the day before. Across the rippling seas of corn, constellations of fireflies appeared, winking and glittering, making the night seem enchanted. It reminded me of the words Laura Ingalls Wilder put in the mouth of her father-in-law, talking to his young son Almanzo at the Independence Day celebrations in Mansfield, New York:

Spaniards were soldiers that only wanted gold. The French were fur traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms. It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America. Don’t you ever forget that.

Inside Holy Trinity Church, Charmaine and I sat in Jack’s pew as a tour group from Norway clustered at the front. An elderly guide was telling his favorite story about Lewis, which he had heard from Lewis’s literary executor Walter Hooper. The two were on a walk when a beggar asked for change. The terminally generous Lewis immediately plunged his hand into his pocket and gave him what amounted to a hefty sum. Hooper rebuked him; the beggar, he said, would probably use it to buy beer. Lewis shrugged. “That’s what I would have spent it on,” he replied.

I was in England to give two lectures at the national conference of Society for the Protection of Unborn (SPUC), one of the world’s oldest pro-life campaign organizations. There is a connection between SPUC and the Inklings of Oxford. Owen Barfield, the philosopher, poet, and friend of Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was one of its founders in 1966, serving as the first chairman and assisting in the drafting of its constitution. SPUC was created as a countermovement during the parliamentary discussions leading up to the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act, which Barfield fiercely opposed.

The Inklings are the most famous literary group to emerge from Oxford. The group met in ancient pubs like the Eagle and Child (currently closed for renovations) and the Lamb and Flag (I stopped for a pint of “Inklings ale”) to discuss faith, literature, and their own writings. Barfield, a committed Anglican, influenced both Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Barfield’s pro-life activism was an extension of the Inklings’ collective worldview into the post-Christian era that Lewis so presciently foresaw; Lewis called Barfield “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.”

Official Oxford has an uneasy relationship with the Inklings and their Christian legacy. There are tours, to be sure, but the gift shops are packed with Harry Potter swag and Inspector Morse memorabilia, but aside from books at Blackwell’s and the Bodleian Library store, the world-famous characters of Narnia and Middle Earth are commercially absent. At the Kilns, where Lewis lived with his brother Warnie for 33 years, the tour guide told us that Lewis has been largely neglected; his home, rendered famous by his bestselling writers, had turned into a decrepit dump until some American Christians visiting Oxford decided to set up a non-profit to purchase and restore it in 1993. Visiting scholars now live there, and it is open for tours.

In my imagination, the Kilns was scarcely a real place; it had floated free of England and joined the realm of Narnia. It was jarring to discover that it is now the last house in a large subdivision, the ten acres that made up the grounds long parceled out and sold. The repairs on the red-brick house are perpetually ongoing; the park behind it, where Lewis loved to walk, is still there, pocked with bomb shelters from the war. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, who is now sadly suffering from dementia, told me many stories about what it was like to grow up there; I could picture many of them as we walked through the house.

History sort of piles on top of itself in Oxford. John Wycliffe taught here. William Tyndale studied here. The Oxford Martyrs, bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, were burned to death near Broad Street in 1555; the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who was in the crowd, would meet the same fate the following year. Latimer reportedly told his fellow martyr: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as shall never be put out.”

Ridley’s final words before the fire was lit blaze bright nearly five centuries later: “Heavenly Father, I give Thee most hearty thanks that Thou hast called me to a profession of Thee even until death. I beseech Thee, Lord God, have mercy on this realm of England, and deliver the same from all her enemies.”

Our tour guide dutifully pointed out Oxford’s riot of religious symbolism—the churches, King James clutching his Bible over the arch of the Bodleian Library—but told us, dismissively, that this stuff was because “pretty much everybody believed in the supernatural back then.” Our more enlightened generation now believes in transgenderism rather than the Resurrection, and some apparently still cling to the belief this is an improvement.

In St. Mary’s Passage, a narrow alley off High Street near the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, a 17^th-century door—dubbed the “Narnia Door”—features a carving of a maned, lion-like face; on either side are two satyr-like “fauns” holding flutes, and a few feet away is a tall black Victorian lamppost. Lewis walked this way countless times, and these scenes made it into the Chronicles of Narnia as Aslan, Mr. Tumnus, and the scene of the faun’s fateful meeting with Lucy Pevensie. There are bits of Narnia all over Oxford.

If the Inklings aren’t your cup of tea, there is something for everyone. A sign in the Turf Tavern, which opened around the end of the 18^th century as a public house called The Spotted Crow, boasts about those who have “bent their elbows” on its tables, including Thomas Hardy, Margaret Thatcher, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, and (less impressively) David Cameron and Boris Johnson. It is also the tavern where future Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke set a Guiness World Record for drinking a yard glass of ale in 11 seconds in 1963 (I looked it up—that’s 1.4 litres), and where future president Bill Clinton famously smoked pot, but didn’t inhale.

Peter Hitchens once described Oxford to me as “a kind of paradise separate from the world,” and it was easy to see what he meant. We walked past the hotel restaurant where, decades ago, Tolkien sat down to read the first bit of a new story he was working on but didn’t yet care for: The Lord of the Rings. Blackwell’s of Oxford, one of the world’s largest bookstores with roughly 125,000 books across four floors, was a wonderful and dangerous place where I could bankrupt myself in a few hours with very little effort.

On the way out of town, we stopped at the Wolvercote Cemetery. Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried here. Beneath their names on the tombstone were the names of the two great lovers of his Middle Earth legendarium. Under Edith’s name: Luthien. Under Tolkien’s: Beren. He survived her by only two years, dying a decade after Lewis. Of the original Inklings, Owen Barfield was the last to die, passing away in 1997. But like the literary giants he supped with, his work lives on—not only in his own books, but in the ongoing work of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, the largest pro-life group in the UK.

This year marks the centenary of Gerald Durrell. Jersey Zoo—his great legacy—kicked off a series of events in January, when he would have turned 100. Durrell, who died at age 70 in 1995, obstinately insisted that he only wrote to pay the bills for his zoo, which hosts some of the first and most successful endangered animal breeding programs on earth. Durrell is personally credited with saving at least a half dozen species from extinction; the impact of his books on conservation efforts has also been incalculable.

Durrell spent his youth on the Greek island of Corfu. His heavily fictionalized trilogy of that time, starting with My Family and Other Animals (1956), made him famous. Durrell began working as a student zookeeper at Whipsnade Park in 1945, and in 1947 made his first animal-collecting expedition to the British Cameroons. He told that story in The Overloaded Ark, published in 1953. Over the ensuing years, Durrell headed off on similar adventure-laden voyages to Cameroon, British Guina, Argentina, and Paraguay, writing books about each expedition.

In 1959, after nearly a decade of selling to other zoos, Durrell founded his own on the island of Jersey, stashing his first animals at the home of his long-suffering sister Margaret’s boarding house in Bournemouth. He established a charitable trust dedicated to conservation in 1963, and his literary fame soon brought high profile patrons such as Princess Anne as well as a slew of documentary deals with the BBC. He wrote over thirty books about his expeditions, the last being a travel diary of his trip behind the Iron Curtain to track the wildlife of the Soviet Union. (His brother Lawrence, known to Gerald’s readers as “Larry,” was the famous novelist who John Steinbeck beat out for the Nobel Prize in 1962.)

