Major's VC raid
KOREA
MAJOR Kenneth Muir died a hero in Korea. An air strike accidentally attacked two companies of the 1st Battalion The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on September 23, 1950.
To allow casualties to be evacuated, Major Muir, 38, led 30 men against an enemy-held hill. He fought on, even when mortally wounded, and was posthumously awarded the VC.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article338169.ece
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
NEWMAN ON WHAT IS A GENTLEMAN
It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself.
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them.
The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause ajar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; -- all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their case and at home.
He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring.
He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best.
He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.
He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them.
The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause ajar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; -- all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their case and at home.
He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring.
He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best.
He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.
He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
LORD ACTION :CONSCIENCE AND RELIGION
Musings of a Scottish Catholic Teuchtar
THE ANCIENT FAITH IN THE HIGHLANDS & ISLANDS
Thursday, 26 February 2009
LORD ACTON:CONSCIENCE AND RELIGION
..I think faith implies sincerity, that is a gift that does not dwell in dishonest minds. To be sincere a man must battle with causes of error that beset every mind. He must pour constant streams of electric light into the deep recesses where prejudice dwells and passion, hasty judgements, and willful blindness deem themselves unseen…..to develop and perfect and arm conscience is the greatest achievement of history, and the chief business of every life, and the first agent therein is religion of what resembles religion.
(Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, March 31, 1883)
FROM:
The Spirit of Lent
by Victor Hoagland, C.P.
Begin with the gospel for Ash Wednesday. Nothing offers better guidance on our lenten journey than the words Jesus spoke to his disciples, read during the liturgy of this day:
“Give alms...Pray to your Father...Fast without a gloomy face...” (Matthew 6: 1-18)
Give... pray... fast.
Almsgiving
Giving alms, Jesus teaches, means making the needs of others our own, especially the needy of our world. They are all around us: children and the old, the sick and the suffering, families and individuals, next-door neighbors and people in lands faraway.
We easily forget them. Rather than just looking out for ourselves — what people say today — see those in need, Jesus says.
Giving will make you live.
And what shall we give? Some time, some of our talent, material resources, perhaps. Almsgiving is not just for the rich. Poor or rich, we all have something to give.
Whatever we give, though, should be something of ourselves, something that costs us. Paradoxically, Jesus also teaches, when we give, we receive some blessing from God in return.
What shall we give to the needy this lent? In deciding, decide generously. After all, before us is the great alms Jesus gave: “He loved us, and gave himself up for us.”
***
AYE
Posted by RICHARD K. MUNRO at 06:06
0 comments:
THE ANCIENT FAITH IN THE HIGHLANDS & ISLANDS
Thursday, 26 February 2009
LORD ACTON:CONSCIENCE AND RELIGION
..I think faith implies sincerity, that is a gift that does not dwell in dishonest minds. To be sincere a man must battle with causes of error that beset every mind. He must pour constant streams of electric light into the deep recesses where prejudice dwells and passion, hasty judgements, and willful blindness deem themselves unseen…..to develop and perfect and arm conscience is the greatest achievement of history, and the chief business of every life, and the first agent therein is religion of what resembles religion.
(Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, March 31, 1883)
FROM:
The Spirit of Lent
by Victor Hoagland, C.P.
Begin with the gospel for Ash Wednesday. Nothing offers better guidance on our lenten journey than the words Jesus spoke to his disciples, read during the liturgy of this day:
“Give alms...Pray to your Father...Fast without a gloomy face...” (Matthew 6: 1-18)
Give... pray... fast.
Almsgiving
Giving alms, Jesus teaches, means making the needs of others our own, especially the needy of our world. They are all around us: children and the old, the sick and the suffering, families and individuals, next-door neighbors and people in lands faraway.
We easily forget them. Rather than just looking out for ourselves — what people say today — see those in need, Jesus says.
Giving will make you live.
And what shall we give? Some time, some of our talent, material resources, perhaps. Almsgiving is not just for the rich. Poor or rich, we all have something to give.
Whatever we give, though, should be something of ourselves, something that costs us. Paradoxically, Jesus also teaches, when we give, we receive some blessing from God in return.
What shall we give to the needy this lent? In deciding, decide generously. After all, before us is the great alms Jesus gave: “He loved us, and gave himself up for us.”
***
AYE
Posted by RICHARD K. MUNRO at 06:06
0 comments:
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
musings on the Trinity, Patrick and the Shamrock
The Enlightenment fathers often compared Socrates and Jesus as merely great teachers. As a minor historian I would say we have to allow for the fact that Jesus may just have been another gifted Rabbi. So if that were the case, I think he still would have to be rated the most influential teacher of all time (In the Western World but it remains to be seen if the Western World will survive; if it doesn’t then it is a moot point.) I would argue he MUST remain the greatest teacher of the West or the West is doomed. Those in the West must not ignore Jesus of Nazareth in any case either as a man –a Great Teacher- or as the Son of Mary and the Son of God. Of course in my book ALL THREE of those facts are true. The first should be obvious even to the secular historian; the second and third is a matter of emphasis and opinion. I happen to believe it myself. Jesus was human completely human –everyone can agree on that- but he also was part of the Holy Trinity.
The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to explain however. In fact, teaching young people about the Holy Trinity is a dilemma. How God can be one yet three is one of the deepest mysteries of our faith? Some will respond, “We’re not supposed to understand it. Just believe Church teachings.” That is not a very satisfactory answer. St. Patrick must have had the same difficulty during his apostleship in ancient Ireland.
When I teach the concept of the Holy Trinity, I use the symbol of the shamrock. St. Patrick himself knew this, which is why he used the metaphor of the shamrock. There is an old charm (freely translated from the Gaelic oral tradition):
Three folds of the cloth, yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger but still one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snow-flakes and ice, all in water their origin share
Three Persons in God; to one God alone to we make prayer.
Secularists point out that there is no ancient document source linking St. Patrick to the shamrock belief than three centuries or four centuries at most. See for example the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3519116.stm
“Old Irish manuscripts make no reference to this in connection with St Patrick, so this is likely to be pure mythology.”
But considering that 90% or more of Irish literature was destroyed by the English invasions this should not surprise anyone. It is also a great prejudice of the modern that only the written is true (when the written is often false or falsified) and oral tradition is not true.
In fact, the oldest occurrences of “shamrock occur in ENGLISH” not Irish Gaelic (there is no source older than the 18th century to have this word; the word “shamrock” derived obviously from the Gaelic word is attributed to about 1572. ) This indirect evidence is telling.
To dismiss the St. Patrick legend as pure mythology also forgets the fact that three was a mystical number for Celts. The druids in Ireland looked at the shamrock as a sacred plant because its leaves formed a triad. It would not have been unusual at all for St. Patrick to have explained the Trinity in the way he did. So I have always believed in the shamrock story. There is also the evidence of the Gaelic tree alphabet. The Saints and Scholars of ancient days used sacred plants and trees to teach the alphabet to the Gaels (the letters of the Gaelic alphabet stand for plants and trees; this was obviously a mnemonic device though perhaps predating St. Patrick and his disciples)
The presence of the Trinity on the day when Jesus is baptized by John in the River Jordan is clearly affirmed in the Gospel.
13 Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan, unto John, to be baptized by him. 14 But John stayed him, saying: I ought to be baptized by thee, and comest thou to me? 15 And Jesus answering, said to him: Suffer it to be so now. For so it becometh us to fulfill all justice. Then he suffered him.
It is here were meet also the figure of the Christ, the Messiah who brings the divine plan of salvation to fulfillment and humbly accepts his baptism as any ordinary man or woman, sinner or saint.
It is this voluntary humbling in this great Trinitarian scene which wins him the praise of God, the Father who proclaims his love for his Son:
16 And Jesus being baptized, forthwith came out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened to him: and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him. 17 And behold a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Of course the dove symbolizes the end of the flood in Noah’s day and the dawn of a new era. Ever since, the dove has symbolized deliverance and God's forgiveness. Gn 8:8-12). The dove in flight is the symbol of the Ascension of Christ or of the entry into glory of the martyrs and saints (cf. Psalm 123:7 “Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the hunters, the snare is broken and we are delivered." In like manner the caged dove signifies the human soul yet imprisoned in the flesh and held captive during the period of mortal life. The dove signifies also the Christian soul, not the human soul per se as such, but as indwelt by the Holy Spirit
Indeed, The dove is a universal symbol of peace and innocence. In ancient Greek myth it was a bird of Athena which represented the renewal of life. According to ancient Scottish legend the devil and witches can turn themselves into any bird shape except the dove. As a Christian symbol the dove is of very frequent occurrence in ancient ecclesiastical art. Two doves on a funeral monument sometimes signify the conjugal love and affection of the parties buried there.
The authors of the Gospels lay great stress on the idea that the major events in Jesus' life can be seen as predicted by the Jewish prophets, especially Isaiah. In the following passage (Isaiah 40: 1-5) Isaiah announces the coming of the Christ or Messiah. These words were memorably set to music in George Frederick Handel's Messiah.
________________________________________
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.
A voice cries out:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
MUNRO
The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to explain however. In fact, teaching young people about the Holy Trinity is a dilemma. How God can be one yet three is one of the deepest mysteries of our faith? Some will respond, “We’re not supposed to understand it. Just believe Church teachings.” That is not a very satisfactory answer. St. Patrick must have had the same difficulty during his apostleship in ancient Ireland.
When I teach the concept of the Holy Trinity, I use the symbol of the shamrock. St. Patrick himself knew this, which is why he used the metaphor of the shamrock. There is an old charm (freely translated from the Gaelic oral tradition):
Three folds of the cloth, yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger but still one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snow-flakes and ice, all in water their origin share
Three Persons in God; to one God alone to we make prayer.
Secularists point out that there is no ancient document source linking St. Patrick to the shamrock belief than three centuries or four centuries at most. See for example the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3519116.stm
“Old Irish manuscripts make no reference to this in connection with St Patrick, so this is likely to be pure mythology.”
But considering that 90% or more of Irish literature was destroyed by the English invasions this should not surprise anyone. It is also a great prejudice of the modern that only the written is true (when the written is often false or falsified) and oral tradition is not true.
In fact, the oldest occurrences of “shamrock occur in ENGLISH” not Irish Gaelic (there is no source older than the 18th century to have this word; the word “shamrock” derived obviously from the Gaelic word is attributed to about 1572. ) This indirect evidence is telling.
To dismiss the St. Patrick legend as pure mythology also forgets the fact that three was a mystical number for Celts. The druids in Ireland looked at the shamrock as a sacred plant because its leaves formed a triad. It would not have been unusual at all for St. Patrick to have explained the Trinity in the way he did. So I have always believed in the shamrock story. There is also the evidence of the Gaelic tree alphabet. The Saints and Scholars of ancient days used sacred plants and trees to teach the alphabet to the Gaels (the letters of the Gaelic alphabet stand for plants and trees; this was obviously a mnemonic device though perhaps predating St. Patrick and his disciples)
The presence of the Trinity on the day when Jesus is baptized by John in the River Jordan is clearly affirmed in the Gospel.
13 Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan, unto John, to be baptized by him. 14 But John stayed him, saying: I ought to be baptized by thee, and comest thou to me? 15 And Jesus answering, said to him: Suffer it to be so now. For so it becometh us to fulfill all justice. Then he suffered him.
It is here were meet also the figure of the Christ, the Messiah who brings the divine plan of salvation to fulfillment and humbly accepts his baptism as any ordinary man or woman, sinner or saint.
It is this voluntary humbling in this great Trinitarian scene which wins him the praise of God, the Father who proclaims his love for his Son:
16 And Jesus being baptized, forthwith came out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened to him: and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him. 17 And behold a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Of course the dove symbolizes the end of the flood in Noah’s day and the dawn of a new era. Ever since, the dove has symbolized deliverance and God's forgiveness. Gn 8:8-12). The dove in flight is the symbol of the Ascension of Christ or of the entry into glory of the martyrs and saints (cf. Psalm 123:7 “Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the hunters, the snare is broken and we are delivered." In like manner the caged dove signifies the human soul yet imprisoned in the flesh and held captive during the period of mortal life. The dove signifies also the Christian soul, not the human soul per se as such, but as indwelt by the Holy Spirit
Indeed, The dove is a universal symbol of peace and innocence. In ancient Greek myth it was a bird of Athena which represented the renewal of life. According to ancient Scottish legend the devil and witches can turn themselves into any bird shape except the dove. As a Christian symbol the dove is of very frequent occurrence in ancient ecclesiastical art. Two doves on a funeral monument sometimes signify the conjugal love and affection of the parties buried there.
