Happy New Year!
Dear Scriptor,
When my wife and I first married, we lived in a two-bedroom house which was smaller than the one-bedroom apartment I’d had before. It had those janky wall-heaters which sort of waft out gas and heat the house when the flame lights them. They’re basically open gas-fireplaces – truly remarkably dangerous if we’d had our children there. When it was really cold outside, they’d fog up all the windows and it felt like we lived in a snow globe or an igloo. My wife and I have dear, dear memories of that place, though we lived there for less than a year before buying a house three times its size.
One of the two bedrooms we used as my study and also as a guest-room. Enclosing a futon leaned stacks of bookcases, some tied to the wall lest they fall. When we folded the futon out, it took up almost the whole rest of the room, leaving just enough space to stand up and scuddle sideways to the restroom. (Coincidentally we slept on the futon – in a far bigger room in the new house – when our daughters were born. What’s more, that futon’s frame has since collapsed entirely, and the futon itself has been repurposed, with a new frame, as the TV-room couch, which my mom sleeps on when she stays over Christmas Eve.) Even when the futon stood as a couch in my study, the room was small enough that I’d often be hit by the door if I was standing off-plum from my desk. There was where I went clickety-clack all day.
I had a situation (as Bob Cratchit would say), and so my wife didn’t work at the time. It was deliriously peaceful. I’d wake up, leisurely have breakfast with the wife, and then close myself off in my study until lunch, after which I’d either nap or pick up whatever little work I had to do in the afternoon. One wonders if we had so much free time then only because we did not yet have children. For while it feels relaxing in retrospect, I certainly remember feeling at the time both harried and unproductive, in that special way only people who are not busy can feel. And yet also and in comparison to how I have to use my time now, I was quite unproductive indeed. Never underestimate the effect having children has in concentrating the mind on what’s important.
I once bought a “Life in Weeks” calendar in an attempt to jump-start productivity. It was poster-sized with ninety ‘lines’ of small squares which went either from the top to the middle or from the middle to the bottom of the page. Each ‘line’ was a year and each small square a week, and so the poster ‘tracked’ every week of a man’s life from birth until he was ninety. The idea was to check off every week as it passed, so one could see – at a glance – exactly how much of his life had elapsed and how much of his life was left in which to “accomplish” something. When I first got it, I had not quite yet passed the one-third mark. I’m a bit over it now. (And of course, that assumes I live to ninety which seems to me an assumption highly suspect.)
If any of you have been snookered into the ‘productivity’ racket, you know that nine times out of ten, any productivity gains do not come from the ‘hacks’ or ‘habits’ the book, article, or podcast suggests. Instead, the mere habit of attempting to form habits helps make the virtue of diligence and industry a habit. (And aren’t ‘diligence’ and ‘industry’ both more euphonic and philosophically clear than ‘productivity’?)
So the big poster of “A Life in Weeks” did little. What did do something was coming out of the room after surfing the internet uselessly for an hour and seeing my wife hard at work on some task for our house and our life. That helped. What also helped was when we found out she was pregnant and I imagined the life I wanted to give our child (we didn’t then know ‘daughter’ was the word). That helped. What had already helped was getting rid of video games, which had become a toxin in my life hard to overstate. But what helped most, perversely and unfortunately, was losing my situation.
Now, I see from finding the link to the first time I wrote about the waste of time that is video games, that I wrote about this first last New Year. It stands to reason we meet the Ghost of Old Years Past at this time.
The Courtyard
Originally inspired by the ‘character journal’ Ben Franklin describes in his biography, I keep a journal. First instituted to track moral indiscretions circa 2004, it has gone through innumerable changes since. As this year marks that project’s twentieth, I thought I’d say something about it.
Journals too often degenerate to omphaloskeptical egotism. ‘Dear Dairy, today I just felt…’ Certainly my entries often degenerate in this way, and journaling for me has in the past been almost entirely an exercise in self-regard. Then again – I feel as if these letters too often degenerate in that same way. This paragraph certainly has.
And yet few habits have helped me quite so much as journaling. So I recommend it to you now. Not that habit of omphaloskepsis – mind – but the habit of writing, recording thoughts and ideas and (most important of all) goals. Writing out one’s thoughts allows a man to ‘voice’ them without the cheating or fudging that so often happens when ideas have not orthography’s body. And setting future goals allows (at a minimum) one to see the cavern between thought and action – again, without the fudging or happy self-talk that can so often happen when looks back at past thoughts without physical receipts.