To reach the jungle, we flew from Lima to the Puerto Maldonado, the gateway to the Amazon, over cloud-filled valleys and mountains dotted with the gleaming roofs of tiny villages and twisting mountain pathways sparkling in the sun like skeins of silver.

***

One does not simply walk into the Peruvian Amazon. We took a boat 55 kilometers downriver, skimming over a brown highway of water twisting through rainforest rising on either side. Cayman and capybara could occasionally be seen on the banks or in the river (we almost ran over three swimming capybaras on the boat ride back) as well as yellow-spotted turtles basking, hunting herons, and throngs of other creatures.

Durrell’s descriptions of insects feasting on his flesh as he tramped through the jungle are hilarious. The actual experience is not. Even when layered with clothing and glazed with every available bug spray, tiny insects successfully left deceptively miniscule bites that grew into itching welts that lasted weeks. When the sweat greased away the bug spray, they attacked in swarms. The Spaniards trekked this jungle in 90% humidity, 70% insects, and full-body armour to conquer the Incan empire.

After reading hundreds of pages of Durrell exploits in which he thrust his arms into dark holes, splashed fearlessly through swamps, streams, and ponds, and blundered about in the rainforest with lassos and nets and canvas bags, I imagined it might be possible to do a couple of hikes into the jungle on my own. But if our guide’s reaction to my suggestion was any indication, Durrell should have been dead almost immediately.

“We do not advise it,” he stated at me with great gravity. He paused thoughtfully for a moment, as if envisioning me being savaged by a jaguar, then nodded again emphatically. “We do not advise it.” I decided to limit my activities between supervised treks to viewing the agoutis, lizards, and squirrel monkeys from the safety of the compound boardwalk and reading Durrell’s The New Noah beneath mosquito netting, a few dozen yards from the edge of the forest.

The best place to view animals safely, our guide insisted, was “on the reever.” The reever, he assured us, was safe.

***

We left for the clay lick cliffs by boat at 3:30 AM. Heat lightning crackled above us, illuminating the clouds like celestial Japanese lanterns while fireflies sparkled in the forest along the river. The Amazon is incredible by day. By night, it is magic. As I scanned a powerful flashlight along the river, the beam caught the fiery red eyes of caymans glowing on the surface and eyes along the bank pausing for a split second before vanishing into the underbrush like fireflies winking out. We arrived at the cliffs, where animals regularly come to consume mineral-rich clay, just before dawn.

The birds arrived with the sun. There were hundreds of them: scarlet macaws, blue and yellow macaws, yellow crowned parakeets, Amazon parrots, landing in the trees above the clay cliffs, calling raucously to each other, encrusting the tree branches like swaying jewels, and peering anxiously into the underbrush for eagles or ocelots. No predators materialized. The only carnivorous bird in sight was a small burrowing owl on a log by the riverbank, gazing about with an exceedingly judgmental look on his face.

Over and over the macaws ascended, circled, and returned to the trees, talking noisily to their mates (macaws are monogamous for life), suspicious that unseen predators might appear if they landed. The smaller parrots abandoned caution first, descending onto the cliffs to worry at the clay. The macaws, however, took their time, even when their smaller cousins were not immediately eaten. When the macaws finally came to the cliffs, they clung just long enough to carve a mouthful of clay before lifting off into the leaves once again.

As the sun climbed, the macaws left in pairs, the parakeets in flocks, the sound of their conversation receding over the treetops. Within an hour, all that remained was the sound of the water and the trees, and it felt like the silence after great music ends.

***

“At night the jungle was a place of mystery…filled with a thousand rustlings and whisperings, as though the trees and the undergrowth were alive with secret life,” Durrell wrote of his first expedition into the South American rainforest. An hour into our first nighttime trek, Durrell’s descriptions of capturing wildlife in the rainforest by night seemed miraculous. Enveloped in darkness, the sounds closed in. Even after our eyes adjusted, and even with a high-beam flashlight, it was nearly impossible to discern where they came from. A frog playing what sounded like a bassoon inches away from us was utterly undetectable by sight.

The wildlife we did see was due to our guide’s almost supernatural ability to pick out creatures in a maze of darkened trees and vines. At one point he suddenly raised his hand to stop us and stabbed his flashlight into the forest; a mouse opossum quivered in the beam, a dozen yards into the jungle. These entrancing, slender-faced tree-dwellers look nothing like the vaguely evil-looking, rat-like marsupials of North America. They bear far more resemblance to a harvest mouse, and are only slightly bigger.

Durrell obtained a mouse opossum on an animal collecting trip to South America in 1958. “Maxie, the mouse opossum, was a creature so fragile and delicate that you felt a puff of wind would blow him away,” he wrote. “He had a long, tapering snout, enormous liquid eyes that stared at you with a mixture of fear and indignation, and a silky grey coat. He would sit in his cage, his tiny pink hands clasped together like a child saying its prayers, and scold me in a series of shrill squeaks if I so much as moved too quickly.”

Some of the spiders were bigger. A tarantula that could have covered my entire hand awaited us just inside the jungle, crouching near a den awaiting prey. Our guide, who was apparently a PR agent for the arachnid family, informed us that he was not dangerous, because he was blind. Nobody seemed inclined to test this theory. Another grotesque, furry black tarantula was easily the size of a dinner plate. The Goliath birdeater, a species of tarantula, can reach a leg span of up to 12 inches and a body length of 5 inches, and is the world’s largest spider. This particular giant was sitting on a log in the twilight. The guide pointed it out to us with great cheerfulness while we hastily crowded to the other side of the path.

(Upon reading this section, my wife Charmaine offered an emphatic correction: “I almost walked into it. It reached out and tickled my leg as if to say: I can get you at any time.”)

At one point, our guide discovered an enormous horned frog buried in the path, only his eyes and the bright green stripe on his back protruding above the soil. These huge amphibians grow up to 20 centimeters long and eat fish, lizards, and mice. We were clearly too large for him, because he only glared at us—although, as Durrell wrote in The Whispering Land, these frogs are willing to attack humans if sufficiently provoked:

One of the most alarming creatures I met during this trip was a horned frog, a creature with a cavernous mouth and jaws like a bulldog. I was foolish enough to try and pick one up with my bare hands, and it fastened onto my finger with a grip that made me yelp. It took two of us to prise the brute off, and the wound it left throbbed painfully for a fortnight afterwards. I treated that particular species with great respect after that, for I had no desire to lose a finger to its enthusiastic bite.

The most alarming sound came from the bamboo rat. We heard him booming constantly through trees; Durrell described the sound perfectly as “halfway between a sneeze and a bark, a short, shrill sound that seemed to explode out of the undergrowth.” I could not locate the large rat no matter how hard I searched. Even though bamboo rats are nocturnal, we came across one the following afternoon slogging through a swamp. When we spotted each other, he instantly hunched on his branch with great mortification, like someone caught singing in the shower when he thought nobody was home. He remained frozen in place until we had sloshed past him.

***

In an oxbow lake a half-hour hike through the jungle from the boat, we met the giant river otters. These endangered creatures are nothing like their much smaller North American cousins; giant river otters are the Amazon’s apex predator, reaching up to six feet long and weighing between 60 and 70 pounds. Not even jaguars, caimans, or anacondas trump their dominance. The largest anaconda discovered in the Amazon measured 26 feet long, but these legendary serpents can be attacked by giant river otters working together as a family, coordinating to attack the snake’s head and undersides. (We didn’t see an anaconda, but massive, foot-wide swathes through the grassy swamps indicated their presence.)

