The Weekly Juvevimen, full steam ahead. This muck understands David Foster Wallace. All right, well, this new Catholic journal, The Lamp, continues to impress the socks off me. I'm going to tell you right now, you got to subscribe.
And I don't really mean you gotta, but, man, this is really, really freaking good. It's like $65 a year where we reference seven or eight issues. I forget, maybe six issues. I don't know, but it's really expensive.
But, man, they must be paying these writers some good money because they're getting out an impressive assortment. Anyway, I'm talking about issue 11 that came last week, and I was impressed by The Lamp previously. This issue might be the best yet. And here's the thing about The Lamp.
It's eclectic yet Catholic. It's probably more eclectic. It's called a Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, etc. And I love that, etc.
The writing in this lamp is superb. And you go to any high school grammar teacher, they'll tell you it's horrible style to use the term etc. But here it is in their byline. I love it.
But to be honest with you, it's so eclectic. I have a hard time believing that anyone, even if you're a freaking Druid, wouldn't enjoy it. But the thing is, it's also unabashedly Catholic. It's kind of like the Catholicism is just stamped there.
It's like a grass mowed field that can be used for Frisbee, lawn bowling, wiffle ball, football, sprinting, bird watching, etc. You might get engrossed in an activity, but all the while you're playing on the same field. You cease to be aware of the field, but it's always there and occasionally makes itself known pointedly. Like when you slide and get a grass stain.
So here, like you read in this lamp, and there's like an essay on James Bond, and there's all sorts of things like that. It's like, what the heck? This doesn't even seem Catholic. And then there'll be something on there about cathedrals.
So anyway, the author bylines by themselves are interesting. Issue 11, in fact, features a review essay about David Foster Wallace that is written by a man who is obviously conversant not only with Wallace's postmodernist prose, but also with the Wallace scholarship. The writer of this absorbing essay, Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk. Yeah, a monk.
Writing an essay. Yeah, I know. Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton. But Czechoslovak monks write often very well.
Like, yeah, I get it. But still, a man so conversant in something so postmodernously cultural, he's also a monk? I think it's a snapshot into something important. Very important.
It's a snapshot into a thing or other thing that I'm beginning to call the bridge option. Now, don't confuse this with the Benedict option. The Benedict option, I think, is a rejection of postmodernity. And I've never read Dreher's book.
Nothing against Dreher. Life is short. There's only so much time to read stuff. I'm pretty sure, based on everything I've read, it's kind of like the Benedict option is kind of a rejection of where we are today.
The bridge option, as I'm envisioning it, kind of stretches back from with its moorings in the postmodern world and the pre-modern world. Anyway, let's move on. All right. As I've mentioned, modernity was the great rejection, which was Western civilization's rejection of the Tao.
Now, the great rejection, being a rejection of the fundamental truth of our existence, wasn't sustainable. So rejections of the great rejection started cropping up with increasing frequency as modernity rolled on. The counter-rejections were evident at the beginning of modernity in Blaise Pascal, a healthy counter-rejection, and also the irrational Rosicrucian movement, a not-so-healthy alternative. As modernity steamrolled everything before it with increasing contempt and disregard for anything outside its unholy trinity of rationalism, empiricism, and progressivism, the counter-rejections picked up steam as well.
Counter-rejections take all sorts of forms, as illustrated in the life of Jack Kerouac. Go back to last week's podcast. Some are edifying, some not. Some are beautiful, some are terrifying.
The great rejection championed rationality. The counter-rejections celebrate irrationality, such as the occult and the absurd. The great rejection championed empiricism. The counter-rejections celebrate the problem of abduction and science's relentless reversals of its own conclusions.
The great rejection championed progress, wealth, and comfort. The counter-rejections celebrate intentional poverty and austerity, like living off the grid, and these dudes who are doing these extreme endurance sports, like that guy on Joe Rogan, Charlie Walker, I think his name was. I think he bicycled from London to Calcutta or some such thing. So, bottom line is some anti-modernists seek to raise modernity.