The many iterations of my journal need not be recited, and I probably couldn’t remember half of them anyway. But the tool I have found to keep my keel relatively even and my rutter pointed North is to write six-month goals. Over those six months I will track those goals and, at the end of them, see how I’ve done. After doing a retrospective, I will directly make a new set of goals for the next six months.
Am I making this clear?
Let’s get to brass tacks. On Sunday, December 31st, I will sit down at our dining table and open my journal back to around July 1st (whenever that Sunday was). There I have recorded six different aspects of my life: my intimate family, the wider family, friends, health, my career, and my own self. Within these six aspects, I have listed one habit to start and one vice to stop.
These are generally deceptively simple. In ‘Intimate’, I have a goal of starting a Morning Time routine, à la Cindy Rollins. And though I continue to think this sounds like the work of a moment, a mere decision easily accomplished, I also have managed to corral us only enough to have regular Morning Times this past week. And then my success is largely an artifact of jetlag and the girls waking shortly after six in the morning.
(As proof, in the week after I first wrote the paragraph above, Morning Time has fallen apart as the girls wake up past eight.)
In ‘Friends’, I wanted to start responding to texts within the first day I receive them (whereas it could take weeks formally). Happily, I mostly accomplished this one. But meanwhile, in ‘Health’, I wanted to top slouching, for I have a back far too bent for a man my age. I… did not do this. I attended to it for perhaps only the first month after the dedication and then dropped it almost entirely.
This Sunday, I will go over all ten to see how I did these last six months. Then I will make goals for the next six months, preserving many of these same goals no doubt but dropping those goals which have either become irrelevant or those which I’ve largely made habit. (It need not be perfect! Indeed, it won’t be.) Over the next six months, I’m thinking of increasing my two habits, one to start and one to stop, to those two habits plus another either to start or stop. Whether I increase my effort will largely depend on how well I’ve accomplished those ten.
I offer you this look not to mimic but as an example. My journal did not always look like this. Just before the present format I’ve here outlined, originally started back when I was still single, I used to list between four and seven goals to “accomplish” within each of those six spheres of life. I’d set for myself the task of calling friends once a month or perhaps twice during the six-month period. I’d set a goal for how many days a week I’d workout, or walk. I’d set goals for how many short stories I’d write, how far through my novel I’d get, how many books a week I’d read.
This helped marvelously in making me “productive”, and it even improved my industry, though my diligence had to wait until I married and had children. If that sounds like it may help, go for it. But perhaps you need not clutter your life with more activity, as I no longer need to clutter mine. Indeed, this entire last year was spent on about five hours of sleep, too much caffeine, and racehorse work from dawn till well after dusk. I intend to get more sleep next year (though I doubt I will in the second half of the year – more on that later).
Indeed, the difficulty I found with that former format was that it gave me races to win but not the virtues to win them. This is the first six-months I’ve focused on habits instead of prizes, but I feel focusing on habits has made me better. Then again, I felt a better person when chasing those prizes, for I had to become a better person to achieve even some of them. So perhaps that old method helped as much or more; or perhaps neither method matters. Perhaps all that matters is trying to reach beyond oneself.
Perhaps you read all these journaling preoccupations and they sound, as they half-sound to me on a re-read, like an attack of Spreadsheet Brain. All I can say is that, as a man naturally inclined towards idleness and by habit trained to dissipation, too given to barren amusements and too willing to shirk work and hand over responsibility, I have found this effort useful. I leave the rest to you, dear readers.
Flowerbeds
For auld lang syne, my dear for auld lang syne we'll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne
Auld Lang Syne, Unknown Artist, circa 1900, New York Public Library
Hortus Proprius
Last year I read seventy-three books, taking the Bible as one. The year before that I read over 150. The year before that, it was over 200. This year, I’ve read fifty-three, and most of those are smaller works, like when I count each Plutarch Life as one ‘book’ or counting Cardinal St. John Henry Newman’s pamphlet “The Idea of a University” as a book. With some exceptions (The Idiot, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Aeneid), even the full books I did read were short, Emma, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, She, The First Men in the Moon, &c. So I feel rather unproductive this year when compared to years past.
