All humor aside, it’s somewhat heartbreaking to see the old kitchen looking so empty and forlorn.
That sounds odd, I’m sure; but our kitchen isn’t just a kitchen, it’s also the dining room, and it’s really the heart of the whole house. And it’s looked more or less the way it does now—or, rather, the way it did last week—for virtually all of my life. Now it’s empty, and I’ll never eat in the old kitchen again. It’s sad.
We have had our first meal in the “temporary kitchen,” a simple affair of bread and cheese. I have called this remodel an adventure, and so it seems fitting that we begin with adventure food. I have no idea where the horses have got to, nor when the orcs and trolls will be showing up.
Meanwhile, the old kitchen is nearly empty: only empty bags, an umbrella or two, and a few stray bits of what’s-all-this-then remain. Oh, and the refrigerator and some coolers to receive its content tomorrow morning before the contractors move it.
The Marines arrived at 9:15 AM and established a beachhead. Much packing and toting ensued. We begin to see the daylight at the end of the tunnel…unless that’s an on-coming train.
The gnomes didn’t come and finish packing up the kitchen while we slept.
Time for Plan B.
Bad craziness and much chaos. Progress, however, has been made, with attendant back pain. Tomorrow is the final push.
Today is D-Day minus three…which is to say that on Wednesday, bright and early, the contractors are going to be here to demolish my kitchen, which I love, the kitchen which is engrained in my bones, the kitchen of my earliest memories, the kitchen with impractical, unusable cabinetry, the kitchen with no place to put a dishwasher, in order to replace it, in the fullness of time, with a kitchen of beautiful tile, a kitchen of soapstone counter-tops and decent lighting, a kitchen with significant cabinet space, a kitchen that looks like it has always been here even though it hasn’t, a kitchen that will make my wife happy, a kitchen with a dishwasher.
Oh, and a powder room.
All this is to note that my “deep thoughts” might not be quite as deep over the next week; or perhaps they will be even deeper, depending on what kind of depth you’re thinking of.
On the other hand, perhaps I’ll have more time to write after the next few days, because it’s not like I’m going to be spending my time, you know, eating.
Not Descartes’ method, but mine.
I’m writing about philosophy, but I want to make it clear that I’m not a philosopher; at best, I’m a student of philosophy. (I suppose you could call me a philosophomore.) I’ve given my reasons for rejecting the modern philosophy I’ve encountered, and my reasons for thinking that St. Thomas and Aristotle have something to teach me. Consequently, I’m trying to learn from them; and in my recent posts I’m trying to share the things that I’ve learned. I am in no way trying to argue rigorously for these positions; I’m simply trying to explain them as best I can. In short, if you think I’ve asserted something without adequately supporting it, that’s quite likely the case; and if it bothers you, let me know. I might be able to cast more light on it.
Lars Walker has a new book out, and he was kind enough to send me a review copy. It’s called Troll Valley, and I think it’s his best work to date.
They always tell aspiring writers that they should write what they know. As commonly understood, I think this is hogwash—a writer needs to be able to go beyond his personal experience to date. But there’s no denying that when it’s done well, the personal touch can bring an immediacy and a concreteness to a work. And that’s precisely what Lars has done here.
Troll Valley concerns the childhood and young adulthood of a young fellow named Christian Anderson, who was born in the small town of Epsom, Minnesota at a time when the Civil War was still in living memory. His family and his neighbors are all Norwegian immigrants, and he grows up speaking Norwegian at home. He and many of his neighbors are members of the Haugean sect of Lutheranism, an austere sect banning all dancing, alcohol, and similar frivolity. This is, if I recall correctly, the background of Lars’ own family; and at one point, in passing, Christian meets a fellow named John Walker, who I suspect is one of Lars’ own ancestors.
Christian’s obvious problem is that he was born with a useless arm, and in a farming community, where physical strength is required, he soons learns to think that he’s no good. But this is not simply a historical novel about the horrors of growing up. Christian has an additional problem. When he is scared, or angry, he begins to see “red caps,” the little men of Scandinavian folklore. And he soon learns that when he sees them he has to calm himself, to shut down his emotions, that, in fact, he has to avoid conflict…because otherwise something awful will happen. He is helped in this by his godmother, Margit, who I hesitate to call his fairy godmother because that gives entirely the wrong impression; but that in fact is what she is. The result is a book about anger and betrayal, about misguided ideals, about learning to live with your demons.