They want to churn it to the ground, upheave all the foundations, and fill salt everywhere. I call that the Punic option, the fate of Carthage after the Third Punic War. It's defeated by Rome. Some seek to reach back over modernity to earlier foundations.
They embrace the postmodernist ideas, but instead of just rejecting everything, seek to reach back to a time before modernity was ascendant. That's the bridge option. And I also think that's the approach of this David Foster Wallace expert monk. He's steeped in postmodernist literature, but yet living in accord with the rule of life developed in the 12th century.
And he's a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College out there in California. That's a classical great book school. They're reading Plato. But this guy, he understands postmodernist literature.
So anyway, what does this monk conclude about David Foster Wallace? He concludes that Wallace is the 20th century's Blaise Pascal. Now, Pascal simultaneously recoiled from the two cutting-edge intellectual currents of his day, Montaigne's blanket skepticism and Descartes' rationalism. Pascal responded with the celebration of the irrational, this famous saying that the heart has its own reasons that the mind can't understand.
And he also responded with the need for humility in light of the enormous mystery that is existence. Basically, Pascal understood there was the Tao. He didn't call it that. He understood there was something on the other side of that door, of Huxley's door.
Again, he obviously didn't know Aldous Huxley or what he was getting at. Pascal knew there was a lot more than what we could just reason to. Now, according to this monk, Wallace did the same thing. But by the time Wallace came along in the 20th century, skepticism and rationalism had grown alarmingly.
You now have postmodern skepticism, which is like Montaigne's skepticism on steroids. You have scientific rationalism, which was shockingly contemptuous of anything else besides itself. So Wallace didn't recoil against modernity, the monk says. He had to recoil against hypermodernity.
I love that phrase, hypermodernity, is where we are today. So what weapons did these allies, Pascal and Wallace, use in their war against modernity and hypermodernity? The monk tells us they used the sacred. Now the term worship appears in many key passages of Wallace's work.
In order to escape hypermodernity, Wallace knew we needed to find something sacred. Wallace seemed to have a rather eminent or earthly understanding of the sacred, something he called, quote, the subsurface unity of all things, unquote. But it was a sense of the sacred nonetheless. It's almost like Wallace had some sort of like pantheistic view of the sacred.
But again, put aside the metaphysical ontological questions. He had a sense there. And it's that sense of the sacred that gives Wallace's work such an absorbing interest to readers. According to the monk, and I tend to agree with him.
Full disclosure, I've read a book of essays by Wallace, The Thing on the Lobster. I forget what the essays are called. And I started Infinite Jest, but, ooh, that one gets hard. I really want to get through it, but it's hard.
Anyway, this always reminds me of Jack Kerouac's On the Road that we discussed last week. People focused on Kerouac's quote-unquote kicks, especially the drugs and sex. But that's not what the book was about. If drugs and sex were the points of the book, it wouldn't have been a source of such absorbing interest back in the 1950s and 60s.
It wouldn't have been the label teed of Judd Apatow's excellent Freaks and Geeks that aired on NBC in 2000. By the way, if you haven't watched Freaks and Geeks, go check it out. I'm watching it a second time. This freaking is a masterpiece.
Anyway, on the road is about the sacred, the need to worship, to find the beatific vision, what they call it, it, it, away from the conventionalities of modern life and to find the beatific vision by getting away from the conventionalities of modern life. Likewise, the monk assures us Wallace's work is about the sacred. We can focus on the dissonance of his prose. Wallace had paragraphs that went on for pages, but that would be like focusing on Kerouac's drugs and sex.
Kerouac's dissonance, the drugs and sex, tear at the conventionalities of modernity in order to get to something deeper. I'm not sure Wallace or Kerouac ever found it, something deeper, but they were trying. And for that, they deserve respect and attention. And I think my new monk friend would agree.