We poled our barge-like raft across the glassy lake, the sun gleaming on the surface and mirroring the jungle. A giant white egret winged from log to tree, followed by his reflection. We heard a hoarse, huffing sound from the bushes along the bank. Our guide huffed back. There was an immediate, frantic panting in response, and a moment later, a strange, wild-eyed head was thrust into view. The brown-and-yellow hoatzin, featuring a chaotic Mohican tuft of feathers atop his head, glanced nervously about, looking like a strung-out rock star who has just been called upon to perform.

The hoatzin’s eyes are set in a bright patch of blue skin, but they have few natural predators because their diet of leaves ferments in their stomach, giving off an odor that has earned them the nickname “stinkbird” and ensures that predators usually give them a wide berth. Their natural enemies assume, based on smell, that the hoatzin is either rotten or poisonous. (This assumption usually works well for rock stars, also.) It was quite excellent to huff at the bushes and immediately hear what sounded like the panting of a heavy smoker attempting to flee great danger in response, followed by one large, worried eye appearing in the foliage.

After an hour on the water, the jungle around us came alive. Golden-brown howler monkeys, some with babies clutching tightly to their bellies, bellowed at each other and occasionally leapt from tree to tree. Chattering troops of capuchin monkeys shook the leaves. The otters finally materialized near sunset, after the guide gave a coughing bark as we poled along the bank. Three enormous heads surfaced: the largest coughed back, showing a set of large, sharp fangs. “I thought they would be cute,” an American girl commented in disappointment. When the guide coughed, the red-eyed otters would breach, bare their teeth, and bark in return.

“Suddenly, round a bend in the river, came a family of giant otters, locally called water dogs,” Durrell wrote of his own sighting. “There were five of them, swimming rapidly downstream, their sleek heads cutting the water, leaving a V-shaped ripple behind them. They were enormous creatures, nearly six feet long, with glossy, chocolate-brown fur and broad, flattened tails. As they swam, they uttered a series of high-pitched, barking cries, like excited puppies, and every now and then one would rear up in the water, standing almost upright, to peer ahead.” Durrell never successfully captured any of them.

Our otters played and fished until it was almost dark, and then sank with scarcely a ripple, and were gone.

***

It is easy to see how Durrell acquired so much material for his books. It is more difficult to imagine how he managed to capture so much wildlife. Despite hunting for a tapir, we only came across fresh tracks. The Amazon red squirrels, coatis, and six-lined racerunner lizards were incredibly fast. Only the hummingbirds—there are 124 magnificent species in Peru—warm up to humans, with one almost incandescent bird alighting on Charmaine’s hand as she held out honey water in a mountainside garden swarming with them.

I prefer Durell’s own accounts to his authorized biography by Douglas Botting, and the posthumous Myself and Other Animals, a collection of previously unpublished writings released for his centenary late last year. Privately—and these convictions occasionally seep into his writing in the final pages of his books—Durrell was often deeply depressed about the impact of civilization on nature and maintained an unhealthy contempt for “human animals.” These sentiments are understandable, but Durrell’s materialism naturally produced only despair.

But for those who believe in a Creator, Durrell’s descriptions are a riotous revelation of divine artistry. It is true that in a fallen world, there is as much suffering and misery in the wild as there is in civilization; it is also true that the picture in the broken mirror still reveals beauty beyond imagining. On our last evening in the Amazon, we climbed a steel tower high above the canopy to watch the sun set over the jungle. As the sun sank to the treetops and melted from yellow to fiery orange, the birds began lifting off from the trees to fly home for the night, emitting their wild hymns to the sky as they went.

Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era is the sort of book that sticks. I first read it in Grade 7 and have wanted a baby raccoon pretty much ever since. I have a small etching of Sterling and Rascal fishing signed by North with “greetings from Little Rascal” in my library (it’ll have to do). On reading it to my children last year, I realized that the book is more than merely a good story—it is a great American novel, easily on par with lesser works that get far more attention.

Published in 1963, Rascal sold over 2. 5 million copies, was adapted for film by Disney and launched a 52-part TV series in Japan that resulted in racoons being inadvertently introduced into the country. Children imported up to 1,500 coons a year and triggered an ongoing ecological crisis as the new species thrived and promptly did what these bandits do: happily plundered the country. After a decade of this, Japan belatedly banned their import; a 2024 headline affirmed that the country is still “grappling with an invasive racoon population” that costs millions in damages annually.

Rascal begins with Sterling’s discovery of an abandoned baby raccoon in the forest outside Brailsford Junction (his fictional name for Edgerton). Between May of 1918 and April 1919, Sterling wandered the woods around Lake Koshkonong, built a canoe in the living room, read books in the branches of the huge tree in the backyard with Rascal lounging in the branches, and reveled in what would be the last year of his boyhood. One never knows until they are over that the good old days are ending; Rascal is both an adventure story and a requiem for childhood.

But in Edgerton, much still is as it was. The original barn stands; the phrase “Damn Kaiser Bill,” carved into the siding by Sterling as his brother Herschel fought the Germans in Europe, is still faintly visible (the volunteer guide, Betty, emphasized to the children that both swearing and vandalism are unacceptable, however understandable the historical sentiment). The highchair where Rascal tried to eat his sugar cubes—he would wash them, they would vanish, he would hunt desperately—sits by the back door.

Rev. Hooten’s Methodist Church can be seen from the barn; it is easy to see how the smell of Sterling’s alarmed pet skunks reached the windows one hot summer day over a century ago and drove the congregants from their pews, forcing the kindly pastor to end his sermon early for the first time anyone could remember. From the backyard, you can also see the steeple and bell tower of the church where Poe the Crow stashed his hoarded treasures, including Sterling’s sister Theo’s stolen engagement ring. His little Bible, given to him by Rev. Hooten for regular attendance at Sunday School, is displayed inside the museum.

Sterling’s initials are still inside the barn, placed there with the same green paint he used on the 18-foot canoe that he built indoors, much to the horror of his visiting sisters. The Society set up a Christmas tree fronted by chicken wire, just as Sterling had it. The cleats nailed to the side of the house for Rascal to access his bedroom via the second story window are gone, of course—the house passed through several owners before a fundraising campaign was launched by the children of the town to purchase it and preserve it as a museum in 1992.

Sterling North went on to become a journalist, working for the Chicago Daily News (alongside Carl Sandburg, the great poet and Lincoln biographer), the New York World-Telegram, and the New York Sun. He married his high school sweetheart Gladys Buchanan, and they had two children, Ariel and David. After going freelance, North wrote a series of American biographies for children and several novels, including So Dear to My Heart and The Wolfling, his final book before he died in 1974 at the age of 68.

I very much enjoyed his 1966 adult wildlife memoir, Raccoons Are the Brightest People, although my relationship with raccoons has been more fractious than North’s lifelong non-aggression pact. Several people I know have had pet baby coons, much to the delight and fascination of my children. They are smart, lively, and adorable. But I had to fight a growing horde of them during one weeks-long springtime war in which coons attacked my quail, pheasants, and chickens and had to be repelled with traps and bullets.