The authors of the Gospels lay great stress on the idea that the major events in Jesus' life can be seen as predicted by the Jewish prophets, especially Isaiah. In the following passage (Isaiah 40: 1-5) Isaiah announces the coming of the Christ or Messiah. These words were memorably set to music in George Frederick Handel's Messiah.
________________________________________
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.
A voice cries out:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
MUNRO
Saturday, February 21, 2009
NELLA FANTASIA In English and Italian:MORICONE THE GREAT
In my fantasy I see a fair world,
Where everyone lives in peace and honesty.
I dream of a place to live that is always free,
Like a cloud that floats,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.
In my fantasy I see a bright world
Where each night there is less darkness.
I dream of spirits that are always free,
Like the cloud that floats.
In my fantasy exists a warm wind,
That breathes into the city, like a friend.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like the cloud that floats,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.
Nella fantasia io vedo un mondo giusto,
Li tutti vivono in pace e in onestà.
Io sogno d'anime che sono sempre libere,
Come le nuvole che volano,
Pien' d'umanità in fondo all'anima.
Nella fantasia io vedo un mondo chiaro,
Li anche la notte è meno oscura.
Io sogno d'anime che sono sempre libere,
Come le nuvole che volano.
Nella fantasia esiste un vento caldo,
Che soffia sulle città, come amico.
Io sogno d'anime che sono sempre libere,
Come le nuvole che volano,
Pien' d'umanità in fondo all'anima.
Monday, February 9, 2009
VALENTINE'S DAY SONG OF UNREQUITED LOVE
An raibh tú ag an gCarraig?
nó a' bhfaca tú féin mó grá
nó a' bhfaca tú gile,
finne agus scéimh na mná?
Nó a' bhfaca tú t-úll
ba chumhra is ba mhilse bláth?
nó a' bhfaca tú mo Vailintín
Nó a' bhfuil sí á cloí mar táim.
Ó bhí mé ag an gCarraig,
is chonaic mé mé féin dó grá
Ó chonaic mé gile
finne agus scéimh na mná
Ó chonaic mé an t-ull
ba chumhra is ba mhilse bláth
Agus chonaic mé do Vailintín
agus ní sí á cloí mar 'táir.
Were You at the Rock?
Or did you yourself see my love,
Or did you see a brightness,
the fairness and the beauty of the woman?
Or did you see the apple,
the sweetest and most fragrant blossom?
Or did you see my Valentine?
Is she pining as I am?
O, I was at the rock
And I myself saw your love
O, I saw a brightness,
the fairness and the beauty of the woman
O, I did see the apple
the sweetest and most fragrant blossom
and I saw your Valentine
she is not pining as thou art !
This song speaks of Penal Days (Circa 1673-1830) during a time of great persecution when the Mass was celebrated in secret at remote gatherings. The "Carraig" was the "Mass rock" used as a meeting-place and altar.
Death was the penalty for those caught at Mass. In Penal Times, a price of 30 pounds (about $1500 in today’s currency) was offered for the head of a priest or hedge-school master (teacher), the same as for that of a wolf.
Horace
Ode II-XVI “Otium”
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
In this lyrical ode echoing many traditional Epicurean themes, Horace tells us that “otium” or peace is to be valued above wealth or power:
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes
condidit lunam neque certa fulgent
sidera nautis;
(Peace the sailor prays, caught in a storm on the open Aegean, when dark-clad clouds have hid the moon and the stars shine no longer certain)
otium bello furiosa Thrace,
otium Medi pharetra decori,
Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura ve-
nale neque auro.
(Peace prays Thrace furious in war; peace prays the Mede with quiver richly adorned; peace Grosphus, that cannot be bought with gems nor with purple nor with gold.)
non enim gazae neque consularis
summovet lictor miseros tumultus
mentis et curas laqueata circum
tecta volantes.
(It isn't treasure nor even the consul's lictor that can banish the soul's miserable tumults and the cares that fly unseen about the paneled ceilings.)
vivitur parvo bene, cui paternum
splendet in mensa tenui salinum
nec leves somnos timor aut cupido
sordidus aufert.
(He lives happily on a little, on whose frugal table shines the ancestral salt-dish, and whose soft slumbers are not carried away by fear or sordid greed.)
quid brevi tortes iaculamur aevo
multa? quid terras alio calentes
sole mutamus? patriae quis exsul
se quoque fugit?
(Why do we strive so hard in our brief lives for great possessions? Why do we change our country for climes warmed by a different sun? What exile from his fatherland ever escaped himself as well?)
scandit aeratas vitiosa naves
cura nec turmas equitum relinquit,
ocior cervis et agente nimbos
ocior Euro.
(Care mounts even the brass-bound galley nor fails to leave behind the troops of horse, swifter than stags, swifter than Eurus when he drives the storm before him.)
laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
oderit curare et amara lento
temperet risu. nihil est ab omni
parte beatum.
(Joyful let the soul be in the present, let it disdain to trouble about what is beyond and temper bitterness with a laugh. Nothing is blessed forever.)
abstulit clarum cita mors Achillem,
longa Tithonum minuit senectus;
et mihi forsan, tibi quod negarit,
porriget hora.
(Achilles for all his glory was quickly snatched away by death; Tithonus, though living longer into old age, shrank away; and to me perhaps the passing hour will grant what it denies to you.)
te greges centum Siculaeque circum
mugiunt vaccae, tibi tollit hinnitum
apta quadrigis equa, te bis Afro
murice tinctae
(Around you moo a hundred herds of Sicilian cows; in your stables whinnies the racing-mare; in wool twice-dipped in African purple)
vestiunt lanae; mihi parva rura et
spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae
Parca non mendax dedit et malignum
spernere vulgus.you are dressed.
(To me Fate that does not belie her name has given a small domain, the fine breath of Muses' Grecian song, and the spiteful crowd to spurn.)
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
In this lyrical ode echoing many traditional Epicurean themes, Horace tells us that “otium” or peace is to be valued above wealth or power:
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes
condidit lunam neque certa fulgent
sidera nautis;
(Peace the sailor prays, caught in a storm on the open Aegean, when dark-clad clouds have hid the moon and the stars shine no longer certain)
otium bello furiosa Thrace,
otium Medi pharetra decori,
Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura ve-
nale neque auro.
(Peace prays Thrace furious in war; peace prays the Mede with quiver richly adorned; peace Grosphus, that cannot be bought with gems nor with purple nor with gold.)
non enim gazae neque consularis
summovet lictor miseros tumultus
mentis et curas laqueata circum
tecta volantes.
(It isn't treasure nor even the consul's lictor that can banish the soul's miserable tumults and the cares that fly unseen about the paneled ceilings.)
vivitur parvo bene, cui paternum
splendet in mensa tenui salinum
nec leves somnos timor aut cupido
sordidus aufert.
(He lives happily on a little, on whose frugal table shines the ancestral salt-dish, and whose soft slumbers are not carried away by fear or sordid greed.)
quid brevi tortes iaculamur aevo
multa? quid terras alio calentes
sole mutamus? patriae quis exsul
se quoque fugit?
(Why do we strive so hard in our brief lives for great possessions? Why do we change our country for climes warmed by a different sun? What exile from his fatherland ever escaped himself as well?)
scandit aeratas vitiosa naves
cura nec turmas equitum relinquit,
ocior cervis et agente nimbos
ocior Euro.
(Care mounts even the brass-bound galley nor fails to leave behind the troops of horse, swifter than stags, swifter than Eurus when he drives the storm before him.)
laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
oderit curare et amara lento
temperet risu. nihil est ab omni
parte beatum.
(Joyful let the soul be in the present, let it disdain to trouble about what is beyond and temper bitterness with a laugh. Nothing is blessed forever.)
abstulit clarum cita mors Achillem,
longa Tithonum minuit senectus;
et mihi forsan, tibi quod negarit,
porriget hora.
(Achilles for all his glory was quickly snatched away by death; Tithonus, though living longer into old age, shrank away; and to me perhaps the passing hour will grant what it denies to you.)
te greges centum Siculaeque circum
mugiunt vaccae, tibi tollit hinnitum
apta quadrigis equa, te bis Afro
murice tinctae
(Around you moo a hundred herds of Sicilian cows; in your stables whinnies the racing-mare; in wool twice-dipped in African purple)
vestiunt lanae; mihi parva rura et
spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae
Parca non mendax dedit et malignum
spernere vulgus.you are dressed.
(To me Fate that does not belie her name has given a small domain, the fine breath of Muses' Grecian song, and the spiteful crowd to spurn.)
Saturday, February 7, 2009
The Incomparable Victoria de Los Angeles
Canción española
From The Times
I SHALL NEVER FORGET WHEN I FOUND OUT OF THE DEATH OF VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES.
It was in the Argyll Hotel in Glasgow just after I had met with Mairi MacInnes, the Scottish Gaelic singer and her family. Just the night before I had heard Miss MacInnes sing in Wendy Weatherby's SUNSET SONG. We were talking about music and favorite singers and I mentioned my fondness not only for Scottish and Irish folk music but classical repetorie as well and of course VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES came up in the conversation. It was a Saturday, January 15, 2005.
January 17, 2005
Victoria de los Angeles
Enchanting Spanish soprano who must be counted among the finest singers of the past 50 years
VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES was a singer whose charismatic personality and knockdown charm secured her a vast public, but in the process sometimes obscured that her deep musicality, remarkable technical accomplishment, catholicity of taste and — above all — a lyric soprano voice of unsurpassed beauty must cause her to be rated among the greatest singers of the second half of the 20th century.
She was first heard in Britain in 1948 when the BBC astutely engaged her for a broadcast performance of Falla’s La vida breve. Her Covent Garden debut (as Mimì in La bohème) followed in 1950. She became a regular visitor to the house for the next decade, excelling in Puccini and Massenet. Habitués counted her Butterfly and Manon, especially when conducted by Kempe, as among the most exquisite in living memory.
Outside the theatre a devoted audience thronged her regular London recitals, first at the Royal Festival Hall and later at the Wigmore Hall, which she continued to give until well into her seventies. In the autumn of 2003, on her 80th birthday, she could look back on a career that had lasted 60 years.
Victoria de los Angeles was born Victoria Gómez Cima into a poor Catalan family in Barcelona in 1923. Her father was a porter and caretaker at the university and her mother a cleaner. The Spanish Civil War played havoc with her schooling, but eventually, against the wishes of her father, she got into the Conservatory in Barcelona to study singing and the piano in 1940.
It did not take her long to make her mark. Though she became a competent performer on the piano, the guitar and the recorder, it was principally as a soprano with a voice amazingly developed for her age that she attracted attention, and by the time she came to graduate she had won every vocal prize available to students. When she was only 16 she was heard on Radio Barcelona and the following year made her opera debut in a Bohème sponsored by the Tres Cosacos cognac company.
De los Angeles gave her first public recital, devoted — perhaps for diplomatic reasons — to German lieder, in Barcelona in 1944. Her debut on the operatic stage followed the same year as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro at the Teatro Liceu, and her early career was notable for some appearances with the 57-year-old Gigli in Madrid in Bohème and Manon, when the famous tenor was said to have been displeased by the enthusiasm aroused in the madrileños by the rising young star.
The door to an international career was opened for de los Angeles by the ending of war and by her winning first prize in the Geneva international competition in 1947.
In the interim she returned to Barcelona to sing Elsa in Lohengrin and Agathe in Der Freischütz. Her success in Geneva having led to the invitation from the BBC, this in turn provoked the interest of EMI, the record company with which de los Angeles was to have a lifelong association.
