Saturday Links
Rubens’s castle, Dostoevsky’s faith, André Aciman in Rome, Salman Rushdie in court, and more.
Good morning! The latest issue of First Things contains a number of articles (and poems!) I know subscribers of this newsletter will want to read, starting with Gary Saul Morson on Dostoevsky’s faith:
When Dostoevsky was being led out to Siberia after being convicted of treasonous involvement in an anti-Tsarist organization, Fonvizina gave him a copy of the New Testament, the only book prisoners were allowed to have. Five years later, when she was deeply depressed, he wrote his famous letter to console her.
Dostoevsky tells Fonvizina that he, too, has suffered from despair, and that “at such moments one thirsts for faith like ‘parched grass,’ and one finds it at last because the truth becomes evident in unhappiness.” Dostoevsky later chose as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24)—which seems to suggest that faith can be achieved only through great suffering.
You’ll also want to read Dan Hitchens’s review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity: “I think religion has got everything appallingly wrong,” Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch told an interviewer in 2015, ‘and it has been terrible for us in sexual terms.’ Now here is the book to prove it, and you could not find a more distinguished historian to make the case . . . The brutal reality, MacCulloch tells us (twice), is that ‘there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex.’ Christian history is full of self-contradictions and abrupt reversals; the implication—which MacCulloch eventually spells out—is that if today’s churches introduce novelties into their teachings, that itself is no novelty; and that conservatives forlornly appealing to ‘perennial doctrine’ might as well call upon Odin and Thor to help them. There is, MacCulloch wants to show, no such thing as unchanging tradition. His task is ‘demolishing the myths of the past,’ however much it [will displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject.’ In short, this is the historian as teller of hard truths.”
Rubens’s castle: “Just a few miles outside the city, Het Steen has become the latest addition to the growing collection of Rubens memorabilia in Flanders. For years privately owned, it was bought in 2019 by the Flemish government’s tourist arm. Rubens – who possessed what today might be considered the unartistic qualities of enormous financial and reputational success and business savviness – snapped it up in 1635 after its owner had gone bankrupt and the castle had been seized by the Council of Brabant. Rubens settled in, proudly declaring himself lord of Het Steen. It was here that he produced several of his greatest landscapes.” Here are more pictures of Rubens’s castle and here are some paintings he did while living there.
In Commentary, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Owen Flanagan’s What Is It Like to Be an Addict?
Having been addicted to alcohol and “benzos” for decades, Flanagan, a former philosophy professor at Duke and Wellesley, incorporates both a personal and a scientific (in the broadest sense) approach to the topic . . . That all addiction is caused by trauma and that addiction itself is a “disease” are the most common ways you hear people on the front lines of social work and policymaking describe drug and alcohol problems. Both the causes of addiction and the way we should treat it are thereby placed within a framework that absolves the addict. Whether or not this might be accurate, the thinking goes, removing the “stigma” or the “shame” from addiction will encourage people to get help.
But, as Flanagan notes, this is not how addiction or recovery actually works for most people. First, most heavy drinkers and drug users recover, and many recover without getting any treatment. They experience shame about their situation, and because of that shame, they decide to alter it.
Speaking of health, your brain is full of microplastics: “The most common plastic found was polyethylene, which is used in plastic bags and food and drink packaging. It made up 75% of the total plastic on average. The particles in the brain were mostly nanoscale shards and flakes of plastic.”
As of this writing, more than half a million people have already passed through the “Holy Door” at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in honor of this year’s Jubilee of Hope. Rome is, as a result, flooded with tourists, and as my colleague Gerard O’Connell reports, the torrent is not expected to end anytime soon.
Jaded travelers might be forgiven for crossing Rome off their destination list this year. Luckily, we have a new book from the novelist and memoirist André Aciman chronicling his formative year in Rome as a teenager. If you don’t want to travel to Rome, try Roman Year instead.
Salman Rushdie in court: “The author’s recollection of the events was vivid at times. He described seeing a person wearing dark clothing rushing at him from his right, and the attack unfolded within seconds after that. He said his attacker was ‘stabbing and slashing’ him repeatedly, for a total of 15 times. At one point, Rushdie said he thought he was dying, and described laying on the stage in ‘a lake of blood’.”
Paul Kingsnorth on a pilgrimage: “What’s the point of this? . . . I just feel like it. I like wandering around edgelands and interesting places, and now that I have a new camera I like photographing them too.”
Poem: Matthew Buckley Smith, “Letter to a Middle-Aged Poet”
William Deresiewicz reads: “The mistake people make when they talk about reading today (I have made it) is to accept that it is just one thing. The screen, our fractured attention spans, et cetera ad infinitum. But it is not one thing and never was and needn’t be. Culture, Lionel Trilling said, is a pattern of oppositions. Every culture calls forth its countercultures, which are a part of culture, too. There are many forms of reading, even now, and many people doing them. Nothing is ‘inevitable’, as the tech lords would have us believe. No one is making you do this. (‘For the individual,’ said Harold Rosenberg, ‘the last voice in the issue of being or not being himself is still his own.’) You can go your way, and you can even attempt to bring others along.”
The return of Eurasia: “In a riveting new book, The Eurasian Century, Hal Brands offers a perfectly timed diagnosis of the mega-region that has long been the world’s strategic hinge and the cockpit of global rivalry.”
It’s lambing season, and Brian Miller is here to tell you about it: “It’s 5 a.m. when I step out into the cold morning. Lambing season is nearly upon us, and late night and early morning welfare checks on the flock are now the norm. Once lambing gets into full swing, midnight and 3 a.m. visits to the barn and paddocks will be added . . . Some of the girls—the smaller-framed Dorpers in particular—already look like WWI dreadnoughts, each a battleship low and wide, waiting to unload its contents.”
Emily Witt talks about the reviews of her book Health and Safety: A Breakdown: “WITT: Mostly, I’ve been happy. There have been reviews in a couple of conservative publications where the headline construction is like, “Emily Witt Started Partying and Ruined Her Life.” This happened with Future Sex,too. They’ll say, “This is really well written . . .” REINES: But . . . WITT: . . . but they’re basically accusing me of false consciousness. When I say at the end of the book that I don’t think what happened was because of drugs, they are like, No, she’s wrong. It’s because of drugs.” It’s because of the drugs.
Forthcoming: Christopher J. Scalia, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read) (Regnery, May 13): “If you’ve participated in many conversations about politics over the past several years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard someone compare our national situation to something from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or George Orwell’s 1984. And if you’ve had a conversation with conservatives about their favorite novels, it’s likely that you’ve heard some variation of Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Tom Wolfe. These writers, of very different literary qualities, all have something to contribute to conversations about conservative ideas. It’s healthy for people to share a core group of books in common. The problem is that our group of shared books has become too limited. The consequence for conservatives in particular is that we’ve so narrowed our literary vision, we’ve blinded ourselves to a great tradition of literature that conveys conservative ideas.”