I connected with Sterling’s daughter Ariel North Olson, who is now 93, by email, and she sent me some reminisces she penned about her father for the 25^th anniversary of the museum. “Some of my earliest memories are of lying in bed at night, hearing the clickety-clack of typewriter keys down the hall,” she recalled. “While I drifted off to sleep, my dad was hard at work on whatever book he was writing…But somehow, he still found time for us. I have wonderful memories of the stories he told to me and my brother. The ones we liked best were about Rascal, the pet racoon he had when he was a boy.”

Sterling North was deeply suspicious of change, both as a conservationist and in some ways, an instinctive conservative. He despised comic books and dubbed them a debased genre of entertainment. Perhaps this is why he subtitled Rascal “A Memoir of a Better Era,” which was nostalgia for lost boyhood as much as anything else. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” as L.P. Hartley wrote. When he died, the sort of childhood he experienced was still possible and not yet colonized by the omnipresent screens that suck the souls of children into the digital wilderness to be scarred by lurking pornographic horrors.

It was sad to hear that the annual Sterling North Literary Festival is discontinued because too few people were showing up, another casualty of the comorbidities of Covid and growing disinterest in books. Rascal, Betty told us, is considered too difficult for many children now. Fans of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ classic The Yearling have recently expressed similar dismay that her work may be forgotten. But Rascal, like The Yearling, has the power to capture generations anew not just because of the power of the prose, but because they hark back to a time when the outdoors was not just the natural habitat of racoons, but of children, too. A better era, perhaps, but not yet irretrievable.

A little over a year ago, I took a position as the headmaster of Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic School, an independent classical school located in Peterborough, Ontario.

Like many other classical schools, Wayside has been undergoing unprecedentedly rapid growth in the past few years. Like many classical schools, we may soon have to launch a capital campaign to fundraise for significant facility expansions.

The fact is that classical education is undergoing a “moment.” Hundreds of new classical schools have opened up across North America in recent years, while already-existing schools are recording record-level enrolment levels.

However, many people still don’t know exactly what classical education is. Recently, I was interviewed by Dr. Brett Salkeld on the Thinking Faith podcast on that topic. Ultimately, we only scratched the surface. However, the conversation should serve as a decent primer on this fascinating movement.

Dr. Salkeld has released the conversation in three parts. You can listen to them here:

Part I

Part II

Part III

(NOTE: If you would like to contribute to the growth of Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic School, check out our $150k matching fundraising campaign.)

Here is a spiritual exercise worthy of Lent: 

Wait……… for an itch……… and then………. don’t scratch it. 

It will start to feel like burning after a bit – your sensory receptors buzzing around the site – wondering why a reflex arc hasn’t been initiated yet to quell the nuisance. The itch may subside after a time, by doing nothing. False alarm; a clothing fibre flicked a follicle. My Lenten beard itches as I’m writing this – every turn of the neck spikes a hundred epidermal sites. I often find myself running my hand through it to temporarily quell the persistent prickle. Eventually, I habituate the sensation enough to not be irritated. Perhaps a more sinister plot is at work: fungal spores triggering the itch response so that once the skin is self-abrased by the unsuspecting giant, the spores and any other microbe in the vicinity may enter a warmer, moister climate and reproduce. But the most likely reason for skin irritations isn’t actually superficial. Rather, they are bodily responses to interior inflammation caused by the foods we eat.

Much of the last few years have been spent learning how to manage the diet of my middle child. For years her eczema had been getting worse, to the point where she couldn’t sit still and her focus was difficult to maintain for executive functioning. After topical treatments were exhausted, we began some exclusion diets for common food allergens like diary, gluten, nuts. If not for getting tested, we’d still be doing exclusion diets to this day. It turns out that she’s not only sensitive to a lot of food staples, but many of their common alternatives as well. After eliminating those, the remaining foods were of course amplified to fill out her diet. Unfortunately, even though they didn’t show up on the test for her, some of those foods I would later find out are universally inflammatory and thus her condition didn’t improve substantially until the last lectins were vanquished.

In the meantime, I began to re-evaluate my own diet. I like eating food a lot. But instead of restrictive diets, I preferred to excise the excess calories with exercise (which I also take some enjoyment in). One thing I didn’t enjoy was squeaking time for food into my morning routine – especially if I just ended up with heartburn for a couple of hours afterward. But I loved breakfast food. Even on those special mornings growing up when you slept till noon on a Saturday, I still couldn’t think about eating lunch food until I had some cereal with milk or toast with PB&J. In hindsight, I suppose it was my body’s low blood sugar telling me to rectify the situation with an abundance of disaccharides. 

The thought never occurred to me until well into my 30’s to simply ignore the hunger pangs – like the itch on my chinny-chin-chin. So, three Lents ago, I decided to give up more than just dessert after dinner. I gave up breakfast (which is essentially the dessert you have before lunch). It was hard at first, but by lunchtime, I felt the same amount of hunger without breakfast as I did with it. That was a big clue to understanding how my metabolism operates. I shed 20 pounds that Lent and haven’t eaten breakfast since. It turns out I only need two squares a day at my age. But the health benefits of my particular fast go beyond cutting out the processed, candy-coated carbs that are breakfast foods. 

The Maronite practice of fasting during Lent is illustrative: they don’t eat between midnight and noon. That 12-hour period is the minimum amount of time needed for your metabolism to switch from burning primarily carbs over to primarily fat. Of course, they’re likely sleeping before midnight and perhaps haven’t eaten since dinner, so every hour added on to the 12 is fat burning, whether you’re sitting down or up and about. The best part about that 12+ hour fast is that the fat metabolizing is evenly distributed throughout the body. To burn fat through exercise, you need to keep your heart rate up within a narrow range of frequencies for an extended period and the fat burned is nearest to the skeletal muscle being used. That’s fine and good. But without fasting, any deep tissue fat built up over time that now coats your organs and is associated with many negative health indicators largely stays put. Some fat can only come out from fasting, just like some demons can only come out by prayer and fasting (Mark 9:29).

The only thing you need during the fasting period is water, and more of it than you would normally drink. Since fat is more calorie rich than carbs or protein, the water used up in the hydrolysis reactions increases proportionately. I vividly recall a pep rally in high school where all the sports teams were featured as build-up for the main event. Out walks our five-foot nothing wrestler and defending Ontario provincial champion in the one-hundred-pound soaking wet weight class.

Principal: “What are you eating?”

Wrestler: “Nothing.” (cheers)

Principal: “What are you drinking?”

Wrestler: “Water.” (more applause)

He retained his title belt a week or two later (with a notch or two added on the inside).

The reason many people give up on fasting after a few hunger pangs is because they’re dehydrated and lethargic. If fasting is done properly, you can feel invigorated and warm by the excess heat being produced from the fat metabolism. Unless you’re a professional rugby player with zero percent body fat or one of those rare metabolisms that burn up everything eaten all day long and still look like a bean pole, you probably have excess fat to burn.

The problem is that for most people, as soon as enough time has passed for fat-burning to kick in in, they immediately switch it back off again by consuming carb-heavy, low nutrient breakfast foods. Fat is first-in/last-out, which means it gets stored by piling layers on top of each other. It’s a little disconcerting to think that the fat I added in my twenties is still there now – tucked away under fat I stored in my thirties. Adaptively, fat is meant to be stored for a season or two, not a decade or two with more added all the time. Our bodies plead for carbs as the metabolic path of least resistance, but if there are none to be had, you can always live off the fat for a while. For thousands of years, our bodies were trained by feast and famine. The West now has neither and we’re fatter than ever.