I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’ll limit myself to a few observations.
First, Faerie is hard to get right. It must be mysterious, and perilous, and fraught with danger for the mortal man who is touched by it. It must not be allowed to become too familiar, or it quite literally loses its magic. Lars handles this deftly and well, while putting his own unique spin on it.
Second, this is a neat period piece, about a time and place and people I hadn’t known much about. Now I do.
And third, the book includes everything it ought to, and still left me wanting more. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I’m still pondering it.
Troll Valley is available as an e-book from the Kindle, Nook and (IIRC) the Apple iBooks stores.
John Christopher, author of the Tripods Trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire, died a couple of days ago. I read the Tripods trilogy numerous times; the middle book was by far my favorite.
Christopher had a few other books that I read as well, including The Sword of the Spirits trilogy and The Lotus Caves, along with a whole bunch I never got to; and it turns out that his real name was Samuel Youd and that he wrote books under seven different names. Who new?
It’s probably time and past time to introduce my boys to the Tripods.
According to Aristotle, when you look at a thing, you see what it is. When you look at a dog, you see that it’s a dog. When you look at a cat, you see that it’s a cat. When you look at a table, you see that it’s a table. He calls this “apprehending the essence of the thing”. “Apprehend” is an interesting word; it means “to sieze”, as opposed to “comprehend”, which means “to grasp”.
So Aristotle isn’t saying that when you look at a dog, you understand fully and completely what it is that makes a dog a dog. He’s simply saying that when you look at a dog, you know it’s a dog, rather than, say, a cat. Even tiny children can tell the difference at a glance.
According to Aristotle, this is simply how our minds work. The dog has an essence, which is simply to say that there is a kind of thing called a dog, that has the nature of being a dog. Your senses perceive the dog, and from the images produced by your senses (which includes the smell of wet dog, the feel of fur, the sound of barking) your intellect abstracts the essence and presents it to you. You don’t need to analyze the appearance of the dog; you just look at it, and know, hey, that’s a dog!
In our modern world, where we tend to think of everything in terms of software and computation, we tend to think, “Oh, I see the dog, and then some pattern recognition software runs in my brain—and very quickly, too!—and it recognizes the pattern of characteristics that makes a dog a dog, and I say, ‘Oh, there’s a dog!'” But according to Aristotle, it’s really simpler than that. The dog has an essence, which is a metaphysical reality; and our intellects are equipped to apprehend that reality, to abstract Dogginess from the Dog that stands before us.
And our intellect saves that essence for later, so we can recognize the next dog we see. Essences are “intelligible”; we can know them directly.
I’ve been reading a book called The Structure of Objects, by Kathrin Koslicki; it’s an attempt, so far as I can tell, to pull some Aristotelian concepts into modern analytic philosophy, about which more later. But only some concepts. She can’t quite bring herself to believe that essences are real, so she resorts to the more modern conception of “natural kinds”; and “natural kinds” are defined, more or less, as clusters of properties that objects of the kind have. According to Koslicki, we recognize a dog because it has floppy ears and a waggy tail and an elongated furry body like a golden retriever or (ahem) a pit bull. Oh, wait, that doesn’t work.
Great Danes and Toy Poodles look rather different, and one could be excused for thinking of them as different species, based purely on surface features. And yet both are known to be dogs. One could appeal to genetics, to numbers of chromosomes and lineages to say, oh yes, these are both dogs; but then we are getting past characteristics that are easily apprehended. In short, appeals to science don’t explain how a two-year-old can look at a Great Dane and a Toy Poodle and recognize them both as fundamentally the same kind of thing.
To be fair to Koslicki, I’m seriously over-simplifying her position, but it doesn’t invalidate my point: essences are something that can be apprehended, seized in a moment without any deep analysis. Koslicki’s position requires a fair degree of comprehension before the objects around us can be grouped into kinds; and that’s nonsense.
And so, as Aristotle says, essences—universals, as they are sometimes called—have a real existence, and our minds are equipped to know them.
The View from the Foothills 