A Christmas Poem

This is a wonderful poem, one of my favourites. Chesterton finds a beautiful paradox at the heart of Christmas:

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost---how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

The Noble Horace

A thousand bright stars lit the sky. With each second the stars grew brighter and more present. They were not a uniform colour: Horace could see red, yellow, purple, white, amber -- he counted the colours eagerly.

The stars seemed to move across the sky. Horace was sure they were murmuring to him. But he was not a curious creature, and so explanations had never mattered to him. He was content to simply enjoy the spectacle.

Several years ago a large probe, about the size of a ten storey building, had landed on Horace’s planet. It had remained untouched until one day, in one of his long solitary walks, Horace stumbled upon it. The screen on the probe lit up and began to ask what even Horace realised were questions. Each question used a simple pictogram format, and Horace had little problem answering most of them.

But when it came to one question he was particularly confused. Having taken a camera survey of Horace, the probe displayed a pictorial representation of Horace’s species. A very small slider then appeared at the bottom of the screen -- too small for Horace to handle with any delicacy -- which enabled him to increase the number of Horaces on the screen. The intention behind the question was to determine a planet’s population size. The empire that sent the probe had never encountered planets with more than a few thousand sentient lives, and so they believed a planet’s entire population could be represented on a big enough screen.

But Horace did not know what it meant. He guessed it might refer to age. He was not quite sure of his age; it was one of the few things that had puzzled him. Indeed, he could not remember not existing. So he pulled the slider to the maximum possible setting.

The 'stars' that now lit up the sky were in fact spaceships -- a planetary invasion initiated in response to Horace’s answer to the probe. They believed they would be colonising the most populous planet ever discovered. It was to be a source of great imperial pride.

But as the ships entered the planet’s atmosphere they saw no evidence of cities or indeed any signs of civilisation. In fact, they saw little evidence of any life at all.

It was only as they approached the surface that they began to see a figure waving at them. He was easily as tall as a skyscraper and had a ridiculous, innocent smile.

It was Horace.

Once they had landed Horace was thrilled to welcome his little guests. He took care not to tread on them and spoke to them in a soft, caressing voice, but which nevertheless felt to the aliens like a very strong wind.

The invading force tried tried to anaesthetise Horace, shooting him with thousands of needles. But this only served to send Horace into a fit of giggles. Having failed to conquer by force, the commander of the fleet, Lupegoggicol the Goiteneidarous, tried what is the last resort for any empire: diplomacy. First, he spoke through some means of amplification; when that failed he tried projecting a holographic image of himself, but his gestures were meaningless to Horace, who ended up imitating the commander as if he were being taught some form of dance.

After spending several days touring the planet, the aliens concluded that Horace was the only sentient inhabitant. As far as Horace could remember he had always been the only inhabitant. There were many fish and a few species of insects which Horace would play with (and occasionally eat), and which were at least twice the size of the aliens. But there was only one Horace. Indeed, Horace was fascinated to see other intelligent creatures like himself, even if they were less than one-eightieth of his size.

The aliens soon left. They realised it would be impossible to bring civilisation to a planet of one person. And so Horace again stood there, with his happy, ridiculous smile, waving the aliens goodbye.

The Decline of Manners

Like most people, I don't pay much attention to studies unless they conform to what I already believe. I'm not sure they are particularly useful except as a rhetorical device. For modern man, a sentence beginning with 'Studies say that...' or 'They say that...' is used in the same authoritative way that classical quotations once were. There is an endless desire to back up one's argument with 'facts', however arbitrary, and preferably of the pseudo-scientific kind. I blame it on (most) university education, to which half of the population is now subjected, and in which one is marked not on logic or strength of argument, nor especially on clarity of thought or ingenuity, but on footnotes and bibliographies. Everything has to reference something else. And so people give studies and other nonsenses almost biblical authority.

There is a new study which says that traditional manners are considered 'outdated' by the young. The results are not interesting, but the subject is. I'm afraid that far too many people, though they can see for themselves the ever-increasing vulgarity of manners, refuse to believe it, often saying that they need to see some sort of study or evidence. Such a study doesn't exist of course, because no one admits the results of a study against which they are already prejudiced. One sees the same phenomenon with immigration, where people refuse to believe its negative effects and demand to be shown some sort of study. And when you do present such evidence, they refuse to countenance it. There are always hostile questions about who conducted the study, their 'biases', picking at possible flaws in the methodology; many simply ignore the study and instead offer a counter-study -- about which they are far less critical.

In this spirit I offer you the aforementioned study which tells us that manners are declining. As I have no wish to question the results of the study, I will gloss over the odd facts of the study's provenance (why, a sceptic might ask, was the study conducted by an insurance firm?) and I will gleefully ignore the limits of its methodology. The study tells us that young people consider 'please' and 'thank you' as outdated courtesies. Nor will most say 'bless you' when someone sneezes, or hold the door open for you.

Of course, I didn't need a study to tell me this. I sense that people don't like you being polite to them; they see you opening a door for them, pulling out a chair for them, or offering to take their coat as some kind of inconvenience -- perhaps even an insult to their selfist way of life. They want to keep to themselves, and they want you to keep to yourself.

I quite understand this. This attitude exists within me too, though unlike many I try to overcome it. Rudeness is often much easier than kindness, and indeed more immediately rewarding. Good manners are a way of making kindness and respect into a habit, because otherwise too many of us default to a sort of standoffishness.

From Up on Poppy Hill

This is certainly one of the more underrated of the Studio Ghibli films. Like most of their films, its themes are family, place, nature, custom -- all those wonderful neglected things. Hayao Miyazaki may often be described as a left-winger, but if that's true he is one of the most conservative left-wingers around. Miyazaki a thoughtful man who finds much to hold onto from the past but equally does not shy away from criticising his nation's history. Neither does he fall into the modern trap of being enamoured with the glitzy hi-tech present; he knows what he would like to change (and often change back).

Poppy Hill, however, is much more about resisting change. Interestingly, those resisting change -- some horrible modern building supposed to replace a charming old university building -- are students. These students are not at all like the students (or young people generally) in modern British society. They are all impeccably polite and deferential, but without ever loosening their principles. They position themselves as custodians of the past against ruthless, cultureless modernity.

Miyazaki's vision is interesting because Japan not merely has an especially vicious imperial past, but moreover a vicious imperial past that ended in catastrophic defeat. One would think it would be hard for anyone to the left of Yukio Mishima to defend the past, yet Japan, even taking into account its astonishing modernisation and westernisation, seems less embarrassed of its history than most of the victorious end-of-history West.

Japan had the good sense after the war not to do away with millennia of tradition. Could the West learn from Japan? We have never had a more uneasy relationship with our past than we do in this century. I think the success of the Studio Ghibli films in the West -- which are truly great animated films unlike the wretched superficiality of modern Disney films -- shows an immutable longing for a world of mystery, tradition, continuity, wonder and goodness. These all can be readily found in British history, no less than in Japanese culture, and they can still be found in their most elemental form in the woods and forests of these islands, if only we would discover them.