A little light culture: conversatio morum

An essential step forward is the development of a fitting order of the day: a division of the day that gives a rhythm to the day, with a reasonably fixed pattern of exertion and relaxation, of spiritual breathing in and breathing out, of ordering one's environment and moments when one is in touch with something beautiful.

The Rule of Benedict for Beginners by Wil Derkse

In touch with something beautiful. I read that and thought, Exactly! That is what life is all about.

I've made a tiny change in my profile: the word "libertine" has been replaced with "aesthete". (Subsequently unchanged so we're back to "libertine" and hoping people get irony.) I'm not sure anybody else will or should care but I have been drifting in a direction that is less libertine and more aesthete-like for a while. I want to live a much more ordered life than I used to and, quite frankly, I am an obedient Catholic to degree that quite shocks me. That wasn't the plan but, like Charles Ryder, my old ways stopped making sense at some point.

But being in touch with something beautiful does matter. I've been reading a book called What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici in preparation to reading all of Proust again next year. It's about as eloquent a defence of modernism as you can manage. Unfortunately for Josipovici, I think the answer to his question is a simple one, modernism was passed by and it was passed by because it failed. The thing modernists set out to do—to fundamentally change the culture—they failed to do.

Josipovici claims that modernism is not a style but, while modernists certainly wanted to create something that was more than a style, that is all it is now. The word modernism refers to a style associated with a particular historic period running from the last years of the the 19th century to the 1950s. Because their aims were so ambitious, we're saddled with a name that feels a bit clumsy when applied to the past but there you are. In my neighbourhood there is an antique store that specializes in modernist antiquities. I'm sure the language can adapt, either by adopting a new word for "modernism" or a new word for "modern".

Although I don't agree with him, Josipivoci has helped me to see things with a new clarity. Although there was a time when I read Prufrock, and thought this was the way of the future, I ultimately have come to reject modernism as an ideology based on lessons I learned from Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Philip Larkin. I don't mind some modernism as a style but too much of what modernists produced is just ugly and when the public didn't get modernism, modernists blamed the public for not working hard enough instead of themselves for producing pointlessly obscure art. But the extra thing I see now is just how important the notion of an disenchanted world is to modernists. You cannot be a modernist unless you really believe that we live in a disenchanted world and I don't. I live in a world haunted by God's beauty. Thus the word change from "libertine" to "aesthete".


(The crypto-Catholic can remain as its irony always has been, or always should have been, obvious. Announcing yourself as "crypto-Catholic" is like announcing yourself as "in the closet" the second you say it it ceases to be true.)