An e-mail from my father brought the sad news of the collapse of much of the Kinzua Bridge, home of my childhood fear of heights (well, that and the lookout tower atop Mount Davis).
No word yet on rebuilding, but I suppose it would be hard to justify putting it all back up. The damage is extensive (scroll down to see it pre-fall), and I don't suppose the utility of the bridge is great enough to justify the big spend it would take to put the bridge right.
A bit like the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain, I guess.
Has anyone else had this experience? Blogger eats your template. You innocently republish and suddenly you've lost everything...I just had a brief section of header in my "view|source".
I was lucky enough to be able to dig back through my Explorer archive and rebuild the template from a reasonably recent version. But, Wow! What a heart-stopping moment to realise that it's not Blogger refusing to publish, but that it has published and suddenly you've lost your site layout.
Learnt me a lesson...keep a back-up of the template (and I should also bother to get a back-up of my content) somewhere on my own machine.
This would not happen if I had the time, know-how and host config to run MT or some other system. I have been following the TypePad demo with interest over at Randy's Beautiful Horizons. It makes a real difference: see his BlogSpot site for comparison.
My most recent reading has been Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Elie interlaces the biographies of four American Catholic writers in the mid-20th Century, about the time when, he argues, American Catholicism was coming of age. The subject of the book is the "pilgrimage" these writers make of their lives, and the impact they had on the American conscience in the post-Second World War era.
I really bought this book as a follow-on to the Thomas Merton book I read earlier this year. I have seen lots of references in my browsing around on Catholic subjects to its other three subjects: Dorothy Day, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. One thing that caught my attention, obviously, was the fact that three of these four writers were converts to Catholicism. So far, an interesting read, made more so by Elie's technique of interspersing snippets of the lives of each, the tangents, the people they knew in common, even when their paths crossed.
I went to mass yesterday morning, and after sitting quietly through the service, I spoke with the pastor and asked to begin the journey to convert to Roman Catholicism.
This, then, is the path I have chosen. It has been some time coming, and I felt it took a bit of resolution to finally take that first big step.
I feel I will blog a bit about this, but not overmuch - I do not intend that this become a religious blog except to the extent that I become a religious person and that colours my worldview. There is much more to it than I can possibly explain.
I want to give Samuel Florman a minute's credit. He is a civil engineer who has enjoyed his career - a builder of structures who celebrates in the building the triumph of human ingenuity over nature. He is a passionate defender of the unpassionate profession of engineering. Engineers, in his view, just get on with it.
Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering was first published in the 1970s as a response to the anti-technology movement that features highly in my "thinking over" list. He argues that these critics (Ellul, Roszak, Mumford, etc) are wrong in vilifying technology as a standalone evil...technology, he argues, is the manifestation of man's desire for progress.
I first noted Florman's book in a Slashdot discussion back in April. I was pleased to see at least a few Slashdotters come up with an awareness of the issues surrounding the role of appropriate technology. I suppose that at least some engineers (myself included) ask these questions in spite of the unflinching acceptance of the role of technology (for better or worse) that the engineering establishment supposes as the raison d'etre of the profession, generally speaking.
Florman is well-read and considerate, and at moments I could accept some of his contentions. But largely, I could not. I felt that Florman was using technology, or technique, as a straw man, to skirt the major issue...the role of capital, and the need for growth, as a prime driver in the Western economies. Florman never arrived at the watershed...he acknowledged that sometimes technology went too far, but he never acknowledged its intrinsic need to do so, to move to the point where it became technology for technology's sake. I think the critics would argue that this is a natural progression, and that we may not be aware of it. But iatrogenic illness, teaching that does not educate - these are systemic failures of the advance of progress for its own sake. Illich in particular (not cited by Florman) calls attention to the mechanisms by which technique takes hold of the modern economy - we spend more effort fixing the ills caused by progress than we benefit from the marginal "progress" itself. We reach a stage (gradually) at which we can no longer distinguish the common weal from the noisy quest for economic advancement tied to financial gain.
I don't want to go too far with this. I think Florman makes an attempt to keep engineers from losing sleep at night, challenged as they might be by the anti-technology critics. But engineers are adaptable...it was ever thus. He writes of the golden age of engineering without ever acknowledging that this was quite possibly the age in which we reached the limits - the watersheds - of the need for advancing technology. I would argue that the continuing progress in engineering reaches a point of diminishing returns, but we, as an economic system focused on growth, don't have the frame of reference to know when exactly that occurs. We can thus founder on the rocks, thinking we are improving our lot when in fact we are making it worse.