It’s not all ineffective doldrums, of course. The girls’ books are becoming increasingly fascinating, and I do not add even the ones I’d have read on my own to this list. I read a lot of lyric poems, for example, and many compelling Saints Lives, scores of fairy tales. What’s more, my choices for myself this year have been more discerning. Not only are they almost all books from The Tradition, but they were all too good, though admitted sometimes it was just that they were too short, to abandon. Last year I may have abandoned a half-dozen. Yet despite this year’s quality, I no longer feel like a cavalcade of culture is pouring into my ears and through my head.
Not that I’ve been exactly lazy. One book a week (or thereabouts) is not too shabby. Especially true since almost all of the books were new to me, whereas I think last year a solid third were familiar friends. New books to me will have an asterisk (*) next to them.
Moreover, given the general quality of the books, I will not do what I did last year, which was to pick five ‘Good’ books and five ‘Bad’ books. I will, however, highlight books I found exceptional in some way and share why with you. These books will be bold.
So just a reminder: an asterisk (*) means I’d never read the book before, and the book being bolded means both that I thought it was exceptional and that I’m about to tell you why.
I hope you enjoy.
January
*Old English Shorter Poems: Volume II, trans. by Robert Bjork
Job
*Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
I said last year that Ivanhoe was one of the few perfect books I’d ever read. Brideshead Revisited is another. For being one of those turn-of-the-century books where nothing really happens, I was carried aloft with the perplexity of the story. And then the last third just shuts us in ever tighter boxes, ever more awkward scenarios, until we want to burst. And just when we think we can’t take any more of it, at the very end, the book destroys and gives hope everywhere. I started reading this just as my wife and I started attending Mass. It was a moving synchronicity.
*Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer
February
Emma, Jane Austen
“Alexander”, Plutarch
*The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle
These stories are amazing fun. I wonder why no one writes stories like this anymore, and I wonder if I could. They’re light, funny, but also have a complexity of human characterization I miss in many modern “complex” books. They seem to embody that saccharine banality ‘still waters run deep’ which was such a popular saying in my teen years. One of Pyle’s great skills is his ability to see. He was trained as an artist, and was indeed a damn good one too. The eye for detail that even a poorly trained artist develops is dearly missing in modern literature. The book also reminded me that Stevenson (more on him, later) wrote the books he loved in his boyhood but which no longer seemed to be written. It feels like that’s what Pyle was doing too, and very well indeed.
March
*“Caesar”, Plutarch
*“Cato”, Plutarch
*“Brutus”, Plutarch (10)
*“Demosthenes”, Plutarch
*“Cicero”, Plutarch
April
*The Pattern on the Stone, W. Daniel Hillis
*On the Republic, Cicero
*Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins
*Holy Moments, Matthew Kelly
May
*With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge
*Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
*Classical Me, Classical Thee, Rebekah Merkle
*“The Idea of a University”, St. John Henry Newman (20)
*Unearthed, Meryl Frank
I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Meryl’s book. As I said in my review, Meryl is a cousin and so to advertise this book again is somewhat self-interested. But I also find it deeply compelling. Perhaps it’s just because it’s about my family, but I don’t think so. What surprised me about the book (and I’ve said this, somewhat apologetically, to Meryl’s face) is that it’s so well written! As a bit of a snob and a wannabe expert in that field, I expected my cousin who has spent her life in academia and politics to write like it. Not a bit! I was deeply please, and deeply affected by the horror of the story. It made me again somewhat ashamedly grateful that my great-grandparents (including my great-grandma’s furs, which Meryl writes about) were safely back here in America.
June
*The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye
In college, I wrote a thesis about how The Chronicles of Narnia was C.S. Lewis’s attempt to teach readers how to become educated men. Clearly even then I was not fully captured by the apparatus, but I was captured enough to call my essay “The Pedagogy of The Chronicles of Narnia”. If I’d known about Anthony Esolen, John Senior, or someone like Jason Baxter (he himself is my age), I would have tried to track down programs that promoted the preservation of culture (if I could then have stood their religiosity) and tried to gain a Ph.D, with them or their acolytes.