Sadly, an audition for Sir David Webster at Covent Garden came to nothing, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, she had made her debut at the Paris Opera in 1949 (as Marguérite in a very ancient production of Faust), which was followed by her Covent Garden debut and a Wigmore Hall recital.
Her Mimì and her Madama Butterfly in London won golden opinions, and her enchanting Manon, in which her regular partner was Walter Midgley. She was also heard in the soprano leads in both Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci on the same evening.
In February 1950 she made her first appearances in Stockholm and Copenhagen, and in March 1951 she arrived in New York to sing Marguérite on one of the Met’s more humdrum evenings, causing Virgil Thomson to write that she made everyone else on stage seem amateurish and to add: “I think she has the makings of a great star.”
They were prophetic words in that from this time onwards her success can be said to have been worldwide and unfailing.
Nor was it only in the French and Italian repertory. It is easily overlooked that de los Angeles made her La Scala debut as Strauss’s Ariadne (under Dobrowen in May 1950), and that in 1961 she went to Bayreuth to sing Elisabeth in Tannhäuser in Wieland Wagner’s production. It was conducted by Sawallisch, and the cast included Windgassen in the title role, Bumbry and Fischer-Dieskau.
Always keen to avoid being typecast as a “Spanish specialist”, she later said she thought of these Bayreuth performances as in some ways the culmination of her career.
A lot of the de los Angeles repertoire coincided with that of her older contemporary and rival Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and many will recall the two divas joining together in a concert in honour of Gerald Moore at the Royal Festival Hall when the point was made by an EMI record of the pair singing Rossini’s Duetto dei due gatti which became a bestseller.
Although de los Angeles’s appearances in the opera house tapered off in the 1960s, she finally retired from the theatre only in 1980, when she sang her last Mélisande, and a list of places where she sang would include almost every major house in the Western hemisphere. But she continued to grace the recital platform with her powers seemingly little diminished. The breadth of her repertory remained astonishing, from Monteverdi through Handel and Mozart to Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams; but however satisfying her published programme, her admirers always looked forward to the moment when, for her encores, she would pick up her guitar and accompany herself in Clavelitos or Adiós Granada.
Her recording career for EMI spanned more than 30 years and included 22 complete operas and some 40 recital records, in which her command of the florid music of Handel or Rossini is as conspicuous as the refined sensibility of her singing of Brahms or Schubert. There is hardly a dud among them, a rare achievement. Among her outstanding recordings are the Bohème she did with Beecham, which remains a classic set, her Manon with Monteux and her Marguérite ( Faust) for Cluytens.
Her Carmen (also with Beecham), aside from being beautifully sung, is one of the few in which the character’s humour is done justice to. It is a list, again, that could be much extended.
Her voice was a lyric soprano of gorgeous refulgence and limpidity, extending in her early years to the D above the stave. It also went down solidly enough to enable her to sing Carmen and Rossini’s Rosina in its original mezzo-soprano key.
De los Angeles was one of those rare singers for whom singing seemed a complete method of self-expression; when she sang the whole person sang. Yet her command of such matters as enunciation, phrasing and colouring,as well as of coloratura, attested to her deep musicality. To all this she united excellent stagecraft and an enchanting persona.
She was a tireless advocate of her country’s music, and if her singing of Spanish song struck some as overpolite, her fastidiousness paid off in German lieder and elsewhere.
She married Enrique Magriñá in 1948, who became her manager, and leaves two sons by the marriage.
Victoria de los Angeles, opera and concert soprano, was born on November 1, 1923, and died on January 15, 2005, aged 81.
(Concha)
Concha. De España vengo, soy española,
en mis ojos me traigo luz de su cielo
y en mi cuerpo la gracia de la manola!
De España vengo, de España soy
y mi cara serrana lo va diciendo.
He nacido en España por donde voy.
A mi lo madrileño, me vuelve loca
y cuando yo me arranco con una copla
el acento gitano de mi canción
toman vida las flores de mi mantón.
De España vengo, de España soy
y mi cara serrana lo va diciendo.
Yo he nacido en España por donde voy.
Campana de la Torre de Maravillas
si es que tocas a fuego toca de prisa:
mira que ardo por culpa de unos ojos
que estoy mirando. Madre, me muero,
por culpa de unos ojos negros, muy negros,
que los tengo "metíos" dentro del alma
y que son los ojazos de mi gitano.
Muriendo estoy, mi vida, por tu desvío;
te quiero y no me quieres, gitano mío.
Mira que pena verse así, despreciada,
siendo morena!
De España vengo, de España soy
y mi cara serrana lo va diciendo.
Yo he nacido en España, por donde voy!
Concha. I come from Spain, I am a Spaniard,
my eyes reflect the bright light of her sky
and my body the grace of her people!
I come from Spain, I am Spanish,
and my highland face shows it plainly.
I am Spanish born , that's for sure.
Anything from Madrid drives me wild,
and when I break into song
the gypsy style of my singing
makes the flowers on my shawl bloom.
I come from Spain, I am Spanish,
and my face shows it plainly.
I am Spanish born , that's for sure.
Bell of the Tower of Wonders,
if you must raise the fire alarm, ring quickly:
see how I'm burning because of a pair of eyes
that I've fallen for. God, I'm dying
because of a pair of dark eyes, so dark,
they have stripped me to the soul,
the eyes of my gypsy boy.
I am dying, my love, of your disdain;
I love you and you don't love me, my lad.
See how sad it is to be despised,
for being dark!
I come from Spain, I am Spanish,
and my face shows it plainly.
I am Spanish born , that's for sure!
THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER
Friday, February 6, 2009
An Die Musik (Schubert)
Schubert's famous ode to the wonders of music, on a poem by Franz von Schober.
This lied, D. 547 (Op. 88, No. 4), dates from 1817. Schubert's famous ode to the wonders of music, on a poem by Franz von Schober. This lied, D. 547 (Op. 88, No. 4), dates from 1817. Von Schober, while a law student in 1816, heard a few of Schubert's songs and found out he was still barely surviving the drudgery of school and looking for work. Von Schober proposed to install him in his own household, so Schubert could concentrate on just composing. Schubert agreed to this after his father's consent was given. Incidentally, Franz (Adolf Friedrich) von Schober was half Austrian half Swede. He grew up in a German and Swedish-speaking household. He was born at Torup Castle near Malmö, Sweden of an Austrian mother.
(GIVING) LIBERALITY Generosity is the key to a life of abundance. Seeking gratification in dead objects indicates a dead soul.
Sharing what’s valuable in life means not just giving away material goods, but also time, attention, wisdom and energy — the things that create a strong, rich and diverse community. This song just overflows with beauty, joy and thankfullness!
AN DIE MUSIK BY Franz von Schober
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf' entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir
Den Himmel beßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!
TO MUSIC
Oh 'tis THEE SACRED ART, in those many black-dog hours,
When the wild net of life takes hold of me,
'Tis thee who have fired my heart with joy!
'Tis thee who have carried me ahead to glimpse of yon better world,
Oft have I heard the soft sigh from thy harp,
Chords so sweet! Chords so blissful!
Thou openest my eyes to a heaven of better times!
'Tis thee I thank for all this, SACRED ART!
(translation R.K. MUNRO)
A la música
SPANISH
Oh, Tú arte benévolo, en cuántas horas sombrías,
cuando me agarra la red traidora de la vida,
Tú has inflamado mi corazón con un cálido amor,
Tú me has conducido hacia un mundo mejor!
Con frecuencia se ha escapado un suspiro de tu arpa,
un dulce y sagrado acorde tuyo
me has abierto el cielo de tiempos mejores.
¡Oh,Tú arte benévolo, te doy mil gracias por ello!
(TRANSLATION R.K.MUNRO)
À la musique
FRENCH
O toi, art tout de noblesse,
que de fois, en ces tristes heures
où la vie resserrait son étau,
m'as-tu réchauffé le coeur,
m'as-tu transporté dans un monde plus clément!
Souvent, un soupir échappé de ta harpe,
un doux accord céleste
m'a ouvert d'autres cieux.
O toi, art tout de noblesse, sois en remercié!
KATHLEEN FARRIER
VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES (I was blessed to see her in person several times in New York and Madrid)
GEORGE LONDON
PLACIDO DOMINGO La Marseillaise ; I can never forget my uncles, my grandfather and many of my kinsmen fought and some died for the freedom of Belgium and France 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. NE OBLIVISCARIS
THE ROADSIDE FIRE
Robert Louis Stevenson (Set to music by VAUGHN WILLIAMS)
WILL make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me,
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, 5
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! 10
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
Lawrence Tibbett - Myself When Young
Omar Khayyam/FITZGERALD TRANSLATION
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd --
"I came like Water and like Wind I go."
Omar Khayyam/FITZGERALD TRANSLATION
MUSIC BY Liza Lehmann (1862-1918)
Ah, moon of my delight, [that knows]1 no wane,
The moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same garden after me - in vain!
And when thyself with shining foot shall pass
Among the guests star-scatter'd on the grass,
And in thy joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one - turn down an empty glass!
THE GREAT JOHN MCCORMACK (My father and grandfather saw him perform in person!)
RARE RECORDINGS OF JAN PEERCE
ROBERT MERRIL and JAN PEERCE LIVE TV RECORDING La forza del destino
Based on the great Spanish play DON ALVARO by El Duque de Rivas
MARIO LANZA a splendid version from DEC 26 1945
SNOWY BREASTED PEARL (Translated from the GAELIC)
WEBSTER BOOTH
NOT AS FINE A SINGER BUT THIS ONE SINGS IT IN THE ORIGINAL IRISH GAELIC
JOHN MACCORMACK SINGING ANOTHER ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION
SOUND AN ALARM
Webster Booth (tenor) sings "Sound an Alarm" from Handel's oratorio, "Judas Maccabeus".
YOUNGER THAN SPRINGTIME. BILL TABBERT was the orignial Lt. Joe Cable and he was a friend of my parents. He sang this song at our home and that was the first time I ever heard this song and others like NESSUM DORMA.
HERE Is a modern version
AND ANOTHER
EZIO PINZA was BIll Tabbert's great friend; when he died they say Bill's career died too
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING
This lied, D. 547 (Op. 88, No. 4), dates from 1817. Schubert's famous ode to the wonders of music, on a poem by Franz von Schober. This lied, D. 547 (Op. 88, No. 4), dates from 1817. Von Schober, while a law student in 1816, heard a few of Schubert's songs and found out he was still barely surviving the drudgery of school and looking for work. Von Schober proposed to install him in his own household, so Schubert could concentrate on just composing. Schubert agreed to this after his father's consent was given. Incidentally, Franz (Adolf Friedrich) von Schober was half Austrian half Swede. He grew up in a German and Swedish-speaking household. He was born at Torup Castle near Malmö, Sweden of an Austrian mother.
(GIVING) LIBERALITY Generosity is the key to a life of abundance. Seeking gratification in dead objects indicates a dead soul.
Sharing what’s valuable in life means not just giving away material goods, but also time, attention, wisdom and energy — the things that create a strong, rich and diverse community. This song just overflows with beauty, joy and thankfullness!
AN DIE MUSIK BY Franz von Schober
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf' entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir
Den Himmel beßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!
TO MUSIC
Oh 'tis THEE SACRED ART, in those many black-dog hours,
When the wild net of life takes hold of me,
'Tis thee who have fired my heart with joy!
'Tis thee who have carried me ahead to glimpse of yon better world,
Oft have I heard the soft sigh from thy harp,
Chords so sweet! Chords so blissful!
Thou openest my eyes to a heaven of better times!
'Tis thee I thank for all this, SACRED ART!
(translation R.K. MUNRO)
A la música
SPANISH
Oh, Tú arte benévolo, en cuántas horas sombrías,
cuando me agarra la red traidora de la vida,
Tú has inflamado mi corazón con un cálido amor,
Tú me has conducido hacia un mundo mejor!
Con frecuencia se ha escapado un suspiro de tu arpa,
un dulce y sagrado acorde tuyo
me has abierto el cielo de tiempos mejores.
