Book of Revelations
Short, Edward
Book of Revelations Father Rutler proves wit and God can coexist. BY EDWARD SHORT The parent tradition of English literature includes many subsidiary traditions. There are the...
...Some celestial symposium made up of all the generals from Alexander to George Patton, who did not make the distinction, would be either the jolliest of f?tes or a pitched battle, but overwhelming odds are that they would be unanimous with Wellington’s motion...
...Eliot, W.H...
...There are what Penelope Fitzgerald called the “kitchen-table” novelists, female heads of families who, like Mrs...
...When Oliphant’s husband died of tuberculosis, she was pregnant with her third child and deep in debt...
...Are coincidences mere chance...
...Is this a trifl e? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors...
...dence as a kind of ironic commentary on the text of our lives...
...She paid off the debts, reared her children, looked after her bibulous brother, and in the evenings at the kitchen table, wrote—98 novels, 25 biographies, and about 50 short stories...
...With a one-hour intermission, the Ring Cycle lasts thirteen hours...
...And the 1 before the 9? It stands for “something secret that has to be unfolded...
...Wagner fi nished The Flying Dutchman on a September 13, premiered Tannh?user on a March 13 and the Ring of the Nibelungen on an August 13...
...I picture myself wiping my brow as I tell all those amiable and eager faces that the expenses and receipts of the Glasgow World Exposition of 1901 were absolutely identical...
...Catholic in scope, it includes chapters on everything from geography and mesmerism to baseball and Napoleon...
...Then there are the comedians of class, about whose subjects V.S...
...This latest book is an entertaining jeu d’esprit on the role coincidence plays in life and history...
...Here, the wit in Rutler gives way to the sage, but whether he is being witty or wise, or both, he is always a delight...
...Wagner fi rst heard Lohengrin performed thirteen years after its completion, wrote thirteen stage works, was married to Cosima for thirteen years and died thirteen months after fi nishing Parsifal on May 13, 1882...
...The 9, Farrakhan explains, stands for the length of time that we spend in the womb...
...In Remote People (1931), Evelyn Waugh described traveling through Ethiopia in the company of “rival Byzantinists at variance...
...I won’t spoil things by quoting the peroration...
...The applause subsides and my bodyguard draws closer as I look to heaven and cry out that the arithmetic sum of the years of Czar Alexander II’s birth and death (1818 and 1881) are the same...
...Apropos arma virumque, Rutler has some timely truths to impart, which should give pause to those who hear only the counsel of defeatism in such parallels...
...His own name has thirteen letters and he was born in 1813, the digital sum of which is thirteen, and he died seventy years later on February 13...
...In one chapter Louis Farrakhan is described expatiating on the number 19 to the “million men” on the Mall in Washington...
...His mentor Liszt, who fi rst met him on September 13 in 1841, visited him on October 13, 1854 in Switzerland where Wagner fl ed from Dresden on May 13, 1849, and where he was exiled for thirteen years...
...There are the poet-critics John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S...
...Recently, many have alleged parallels between Iraq and Vietnam...
...therefore I now give you my parting advice...
...You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who never understood arithmetic...
...Trollope was left in equally parlous straits by her husband—a feckless clergyman who went to his grave attempting to write a history of ecclesiastical rites—but she recouped the family fortunes by writing the bestselling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), after which she churned out no less than 35 novels...
...A mad world calls it madness, but in small sane pockets of that world it is called sanctity...
...It should amuse and instruct a wide audience...
...Oliphant and Frances Trollope (Anthony’s mother)—and, indeed, Fitzgerald herself—wrote books to keep the bailiffs at bay...
...I am not sure what we are to conclude from this review of arms and men, but it is never amiss to conjure up the victor of Waterloo in his celebrated dispatch of June, 1815: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won...
...Rutler marvels at the electrifying effect that this vatic pronouncement has on Farrakhan’s auditors, and then says: Should I ever face an audience of a million men in the nation’s capital . . . I would shout into the microphone portentous puzzles that escaped even [Farrakhan’s attention...
...Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic...
...In Rutler’s Coincidentally, readers will meet with similarly choice absurdities...
...You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and, you ought, dear Lucy to have carried but one...
...Rutler recognizes that “an irresponsible mind may make too much” of coincidence...
...Author of 14 books on theology, history, cultural issues, and the lives of the saints, Rutler is also host of a weekly television program on EWTN...
...But he also recognizes that only the barbarous mind can be indifferent to connections that argue not only the coherence but the wonder of history...
...by the time you return, I shall probably have received my fi rst paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you...
...Or proof that God intervenes in the unfolding of events...
...Coincidentally is a comic tour de force that gives new life to Sterne’s great motto: “Vive la bagatelle...
...Here is a typical effusion: For the dark and driven Richard Wagner, thirteen had mixed connotations...
...You know, in the fi rst sum of yours I ever saw, there was a mistake...
...Numerological mania has never been given a funnier send-up...
...Most of us are conscious of coinciEdward Short is completing a book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries, which will be published by Continuum...
...Rutler shows that coincidences may not be as rare as we are accustomed to imagine...
...Henry Fielding and William Makepeace Thackeray were the masters of this tradition...
...But no group produced wittier writing than the witty divines Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, and Sydney Smith...
...The one kind of humor that always gets this right is literally graceful...
...William Tecumseh Sherman, having graduated from West Point in the year that the capital of New Zealand was named for the Iron Duke, agreed as he surveyed the carnage of Shiloh: “The scenes on this fi eld would have cured anybody of war...
...Don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year...
...The letter that Smith wrote to the daughter of a lady friend is a good sample— which, coincidentally, concerns a subject dear to the author under review...
...Auden, and William Empson...
...He also sees in coincidence a summons to sanity: Not to laugh at coincidences is a prescription for weeping at coincidences and that way lies endless madness...
...Chesterton, who remarked in one of his Father Brown stories that “there is in life an element of elfi n coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss...
...In this, he agrees with G.K...
...Pritchett once remarked: “One glance at the English upper classes imposing their private fantasies on whatever is going on, treating everything from war downwards as though it were happening in one of their country houses, has been enough to provide comedians with material for a lifetime...
...and God bless you, dear child . . . The divine most responsible for rejuvenating this lively tradition is George Rutler, Roman Catholic pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City...
...Suffi ce it to say that here is a skit tailor-made for one of Rutler’s television programs...
Vol. 13 • April 2008 • No. 29