Instead, I pursued a mostly unused J.D., and I wrote my essay without any “theory”, that is without quoting past literary scholars. At the time, there were no literary scholars I knew who I cared to use. I didn’t even really know C.S. Lewis had written five books and hundreds of articles on literary theory. I knew only The Discarded Image and was so ignorant of The Tradition I didn’t understand almost anything I found there (though knew I’d found something significant all the same). What’s worse, my professors introduced me to no literary theory worth its name, despite my reluctance and indeed outright refusal to use Derrida or Foucault as they wanted. They’d rather I use nothing and suffer in the grading of my essay than learn anything but their Critical scholarship or their Freudian lens.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on them. Maybe they didn’t know these scholars either.
But if only I’d known of Northrup Frye then! The Educated Imagination in particular would have been the perfect accompanying book, for it almost effortlessly leads a naïve reader into the world of – well – of how to educate an imagination, what that means, and the main scholars of this field. If one wants to start his journey into understanding literature and The Tradition, he could do far worse than starting with The Educated Imagination.
*Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
I talked about Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde right after I’d finished it. What amazed me then and amazes me still is not only that Mr. Stevenson seems to have brought into our world a New Myth, but that so many of the 19th Century masters did. Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, and of course Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde are all remarkable works, perfect in their genres and with a story which carries all before it. Even those who have never once seen any faithful adaptation of these works know their Myths, for the Myths are in everything we now read and watch.
I am often very hard on the 19th Century, for I feel the Romantic Movement (esp. the Transnationalism Movement) ruined our understanding of art and man, but those faithful workers in the Tradition in this era are unsurpassed craftsmen. To switch interests of mine for a moment: whatever education these writers had must needs a resurrection in our modern world if we are to endure our future.
*Aeneid, Virgil
July
*This Is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival, Bishop Robert Barron
*The Idiot, Dostoevsky
*Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
While nowhere near as profound as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped is a nearly perfect boys’ adventure story all on its own. What Rob Roy is to the adolescent novel, Kidnapped is to the boys’ novel. Indeed, they are so similar it is hard to imagine Sir Walter Scott’s novel did not heavily influence Mr. Stevenson’s.
As I wrote on Twitter, “[I]f Stevenson sat down & said 'I want to make Rob Roy for children', I would not be surprised.”
*When We Were Young, A. A. Milne
This is the only book I read primarily for the children that I’ve included here, and that’s because the poems are just absolutely perfect. I especially love the one which introduces Winnie the Pooh (here Mr. Edward Bear). Seriously, if you have children and even if you don’t, buy this book. Just do it. I’ll even give you a link! The poem begins:
A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise. Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at; He gets what exercise he can By falling off the ottoman, But generally seems to lack The energy to clamber back. Now tubbiness is just the thing Which gets a fellow wondering; And Teddy worried lots about The fact that he was rather stout. He thought: "If only I were thin! But how does anyone begin?" He thought: "It really isn't fair To grudge one exercise and air." ...
*How to Save the West, Spencer Klaven
August
*The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, G.K. Chesterton (30)
*The Metamorphoses, Ovid
September
*She, H. Rider Haggard
*Poetics, Aristotle
*Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature, C.S. Lewis
Lewis is a genius and howevermuch he is read, he ought to be read more. Many of the ideas in this book, Lewis also presents and beautifully in The Discarded Image, which is a shorter yet weightier work. Nonetheless, if one were to ask for a primer on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he could ask for no better. Lewis’s superpower is introducing us to this foreign world as naturally as to the town five miles away, but without effacing any of its strangeness.
*Annals (Books 1-6), Tacitus
*St. Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton
*Exogenesis, Peco Gaskovski
This is the newest book on this list and the one I constantly fail to write a review for. There’re some unevennesses here, questions of plotting and theme I’d have asked him about had I been his editor. And yet, the book is well constructed, thoughtful, and unexpectedly compelling. There are a few “twists” which even in hindsight I do not find quite plum to the story, but the vast majority seem obvious in hindsight yet few were obvious in foresight. What I especially love is how few truly villainous characters there are and how weak are the supposed heroes. No simple morality play, this. He does not repay every virtue with kindness, every vice with consequence, and he weaves what morality he has to share with us into the very nature of the characters. He remembers throughout that we are all broken vessels. I do not read (especially lately) many new books, but this one very much repaid my attention.