¡Oh,Tú arte benévolo, te doy mil gracias por ello!
(TRANSLATION R.K.MUNRO)
À la musique
FRENCH
O toi, art tout de noblesse,
que de fois, en ces tristes heures
où la vie resserrait son étau,
m'as-tu réchauffé le coeur,
m'as-tu transporté dans un monde plus clément!
Souvent, un soupir échappé de ta harpe,
un doux accord céleste
m'a ouvert d'autres cieux.
O toi, art tout de noblesse, sois en remercié!
KATHLEEN FARRIER
VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES (I was blessed to see her in person several times in New York and Madrid)
GEORGE LONDON
PLACIDO DOMINGO La Marseillaise ; I can never forget my uncles, my grandfather and many of my kinsmen fought and some died for the freedom of Belgium and France 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. NE OBLIVISCARIS
THE ROADSIDE FIRE
Robert Louis Stevenson (Set to music by VAUGHN WILLIAMS)
WILL make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me,
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, 5
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! 10
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
Lawrence Tibbett - Myself When Young
Omar Khayyam/FITZGERALD TRANSLATION
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd --
"I came like Water and like Wind I go."
Omar Khayyam/FITZGERALD TRANSLATION
MUSIC BY Liza Lehmann (1862-1918)
Ah, moon of my delight, [that knows]1 no wane,
The moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same garden after me - in vain!
And when thyself with shining foot shall pass
Among the guests star-scatter'd on the grass,
And in thy joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one - turn down an empty glass!
THE GREAT JOHN MCCORMACK (My father and grandfather saw him perform in person!)
RARE RECORDINGS OF JAN PEERCE
ROBERT MERRIL and JAN PEERCE LIVE TV RECORDING La forza del destino
Based on the great Spanish play DON ALVARO by El Duque de Rivas
MARIO LANZA a splendid version from DEC 26 1945
SNOWY BREASTED PEARL (Translated from the GAELIC)
WEBSTER BOOTH
NOT AS FINE A SINGER BUT THIS ONE SINGS IT IN THE ORIGINAL IRISH GAELIC
JOHN MACCORMACK SINGING ANOTHER ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION
SOUND AN ALARM
Webster Booth (tenor) sings "Sound an Alarm" from Handel's oratorio, "Judas Maccabeus".
YOUNGER THAN SPRINGTIME. BILL TABBERT was the orignial Lt. Joe Cable and he was a friend of my parents. He sang this song at our home and that was the first time I ever heard this song and others like NESSUM DORMA.
HERE Is a modern version
AND ANOTHER
EZIO PINZA was BIll Tabbert's great friend; when he died they say Bill's career died too
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Montage: STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN & Lt. Col David Niven, formerly of the HLI
From the great film duo of
Writen/Directed: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
DP: Jack Cardiff
Peter: David Niven
June: Kim Hunter
1946
One of Lt Colonel Niven’s first film after six years of active service mostly in the Rifle Brigade and SAS (Commandos; North Africa, Sicly, D-Day, Normandy). He was very modest about his military service some of which appears to have been top secret. He claimed to have been born in Kirriemuir, Scotland but this was a polite fiction; he was actually born in London from a family of Scottish descent. Nonetheless, he loved Scotland and had an emotional tie to the land of his ancestors. He was a Leal Mon.
He was a graduate of Sandhurst and served 11 years in the British Army beginning his career with the HLI (Highland Light Infantry). His first choice was the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. His father was killed at Gallipoli and he was partially raised by a wounded piper of the Argylls. His semi-fictional autobiographies are charming .
I read them in Spanish while living in Spain in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
The Moon's a Balloon: Reminiscences, London, 1971.
Bring on the Empty Horses, London, 1975.
He had a small part in DODSWORTH with Walter Huston and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton
The Dawn Patrol (1938 with Errol Flynn (as Lt. Scott) was really his break out role; if you think about it he made a career of playing himself (a debonair British officer with derring-do)
One of the few glimpses we have of his WWII service he was giving his men a pep talk before a particularly dangerous mission and Niven is reported to have said: “ You chaps have to remember you only have to do this once. I’ll have do to it all over again with Errol Flynn!” It got a lot of laughs from his men. He was, it was said a very brave and beloved commander. He was an acquaintance of Winston Churchill who admired him greatly because he knew that Niven –already a star in America- did not have to come back to England in 1939.
Some of my favorite Niven films are: The Bishop's Wife (1947) with Loretta Young and Cary Grant
Enchantment 1948) with Teresa Wright (From the Rumer Godden novel Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, which I found charming; 2007 is Rumer Godden's Centenary Year; she was a very religious and spiritual woman; Rumer Godden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1968. "I like the way everything is clear and concise," she remarked propos her new religion. "You'll always be forgiven but you must know the rules.”
Around the World in Eighty Days (as charming a Phileas Fogg as you will meet and Ronald Colman had a cameo in that film) ; as a boy I read every Jules Verne Novel
Separate Tables ( with Deborah Kerr; he won an Oscar for his performance as a phoney Major)
I think the first film I ever saw him in was Please don’t Eat the Daisies (1961) with Doris Day. It was a nice family movie.
The Guns of Navarone (1961) I saw in the movies as a small boy and thought it was the greatest film of all time. It wasn’t but it was grand entertainment and beautifully filmed and acted.
55 Days at Peking (1963) with Charlton Heston was also one of my favorite films of all time; I am very fond of the soundtrack which is right up my alley. This film is as close to an international Tattoo as you will every find and is still entertaining even if an aging , overweight boozy Ava Gardner is not very convincing as a glamorous beauty.
The Pink Panther (1964) may be his most famous film after all these years and he certainly helped make that charming comedy tick.
His later films were much less memorable.
MUNRO
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (AKA A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (AKA A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH Escalera al cielo (Sp) Une question de vie et de mort (Fr) Scala al paradise (It)
A classic film directed by the Archers considered the best European and British film directors of the 20th century*
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
TIME: May 1945 Just before V-E Day.
PLACE (setting) : Someplace over the English Channel, England and….Heaven
MAIN CHARACTERS
1) PETER CARTER (the pilot) Starring DAVID NIVEN
Oscar winning actor
2) JUNE (the American girl; WAAC Woman’s Army Air Corps) Starring KIM HUNTER
Oscar winning actress
3) Bob Trubshawe
(“Sparks”: the radio man on the bomber) ROBERT COOTE
4) A woman angel Kathleen Byron
5) Conductor 71 (Frenchman)
(A French Noble executed during the Reign of Terror 1791) Marius Goring
6) Dr. FRANK REEVES (an English Doctor) Roger Livesey
7) Abraham Fallon (American; killed April 19, 1775 at the Battle of Lexington) Raymond Massey
8) The Celestial Judge / The Surgeon Abraham Sofaer
Extras:
From all the Allied Powers
See what countries you can identify. included real WWII R.A.F. crews,
Red Cross nurses
and W.A.A.C (Woman’s Army Air Corps)
MOVIE QUESTIONS and DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) Peter Carter is the RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot who is returning from a bombing mission over Nazi Germany. What is the matter with his plane?
2) Why is Peter Carter alone except for “Sparks” the dead radioman (Bob)? Where is his crew?
______________________________________________________________________________
3) Why doesn’t Peter bail out with his parachute?
_____________________________________________________________
4) Who does Peter talk to over the radio?
_____________________________________________________________
5) According to Peter who the world is in trouble because it ignores the teaching of what three famous teachers?____________________________________________________________________________
6) Peter comes to in the surf of the English Channel and who does he meet at the beach?
____________________________________________________________________________________
7) Do you believe in love in first sight?
___________________________________________________________________________________
8) Even though Peter has survived he has a head injury so what does Dr. Reeves tell Dr.
McEwen and June what Peter needs to survive?
9) When the ambulance is late what does Dr. Reeve do? What happens to Dr. Reeve? What job will Dr. Reeve take?
_______________________________________________________________________
10) )Who says:” I've fallen in love with her. Her accent is foreign, but it sounds sweet to me. We were born thousands of miles apart, but we were made for each other/”
______________________ _______________________________________________________
11) In Heaven the prosecutor Abraham Fallon say “Be careful, doctor Reeves. In the whole Universe, nothing is stronger than The Law.
Doctor Frank Reeves: Yes, Mr. Fallon, nothing is stronger than The Law in the Universe, but on Earth nothing is stronger than________________________________________________________________________________
12) Will June and Peter live a long and happy life together in the end?________________________
POEM BY WILLIAM BLAKE "THE DIVINE IMAGE"
The Divine Image
by William Blake
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen , Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
by William Blake
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen , Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
A Highland Gentleman
FROM AM BAILE:
In the aftermath of the last Jacobite Rebellion a series of Acts of Parliament launched an assault on the culture of Gaeldom including the proscription of Highland dress and the playing of pipes.
The form of Highland dress has always owed much to the army and it was the Highland regiments which kept the kilt and the tartan alive until, in 1782, their use was once more permitted. Before that time, Scots were only permitted to wear any 'tartanry', if they joined the British Armed Services. Pipers were permitted to wear their kilt, but usually in a Regimental color.
The kilt itself in its original form was a very basic garment which required neither tailoring nor the frequent replacement which a pair of breeches needed. The tartan cloth forming a piece of material some two metres in width by four or five metres in length. This was known variously as the Breacan, the Feileadh Bhreacain and the Feileadh Mor - the big kilt, usually referrred to in English as the belted plaid.
The belted plaid had many advantages in the Highland climate and terrain. It allowed freedom of movement, it was warm, the upper half could provide a voluminous cloak against the weather, it dried out quickly and with much less discomfort than trousers and, if required, it could, by undoing the belt, provide a very adequate overnight blanket. The tightly woven wool proved almost completely waterproof, something the lose woven wool of today is not. When complete freedom of action was required in battle it was easily discarded, and one famous Highland clan battle, that between the Frasers the MacDonalds and Camerons in 1544, is known as Blar-na-Leine, which can be translated as 'Field of the Shirts'.
The bagpipes are thought to have been used in ancient Egypt. The origins of the pipes in Scotland is unclear. It had been suggested that they were a Roman import. Others have claimed that the instrument came from Ireland as a result of colonisation. The original pipes in Scotland had only a single drone. The second drone was added in the mid to late 1500s. The third drone, or the 'great drone', came into use early in the 1700s.
Beginning with Iain Odhar, who lived in the mid-16th century, the MacCrimmon family was responsible for elevating Highland pipe music to new heights. This music is called piobaireachd (pronounced piobroch).
Clan pipers' titles were mostly hereditary and held in much esteem. The best known were the MacCrimmons, pipers to MacLeod of Dunvegan; the MacAuthurs, pipers to MacDonald of the Isles; the MacKays, pipers to the MacKenzie; the Rankins, pipers to MacLean of Duart
As dèidh Ar-a-mach mu dheireadh nan Seumasach thug sreath de dh' Achdan Pàrlamaid ionnsaigh air dualchas na Gàidhealtachd le toirmeasg an èididh Ghàidhealaich agus cluiche na pìoba.
Tha an deise Ghàidhealach riamh air a bhith gu mòr an comain an airm agus b' iad na rèisimeidean Gàidhealach a chum am fèileadh agus am breacan beò gu 1782, nuair a chaidh an ceadachadh a-rithist. Ron àm sin chan fhaodadh Albannaich breacan sam bith a chur orra ach a-mhàin nam biodh iad ann an seirbheis Arm Bhreatainn. Dh'fhaodadh pìobairean am fèileadh a chur orra, ach mar bu trice b' ann an dath na rèisimeid.
