Become the book

A few weeks ago, a friend was sent an email from an earnest young chap who asked, "What can young people do who want to restore the Before Time? It was all stolen from us and for the most part, we have only the barest glimmer of what it was all like and hardly know what it is that we have lost."

My friend wrote a lengthy reply that I thought was rather beside the point and failed to give the poor chap a straightforward answer. But I thought of one instantly: Become the living embodiment of the thing you are trying to restore.

I thought of a scientifiction novel by the great Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451 about a future society in which books, other than girlie magazines, are entirely banned, everyone is addicted to television and sports and is more or less incapable of reasoned criticism. The main character meets a pretty girl who is a clandestine reader/book-owner, and when she is killed, flees to the fringes of society where he finds her book-loving friends engaged in archiving the literature, history and philosophy of the past.

Their method, knowing that the books themselves could all be destroyed, is to become the books. Each picks one and memorizes it, the entire thing, calling on memory skills that are latent in the human mind, even the mind of distracted Westerners. Each becomes a living archive of the past.

I gave the following response to my friend who forwarded the poor young chap's email:

Step one: become a traditional Christian. Practice that faith in as muscular a way as you can manage. Learn everything there is to know about the Christian traditions. Be Christian on purpose and as forcefullly and energetically as you can.

Step two: forcefully purge all modernist and postmodern ideas from your mental landscape. (This may take many years, but is a most enjoyable exercise.)

Step three: Quit University immediately if you are in. Run! If not yet in, abandon any idea of going to University. (If you have already gone to University, go to confession and forget all about it.)

Step four: begin to read the Classics of Western Civilization in philosophy and literature, starting with the Greeks and working your way up through the late antiquity guys, into Augustine then on to the Scholastics. When you get to the end of the 15th century, stop. Skip on to Newman. Stop. Skip again to Chesterton and Dawson. Stop again. Skip to Mortimer Adler and Gilson.

Step five: Stop reading and learn to sing, play an instrument, paint or do calligraphy (only one of these, not all at once.)

Step six: Get married to a practising member of your church.

Step seven: Have a lot of children.

Step eight: Teach them all that stuff you've just learned.

Step nine: Make sure you go to heaven and take as many others with you as you can.

Thats it.

* ~ * ~ *

I might add another, lesser step. Become ordinately attached to the things of the past. The material objects, that is. They are almost always more beautiful, more representative of The Good than anything made after 1960, and more solidly built. We are physical beings, sacramentality is important, and if the things we see every day, the things we wear, eat and use are material contradictions to the things you are trying to force into your brain, you are at a disadvantage.

Such attachments, however, can lead to small confusions. I still sometimes unconsciously reach for the carriage handle to push it back when the cursor reaches the right edge of the screen, and occasionally try to flip over a CD when it comes to the end.