Thursday, October 06, 2005

God & Bertie Wooster

Just picked up the new issue of First Things with includes the article with the best title ever, the aforementioned "God & Bertie Wooster". Just a taste:
"Suppose that words were all you had. Suppose the great edifice of Western civilization had collapsed around you- all its truths, all its certainties, all its aspirations smashed to meaningless shards. Suppose... oh, I don't know, suppose that it was 1919, and the Great War had just finished cracking Europe across its knee like a stick, and you were living in what the poet T.S. Eliot in one of his occasional sour moods called the Waste Land, and words were all you had: stray lines from lost poems, refrains from otherwise unforgotten songs, tags from half-erased sermons - fragments, only fragments, to shore against your ruins. What would you do?

...

"But in those dark days of the twentieth century, in the middle of the apparent collapse of it all, there was at least one man who had the courage, the intelligence, and the sheer persevering goofiness simply to ignore the whole mess, frittering away his days by writing books like Leave It to Psmith, Young Men in Spats, and My Man Jeeves."
Haven't read it yet, of course. I'll give my impressions once I have.

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