Na chruth tùsail, b'e bad-aodaich gu math sìmplidh a bha san fhèileadh, nach fheumadh tàillearachd no càradh, mar a dh'fheumadh briogais. Bha breacan na phìos aodaich de dhà meatair de leud agus de cheithir no còig meatairean de dh'fhaid. Bha seo air ainmeachadh mar Breacan, am Fèileadh Breacain agus am Fèileadh Mòr. Bha am Fèileadh Mòr no am 'Big Kilt' sa Bheurla mar bu trice a' ciallachadh plaide le crios air. Bha mòran bhuannachdan sa phlaide-chrios ann an aimsir agus talamh na Gàidhealtachd. Bha e furasta gluasad leis, bha e blàth, dh'fhaodadh am pìos àrd dheth a bhith na chleoca mòr dìonach an aghaidh na sìde, thioramaicheadh e gu luath agus le fada na bu lugha de mhì-chomhfhartachd na briogais agus, nam feumaist, le bhith a' toirt dheth a' chrios, dhèanadh e deagh phlaide oidhche. Bha an clò a bh' air a dhlùth-fhighe cha mhòr gu tur dìonach air uisge, rud nas eil clò an latha an-diugh a th' air fhighe nas fharsainge. Nuair a bhiodh feum air mòr-shaorsa gluasaid, bha e furasta a chur dhiot agus tha aon bhlàr cinnidh ainmeil ann, eadar na Frisealaich, na Dòmhnallaich agus na Camshronaich ann an 1544 air ainmeachadh mar 'Blàr na Lèine'.
Thathar an dùil gun robhar a' cluiche na pìoba san t-seann Eiphit. Chan eil eachdraidh na pìoba an Alba idir soilleir. Tha feadhainn dhen bheachd gun tàinig iad a-steach ri linn nan Ròmanach. Tha cuid eile ag ràdh gun tàinig iad à Eirinn ri linn eilthireachd. Cha robh aig a'chiad phìoban ann an Alba ach aon dos. Chaidh an dàrna dos a chur riutha ann am meadhan no deireadh nan 1500an. Thàinig an treas dos no an 'Dos Mòr' tràth sna 1700an.
A' toiseachadh le Iain Odhar, a bha beò am meadhan an t-16mh linn, bha teaghlach MhicCruimein nam meadhan air àrdachadh cliù na pìoba. 'S e pìobaireachd a th' air a' cheòl seo. Bha tiotalan phìobairean nan cinnidhean, mar bu trice, dualach agus bhathar a' toirt mòran spèis dhaibh. B' iad Clann MhicCruimein a b'ainmeile, 's bha iadsan nam pìobairean do MhacLeòid Dhùn Bheagain; bha Clann MhicArtair nam pìobairean do MhacDhòmhnaill nan Eilean; bha Clann MhicCaoidh nam pìobairean do Chlann MhicChoinnich; bha Clann MhicFhraing nam pìobairean do MhacGilleathain Dhubhairt
Of Maddoff and the Truth: Far better to be a leal mon
Dear friends and colleagues:
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually Victor Frankl
One thing is certain: Bernard L. Madoff was not a leal mon; a chivalrous gentleman of honor. He was not a good brother. He was not a good husband. He was not a good father. He was not a good citizen. He was not a good exemplar of his race and line. He shamed his coreligionists and fellow citizens. He exploited the greed and vanity of others. He was, indeed, an exemplar of the Hollow Man, a man without a chest. A clear example of the stunting effect of greed and materialism as a kind of spiritual disease.
If we are wise we will study his tale for it is a morality tale. There is no question his scam was a technology scam made possible by the PC for it was the PC and phoney printouts that were his accomplices.
How gullible is the modern man to the Leaf, the Printed Page! Tolstoy warned us long ago how unjust and unwise it was to judge men by “mere pieces of paper.”
But truth is a fixed star – a thing of abiding clarity- it needeth not the pencil or the pen. Many is the truth that has never been written only experienced, only remembered, only taught. Many the statistic a mere fabrication.
Una verdad pocha which may have been true in 1914, 1959 1999 or last month but no longer is. This world has many turns and all is flux.
And the truth often reveals itself sometimes over a long period of time and sometimes in a flash as by accident. But make no mistake it often passes us by.
Mr. Madoff was a parasite and charlatan like the three rascals in Juan Manuel’s story who left the Emperor without his shirt.
"He appeared to believe in family, loyalty and honesty,” said one former Madoff employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing litigation and investigations. “Never in your wildest imagination would you think he was a fraudster.”
And he was great because he was so “successful” and if you are rich you must really know.
In the end he will have to live with himself and the fact he dishonored and defrauded even his own family members.
In the end he will have to face the Just Judge whom I believe will judge the living and the dead.
In the end he will be left will be his name: Ponzi, Quisling, the Pseudo-J. P. Morgan: Madoff. The Pseudo Mench. The man without shame left only with ignominy.
The Great Teacher said, indeed, “What profiteth a man who gains the whole world and loses his soul?” (Luke 9:25)
“the honest man, though e’er sae poor
Is king ‘ men for a’ that” (BURNS)
Excessive pride indeed cometh before the untergang.
Victor Frankll wrote, in Man’s Quest for Meaning,
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate…. in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually.”
What we do is what we become.
Far better to be a modest man, a humble man, a man of honor, a seeker of the truth, a ranker: a leal mon loved and respected to the end and indeed long after too.
“ Man cannot be measured by the colour of his skin, or by his speech or by his clothes and jewels, but only by his heart. (Mika Waltari).
In the end truth and honor ‘-tis true- are better and more lasting than gold. When our world has passed away, when our nation ceases to exist, when our language is forgotten, when our books are dust, truth will abide.
Aye. “S truth.
RICHARD K. MUNRO
January 25, 2009 - NYT
The Talented Mr. Madoff
By JULIE CRESWELL and LANDON THOMAS Jr.
TO some, Bernard L. Madoff was an affable, charismatic man who moved comfortably among power brokers on Wall Street and in Washington, a winning financier who had all the toys: the penthouse apartment in Manhattan, the shares in two private jets, the yacht moored off the French Riviera.
Although hardly a household name, he secured a longstanding role as an elder statesman on Wall Street, allowing him to land on important boards and commissions where his opinions helped shape securities regulations. Along the way, he snared a coveted spot as the chairman of a major stock exchange, Nasdaq.
And his employees say he treated them like family.
There was, of course, another side to Mr. Madoff, who is 70. Reclusive, at times standoffish and aloof, this Bernie rarely rubbed elbows in Manhattan’s cocktail circuit or at Palm Beach balls. This Bernie was quiet, controlled and closely attuned to his image, down to the most minute details.
He was, for instance, an avid collector of vintage watches and took time each morning to match his wedding ring — he owned at least two — to the platinum or gold watch band he was wearing that day.
Per his directives, the décor in his firm’s New York and London offices was stark. Black, white and gray — or “icily cold modern,” as one frequent visitor to the New York operation described it.
Despite nurturing a familial atmosphere in his offices, he installed two cameras on the small trading floor of the firm’s London operations so he could monitor the unit remotely from New York.
This Bernie also ran a money management business on the side for decades that he kept hidden far from colleagues, competitors and regulators.
While he managed billions of dollars for individuals and foundations, he shunned one-on-one meetings with most of his investors, wrapping himself in an Oz-like aura, making him even more desirable to those seeking access.
So who was the real Bernie Madoff? And what could have driven him to choreograph a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, to which he is said to have confessed?
An easy answer is that Mr. Madoff was a charlatan of epic proportions, a greedy manipulator so hungry to accumulate wealth that he did not care whom he hurt to get what he wanted.
But some analysts say that a more complex and layered observation of his actions involves linking the world of white-collar finance to the world of serial criminals.
They wonder whether good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators.
“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.
Mr. McCrary cautions that he has never met Mr. Madoff, so he can’t make a diagnosis, but he says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.
“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says. “They manage the impression you receive of them. They know what people want, and they give it to them.”
As investigators plow through decades of documents, trying to decipher whether Mr. Madoff was engaged in anything other than an elaborate financial ruse, his friends remain dumbfounded — and feel deeply violated.
“He was a hero to us. The head of Nasdaq. We were proud of everything he had accomplished,” says Diana Goldberg, who once shared the 27-minute train ride with Mr. Madoff from their homes in Laurelton, Queens, to classes at Far Rockaway High School. “Now, the hero has vanished.”
If, in the end, Mr. Madoff is found to have been engaging in fraud for most of his career, then the hero never really existed.. Authorities say Mr. Madoff himself has confessed that he was the author of a longstanding and wide-ranging financial charade. His lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, declined to comment.
During the decades that Mr. Madoff built his business, he cast himself as a crusader, protecting the interests of smaller investors and bent on changing the way securities trading was done on Wall Street. To that end, like a burglar who knows the patrol routes of the police and can listen in on their radio scanners, he also actively wooed regulators who monitored his business.
“He once mentioned to me that he spent one-third of his time in Washington in the early 1990s, late 1980s,” says a person who has known Mr. Madoff for years but requested not to be identified because he does not want to be drawn into continuing litigation. “He was very involved with regulators. I think they used him as a sounding board and he looked to them like a white knight.”
“He was smart in understanding very early on that the more involved you were with regulators, you could shape regulation,” this individual adds. “But, if we find out that the Ponzi scheme goes back that far, then he was doing something much smarter. If you’re very close with regulators, they’re not going be looking over your shoulders that much. Very smart.”
MR. MADOFF spent his early years in Laurelton, a close-knit, Jewish enclave where he and his friends ate ice cream at the local five-and-ten and attended activities at the community center.
“It was an idyllic place to grow up in,” recalls Vera Gitten, who attended elementary school with him. She remembers him as “very thin,” a good student and extremely outgoing. She recalls a musical skit that he and his best friend wrote, rehearsed and performed for the class when they were in fifth or sixth grade.
“It was a broad company, sort of a ‘Sheik of Araby’ kind of thing where they wore costumes, which were their parents’ bedsheets, that made them look like they were desert sheiks,” Ms. Gitten says. “They would have us rolling.”
None of Mr. Madoff’s former elementary school friends could recall what his parents, Ralph and Sylvia, did for a living. According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents from the 1960s, it appears that his mother had a brokerage firm called Gibraltar Securities registered in her name with an address in Laurelton.
In 1963, the S.E.C. began investigating whether a number of firms, including Ms. Madoff’s, had failed to file financial reports and whether that required revoking their registrations. Early the next year, Ms. Madoff withdrew her registration and the S.E.C. dropped its proceedings against her.
While Mr. Madoff’s friends remember little about his parents, they all clearly recall his childhood sweetheart, and future wife, Ruth Alpern, a pretty, bubbly blonde who was voted “Josie College” by her Far Rockaway High School class.
Mr. Madoff, after graduating from high school in 1956, spent a year at the University of Alabama, where he joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity. A year later, he transferred to Hofstra University, where he graduated in 1960 with a degree in political science. He later became a Hofstra trustee, but the university never invested with him.
Mr. Madoff spent the next year at Brooklyn Law School, attending classes in the morning and running his side business — installing and fixing sprinkler systems — in the afternoon and evening, recalled Joseph Kavanau, who attended law school with Mr. Madoff. When Mr. Kavanau married his wife, Jane, who was Mrs. Madoff’s best friend from Queens, Mr. Madoff was the best man.
“Bernie was very industrious,” Mr. Kavanau explains. “He was going to school and working at the same time.”
Mr. Madoff was never interested in practicing law, Mr. Kavanau says. Instead, Mr. Madoff left law school and, using $5,000 saved from being a lifeguard and from his sprinkler business, joined the ranks of Wall Street in the 1960s.
“For many years when we were first married, my wife and I would go to their house or we would all go out to dinner, maybe a couple of nights a month,” said Mr. Kavanau, who says that the first home Mr. Madoff shared with his bride was a modest, one-bedroom apartment in Bayside, Queens.
Over the years, however, the two couples drifted apart. From time to time, Mr. Kavanau said he turned on the television and caught a glimpse of Mr. Madoff — now a successful financier — being interviewed, realizing that he had made his mark on Wall Street.
“The last time I saw him, we had run into him and Ruth on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach,” Mr. Kavanau recalls. “We were definitely aware of how well he was living.”
When asked if he can understand what happened, what may have motivated or prompted Mr. Madoff to eventually take such risks after building up a seemingly successful business, Mr. Kavanau paused.
