2003-04-08 - 6:48 p.m.
Dear Jessica,
I hope you are well and that this finds you not in a Percy-esque funk on a Wednesday afternoon, not serving coffee while imprisoned in a conversation about hair color, and not without something better than email to read.
I am writing with an awkward question: Is there some news about your plans that you would feel free to mention I ask for the simple reason that, as noted in the earlier email, I sent your letter of recommendation to ISI. However, the Admiral replied, mentioning something about your having withdrawn the application as you plan to enter the religious life. I had not heard anything about this, and naturally I wondered if I might inquire----thus this message.
I do hope the inquiry is less than wholly irritating or nosey. Please ignore this if you'd rather not say anything. But in the meantime, I'll keep you in my prayers, and next time I'm sipping a bourbon (not coffee), I'll offer a quiet toast in your honor.
Dr. Whalen
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sign no more, ladies, sigh no more - men were deceivers ever" (honored professors excepted, of course)
oh my, oh my... how rumors do get started, and in the funniest places. alas, i have not decided (yet) to get me to a nunnery (though it certainly has crossed my mind), as i have the small hurdle of joining the Church which i must conquer first (a thing i am tentatively hoping to do next year). i wish i had the sort of certainty required for the convent, but as of yet, i am still rather unsure of my place in the world.
the only possible explanation i can think of is that our jovial mr. duke, was either thinking himself humorous and no one got the joke, or... i just now as i was typing thought of another possibility: there is another jessica associated with ISI who is joining a convent. i think she may even be from washington state...
well, i suppose that i will call the appropriate folk and straighten out the misunderstanding. many thanks for your help and encouragment with all of this. i really do appreciate it.
and as to the Percy-esque funk on a wednesday afternoon; no. the funk i find myself in is of a distinctly monday-ish flavour, and i haven't had morning terrors for quite some time now. actually, i've been too sick to indulge in any serious malaise this week. i've been down with a nasty little cold, that for all the discomfort is has caused, has also left me with quite a bit of time to read the fellowship of the ring aloud back and forth with my mother, who is also sick. so all things considered, i cannot really complain... too loudly, anyway. there is something very satisfying in introducing others to the tolkein's enchanting epic. most of the things i am reading hold no interest for my family, so tolkein has been a welcome meeting ground for us.
you would be pleased to know i have acquired my first belloc, how the reformation happened. i finished the first chapter last night and i am anticipating a very good read. i also purchased the whit stillman trilogy, which i have to watch in the middle of the night, if i do not want a lecture about the dangers of intellectual arrogance. oh well. i believe c. s. lewis wrote about the difficulty of coming home after university to a family with whom you no longer share the same (and i cringe to use the word) values. i love them, but we no longer understand each other. perhaps it just takes a few years to settle into the changes... we'll see.
well, i ought to go. thank you again for the inquiry as to my potential vocation. rest assured that if the convent is in my future, you will be among the first
to know.
cheers,
jessica
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Dear Sister Jessica,
Your predicament at home is understandable, and the Fellowship of the Ring is probably good medicine for both you and your mother. (Better medicine than the Early Times resorted to by many a Percy hero.) I hope you feel better soon.
Men were deceivers ever. . . . Well, in this case the Admiral must have been simply mistaken. I think you are right about the other Jessica. Jason is an impish fellow, but I don't think he would be spreading something like that about.
Are you, then, still in the running for ISI? If so, I'll email the Admiral just to make sure he does not mistake you for the other Jessica. Given your note, it might be a good idea for you to move into a place of your own. Love them to death, but too long spent in such strains can be rather hard on one.
A nunnery is a fine place. The old Protestant idea that people became nuns who were fleeing from something is well belied by the reality--women who "leave the world" to embrace something, or rather, Someone. But, far off in the land of yuppies and coffee, you might think I'm pushing the idea. Not so. Such things are matters of calling, not careers.
Do take care of yourself.
Cheers,
Dr. Whalen
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"wanted: a room of my own"
honored professor,
yes, please let "the admiral" know that i am still very interested in working for isi, in any capacity he can find...
it would be good to be in the company of people with whom i have a common language. even the reading that i do here is not as stimulating as i know that i will not been required to or even have the off chance of discussing it with anyone who will have even heard of
the author. i suppose many people educated themselves like this, but it does make a person realize what a great thing college is.
however, aside from reading a great deal, i have recently taken up crocheting and am quite pleased with myself. i decided that smoking a pipe just does not behoove a young lady trying to get in touch with her feminine side, so to speak, and i needed an endearing and slightly eccentric hobby to keep myself busy. of course, i wonder about these silly fads that pop up among young, self-conscious quasi-academics - perhaps it is a strange nod to our grandparents and the simplicity and quiet of their lives. whatever it is, i am having a great time constructing gratuitous numbers of misshappen scarves that i'm sure will become next year's Christmas gifts.
oh, while i have your ear, i do have a question that you may be able to answer for me: i was talking to an ex-hillsdalian the other day, and he wanted me to get the name of the philosopher you mentioned as an aside in our thesis class. i believe he was french(?)and he wrote about the western notion of romantic love being distinctly un-christian - a love of death, or something to that effect.
well, i am opening tomorrow at starbucks, and 4 am comes early. so i will bid you farewell and thank you one more time for all your help.
jessica
and this is just for fun:
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?
In cloud of clay so cast to heaven
What shape shall man discern?
These lords may light the mystery
Of mastery or victory,
And these ride high in history,
But these shall not return.
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Dear Jessica,
The brevity of my notes may not indicate the extent to which I am succumbing to temptation in corresponding rather than dealing with the paperwork on my desk. If I delay long enough, it will go away, right?
I have sent a note to the Admiral about your continued interest in ISI. I told him that you are not (at least yet) wearing a floor-length habit that swishes and sweeps with magisterial authority while you process through rooms and down hallways to the light rattle of beads and the intimidation of religious secularists. Seriously, I did put him onto the identity confusion and informed him of your hopes to work with ISI. So be of good cheer, good heart, and we'll keep this in our prayers.
The author you mention is a Swiss philosopher, Denis De Rougemont, who published Love in the Western World in 1940. He is brilliant, thoughtful, a serious Christian and thinker, but, finally, mistaken in his understanding of romantic love. He makes the mistake of assuming that common distortions of romantic love are the thing itself, and thus he tosses the romantic baby out with the passion-blinded bath water (lovely mixed metaphor). It is an interesting work, revealing and worthwhile, but he thinks that there is a death wish at the heart of romantic love. The medieval troubadours exalted unfulfillable love in their romantic conventions and he takes this to be an actual statement about love itself. It desires frustration, and is thwarted when fulfilled. This he contrasts with marriage (not to be confused with romantic love) which is characterized not by passion but by sacrifice and responsibility. I know what he means, certainly, but it makes me wonder whom he married. A cruel joke, probably, but what I mean is that there is a Manichean thrust in his rejection of passion. Same old problem. What will we do about our wayward, disordered selves? Our passions are trouble, so the temptation is to amputate them. But if, as Percy knows, they are volatile but necessary means of our actually loving creation and each other as we are meant to love, what then? And what if our proper understanding of the world also requires the dangerous pledge of passion? I wonder if sacrifice and responsibility are not better taken up with the help of our poor passions. The can correct each other, I think.
But enough. I have to return to the drudgery on the desk, a responsibility for which I have little passion. God bless you and yours, and don't let your own passions die in the ashes of drudgery, 4am coffee, or fear.
Cheers,
Dr. Whalen