Fasting is not a fad. It’s not the nutritionist magazine flavour of the month. Sure, it is more in vogue today because we understand the science behind it, but there aren’t any products to profit off of. By choosing not to eat for a period of time, you are following a ritual as much as a regimen. Fasting not only sobers the body but sobers the mind. Feel hungry every day. Use that hunger to get outside yourself. Traditional fasting doesn’t seek as its end a better beach body. Donate the breakfast you don’t have every day to the children who don’t have any and offer up your sacrifice for the millions around the world who are hungry. And if you can’t do it with a smile, you’re probably not doing it right.

“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” (Matt 6:16)

Jim Davis has a comic where a distraught Garfield gazes downward as he grabs his belly prior to commencing the next reluctant diet: “there will be a whole lot less of me around”. To fast is to diminish – literally and figuratively. Humility is the desire to decrease so that others may increase. The spiritual life begins where I end. God isn’t asking me to be a better person, like some peddling self-help guru. He wants me to be a new person. He wants me to be incorporated: Jesus Inc. 

If “you are what you eat”, eat less of the world and commune with God – the best way to break-fast.

“On the road with Laura Ingalls Wilder”: a road trip to the Little House sites with children in tow.

“The Swiss Family Robinson: A Return to the Classics”: A reflection on my favorite childhood novel.

“Ties that Bind: Wendell Berry, the Bible, and Port William”: On the Bible and the novels of Wendell Berry.

“The Forgotten Christmas Story by Charles Dickens”: On Dickens’ forgotten book The Life of Our Lord.

“When Middle Earth Came to Vienna”: On the Winged Hussars and the inspiration for Tolkien’s famous cavalry charge.

Intermittent, shallow breaths, bed he lay upon.
A gurgle, a grimace, one last gasp, and gone.

Such was the manner of my father's passing on January 30^th, 2023. For the first time in my life, death was not an academic thought experiment, but a real, visceral encounter with mortality. My heroic mother, bedside-bound for days, famished, and sleep deprived, loved him to the end. Though this was her third time keeping vigil over someone in his/her final hour, my mother's undying love for her husband is the stuff of legend in an age where most patients and their caregivers surrender to the inevitable much sooner.

But it’s all wrong. 

Whether the hour is early or late, death is not right. Even though my father’s pain medication was carefully tuned, I could tell, through that brief frown that disturbed his otherwise peaceful countenance over the previous 24 hours, that in those final moments he realized his impending doom. We are meant for life: death is a cosmic disruption of earth-shattering proportions. For a full day, my father's every delayed breath was followed up with quick catch-up breaths to recover precious oxygen – self-preservation to the end. It was agony to watch, though I still tried to keep the mood light around my family.

The late, great Fr. Richard Neuhaus wrote a book about his near-death experience, called As I Lay Dying. In it, he dispelled the myth of our modern ‘dying with dignity’ mentality. “Death is the final indignity,” he said. No matter how we dress it up, death remains a catastrophic rupture in our human fabric – redeemed only by the hope that there is a pathway to reunification.

If we were to help a non-religious person understand Heaven, it’s this: whether the relationship is romantic or filial, we wish to be with be those we love. When you love someone, you want to be in their company all the time. You could talk to them for hours, into the night, and not tire. Sometimes you don’t even need to talk at all – just sit in their presence.

The desire to always be with loved ones is a powerful force. It can inspire a daughter to convince her father to get baptized so that when they do get parted, it won’t be for long. Heaven is the fulfillment of every visit cut short, every meeting ending too soon, every reluctant parting. God, who is Love, breaks down all barriers of time and space so that His love extends through every degree of separation – binding all our individual loves into His. 

My father loved people. He loved with an impartiality that was unrivaled. Everyone was interesting to him. There was something interesting about every individual he met and he was going to talk to you until he figured out what it was. He never said a bad word about anyone (plenty of bad words – just directed at broken farm equipment and other fateful circumstances).

On a scale from orc to elf, I suppose my father would slide neatly into hobbit: short in stature, ale drinking, lover of all things that grow. He studied agriculture at the University of Guelph back when they still had cattle grazing in pastures around campus. The farm he and my mother purchased in Laurentian Valley Township overlooks the Indian River and the fields beyond, like a majestic moviescape. 

All this beauty, and yet his vision was obscured during the back half of his life with congenital cracks in his retina. I vividly recall the sit-down family meeting during which it was announced that he would no longer be able to see our baseball games or, at least at a minimum, not be able to drive us to them. Did that deter him? No. He still coached and ran indoor fastball skills clinics for another decade. He also took up blind bowling, blind fishing, and even blind hockey. Somehow, he managed to drive the tractor and scrape a living off the land with merely peripheral vision.

Strangely, I believe he was better off without his sight. Who knows what kinds of ‘Tookish’ mischief he’d have gotten into? Based on tales from his youth, he’d already fulfilled a lifetime’s quota. Since vision is our dominant sense, my father’s impairment made him more humble, dependent, though understandably frustrated. When I first reached his deathbed, I assured him that he would have a new pair of eyes soon.

In the eyes of the world, my father’s life may not seem so remarkable. But when looked through Heaven’s eyes his life is remarkable indeed – not because of all the amazing things my father did, but because of the amazing things that God did for him.  

Born and raised in the secular science town of Deep River, Ontario, his irreligious upbringing did not portend a death in friendship with God. But he fell in love with my German Catholic mother and agreed to raise any children in her tradition upon marrying. He was never hostile to religion (he saved up any hostility for when his children disobeyed their mother). But religious indifference can be an even greater challenge to overcome. At least the hostile atheist is consciously contending with God on the intellectual level whereas God had to compete with sports and cows for my father’s attention.

He reluctantly entered the Church when my siblings and I were teenagers, much to the delight of his mother-in-law (now in her nineties) and in no small way due to her relentless prayers. Though her weakened memory makes prayer routines more difficult, her daughter (my mother), has taken up the mantle. Her prayer list is long and gets longer all the time because no one ever comes off of it. My father is no exception – it’s just that the nature of the prayer has changed from ‘save his body’ to ‘save his soul’.

My family feels confident that my father is on route to the Good Place, but there has been no shortage of prayers from all quarters to speed his steps along that path. Within a minute after he drew his final breath, the Catholic chaplain just happened upon our hospital room to say prayers for the recently deceased. Within an hour, that same priest said Mass specifically for him in the hospital chapel. The day before, he received the Sacrament of the Sick which he also received 3 weeks prior (when we thought he was dying the first time). An entire archdiocesan seminary’s worth of priests were offering Masses for him throughout the ordeal because my wife works there and kindly kept her boss updated. 

While his medical care was at times suspect, his spiritual care has been second to none. I sure hope that when my time comes, I get the kind of heat in the hot air balloon that he is benefitting from. He may even get time served for the suffering he has endured. But we don’t know for sure, and that’s why we pray.

Here’s to Robert Gordon Austen, a.k.a. Rob, Bobbie, Dad, the ‘dude’, the ‘sausage man’, the ‘sugar bear without no hair’, or just ‘Shug’. Thank you for fathering me. Without you, I wouldn’t even exist, let alone become the man I am today. Now that you can see the puck again, you should start working on your game – I’m looking forward to playing a lot of hockey in Heaven.

Elon Musk is in the news again, this time for talking about how he wants to put microchips in our brains.