“There is no way to. I can’t make it add up. It doesn’t make sense,” he says, growing increasingly frustrated. “I cannot take the Bernie I knew and turn him into the Bernie we’re hearing about 24/7. It doesn’t compute.”
WHEN Mr. Madoff arrived on Wall Street in the 1960s, he was an outsider. His small firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, got its start by matching buyers of inexpensive “penny stocks” with sellers in the growing over-the-counter market. This hardscrabble market was made up of stocks that were not listed on the tonier New York Stock Exchange or American Stock Exchange.
In the O.T.C. market, it was common practice — and completely legal — for firms like Mr. Madoff’s to try to attract big trades to their shop by offering to pay clients a penny or two for every share they traded. His firm would make money by pocketing the difference in the “spread,” or the gap between the offering and selling price for the stocks.
During the mid-1970s, when changes in the rules allowed his firm and others like it to trade more expensive and more prestigious blue-chip stocks, Mr. Madoff began gaining market share from the Big Board.
“He was a man with a good idea who was also a terrific salesman,” says Charles V. Doherty, the former president of the Midwest Stock Exchange. “He was ahead of everyone.”
While completely legitimate, the practice of paying for trading orders was entirely distasteful to blue bloods on the established exchanges who saw the actions, ultimately, as a threat to their livelihood. Around this time, Mr. Madoff began cultivating key relationships with regulators.
“He was the darling of the regulators, without question. He was doing everything the regulators wanted him to do,” says Nicholas A. Giordano, the former president of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. “They wanted him to be a fierce competitor to the New York Stock Exchange, and he was doing it.”
Current and former S.E.C. regulators have come under fire, accused of failing to adequately supervise Mr. Madoff and being too cozy with him.
Arthur Levitt Jr., who served as S.E.C. chairman from 1993 to early 2001, has acknowledged that he occasionally turned to Mr. Madoff for advice about how the market functioned. But Mr. Levitt strongly denies that Mr. Madoff had undue influence at the S.E.C. or that the agency’s enforcement staff deferred to him.
Mr. Levitt said that he was unaware that Mr. Madoff even ran an investment management business, and that Mr. Madoff never had special access to him or other S.E.C. officials. He also noted that he and Mr. Madoff opposed one another on several key industry issues.
“The notion that Madoff came to my office many times is a fiction,” Mr. Levitt says. “And the notion that he did my bidding is so fantastic that it defies belief.”
Mr. Madoff’s firm was an early adopter of new trading technologies. And, during the early 1990s, he served three one-year stints as head of the Nasdaq, an electronic exchange that has competed vigorously and won market share from brick-and-mortar exchanges like the Big Board.
Despite this flair for the experimental, Mr. Madoff routinely told his employees to adopt the mantra “KISS,” or “keep it simple, stupid.” He was, after all, a man of precise and controlled habits. He smoked Davidoff cigars and, in London, tailored his suits at Kilgour on Savile Row and bought many of his watches at Somlo Antiques.
Associates and others acquainted with him said his punctilious ways sometimes veered into obsessive-compulsive behavior. His office, for example, always had to be immaculate.
According to a former employee, who requested anonymity because of continuing litigation and because, he said, regulators have told Madoff employees not to speak to the media, Mr. Madoff scouted the office for potential filth. Once, when he spotted an employee eating a pear at his desk in New York, this person said, Mr. Madoff spied some juice dripping onto the gray carpet.
“What do you think you are doing?” this person recalls Mr. Madoff demanding. Eating a pear, the employee replied. Mr. Madoff ripped the soiled carpet tile from the floor, then rushed to a closet to retrieve a similar swatch to replace it.
Julia Fenwick, who was the office manager for Mr. Madoff’s London operation from 2001 until the unit was shuttered in December, said that “everything had to be perfect” and that “you never left paper on your desk — ever.”
Although he visited the London office only a couple of times a year, usually on the way to his vacation home in France, Mr. Madoff still reveled in micromanaging everything there, including the office décor.
The London unit recently finished spending about $700,000 for a refurbishment that recreated the black and gray palette of Mr.. Madoff’s New York office and his private jet, Ms. Fenwick says. The result was office furniture made from black ash, black trimming on gray walls, black computers, black mouse pads and even a black refrigerator on the trading floor.
But former employees and friends say Mr. Madoff’s obsession with order and control of his environment never led them to believe that deeper problems were afoot.
“He appeared to believe in family, loyalty and honesty,” said one former Madoff employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing litigation and investigations. “Never in your wildest imagination would you think he was a fraudster.”
Despite all of the easy money that rolled into Mr. Madoff’s firm for much of its existence, financial pressures began to emerge there during the last several years after Wall Street changed the way securities were priced and as new competition emerged.
In his asset management business, however, Mr. Madoff continued to haul in fresh rounds of money from unsuspecting investors hungry for the predictable and handsome returns he booked year after year, without missing a beat.
Employees who were veterans in the New York and London offices were even allowed to invest with Mr. Madoff, according to people who worked at the firm. Some employees are said to have given Mr. Madoff a large portion of their life savings — all of which now appears to be gone.
Like so many others who invested with him, his employees weren’t lured to his funds simply by a promise of outsize returns. Rather, they say, they sought the security of investing with a man they knew and trusted. The Bernie they thought they knew.
Mr. Madoff’s confidence reminds J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist, of criminals he has studied.
“Typically, people with psychopathic personalities don’t fear getting caught,” explains Dr. Meloy, author of a 1988 textbook, “The Psychopathic Mind.” “They tend to be very narcissistic with a strong sense of entitlement.”
All of which has led some forensic psychologists to see some similarities between him and serial killers like Ted Bundy. They say that whereas Mr. Bundy murdered people, Mr. Madoff murdered wallets, bank accounts and people’s sense of financial trust and security.
Like Mr. Bundy, Mr. Madoff used a sharp mind and an affable demeanor to create a persona that didn’t exist, according to this view, and lulled his victims into a false sense of security. And when publicly accused, he seemed to show no remorse.
Television footage of Mr. Madoff entering his Park Avenue apartment building after federal authorities charged him with fraud in December doesn’t seem to show a man exhibiting any sorrow or regret. With a battery of reporters asking him whether he felt remorse, he declined to respond and pushed his way into his building. (Thus far, his only public apology has apparently been in letters left in his lobby for fellow tenants who suffered through the media circus outside their building.)
To some extent, analysts of criminal behavior say, defining Mr. Madoff is complicated by the wide variety of possible explanations for his scheme: a desire to accumulate vast wealth, a need to dominate others and a need to prove that he was smarter than everyone else. That was shown, they say, in an ability to dupe investors and regulators for years.
Like the former F.B.I. agent Mr. McCrary, Dr.. Meloy cautions that he has not met Mr. Madoff and can’t make a clinical diagnosis. Nevertheless, he says individuals with psychopathic personalities tend to strongly believe that they’re special.
“They believe ‘I’m above the law,’ and they believe they cannot be caught,” Mr. Meloy says. “But the Achilles’ heel of the psychopath is his sense of impunity. That is, eventually, what will bring him down.”
He says it makes complete sense that Mr. Madoff would have courted regulators, even if he ran the risk of exposing his own actions by doing so.
“In a scheme like this, it’s very important to keep those who could threaten you very close to you,” Dr. Meloy explains. “You want to develop them as allies and shape how they go about their business and their attitudes toward you.”
INDEED, if it is shown that Mr. Madoff fooled regulators for decades, that would have been a “heady, intoxicating” experience and would have fueled a sense of entitlement and grandiosity, Mr. McCrary says.
And by reeling in people from the Jewish community, from charities, from public institutions and from prominent and relatively sophisticated investor networks worldwide, Mr. Madoff wreaked havoc on many lives.
That’s why Mr. McCrary says it’s not too far-fetched to compare Mr. Madoff to serial killers.
“With serial killers, they have control over the life or death of people,” Mr. McCrary explains. “They’re playing God. That’s the grandiosity coming through. The sense of being superior. Madoff is getting the same thing. He’s playing financial god, ruining these people and taking their money.”
MUNRO'S COMMENTARY
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually Victor Frankl
One thing is certain: Bernard L. Madoff was not a leal mon; a chivalrous gentleman of honor. He was not a good brother. He was not a good husband. He was not a good father. He was not a good citizen. He was not a good exemplar of his race and line. He shamed his coreligionists and fellow citizens. He exploited the greed and vanity of others. He was, indeed, an exemplar of the Hollow Man, a man without a chest. A clear example of the stunting effect of greed and materialism as a kind of spiritual disease.
If we are wise we will study his tale for it is a morality tale. There is no question his scam was a technology scam made possible by the PC for it was the PC and phoney printouts that were his accomplices.
How gullible is the modern man to the Leaf, the Printed Page! Tolstoy warned us long ago how unjust and unwise it was to judge men by “mere pieces of paper.”
But truth is a fixed star – a thing of abiding clarity- it needeth not the pencil or the pen. Many is the truth that has never been written only experienced, only remembered, only taught. Many the statistic a mere fabrication.
Una verdad pocha which may have been true in 1914, 1959 1999 or last month but no longer is. This world has many turns and all is flux.
And the truth often reveals itself sometimes over a long period of time and sometimes in a flash as by accident. But make no mistake it often passes us by.
Mr. Madoff was a parasite and charlatan like the three rascals in Juan Manuel’s story who left the Emperor without his shirt.
"He appeared to believe in family, loyalty and honesty,” said one former Madoff employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing litigation and investigations. “Never in your wildest imagination would you think he was a fraudster.”
And he was great because he was so “successful” and if you are rich you must really know.
In the end he will have to live with himself and the fact he dishonored and defrauded even his own family members.
In the end he will have to face the Just Judge whom I believe will judge the living and the dead.
In the end he will be left will be his name: Ponzi, Quisling, the Pseudo-J. P. Morgan: Madoff. The Pseudo Mench. The man without shame left only with ignominy.
The Great Teacher said, indeed, “What profiteth a man who gains the whole world and loses his soul?” (Luke 9:25)
“the honest man, though e’er sae poor
Is king ‘ men for a’ that” (BURNS)
Excessive pride indeed cometh before the untergang.
Victor Frankll wrote, in Man’s Quest for Meaning,
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate…. in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually.”
What we do is what we become.
Far better to be a modest man, a humble man, a man of honor, a seeker of the truth, a ranker: a leal mon loved and respected to the end and indeed long after too.
“ Man cannot be measured by the colour of his skin, or by his speech or by his clothes and jewels, but only by his heart. (Mika Waltari).
In the end truth and honor ‘-tis true- are better and more lasting than gold. When our world has passed away, when our nation ceases to exist, when our language is forgotten, when our books are dust, truth will abide.
Aye. “S truth.
RICHARD K. MUNRO
January 25, 2009 - NYT
The Talented Mr. Madoff
By JULIE CRESWELL and LANDON THOMAS Jr.
TO some, Bernard L. Madoff was an affable, charismatic man who moved comfortably among power brokers on Wall Street and in Washington, a winning financier who had all the toys: the penthouse apartment in Manhattan, the shares in two private jets, the yacht moored off the French Riviera.
Although hardly a household name, he secured a longstanding role as an elder statesman on Wall Street, allowing him to land on important boards and commissions where his opinions helped shape securities regulations. Along the way, he snared a coveted spot as the chairman of a major stock exchange, Nasdaq.
And his employees say he treated them like family.
There was, of course, another side to Mr. Madoff, who is 70. Reclusive, at times standoffish and aloof, this Bernie rarely rubbed elbows in Manhattan’s cocktail circuit or at Palm Beach balls. This Bernie was quiet, controlled and closely attuned to his image, down to the most minute details.
He was, for instance, an avid collector of vintage watches and took time each morning to match his wedding ring — he owned at least two — to the platinum or gold watch band he was wearing that day.
Per his directives, the décor in his firm’s New York and London offices was stark. Black, white and gray — or “icily cold modern,” as one frequent visitor to the New York operation described it.
Despite nurturing a familial atmosphere in his offices, he installed two cameras on the small trading floor of the firm’s London operations so he could monitor the unit remotely from New York.
