Daniel

“until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“Charles Ryder, the successful dilettante, the antiquarian, the Bohemian poseur, is finally woven into what is a true culture. Brideshead is his home, not because he grew up there (he did not), but because it has placed him, as if he were a stone, in an ancient edifice of meaning. He is in communion with the Crusaders who fought at Acre, now in ruins, and Jerusalem, also in ruins. He is in communion with the friend of his youth, the alcoholic Sebastian, now an exile, a pilgrim, and a man with a home, half in and half out of a community of monks in North Africa, where one morning, as his sister Cordelia foretells, “after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”12 It beats secular exhaustion and a shot of morphine. This being home is not a sentiment. It is a felt reality, and from this day on it gives form to Charles’s life. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” a soldier tells him in the last line of the book.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“Employing the engine of compulsory and universal education, we have turned the school into a factory for the production and propagation of political opinion, uniform and relentless. If you cannot persuade the parents, you can stamp the children, as you would stamp molten wax with the same seal, hundreds at a time.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“[H]owever dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. It is true that ever since the French Revolution attempts have been repeatedly made to manufacture feast days and holidays that have no connection with divine worship, or are sometimes even opposed to it: “Brutus days,” or even that hybrid, “Labor Day.” In point of fact the stress and strain of giving them some kind of festal appearance is one of the very best proofs of the significance of divine worship for a feast; and nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World