*The Enchiridion (The Handbook), Epictetus
Revelation, St. John
*Roots of Western Civilization (A Lecture), Anthony Esolen (40)
October
“On Fairy Tales”, J.R.R. Tolkien
*Sonnez les Matins, Jane Scharl
This is another new book, one from a friend of these letters. There are three exceptional qualities to this play. First and most obviously, it’s in verse. What’s more, the verse is of consistently high quality. What’s even better, at times the verse simple sparkles. Second, under the surface and yet not obscured by it runs a deep meditation on the Church, one I only half understand. It’s like if a man were to kayak on the crystal ocean and watch as two-hundred feet below all of ocean life pranced before him. He might not perfectly understand what that life was doing, but it would be fascinating to watch. And that leads us to – Third, it’s fun! The play is fun, funny, and even a bit wild. I always looked forward to my time with the play, which I can’t honestly say about all the books I read, not even all those I enjoy. I bet the play would be a riot on stage, and hope I might one day catch a production.
November
*A Mathematician’s Lament, Paul Lockhart
For homeschoolers (esp. of a Charlotte Mason temperament) who don’t know how to approach math, this book is indispensable.
*The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers
The Song of Roland, Sayers translation
*Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
December
*King John, Shakespeare
*The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells
*Drive, Daniel Pink
*Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper
The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis
*Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell? The Collected Work of Aloïse Buckley Heath, Aloïse Buckley Heath
The Amphitheater
Have you ever wondered what Auld Lang Syne would sound like in Irish? Wonder no longer!
The Shed
First off, January is a month which I normally take off. But that no longer means there will be no letters! Because I now have more than a year of these crazy things, I will post old ones on my fortnights off. I’m thinking of calling it “Garden Memories” or somesuch.
More important, there is a Tradition which is largely obscure to us now. It’s a Tradition of Story, and it used to be the basis of our culture. It’s made up of nursery rhymes, Bible stories, folk tales, Saints Lives, and the one-thousand or five- good books that lead to the one-hundred or five- Great Books. These books feed the soul, conform one to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. They are teachers, without which it’s impossible to even explain the Good, the True, and the Beautiful except in so far as those without the real thing are desperate enough to gorge themselves on fakery, as a teen who has known only hot pockets will eat freezer-pizza and think himself feasted.
In my long quest to delve deep into The Tradition, this Sea of Story, what Tolkien called ‘The Soup of Story’, I have used Uncle Jack (C.S Lewis) and the aforementioned Tollers (Tokien) to get an idea of it. There are few living practitioners (that I know of!), but I have found two scholars who deal with this world. They work outside academia and so need not propitiate it. They are Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks of The House of Humane Letters, and I’ve been following their podcast (The Literary Life Podcast) for several years now.
Because my wife and I are finally back on our feet (that loss of situation bit deep), I bought my first class from them during this Christmas sale (still two days left!). I often feel The Literary Life Podcast barely skims the surface, and Ms. Stanford and Mr. Banks have admitted as much. After all, how far can one delve in three ninety-minute podcasts covering Hamlet? But I want a deep dive, and I look forward to seeing if the fairy tale class I bought lives up to its hype.
Indeed, if “How to Read Fairy Tales” goes well, I will study with them on deeper levels. Not only are there some whacky classes and webinars I’d like to attend (“How to Read Beowulf”, “Seeking the Discarded Image”, “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away”, &c) There is a class, “How to read Literature”, which comes next after the fairy tale class in sequence. If that too goes well, I would try to for a fellowship with them the following year.
Much of this knowledge one could acquire with a good adviser at a non-crazy University. As that path is no longer available to me, I plan to journey down this one.
I do recommend their podcast. Enjoy.
The Loud Music Played Way Too Late Into the Night
I’m here to remind you all, if you did not read the last letter or meant to click the link but forgot, that my essay on why we should ban (or force the sale of) TikTok has been published by The Vital Center. Come give it a read. The Vital Center has also asked me to expand that essay into an article for their magazine. So, as they say, Watch This Space.
Reviso Umbra Aedificata et Peroratio
As we now have a comment section below this letter, I have a question for you all. I write on music, art, society, (occasionally) politics, education, and, of course, writing. If you don’t like my writing on writing, I honestly don’t know what you’re doing here (that is, unless you’re family). I couldn’t stop writing on writing if you wanted me to.
But as for those other topics, some are important to me more than others, but none of them are vital to include in these letters. So here’s the question: What do you like? Which do you want more of? Which do you wish I’d avoid?
As always, please
Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can
If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE.
If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor
And you’d be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.
Happy New Year! Until next we meet, I remain your fellow
Scriptor horti scriptorii, Judd Baroff