West Coast Odysseus

Christopher Hitchens, my favourite writer and hero (though he did not approve of hero worship) has died of esophageal cancer.

It may surprise some to note that Hitchens’ writing provided me a good deal of comfort as well as joy. I fell in love with Hitchens as a thinker with attitude when I watched the Tony Blair-Christopher Hitchens debate on whether or not religion is a force for good in the world today. Hitchens took the side that it did not, and he put his points in a way that was both memorable and highly entertaining, not to say downright funny. That is a gift.

More recently, I have been encountering far-reaching changes in every aspect of my life that have brought with them not only their share of positive developments, but also of stress and even anguish. It was during this time that I began and completed Hitchen’s book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was a riot to read, and I enjoyed it immensely, even if–as a lover of traditional sacred architecture and music in the western canon–I can’t quite bring myself to fully agree with the book’s subtitle. I finished reading it only two days ago.

Hitchens’ bright yellow book took me out of myself when I most needed a feeling of transcendence and immanence, when I most needed a reminder that it is human ethics I must live up to, not unattainable “divine” ones self-imposed on humanity by corrupt religion. For me, Hitchens was above all an inspiring and humane force for great good in the world, and I will cherish his memory.

Rest in peace, dear man.

Image of Gilad Shalit returning to Israel taken from the Toronto Star

I have followed the story of Gilad Shalit ever since he was kidnapped out of Israel and smuggled into Gaza by Palestinian terrorists back in 2006. Today, Hamas has finally allowed his release–in exchange for more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, many of whom have the blood of non-combatants on their hands. The most notorious of these waved that literal blood on his real hands to a cheering crowd:

Image of Ramallah lynch mob and Abed Alaziz Salaha from Ynet News

I remember the very day I saw this picture on the front page of one of Canada’s largest broadsheet newspapers when I was a graduate student in Toronto. I was shocked and horrified that anyone could be so brutal. But the details were worse. Two Israeli reservists had gotten lost in Ramallah. Pursued by an angry mob, they sought refuge in a local police station. The mob attacked the police station, and the police did not defend the two Israelis from the weapons and malice of the angry mob of men. After those barbarian psychopaths in Ramallah had beaten the two Israeli soldiers, they doused their bodies with gas and set fire to them; they also threw one of them out a window. But that wasn’t the end. Then they phoned the families of the Israelis using the dead men’s cell phones and taunted them. That was perhaps the worst part of all, and the day I read the newspapers’ coverage of this event is one I shall never forget.

Despicable. Psychopathic. Worse than barbaric. And these murderous, sadistic men are receiving a hero’s welcome in “Palestine” now that Hamas has orchestrated their untimely release from prison in exchange for a young and innocent man whom Hamas-types kidnapped out of Israel proper. (Remember, although Shalit was neither in the West Bank nor Gaza, Hamas lays claim to all of Israel.) Anyone with any integrity at all would do well to reflect on just what sort of society the Palestinians, who elected Hamas as their government, are building for themselves:

Image of Hamas celebration of a returned prisoner taken from CBC.ca

The prisoner swap shows Israel’s weakness in not finding Shalit sooner and in letting him languish for so long, but it also shows the differences in humanity between the two sides. Hamas has often recruited Palestinian children–including the depressed, the marginalized, and the mentally ill–as suicide bombers to blow up the elderly, the disabled, and the young without regard for even the most basic of human values. Israel, on the other hand, despite having many flaws–as many nations do–does everything it can to bring back one single life from the brink. Right now, though, what matters is that Shalit is back with his family–but Israel needs to make Hamas pay dearly if it ever kidnaps another Israeli again. In the meantime, if people really study this deal, Hamas may have found that it has lost in the court of public opinion.

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External link: Wikipieda entry on the Ramallah lynching

Photographs by Nathan Bauman; copying for commercial and government use is prohibited; for personal use, please link back to this site, and include my name in a caption; thank you!

If the Banff Springs Hotel is perhaps the reason to visit Banff, then surely Lake Louise is the reason to visit the Rocky Mountains in the first place. On the way up to Banff last weekend, and on the way back, we stopped in at Lake Louise for a brief visit. It was raining the first time, but sunny two days later, and regardless of the weather, the lake holds up as one of the most beautiful places on earth thanks to the exquisitely-pleasing colour of the water and the ice and mountains behind it:

The following photograph was actually from our first visit, when it was raining:

I regret very much not having the time to either do any hiking around the lake, or canoeing in it. I definitely want to do both on my next trip to this place that is among Canada’s most beautiful sites.

Perhaps the reason to visit Banff is to spend a night or two in the historic Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. The hotel is a kind of living museum, and one-hour tours are provided free of charge to guests and for a fee to others. The hotel itself is quite old, and exquisitely beautiful, inside and out. Stone facades, tapestries, carpets with intricate designs, and unique passage-ways between the turret rooms make for a memorable experience. Meanwhile, large rooms, halls, and corridors simply take the one’s breath away.