In early December, Musk suggested that Neuralink’s implantable chip might be ready for human trials in as little as six months. (He co-founded the company in 2016.) Musk boasted that the chip could one day allow users to control their smartphones with their thoughts, even “better than someone who has working hands.”

That’s fairly tame stuff for Musk.

Musk has previously waxed eloquent about “downloading” our consciousness into a computer or even a new body, so that we can “live forever.” One of the many transhumanist fantasies he has entertained over the years is that we will one day be able to use brain implants to store memories. “We can save and replay memories,” he said at another Neuralink event in 2020. “The future is going to be weird.”

As someone who has spent the past six years studying memory, count me unimpressed. There's nothing particularly “weird” about being able to “save and replay” memories. Humans have been doing this since, well, forever, using the single most sophisticated “wetware” neural network in the universe: the human brain.

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For the past six years, I’ve studied memory for my PhD dissertation. As part of this project, I’ve researched the techniques that ancient and medieval thinkers (such as Thomas Aquinas, the subject of my dissertation) used to train their memories to accomplish feats that sound completely implausible to us.

Ancient literature if chock full of anecdotes recounting such feats. Pliny recounts how Scipio could remember the names of all the citizens of Rome. Similarly, he reports that Cineas, an ambassador from King Pyrrhus, memorized all the names and faces of the members of the Roman senate and nobility the day after he arrived. In his book On the Soul, Augustine recounts how his friend Simplicius could recite the whole of the Aeneid (over 10,000 lines long) and various of Cicero's speeches, both forwards and backwards, or recite any line from any book on demand.

Given the rarity and enormous expense of books throughout the ancient and medieval period, there were obviously powerful incentives to push one's memory to the limit. The success of one's career as an orator, scholar or preacher in large part depended upon it. However, not only did ancient and medieval authors have powerful incentives to memorize, they also had access to an elaborate set of techniques, and routine training in those techniques, to help them do it.

These techniques sound profoundly counter-intuitive to those who have never encountered them before. In brief, ancient and medieval authors would fabricate images to represent the things they wished to remember. They would then imaginatively place these images in a series of architectural spaces (loci), often derived from local temples or churches. When they wanted to remember something, they would "retrieve" the image of the thing they wished to memorize from the appropriate locus, traveling to that space in the privacy of their minds.

Most people's intuitive objection when they hear these methods explained, is that memorizing all those images and places just adds a huge amount of unnecessary overhead work. The weird thing, however, is that these techniques work. There's simply no doubt about it. This was proven in an extraordinary way by the journalist Joshua Foer, the author of the fascinating 2011 book Moonwalking with Einstein.

In the book, Foer recounts his year-long effort to train his memory using the loci method in preparation for the American Memory Championships. Foer's journey began when he first covered the American Memory Championships as a freelance journalist. What struck him was how all of the "mental athletes" (as they call themselves) that he interviewed, and whom he had just watched memorize vast quantities of randomly shuffled decks of cards or random digits in mere minutes, swore up and down that they did not have particularly good memories.

“My memory is quite average," the European memory grandmaster (i.e. a mental athlete who has successfully memorized 1,000 random digits in an hour) Ed Cooke told Foer. "All of us here have average memories.” He added, “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly.”

Convinced by Cooke to undertake a rigorous regimen of memory training under Cooke's tutelage, Foer returned one year later, and won the American Memory Championships. To do so, he memorized a randomly shuffled deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds, 107 first and last names in fifteen minutes, and other various such-like challenges.

The book is a riveting read. I just finished my second read-through, and highly recommend it.

Foer comes across as a reliable guide to the weird world of mnemonic competition and practice. In the conclusion, he admits that for all of the enormous progress he made in his capacity to memorize all sorts of data and trivia, he found the process of using these mnemonic practices in daily life challenging.

The problem with memory training, is that it is highly task-specific. A person can train himself to memorize large numbers of digits, and make little progress in his ability to memorize, say, poetry. Meanwhile, he might remain just as absent-minded as before (Foer himself recounts how, shortly after winning the memory championship, he forgot that he drove his car to a dinner appointment, only remembering after opening his front door after taking public transit home!)

However, he says, for all the limitations of these memory techniques, the process of training in them for a year changed him in ways that matter.

He writes:

But after having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I’m convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.

This is certainly one of the key takeaways from my own studies into memory. We only remember what we notice. Furthermore, it matters how much we want to remember something, and how intensely we focus on it. This is why Aquinas, in his four rules for how to train one's memory in the Summa theologiae, exhorts his readers to have "anxiety” (sollicitudo) in relation to the things one wants to remember. In other words, memorizing something requires that we single that thing out as being important, and then pay attention to it long enough to commit it to long-term memory.

It used to be the case, up until not so long ago, that intensive memory training was par for the course in any education. It was expected that any truly educated person would have considerable portions of English poetry memorized, especially Shakespeare, or any number of great speeches by the likes of Cicero, as well as considerable portions of Scripture.

In order to memorize these texts, the one memorizing had to pay attention to the texts at a level of depth and with a degree of focus that far exceeds what we normally expend in reading most books. The one memorizing absorbed these texts into his being, in the process learning the lessons that they had to teach far more thoroughly than those of us who read them once and toss the book to the side.

Foer's book not only reminds us that every single one of us with a normal, functioning brain can memorize far more than we give ourselves credit for, he also reminds us that we may well have a moral responsibility to memorize more than we do. At a minimum, in memorizing we become more fully human, in that we become more fully present to those things that we deem worth remembering.

In his essential book Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, Carl Trueman notes that the social imaginary we see developing around us (in film, TV, and literature) is not only post-Christian, but increasingly anti-Christian. During a recent interview, I asked him what it might look like for Christians working in culture to construct or recover the Christian social imaginary. He observed that many particularly powerful examples of this have been Catholic. Trueman himself is a Presbyterian, but has his students read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, and noted that he sees a growing Protestant interest in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which celebrated its centenary this year.

I began to work my way through Undset’s mammoth work (the edition I have amounts to over 1,100 pages), and it is without doubt one of the best works of historical fiction I have ever read, with detail that brings medieval Norway to life in both its people and landscapes. Undset was utterly deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature she received largely on the strength of this trilogy. Her work is a reminder of what can be produced when a genius at the height of her powers turns her attention to the sacred. Here, for example, is her description of the clergyman Gunnulf contemplating and envisioning the Crucifixion:

The hill with the three crosses against the sky. The cross in the middle, which was meant to bear the king of heaven and earth, shook and trembled; it bent like a tree in the storm, in fear of bearing too much precious burden, the sacrifice for all the sins of the world. The lord of the storm tents forced it, the way a knight forces his defiant stallion; the chieftain of heaven carried it into battle. Then that miracle occurred which was the key to ever deeper miracles. The blood that ran down from the cross in redemption and penance for all sorrows—that was the visible sign. With this first miracle the eye of the soul could be opened to contemplate those still hidden—God, who came to earth and became the son of a virgin and brother to the human kin, who lay waste to Hell and who, with the released souls that were his spoils of war, stormed toward the dazzling sea of light from which the world was born and which sustains the earth. It was toward that unfathomable and eternal depth of light that his thoughts were drawn, and there they perished in the light, vanishing like a flock of birds into the radiance of an evening sky.

