More Delights and Disdains . . .

of a diminutive nature of late . . . Number 15

Disdains:

Finding it hard to believe that Otto the Dachshund has male pattern baldness . . . just like me except that male dachshunds lose the hair on their ears. I learned this fact during his recent vet visit. I just thought it resulted from his sister chewing his ears when they were puppies. Poor thing . . .

Delights:

Spending part of Spring break working with my son on my old 1968 BSA motorcycle. I use the word “work” loosely for me as I just sat back and hollered out advice such as “don’t slip in that big oil puddle” and “son, you need to kick it harder” or “Watch out for that dog”. As a reminder, we removed the gas tank last Fall, flushed out the rust several times with distilled white vinegar, coated the inside of the tank with foggy oil, and stored it until last week. We remounted the tank, replaced the fuel valves leading to the carbs, filled the tank with fuel, topped up the oil, charged the battery and after several kicks to the starter, it fired up and ran perfectly. Behold, a resurrection miracle of sorts.

Finishing William Faulkner’s Pylon, a book that explores the futility and desperation found in the pilots, wing walkers and crew whose fans make out to be celebrities but who are addicted to living in the moment as we all sometimes are. In this book, Faulkner adds to his famous indecipherableness with passages such as this gem:

“It would be there—the eternal smell of the coffee the sugar the hemp sweating slow iron plates above the forked deliberate brown water and lost lost lost all ultimate blue of latitude and horizon; the hot rain gutterfull plaiting the eaten heads of shrimp; the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand airplants swinging stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonorafeet tigerbarred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in a myriad oil—tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.”

Viewing Freud’s Last Session, a 2023 film with Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud and Matthew Goode as C. S. Lewis. The film depicts a semi-fictitious discussion between those two on various topics. While it is true that Freud was visited by an Oxford don shortly before his death, there is no proof that it was Lewis. However, the director conveys an accurate depiction of Lewis the Christian and Freud the Atheist. The performances by the two actors make it worth watching.

Listening to an audio clip of Christopher Hitchens’, another renowned atheist, 2006 address to the University of Toronto debating club on the absolute necessity of the right to free speech. His attack upon religion in general begins about 12 minutes into the address, where he states that organized religion is the main source of hatred in the world - a statement that I cannot disagree with. I have a collection of Hitchens’ political and literary essays that I have enjoyed reading over the years, but his incredible mind that just fell short in comprehending why Jesus Christ transcends mere organized religion and is, in fact, the Son of God.

C. S. Lewis, speaking in 1942 (published in Mere Christianity in 1952), gave the argument for Jesus Christ being the Son of God its most memorable formulation (imagine a debate between Lewis and Hitchens):

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” (Mere Christianity)