This Bernie also ran a money management business on the side for decades that he kept hidden far from colleagues, competitors and regulators.
While he managed billions of dollars for individuals and foundations, he shunned one-on-one meetings with most of his investors, wrapping himself in an Oz-like aura, making him even more desirable to those seeking access.
So who was the real Bernie Madoff? And what could have driven him to choreograph a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, to which he is said to have confessed?
An easy answer is that Mr. Madoff was a charlatan of epic proportions, a greedy manipulator so hungry to accumulate wealth that he did not care whom he hurt to get what he wanted.
But some analysts say that a more complex and layered observation of his actions involves linking the world of white-collar finance to the world of serial criminals.
They wonder whether good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators.
“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.
Mr. McCrary cautions that he has never met Mr. Madoff, so he can’t make a diagnosis, but he says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.
“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says. “They manage the impression you receive of them. They know what people want, and they give it to them.”
As investigators plow through decades of documents, trying to decipher whether Mr. Madoff was engaged in anything other than an elaborate financial ruse, his friends remain dumbfounded — and feel deeply violated.
“He was a hero to us. The head of Nasdaq. We were proud of everything he had accomplished,” says Diana Goldberg, who once shared the 27-minute train ride with Mr. Madoff from their homes in Laurelton, Queens, to classes at Far Rockaway High School. “Now, the hero has vanished.”
If, in the end, Mr. Madoff is found to have been engaging in fraud for most of his career, then the hero never really existed.. Authorities say Mr. Madoff himself has confessed that he was the author of a longstanding and wide-ranging financial charade. His lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, declined to comment.
During the decades that Mr. Madoff built his business, he cast himself as a crusader, protecting the interests of smaller investors and bent on changing the way securities trading was done on Wall Street. To that end, like a burglar who knows the patrol routes of the police and can listen in on their radio scanners, he also actively wooed regulators who monitored his business.
“He once mentioned to me that he spent one-third of his time in Washington in the early 1990s, late 1980s,” says a person who has known Mr. Madoff for years but requested not to be identified because he does not want to be drawn into continuing litigation. “He was very involved with regulators. I think they used him as a sounding board and he looked to them like a white knight.”
“He was smart in understanding very early on that the more involved you were with regulators, you could shape regulation,” this individual adds. “But, if we find out that the Ponzi scheme goes back that far, then he was doing something much smarter. If you’re very close with regulators, they’re not going be looking over your shoulders that much. Very smart.”
MR. MADOFF spent his early years in Laurelton, a close-knit, Jewish enclave where he and his friends ate ice cream at the local five-and-ten and attended activities at the community center.
“It was an idyllic place to grow up in,” recalls Vera Gitten, who attended elementary school with him. She remembers him as “very thin,” a good student and extremely outgoing. She recalls a musical skit that he and his best friend wrote, rehearsed and performed for the class when they were in fifth or sixth grade.
“It was a broad company, sort of a ‘Sheik of Araby’ kind of thing where they wore costumes, which were their parents’ bedsheets, that made them look like they were desert sheiks,” Ms. Gitten says. “They would have us rolling.”
None of Mr. Madoff’s former elementary school friends could recall what his parents, Ralph and Sylvia, did for a living. According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents from the 1960s, it appears that his mother had a brokerage firm called Gibraltar Securities registered in her name with an address in Laurelton.
In 1963, the S.E.C. began investigating whether a number of firms, including Ms. Madoff’s, had failed to file financial reports and whether that required revoking their registrations. Early the next year, Ms. Madoff withdrew her registration and the S.E.C. dropped its proceedings against her.
While Mr. Madoff’s friends remember little about his parents, they all clearly recall his childhood sweetheart, and future wife, Ruth Alpern, a pretty, bubbly blonde who was voted “Josie College” by her Far Rockaway High School class.
Mr. Madoff, after graduating from high school in 1956, spent a year at the University of Alabama, where he joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity. A year later, he transferred to Hofstra University, where he graduated in 1960 with a degree in political science. He later became a Hofstra trustee, but the university never invested with him.
Mr. Madoff spent the next year at Brooklyn Law School, attending classes in the morning and running his side business — installing and fixing sprinkler systems — in the afternoon and evening, recalled Joseph Kavanau, who attended law school with Mr. Madoff. When Mr. Kavanau married his wife, Jane, who was Mrs. Madoff’s best friend from Queens, Mr. Madoff was the best man.
“Bernie was very industrious,” Mr. Kavanau explains. “He was going to school and working at the same time.”
Mr. Madoff was never interested in practicing law, Mr. Kavanau says. Instead, Mr. Madoff left law school and, using $5,000 saved from being a lifeguard and from his sprinkler business, joined the ranks of Wall Street in the 1960s.
“For many years when we were first married, my wife and I would go to their house or we would all go out to dinner, maybe a couple of nights a month,” said Mr. Kavanau, who says that the first home Mr. Madoff shared with his bride was a modest, one-bedroom apartment in Bayside, Queens.
Over the years, however, the two couples drifted apart. From time to time, Mr. Kavanau said he turned on the television and caught a glimpse of Mr. Madoff — now a successful financier — being interviewed, realizing that he had made his mark on Wall Street.
“The last time I saw him, we had run into him and Ruth on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach,” Mr. Kavanau recalls. “We were definitely aware of how well he was living.”
When asked if he can understand what happened, what may have motivated or prompted Mr. Madoff to eventually take such risks after building up a seemingly successful business, Mr. Kavanau paused.
“There is no way to. I can’t make it add up. It doesn’t make sense,” he says, growing increasingly frustrated. “I cannot take the Bernie I knew and turn him into the Bernie we’re hearing about 24/7. It doesn’t compute.”
WHEN Mr. Madoff arrived on Wall Street in the 1960s, he was an outsider. His small firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, got its start by matching buyers of inexpensive “penny stocks” with sellers in the growing over-the-counter market. This hardscrabble market was made up of stocks that were not listed on the tonier New York Stock Exchange or American Stock Exchange.
In the O.T.C. market, it was common practice — and completely legal — for firms like Mr. Madoff’s to try to attract big trades to their shop by offering to pay clients a penny or two for every share they traded. His firm would make money by pocketing the difference in the “spread,” or the gap between the offering and selling price for the stocks.
During the mid-1970s, when changes in the rules allowed his firm and others like it to trade more expensive and more prestigious blue-chip stocks, Mr. Madoff began gaining market share from the Big Board.
“He was a man with a good idea who was also a terrific salesman,” says Charles V. Doherty, the former president of the Midwest Stock Exchange. “He was ahead of everyone.”
While completely legitimate, the practice of paying for trading orders was entirely distasteful to blue bloods on the established exchanges who saw the actions, ultimately, as a threat to their livelihood. Around this time, Mr. Madoff began cultivating key relationships with regulators.
“He was the darling of the regulators, without question. He was doing everything the regulators wanted him to do,” says Nicholas A. Giordano, the former president of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. “They wanted him to be a fierce competitor to the New York Stock Exchange, and he was doing it.”
Current and former S.E.C. regulators have come under fire, accused of failing to adequately supervise Mr. Madoff and being too cozy with him.
Arthur Levitt Jr., who served as S.E.C. chairman from 1993 to early 2001, has acknowledged that he occasionally turned to Mr. Madoff for advice about how the market functioned. But Mr. Levitt strongly denies that Mr. Madoff had undue influence at the S.E.C. or that the agency’s enforcement staff deferred to him.
Mr. Levitt said that he was unaware that Mr. Madoff even ran an investment management business, and that Mr. Madoff never had special access to him or other S.E.C. officials. He also noted that he and Mr. Madoff opposed one another on several key industry issues.
“The notion that Madoff came to my office many times is a fiction,” Mr. Levitt says. “And the notion that he did my bidding is so fantastic that it defies belief.”
Mr. Madoff’s firm was an early adopter of new trading technologies. And, during the early 1990s, he served three one-year stints as head of the Nasdaq, an electronic exchange that has competed vigorously and won market share from brick-and-mortar exchanges like the Big Board.
Despite this flair for the experimental, Mr. Madoff routinely told his employees to adopt the mantra “KISS,” or “keep it simple, stupid.” He was, after all, a man of precise and controlled habits. He smoked Davidoff cigars and, in London, tailored his suits at Kilgour on Savile Row and bought many of his watches at Somlo Antiques.
Associates and others acquainted with him said his punctilious ways sometimes veered into obsessive-compulsive behavior. His office, for example, always had to be immaculate.
According to a former employee, who requested anonymity because of continuing litigation and because, he said, regulators have told Madoff employees not to speak to the media, Mr. Madoff scouted the office for potential filth. Once, when he spotted an employee eating a pear at his desk in New York, this person said, Mr. Madoff spied some juice dripping onto the gray carpet.
“What do you think you are doing?” this person recalls Mr. Madoff demanding. Eating a pear, the employee replied. Mr. Madoff ripped the soiled carpet tile from the floor, then rushed to a closet to retrieve a similar swatch to replace it.
Julia Fenwick, who was the office manager for Mr. Madoff’s London operation from 2001 until the unit was shuttered in December, said that “everything had to be perfect” and that “you never left paper on your desk — ever.”
Although he visited the London office only a couple of times a year, usually on the way to his vacation home in France, Mr. Madoff still reveled in micromanaging everything there, including the office décor.
The London unit recently finished spending about $700,000 for a refurbishment that recreated the black and gray palette of Mr.. Madoff’s New York office and his private jet, Ms. Fenwick says. The result was office furniture made from black ash, black trimming on gray walls, black computers, black mouse pads and even a black refrigerator on the trading floor.
But former employees and friends say Mr. Madoff’s obsession with order and control of his environment never led them to believe that deeper problems were afoot.
“He appeared to believe in family, loyalty and honesty,” said one former Madoff employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing litigation and investigations. “Never in your wildest imagination would you think he was a fraudster.”
Despite all of the easy money that rolled into Mr. Madoff’s firm for much of its existence, financial pressures began to emerge there during the last several years after Wall Street changed the way securities were priced and as new competition emerged.
In his asset management business, however, Mr. Madoff continued to haul in fresh rounds of money from unsuspecting investors hungry for the predictable and handsome returns he booked year after year, without missing a beat.
Employees who were veterans in the New York and London offices were even allowed to invest with Mr. Madoff, according to people who worked at the firm. Some employees are said to have given Mr. Madoff a large portion of their life savings — all of which now appears to be gone.
Like so many others who invested with him, his employees weren’t lured to his funds simply by a promise of outsize returns. Rather, they say, they sought the security of investing with a man they knew and trusted. The Bernie they thought they knew.
Mr. Madoff’s confidence reminds J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist, of criminals he has studied.
“Typically, people with psychopathic personalities don’t fear getting caught,” explains Dr. Meloy, author of a 1988 textbook, “The Psychopathic Mind.” “They tend to be very narcissistic with a strong sense of entitlement.”
All of which has led some forensic psychologists to see some similarities between him and serial killers like Ted Bundy. They say that whereas Mr. Bundy murdered people, Mr. Madoff murdered wallets, bank accounts and people’s sense of financial trust and security.
Like Mr. Bundy, Mr. Madoff used a sharp mind and an affable demeanor to create a persona that didn’t exist, according to this view, and lulled his victims into a false sense of security. And when publicly accused, he seemed to show no remorse.
Television footage of Mr. Madoff entering his Park Avenue apartment building after federal authorities charged him with fraud in December doesn’t seem to show a man exhibiting any sorrow or regret. With a battery of reporters asking him whether he felt remorse, he declined to respond and pushed his way into his building. (Thus far, his only public apology has apparently been in letters left in his lobby for fellow tenants who suffered through the media circus outside their building.)
To some extent, analysts of criminal behavior say, defining Mr. Madoff is complicated by the wide variety of possible explanations for his scheme: a desire to accumulate vast wealth, a need to dominate others and a need to prove that he was smarter than everyone else. That was shown, they say, in an ability to dupe investors and regulators for years.
Like the former F.B.I. agent Mr. McCrary, Dr.. Meloy cautions that he has not met Mr. Madoff and can’t make a clinical diagnosis. Nevertheless, he says individuals with psychopathic personalities tend to strongly believe that they’re special.