I also don't want to seem a total Luddite. I am an engineer, and I respect a role for technology in today's world. I reckon we would be starving without it, but I also reckon we would not have been so careless with our population had we not had the crutch of better living through chemistry or biology or genetic engineering to keep us going this long. So it all comes down to a question of why. I think Florman argues that the engineer's role traditionally has not been to ask this question, but to serve it when it is answered by others - politicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs. He argues that we might do better as engineers to ask and answer the question for ourselves. Then, he suggests, we might equip ourselves with the tools and acquire the prestige we need to reach our destiny as engineers. But in the mean time, we exist, therefore we engineer...ours is not to ask such questions.
Do I buy it? No. I was glad to have a critical view. I still believe that there is a fundamental re-awakening that is overdue; that the key missing element is the dimension of the accumulation of social capital - common wealth
I have a hard time wanting to go public with this, but I am considering "converting" to Roman Catholicism. I guess I have not exactly been silent on the issue in recent months.
I have sniffed around in the blogosphere. I have found some really insightful blogs attached to "St Blog's Parish". And also a lot (a LOT) of noise. I have received by private correspondence some good advice, and also, in contrast to the noise, a lot of silence. It is a confusing thing, but I do not think it is meant to be so.
For me, I think the decisions, and the motivations, are fairly personal and private. But at the same time, I feel I have a lot to say, and nothing to be ashamed of.
I do not know how far back to go in considering the roots of my desire. I have considered myself for many years to be an atheist. I had a total lack of any belief in any kind of religious framework. As I started to see the sense...the pure beauty of Christ...I started looking for a way to reconcile my own disbelief (not doubt, but total disbelief) with what I was feeling. I know it is not about me, but about Him.
But where to draw the line? Exemplars in writing (Hoinacki)? My Catholic grandparents? Ardent but personal lived religion amongst close friends? I think the war in Iraq had a lot to do with this. The question of justice. My own sensitivity to the injustices of the Middle East have led me to ask difficult questions about how a Christian people, and how a Jewish people who have been persecuted unto the end, have been able to stomach; to justify; the crimes against men - brothers - committed every day in the Middle East. I watched my own country consent to the killing of innocents yet again. I started to feel a real sense of the persecution. I started to see the truth of the message of peace of Christ. I started totally to doubt the sincerity of anyone who thinks that waging war is a just or Christian act.
I consider, actually, the teachings of the Mennonites - the peace church, anabaptism - to be very close to what I believe. But also I feel I owe it to myself to seek Christ mystically, in the footsteps of John of the Cross, of the Carmelites, for example. To find a deeper connection with God that I do not see in the Protestant tradition. I do believe that the Roman Catholic faith can be such a vehicle. I think that it would be hard to get bogged down in the weaknesses of the church. All Christians of any stripe should be considered just that - Christians. It bewilders me that anyone could feel the differences of sect so strongly as to act violently against a brother Christian. The form of your worship is pretty personal. If you can accept a Christian, a Nicene or even a more gnostic framework, well then, you are a Christian. You should honour the example set by your God and Saviour.
So, at that level, I feel I would make a good Christian. I feel that I may not agree with the human direction of any Church, but that the point is not to think about yourself, but to think about God. Frailties can be prayed over. Sin can be forgiven. The first act is to cross the line into belief. I am ready to go there.
I find myself a stranger to prayer. I find that, while I used to be able to enter a church without sentiment, I can no longer do so. I feel meek, tentative. I know that others have come into this place to seek. I do not, myself, know how to do this. And knowing that I want to do it, I need to.
I feel a presence. I feel a call to resort to prayer. I have tried. It feels weird, but I still keep trying. I read Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain and it gave me some guidance. I considered trying to pray - not, mind you, down on my knees, imploring. Silent, contemplative. asking for some sign. "Shall I go forward?" I do not understand Marian devotion. But I considered asking Mary for a sign. And the night I did so, I heard a woman's voice in my sleep, whispering my name, twice, so clear I woke like a shot, knowing that I had gone to sleep asking.
Since then, I have considered that I have a (very personal) calling to carry on with my seeking. Every morning I look up at Christ with his arms open atop Corcovado. It brings tears to my eyes. This beautiful man-God, opening his arms to the cidade maravilhosa below, offering an answer to so many who suffer in such misery below. It is only for us to ask...he is there, waiting for us to come home.