Throughout the trilogy, Undset masterfully portrays the consequences of sin—the guilt, the terror, the unravelling and unforeseen consequences. Kristin Lavransdatter lives within a totalizing Catholic system, but Undset, while being honest about the flaws of both the system and the clergy (with their many illegitimate children), is clear that the moral wounds we inflict on ourselves and others are, fundamentally, at the root of our misery. In my view, she does this as magnificently as Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment; or more recently, Wendell Berry’s portrayal of marriage breakdown in The Memory of Old Jack. Post-Christian literature often revels in sin, and some of the most talented writers of our time waste their powers in masturbatory fantasies. Better writers highlight a better way.

Both Christians and conservatives have been notoriously bad at culture-building, with “Christian films” largely resembling Hallmark flicks without the self-awareness and explicitly conservative ones coming off as ideological screeds. I am interested in the efforts of organizations such as The Daily Wire to rectify that (although, as I’ll detail in another essay, their offerings thus far leave me deeply skeptical). But fortunately, we can look back at an inheritance of staggering richness. Catholicism produced Greene, Undset, and Tolkien, to name a few; the Orthodox have Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (and who else do they need?); but there is so much more. In children’s literature, as I noted in a previous essay, the works of Johanna Spyri, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Johan Wyss, and Louisa May Alcott are beautiful examples of a Christian social imaginary and a wonderful way to introduce virtues to children (this was the intention of some of these works).

There are many I could add to that. There is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War, of course. The closing lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities are among the greatest ever written. There is C.S. Lewis, despite some of his weird theological quirks. The evangelical literary scholar Karen Swallow Prior has recently published an entire series of classics with introductory Christian reading guides. And some more recent authors have also made valuable contributions in the realm of historical fiction that are well worth your time. Even if all attempts to revive a new robust Christian social imaginary fail, there is enough in our inheritance to keep anyone occupied for a lifetime. Revisiting these great works will reveal, once again, why they contain so much power—and remind us of a different world that once was and can be again—at least in our own homes, families, and communities. For as all the great literature tells us, recreation is a work that must be renewed with each generation.

My wife is an obsessive fan of Anne of Green Gables, the melodramatic and mischievous redhead from the Maritimes who captured the hearts of millions. A few years ago, hunting for some place to take her on a daytrip, I stumbled across a place I didn’t know existed: The home of L.M. Montgomery in Leaksdale, Ontario. It was in this house, it turns out, that she wrote most of the Anne books. I thought that a trip to Prince Edward Island was necessary to visit a place associated with Anne Shirley and her creator, but it is actually a little house in the forested countryside just north of Toronto, a short walk down the road from the Presbyterian church that her husband pastored, that is the birthplace of many of Montgomery’s works.

Anyone interested in Montgomery and her immortal characters should take the time to visit. You can enter the old church where her husband preached and sit in her pew. Just outside is a statue of Montgomery, sitting on a bench with a smile playing about her lips. Inside the house, the friendly tour guide let us sit on the couch where Montgomery did her writing and even let my wife play her ancient organ. Directly across the muddy road from the Montgomery house was a little green valley, crested by flaming trees garbed in all of autumn’s orange and crimson glory. This was the inspiration for Montgomery’s Rainbow Valley. As Montgomery described it: “The sun was setting over Rainbow Valley. The pond was wearing a wonderful tissue of purple and gold and green and crimson. A faint blue haze rested on the eastern hill, over which a great, pale, round moon was just floating up like a silver bubble.” It is all still there.

Montgomery could capture Canada’s natural beauty like few other writers could—and as someone who grappled with depression, she could also grasp its healing power. “It was November,” she wrote in one of her Anne books, “the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.” To walk the same paths and see just what Montgomery saw, and then to read those lines—that is the way to fall in love with literature. Montgomery’s pages fairly breathe with the crisp breezes that caressed her upturned face, passed through her pen, and now refresh generations of readers.

But I believe it is the nostalgia that Montgomery captures that truly explains the ever-green nature of her storytelling. Anne’s journey from a little girl enraptured by the high drama of ordinary living through the perils of adolescence and culminating in the arrival of adulthood and, eventually, her own children—Montgomery tells this story in a way that can catch you off-guard, as if someone has reminded you suddenly how much time has passed and how many beautiful moments turned into memories before you had a chance to notice. Like in Anne of the Island, when the grown-up Anne looks at her bosom friend Diana, who has just become a mother—and is suddenly struck by how much time had slipped away, and how much it had taken with it: “Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer, desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.”

Who cannot understand those few lines? Who has not flipped through an old photo album, looked up, and realized suddenly how many people have come and gone and changed and grown and thought with a sharp pang that isn’t quite pain but rather feels like it, that although we might not really want to go back in time, we still find ourselves desperately wishing we could crawl inside of one of those old memories and be there for just a moment, and feel all of those same feelings once again? That is nostalgia—the realization that the moment we are living in, right now, will probably be one of the “good old days” in just a moment or two—and few writers rendered the contradiction of that sense of sadly happy remembrance as well as Lucy Maud Montgomery.

In 1996, Irish American author Frank McCourt founded a new genre with his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Angela’s Ashes: the “misery memoir.” He famously recounted his impoverished childhood in Limerick in sordid detail, recounting the scars of alcoholism, sibling death, and the Great Depression while lingering fondly over the lusts of adolescence and implicating others in his misdeeds (less famously, his account was strenuously objected to by many of those who knew him, including his mother). McCourt’s opening line sets the stage:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Unfortunately for those of McCourt’s contemporaries who beg to differ, he was a magnificent writer whose prose prompted a stream of pilgrimages to Limerick. I was recently there myself (although I didn’t visit any “McCourt sites”) and discovered that merely bringing up his name can provoke a vehement reaction. (“Proven liar” was the phrase used.)

Tom Phelan’s 2019 memoir We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It, a recounting of his rural upbringing in County Laois in the 1940s and ‘50s, has already been compared to Angela’s Ashes, but is in many ways an answer to it. Phelan is McCourt’s equal as a prose stylist, but he is less inclined to wallow in the more squalid details and is far less fascinated by the urges that every young boy experiences in puberty that seemed to so occupy McCourt. Both memoirs recount a childhood before rural electrification, the telephone, and even indoor plumbing. Both record a time when the Catholic Church held enormous sway over every aspect of life. And both record a struggle for survival in times of crippling poverty.

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To his portrait of a bygone era, however, Phelan brings wisdom and understanding. His father’s year-round backbreaking labor in the soil (and often mud) meant he could be impatient and occasionally explosive, but Phelan remembers “him as a man who loved his wife and children who at times was driven over the edge while trying desperately to take care of them.” His memories are not tinted by rose-colored glasses but by the love that the family had for one another—not always articulated, but almost always felt. Each chapter contains a single vignette from his childhood, and despite the honesty of these portraits, all are powerful reminders of how gratitude colors perspective.

His stories of farm life are not all about backbreaking labor—some are about the magic of new life. The story of his mother carefully raising hatchlings each year was particularly evocative—I’ve always felt that there is something wonderful about watching a hen with her new chicks, clucking her instructions, pointing out food bits with her beak (instantly followed by three or four peeping pecks at that precise spot), ruffling her feathers at night for her chicks to bury themselves deeply within. There is magic everywhere if you have the eyes to see it, and Phelan most certainly does. Poverty is the backdrop rather than the focal point of his memoir.

