1. I seem to be missing Friday Flotsams quite a bit lately. These are confusing times.

2. My first year of teaching has officially concluded in a chaotic rush of a ‘center cleaning day’. It was truly a life-changing experience, and I’ve learned an enormous amount even in a single year. I feel that, at long last, I’ve found a day-job I can actually pursue with some profit and, hopefully, become good at, and I’m immensely grateful for it.

3. Yesterday I read Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poem Our Lady of the Snows, which is an articulation of the typical Protestant objection to the monastic system, unable to see anything but dreariness and misery in the supposed retreat from life (put, of course, in the tones of a genius).

This line:

For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight;
…
Those he approves that ply the trade,
That rock the child, that wed the maid,
That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
And still with laughter, song and shout,
Spin the great wheel of earth about.

Made me at once think of this one:

And the Lord answering, said to her: Martha, Martha, thou art careful, and art troubled about many things: But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her.

4. To have many thriving monasteries are one of the chief marks of a healthy society. When there are places where men go for the sole purpose of pursuing spiritual perfection, then it is a sign that spiritual perfection is something valued and appreciated, and thus that the whole spiritual realm is acknowledged as having a claim upon society. Stevenson, as a modern, has trouble with this concept. He is of the type to ask “but what good does it do?” by which he means “how does this help us to make as many people as possible healthy, productive, wealthy, and safe?”

The motto of the modern world might be put as, “seek ye first what you will eat and what you will drink and what you will put on, and the Kingdom of Heaven will be offered unto you.”

5. To say that all human law and society rest on Force is to have it backwards. Human society rests upon relations and duties. Force is the proper corrective measure when these fall out of place.

To say that force is the foundation of civilization is like saying surgery is the foundation of health.

6. The first step to being a writer is to have something to say that is worth saying. The second is to say it. The next ten million steps amount to refining the first two.

7. I once heard a French Canadian saying that I thought was pretty amusing:

“There are four peoples in the British Isles: there are the Irish, who don’t know what they want and are willing to die for it. There are the Welsh, who pray on their knees and prey on their neighbours. There are the Scots, who keep the Sabbath and anything else they can get their hands on. And the English, who claim to be a self-made people, thus relieving Almighty God of a horrible responsibility.”

My Addition: and then, of course, there are the Americans, who are all four at once and always expecting praise for it.