I saw a copy of Tracy Chevalier's novel, Girl with the Pearl Earring, on the shelf at a friend's house, and the picture reminded me of the Vermeer exhibit I saw in London a few years back. I saw a copy of the book at Heathrow and decided to give it a read. It's a quickie - a historical novel about the girl who posed for the picture, imagined by Chevalier to be a maid to the Vermeer family.
I finished reading Ellmann's biography of James Joyce at the end of June. I made a pledge to myself to get through it before we went home, since I didn't fancy hauling its immensity around the UK with me.
Joyce lived a complicated existence. I came away ambivalent about him...polyglot polymathic genius, to be sure. But also an irresponsible, unreliable, totally self-serving man whose family and friends both acknowledged his charisma and suffered his excesses and flippancy. I feel I understand Ulysses much better for having seen his milieu and his work practices. I also quite enjoyed reading about how he took his place in the literary circles. He was sensitive, a letter writer, a campaigner for his own views, and yet totally apolitical, even against the backdrop of Ireland's independence movement. I could identify with Joyce's sense of Irishness...you could never take the Ireland out of the boy, but you could not get the self-exiled man ever to come back home.
So, as I was saying, the last month has been a loucura - total madness. We wound up our job in Curitiba in the first days of July. The last weeks were spent in a series of long documentation-heavy meetings. We loaded our household up into a truck and sent it into the Brazilian hinterlands, to meet us weeks later.
We moved back to the apart-hotel where we started our stay in Curitiba a year ago. We hosted a party where we sadly left behind our many friends and acquaintances in Curitiba. For a city I had never heard of 18 months ago, it has left a large and indelible mark on me - a place I will never forget. Friendly, conservative, un-Brazilian and yet so Brazilian. Just days in Rio show the differences.
I spent a week in the UK. We had been carefully planning our time there so as to maximise visits with our friends and enjoy a slice of the English summer. We visited with my wife's sister and her husband (they who visited at Easter-time), then with my brother and his wife and their 3-week-old first baby (my first uncle-hood!). They have a new (old) home in rural Oxfordshire. We were also graced with a visit from my cousin from Seattle, who was in Ireland for a conference and decided to add a week in the UK to his itinerary - I had not seen him in 10 years, so the few times we met were a great opportunity to catch up on deep family roots. It was his brother we tried to visit in Peru in March.
I went to many book and record shops (30-ish books, 15-ish CDs came back with me). I give special credit to the new London Review Bookshop. I visited the British Museum and saw the Elgin marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Sutton Hoo ship burial - all favourites of mine. I also shopped to reload on underwear and other clothing to replace the things that have worn out or I have never been satisfied with in Brazil. I went home with a 30 kg suitcase half full of clothing, the other half filled with two broken-down suitcases to aid in our return. I came back with two suitcases weighing 50 kg, mostly the books.
We stayed in London in the lovely home of friends who gave us a comfortable base for tackling the bedlam of the big city. We went to the opera with other friends (we saw Werther, which we didn't know, and was pretty melodramatic and over-extended, but which was well-presented and enjoyable nonetheless). We also had a nice visit with some other friends that took us for a walk and a pub lunch into the Surrey hills for one of the nicest English summer afternoons I have ever passed.
And then that evening I got on a plane back to Rio, cidade maravilhosa, our new home for the next year. I had a hectic week of moving in that makes it seem longer than it really was. I arrived Sunday morning, took possession of the apartment on Monday, the movers came on Tuesday and I started reporting in to work on Wednesday. I've spent the evenings getting the house re-settled. Did I mention that it is a penthouse? Close to the beach at Ipanema? No matter. It is lovely. Extremely different to our place in Curitiba, but after a year in a big "country house" in the 'burbs in the provinces, I reckon a year in the city in Rio will provide us with a wealth of contrasts.
And so, here I am. I am actually flying solo until early August, as wife and child are still in the UK, making the rounds of more friends and family.
Oh, and I've saved the best for last...we are expecting another child, come January. This one will be born in Brazil. We couldn't be happier about this. I think it is quite ironic that the new baby will be a Brazilian, but the non-Brazilian one will speak better Portuguese. Well, that assumes we leave, etc. In my heart I know we will have to, but just now I might be lulled into thinking that I could stay here forever.
Sorry for the total lack of posting over the last month or so. It has been all change chez bandiera as we have moved home and jobs to Rio de Janeiro. Still have a ways to go before I can resume any kind of posting, but we are settling in and I will return shortly. Please bear with me!