To be fair to McCourt, Phelan grew up within an intact family while Frank and his siblings were abandoned by their father. Phelan’s memoir was a reminder, once again, that the primary privilege any child can receive has nothing to do with pigmentation and everything to do with parents who stay together and pray together. Phelan recounts special moments with his father in the fields, on the farm, and taking the horse-drawn wagon to town. McCourt has no such memories, and perhaps if he had, his memoir might not have been so miserable. “Of course, the passing years have smoothed the jagged edges of the raw emotion of the times; no one can marinate in such agony for long,” Phelan wrote in his novel The Canal Bridge. McCourt would have begged to differ. 

Everything you need to know about Phelan’s memoir is found in the title: We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It. He is not only referring fondly to farm life; he is reminding us that time bears those we love away from us; that the only ‘good old days’ are here, and now, the ones we have—and that to recognize this demands a life lived with heartfelt gratitude. Certain passages reminded me of an observation from Patti Smith’s memoir: “We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.”

A writer of Phelan’s calibre, at least, can recapture the things he knew and to linger there for just a moment longer. I suspect that’s why he wrote this memoir. Phelan captured what Laura Ingalls Wilder so beautifully described at the end of her first book, which she wrote to spend more time with her deceased father:

“When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting. She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

That the great English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse "disgraced" himself during World War II is  about as established as any fact about Wodehouse's life is. Certainly, it was accepted as fact by just about anyone who wasn't a Nazi who was alive in the early 1940s.

Granted, this fact was (and is) interpreted differently by Wodehouse's fans and detractors. To the latter, Wodehouse was at best a sell-out and at worst a traitor. George Orwell's defense of his fellow scribbler, on the other hand, is typical of the former: Wodehouse (argued Orwell) was merely a victim of his own glorious naivete, of that innocent, wholly apolitical soul that could dream up the modern fairylands of Blandings Castle and Bertie Wooster's flat.

The facts, for those who don't know them, are these: In 1940 Wodehouse was living in his villa in Le Touquet, France. At the time he, like most everyone, assumed that the Germans would be repulsed long before they reached France.

He was wrong. Carried by the momentum of their remorseless blitzkrieg across Belgium, the Nazis swept into Le Touquet before Wodehouse and his wife Ethel could plan an escape. Wodehouse was taken into custody and sent to a series of civil internment camps. A little less than a year later, four months shy of his sixtieth birthday, he was released.

In the weeks before his release, Nazi propagandists in the German Foreign Office conceived the plan of asking him to do a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin about his war experiences. Evidently, the Nazis hoped that Wodehouse's slightly premature release (the usual age for release was sixty) and broadcasts would help keep America (where Wodehouse was wildly popular) out of the war. Not knowing of these machinations, Wodehouse agreed to the request, recording a series of talks putting a typically Wodehousian spin on his incarceration: painting the time as a kind of a lark, a belated throwback to his public school days.

Understandably, Wodehouse's appearance on Nazi radio and his lighthearted tone did not sit well with a British populace hunkering down as their cities were being flattened by nightly air raids and who were daily losing fathers and sons to the Hun in the trenches of Europe. Hence, his disgrace.

I have no interest in re-adjudicating this old controversy. All this is only by way of background to what seems, to me, as a writer and academic, by far the most astonishing and under-appreciated fact about this period of Wodehouse's life: namely, that during his internment he wrote - and finished - an excellent comic novel (Money in the Bank) that makes not the slightest reference to the war, his sufferings, or anything else of the slightest social, political or moral consequence.

It is important to understand the conditions in which this feat was accomplished.

On the day of Wodehouse's arrest, the Nazis showed up at his villa unannounced, gave him ten minutes to pack, and then whisked him away from his wife, his friends, his work, his life. He was then shuttled from camp to camp in packed railway cars, without ever being told where he was being sent. His internment was spent in often bitterly-cold dormitories lacking all privacy with hundreds of other men (some of whom committed suicide), during which he lost nearly 60 pounds from malnourishment. Having refused any special treatment, including the offer of a private room, the two luxuries that he availed himself of were the abundant spare time, and (eventually) a rented typewriter.

Money in the Bank was written, Wodehouse later wrote to his friend Bill Townend, "in a room with fifty other men playing darts" and with Nazi guards looking over his shoulder.

There are parallels in the annals of art, of course. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, wrote a 1200 line poem while serving a sentence in the Gulag, in conditions even much worse than those endured by Wodehouse. Solzhenitsyn would write each line on a bar of soap in the morning, and then memorize it. John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress while in prison. Ditto Boethius with The Consolation of Philosophy. Etc.

But that's the point isn't it? Even if Money in the Bank hardly ranks alongside The Consolation or Pilgrim's Progress as immortal art, the writing of it places Wodehouse among a remarkable few - those so committed to their craft that they would allow nothing short of death to stop them from producing. And even then, there is something that sets him apart, i.e. his towering insouciance. Whereas these other detainees typically sought to make sense of their sufferings, or the human condition, through art, he seems to have somehow transcended his sufferings, writing as if they did not even exist.

It has always seemed to me that there is something strangely moving about this thoroughly Wodehousian act of defiance.

Hitler wanted Wodehouse, and every other person on the planet, to do nothing but think about him. If they were not thinking about him with rapturous adoration, then at the least he wanted them thinking about him with an all-consuming hatred and dread. There he was at the microphone, bellowing to the world with that furious, frenetic energy of his, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" And there was Wodehouse, cheerily tapping away at his typewriter, thinking about Hitler not at all.

What a beautiful thing!

It's true that one wouldn't necessarily want a world filled only with Wodehouses. And yet, as Bishop Barron noted in a recent interview with Lex Fridman, one can disagree with pacifists, and yet be grateful that they exist. "Because," as he noted, "they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares."

So too with the Wodehouses of the world. More than anything, evil lusts for attention. It wants our minds, our thoughts, our souls. It wants us to forget that goodness and innocence and beauty and love and truth even exist. It wants us to think that evil is the only thing with any power. It wants us to fret and to fight, and in the fighting to lose hope, and in losing hope to lose all dignity and all humour and all happiness. It wants us to continually obsess about its every move, and to live in dread what it might be up to next. And sometimes, it seems, we are all too willing to oblige.

That is why we need to be reminded from time to time that sometimes the most brilliant tactical move when coming face to face with the devil may well be that of the scrappy, happy little boy who enrages his bully more by walking past him, entirely absorbed in his own thoughts, whistling a cheery tune. Or, by writing a comic novel.

On today’s episode, we are joined by Dr. John Cuddeback, a professor of philosophy at Christendom College, where he has taught for twenty-five years. He also writes at life-craft.org on many of the same themes that we cover here at Utopian Idiots, and has published a book on friendship.

Today’s conversation is all about Wendell Berry, easily one of America’s greatest living writers. Dr. Cuddeback is a long-time reader of Berry, and in 2012 published an academic article in Nova et Vetera on some of his main ideas. He has also met Berry, and been engaged in a long-term correspondence with him through snail-mail (the only kind of mail that Berry receives, given that he has never owned a computer).

Dr. Cuddeback shares his expertise about all things Wendell Berry with us, providing an introduction to and rich reflections on some of his key works and ideas.

As a final note, Jonathon and I have been devouring Berry’s fiction over the past few months, and can’t speak highly enough about his novels and short stories. This will not be the last time we discuss Berry. But for now, please enjoy this delightful 50 minute conversation with Dr. Cuddeback.