I quite liked the stone on the exterior of the building; another angle is shown below:

When one comes in the interior, it is quite dark:

One of the highlights of the tour I went on was the famous Mount Stephen Hall, two views of which are shown below:

The individual rooms, columned halls, and corridors of the hotel are also stunning:

Above: the Oak Room in the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel

Above: the Rundle Lounge and Restaurant (I think!) in the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel

Above: the Cascade Ballroom in the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel

The Conservatory also has a charm of its own:

A former-CP Rail hotel, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is much more than these photographs, of course. I was unable to get photographs of the Alhambra room, or of Grapes or almost any of the other eateries in the hotel. Perhaps another time–when I can learn more settings on my camera. One thing I can say: I happened to drive by the Fairmont in Lake Louise, and while I didn’t go inside it, I can say that it is characterless in its bland newness; the Banff Springs Hotel maintains its character thanks to the architectural values of the age which built it. Money permitting, I would be happy to go back many times to visit it.

Below: part of the hotel is visible from the parking garage:

Last weekend my family and I took a very short trip to Banff, Alberta. We stayed there for two nights and took in the Rocky Mountains and the gorgeous colours of the rivers and lakes there. The following photograph shows the water just below Bow Falls, and the one after that shows the falls themselves:

We took the gondola to the top of Sulfur Mountain; the following photograph shows a view on our ascent:

This is one of many views one can see from that vantage point:

There is an interesting boardwalk involving a lot of stairs that runs atop a short distance of the ridge on this mountain:

On the way back from Banff, I was struck by the way the sunlight and shadows were playing on this peak, and I stopped the car to take a picture; five other cars stopped to do exactly the same thing.

Unfortunately, the clouds covered more of the peak just before I was able to take any pictures at all, and another gentleman remarked to me how disappointed he was as this had happened to him, too. But the clouds themselves can be quite lovely, can’t they?

The other day I remarked that C.S. Lewis seemed to be living his adult intellectual life as a reaction to Nietzsche. Now, I’m starting to wonder if Lewis might rather have been influenced by Nietzsche before he turned against him. The reason I wonder this is that Lewis is so often at such pains to make his Narnia theology grounded in “earthiness”; this seems to show him to be the intellectual descendant in some ways of Nietzsche, whose Thus Spoke Zarathustra sets out a call to create a system of ethics that is friendly to the Earth, not imposed from a delusional picture of heaven.

I suppose Lewis would say that he got his “earthiness” directly from mythological antecedents rather than from Nietzsche. On the other hand, I think Thus Spoke Zarathustra would have struck a chord with Lewis before his conversion to Christianity. At some point, though, Lewis became a Christian as an adult, and then from that time on it would seem that he reacted to Nietzsche’s idea of the overman just as much as he agreed with him about the need for “earthiness” in human values. Lewis’s creation of an earthy spirituality, then, was Nietzschean in earthy flavour and in substance. I think we might well consider Lewis to have had nearly as profound an effect on Christianity as Paul did on the theology of “the Way” that would later become known as Christianity. (Lewis was not the only person seeking to make Christianity more body-friendly, of course, but he popularized this new direction to an unprecedented degree.)

Today in the mail I received two relatively cheap CD’s (with free shipping); one of these was a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz as performed by the Berlin Philarmonic Orchestra and directed by the twentieth century’s most famous conductor, Herbert von Karajan. This is, of course, the same recording memorably used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The CD has been remastered, as one would expect of a 1966 recording, and the recording does not get in the way of a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

I’m glad I had heard the Blue Danube waltz before I saw the movie, but the movie has added to my appreciation of the music. Listening to it several times over the last hour has given me no small amount of pleasure tonight! Meanwhile, inspired by 2001, I also purchased several weeks ago Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” as performed for the same label by the same orchestra and conductor. This was not, though, the recording used in 2001, and there’s a bit of a story to that:

Citing John Culshaw’s autobiography Putting the Record Straight, the Internet Movie Database explains “The end music credits do not list a conductor and orchestra for “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Stanley Kubrick wanted the Herbert von Karajan / Vienna Philharmonic version on English Decca for the film’s soundtrack, but Decca executives did not want their recording “cheapened” by association with the movie, and so gave permission on the condition that the conductor and orchestra were not named. After the movie’s successful release, Decca tried to rectify its blunder by re-releasing the recording with an “As Heard in 2001″ flag printed on the album cover. John Culshaw recounts the incident in “Putting the Record Straight” (1981)… In the meantime, MGM released the “official soundtrack” L.P. with Karl Böhm’s Berlin Philharmonic “Also Sprach Zarathustra” discretely substituting for von Karajan’s version.”

Coincidentally, my other CD that came today was Karl Böhm’s version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony for the Deutsche Grammophon label (though my version is the re-release on the economical Eloquence label). I have yet to listen to it, but I’m sure I will enjoy it. Meanwhile, I hope to purchase the Decca recording of von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Thus Spoke Zarathustra at some point in the future.

It has been nearly a decade since I bought any CD’s, not counting a few I bought in Korea (most of the tracks of which I never listened to). Living with a toddler will do that to a person. But he’s a joy, of course, and he’s maturing. And–I’m very pleased to say–he adores the opening Sunrise sequence of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and he constantly asks to watch 2001. I’ve let him watch just the opening sequence of the ape-men, for now. When we can watch the film together in its entirety, it will be a happy memory for me.

A few days ago, I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian to my son. One of the many parts that got my attention was the section that described the presence of the god Bacchus near the end of the book. Towards the end of the book, there are a couple of dance parties of dryads and naiads that feature Bacchus and Silenus and dancing and whirling around with them. Now Lewis has specifically written that the festivities included the turning of well-water into wine (recalling the story of Jesus’ miracle at Cana), and he makes it clear that wine (the purview of Dionysus) was present at the celebrations. But what takes the cake is Edmund’s comment about Bacchus when he says “there’s a chap who might do anything–absolutely anything.” Does that include the orgiastic rites of ancient Dionysian religion? Bacchus is here in the company of Aslan, and that’s why the children can feel safe with Bacchus around. In some ways, it’s quite odd that evangelicals have allowed Lewis to get away with all this in a children’s story.

The presence of Bacchus, of all people, and his associated creatures–combined with Aslan’s love for the dwarf Trumpkin, whom he calls a “son of Earth”–makes it clear to me that Lewis had really taken the Nietzschean criticisms of Christianity to heart: namely, that it was a life-denying religion led by “preachers of death” who were “deniers of the body” who were focused on abandoning the earth in pursuit of a pie-in-the-sky deity. In Nietzsche’s view, these scoundrels in bishops’ robes were denigrating the human body and the Earth itself, and indeed, there was a long Christian tradition of this sort of thing going all the way back to St. Simeon the Stylite and beyond that to Paul and Jesus and beyond them even further back. It’s a view characterized by the expression “what’s bad for the body is good for the soul”, and it produced not only the Catholic flagellants but also perfectly good men who for centuries voluntarily castrated themselves for Christ.

I am sure that Lewis was not the only member of the mid-twentieth century conservative movements within Christianity who was professing a more body-friendly faith, but I do suspect that he did much to make Christianity more friendly both to the environment and to the human body. It seems to me that if we accept that Lewis was reacting so strongly to Nietzsche, then we must admit that Nietzsche’s effects on European Christendom were far-reaching and profound–and altogether for the better, even if the theological reforms in most denominations would not go as far as some of us might like.

I realized the other day that I have broken the historical Jesus’s record for most consecutive years and months without seeing a movie in a movie theater in my native country. Now I realize that this may seem strange and even hard to believe. I did see movies when I was a child in darkened school gymnasiums, and I did go to the IMAX theater in Science World downtown–where the film was a documentary about beavers. Curiously, on a recent trip there with my son, we saw the same film.

My first movie in a theater was actually Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I watched in Vienna, Austria, of all places. My second was The Butterfly Effect, which I was taken to in South Korea. That was a very interesting, philosophical movie, but was so nightmarish in certain respects that I do not wish to see it again. I also saw there the final Star Wars prequel movie in South Korea, as well as The King and the Clown, a Korean movie.

My basic problem with movies in theaters is that I have no access to closed captions, and I depend on these for understanding; I realized how much this was true today. Yes: today at 11:30am I gave in and took in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. I’ve never read the books, and don’t think I will, but I have enjoyed all the movies. Since the franchise was ending with this movie, I decided to go see it on the “opening” day. I ended out missing about forty percent of the dialogue, but enjoyed it very much all the same. I’ll enjoy it more when it comes out on DVD–then I can watch it on my 14″ laptop! (I still don’t have a TV.)

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By the way, I’ve always loved Snape’s character, and it was nice to see him have more screen time. His death, of course, was heart-breaking. Meanwhile, comic levity was unexpectedly provided by Minerva, who uttered my favourite line of the movie: “I’ve always wanted to use that spell!”

The thought occurs to me that much of C.S. Lewis’s Christian life was spent as a reaction against Nietzsche–but the point being that Lewis never properly understood him! Of course, I’ve read only the first of the four parts of just one Nietzsche work, but I suspect I’ve got enough to see that Lewis was reacting against him in many of his own works, including the Narnia series, and unfairly so, it seems. Meanwhile, I just read Philip Pullman’s thought-provoking critique of the Narnia works, and I must say that although I love the Narnia books, I can certainly see where Pullman is coming from. I may very well end out giving His Dark Materials to my son when he is older to provide a much-needed antidote. Having said that, I think that for a cheerful person of a young age, allegorical joy is going to be more enjoyable than allegorical critique of religion.