“They believe ‘I’m above the law,’ and they believe they cannot be caught,” Mr. Meloy says. “But the Achilles’ heel of the psychopath is his sense of impunity. That is, eventually, what will bring him down.”
He says it makes complete sense that Mr. Madoff would have courted regulators, even if he ran the risk of exposing his own actions by doing so.
“In a scheme like this, it’s very important to keep those who could threaten you very close to you,” Dr. Meloy explains. “You want to develop them as allies and shape how they go about their business and their attitudes toward you.”
INDEED, if it is shown that Mr. Madoff fooled regulators for decades, that would have been a “heady, intoxicating” experience and would have fueled a sense of entitlement and grandiosity, Mr. McCrary says.
And by reeling in people from the Jewish community, from charities, from public institutions and from prominent and relatively sophisticated investor networks worldwide, Mr. Madoff wreaked havoc on many lives.
That’s why Mr. McCrary says it’s not too far-fetched to compare Mr. Madoff to serial killers.
“With serial killers, they have control over the life or death of people,” Mr. McCrary explains. “They’re playing God. That’s the grandiosity coming through. The sense of being superior. Madoff is getting the same thing. He’s playing financial god, ruining these people and taking their money.”
MUNRO'S COMMENTARY
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Speaking of Chivalry or the "Leal Mon".
In Memory of
Captain ALEXANDER ALAN MACKENZIE
4th Bn., Seaforth Highlanders
who died age 26
on 23 March 1918
Son of the late Alexander and Helen MacKenzie.
Remembered with honour
ARRAS MEMORIAL
http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/hudsoncrash2.pdf Graphic of miracle flight
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5529137.ece
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4300211.html
Here are some interesting articles related to Chivalry and manhood.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2541
http://spectator.org/archives/2007/04/11/groping-for-god-and-country-an
“CHIVALRY or the LEAL MON”
BY RICHARD K. MUNRO
Chivalry was present when Airbus A320 crashed on the Hudson. It was present in the person of the Captain Sullenberger, in the crew and in the passengers. [Chesley Sullenberger] “walked the plane twice after everyone else got off and tried to verify that there was nobody else on board. This pilot did a wonderful job," said Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York. The remarkable exploit of Captain Sully was the prefect example of a chivalrous hero who followed a manly code of ethics that puts DUTY and others –the Common Good- ahead of self at all times. Chivalry was present that cold April night in 1912 when the great ship the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A stunning statistic from the calamity reveals the ethos of the day: While seventy-four percent of the female passengers survived, only 20% of the men aboard the tragic luxury liner perished. The rule for the lifeboats: women and children first! I remember reading that Winston Churchill was once asked what he would do if the Soviets or the Nazis triumphed in the end; he said he would prefer not to survive in such a world. There are things, in other words, worse than death. If civility, right and wrong, family, faith and chivalry were to die then I, too, would prefer not to survive to endure such a world. Chivalry might be down but it is not out.
Women and children first are indicative of a belief and hope in the future of family, society, country, faith and civilization. It is recognition that men are expendable in extremis. Women, mothers and children are the future. “Women and children first” is not just a time-worn phrase. It bespeaks, honor, fidelity and chivalry - a higher consciousness- one nurtured by the great legacy of Western Civilization, itself a product of Judeo-Christian religious thought and norms of Right and Wrong developed over centuries. Unfortunately, these virtues contend with powerful, often destructive influences from a hedonistic popular culture in the movies, Las Vegas, rock music, television, sports that bombard us with outrageously sexual images of men and women that are not just inappropriate but exploitative even perverse, pornographic and degenerate.
There is no question I am of the Old School. I was raised to be a Highland Gentleman what Walter Scott called a “Doonie Wassal” (Dhuine-uasal Gàidhealach). (As I write I listen to FLOWERS OF THE FOREST a tune and song I must have heard in the womb). Such songs like this or KELVIN GROVE or the NAMELESS LASSIE or RIBHINN CHOIBHNEIL (The Kindly Lassie) which put me at one with the many past events: round the old Baldwin Hamilton upright singing with my mother and sisters as the old folk listened, St. Mungo Cathedral January 14, 2005, the Edinburgh Tattoo in 2000 and 1967, The Park Bar (in Glasgow) and Kelvin Grove in 1967,2000 and 2005, Kearny High School Auditorium 1975, Madison Square Garden 1959 (we never went to basketball games but to see the tattoos of Highland Regiments particularly the Black Watch and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.)
http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_forest.htm
Sing on, sing mair o' thae auld sangs, {SING MORE OF THE OLD SONGS)
For ilka ane can tell {FOR EACH ONE CAN TELL
0' joy or sorrow i' the past {OF JOY OR SORROW IN THE PAST
Where mem'ry lo'es to dwell, {WHERE MEMORY LOVES TO DWELL}
http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_sangs.htm
Victorian literature, classical literature, the Bible, traditional Christian prayers and practices were very strong in my family and quite literarily a part of every day life. Growing up as a boy I never remember a single day without books being opened, poems recited, music being played and songs being song though not the songs popular of the time. My son is still astonished that I don’t know the popular music of the 1950’s or 1960’s –supposedly my time- I know the music of the 1850’s and pre-1919 Britain and Europe especially. Naturally, I had heard of Elvis Presley but unless he was singing hymns or traditional music I simply had no interest. I preferred Broadway musicals, opera, classical music and traditional music which seemed much richer linguistically and intellectually to the immature yelpings and banging about of pop and rock music.
My father, in particular, was a model of gentlemanly behavior and what the Greeks called sophrosyne (moderation). He rarely drank anything but wine or sherry. I never saw him intoxicated though he admitted to me he had had his moments of great Celtic exhuberance –V-J day for example. I loved and admired my Auld Pop for his kindness and virtues but temperance was not one of his virtues. I think he tried to drink to kill the pain and loneliness of having survived two world wars unlike almost all of his friends and comrades in arms. Nonetheless he was a mild-mannered gentleman and was always tender with children and women though literally ready to lay down his life to protect those he loved. When he was occupied reading to his grandchildren or teaching them he was too occupied and responsible to drink. He was a ‘leal mon’. In fact, he saved my life when I was an infant, a story that my sisters and parents recounted to me. Perhaps this was the beginning of the great bond of love we had and still have. He had tremendous strength and physical courage and throughout his long life he risked his life many times to save his friends and comrades in arms. He was awarded the Military Medal for courage at 2nd Ypres and it was said he and his comrades would have earned the Victoria Cross except for the fact that there were no officers to document their heroism. The Dins (Indian Soldiers) called him “Changa Dost” (the good comrade) because he would bring back wounded Indian soldiers just the same as wounded Scottish soldiers, most notably Captain Sandy MacKenzie, ASH (later Seaforth Highlanders). Major MacKenzie was critically wounded in the Struma Valley and unable to make it back to allied lines but Auld Pop tended to his wounds, nursed him and carried him on his back for hours bringing him to the aid station. He invalided out of the service but reenlisted during the crisis of 1918 and tragically was killed in France. That was heartbreaking to the men he had led and who thought he had made it back to “Old Blighty” safe and sound. Sandy MacKenzie was only 26.MacKenzie is listed as a Captain in the Commonwealth war graves records but I was told that Captain MacKenzie was posthumously promoted to Major. I have a gold watch his widow gave to my grandfather in 1919.
NE OBLIVISCARIS (do not forget).
http://www.cwgc.org/search/casualty_details.aspx?casualty=3077733
I have not achieved much in this life –I am just a humble schoolmaster- but I have not been guilty of cruelty, neglect or abuse of elders, children or women and I have tried to be a guiding parent and a loyal and faithful husband to my wife. A good conscience is my only reward of a chivalrous gentleman. There have been many times when I think, indeed, I am the “last of the Mohicans” but I think of what Chivalry is and think it is worthy to speak of and to teach others by word and by example.
John Stuart Mill said:
“Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race, as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times. “
Chivalry spells out certain ethical standards that foster the development of manhood. Politeness and deference towards others, especially women, children and elders is the mark of a gentleman. The virtues of chivalry offer more, however, than mere pleasantries and politeness. They were, are and remain beautiful and noble ideals! They should appeal to the true man. They give purpose and meaning to male strength, and therefore support the overall workings of society for the Common Good. We admire men who are strong, but if their strength is not directed to uphold what is good, honest and just, what value does it have? The SS were strong but they were evil. The Marines I served with were men of honor but I am sure they were every bit the fighting men the toughest SS men were. Chivalrous gentlemen are called to use their strength to defend those who cannot defend themselves, and commit themselves to just causes.
Nothing is more unmanly, in my opinion, and petty, than delighting in scandal and gossip. Not only do you harm those who are victims of gossip, you harm yourself as well. How? By becoming a creature who is unloving. It is wrong to delight in the guilt or suffering of others, or to feed the flames of scandal, a major occupation of nightly television. I am interested in the news of the day but I turn off gossip about so-called celebrities, murdered wives and children. I usually am the last one in the school to know that so and so was cheating on so and so. I simply have no interest in the private sexual lives or preferences of my colleagues. We talk about students, the political and cultural affairs of the day, literature and sometimes sports or our families. I don’t talk a lot about TV because, I must admit, I am not with it when it comes to the latest TV show. I do talk about movies because I love movies particularly classic movies but week after week I look at what is in the cinemas and really I have no interest. Once again, I have more in common with people who are married and have children so I tend to socialize with them though I certainly don’t ignore younger single teachers.
Men ought to be courteous and polite to others, generous helpmates to their wives and elders in their family, their faith community, their social world and their country. My mother, who was a model of Caritas (Christian love), used to say: “God made us strong only for short while so that we can help others.” A man, in my opinion, should never neglect his home or his family duties and should do his best at his work –if not for himself then to provide for his loved ones.
What are the virtues a man -a “leal mon” should have? . Above all he must have integrity or display that the Greeks called “alethic” virtue. Truth must be important to a real man.
One must avoid the temptation to shade the truth, boast or lie, especially to those we love. Sometimes honesty requires us to say things that seem blunt or harsh but a measure of tact, gentleness and a humble, loving approach can take the sting out of honest criticism. He must be honest and share with his children the personal value integrity, modesty, chastity, faithfulness, patriotism, motherhood and faith has for him.
I always tell my catechists that there were times in my life when I did not go to Mass as often as I should have but I never lied about to anyone especially my mother. When she called me up to ask if I had gone to Mass I could never bring myself to lie to her and I promised I would not neglect my obligation. But I also tell them that as the years go on I really enjoy going to Mass and really miss it if I don’t go. For it is when I am at Mass –and when I am singing- that I am closest with my dear departed ones.
A man must courageous but be gentle to the weak and with a strong sense of justice which means having gratitude, displaying mercy and being generous. He must have respect for his marriage partner for life. The word respect comes from the Latin “respicere” meaning “to look at”; one does not ignore others; one looks at them with respect and worth with all their assets and weaknesses. He must be humble enough to laugh at himself and at the world. Humility means an extreme awareness of the limits of all virtue and of one’s own limits as well. Not all can be done and not all can be known. Scott wrote that “true genius of the highest class is always humble.” Men are beings of the earth (humus in Latin whence humility). In my experience the most generous people are also the most humble. Wherever there is humility, says St. Augustine, there is also Charity.” I believe the Gael of old –before the Saints and Scholars and the Greeks hardly knew humility as they did not know mercy or charity. Aristotle did not seem to recognize this virtue in his Nichomachean Ethics. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
A man, must be, faithful and loyal to those he loves. This is the essence of being a “true man” a “leal mon”. If we want to grasp the essence of martial fidelity we need to understand what makes a married couple a married couple. I dislike the term “couple” or ‘”significant other” very much. My uncle Jos –a very frank and sometimes brutal man less gentlemanly than my father- was fond of the term “concubine” which if you think of it is just a fancy word for bed-companion or a “piece of ass.” One would think a woman would aspire to more than being the “squeeze” of the moment. But it is quite true English sometimes lacks the proper vocabulary of love and marriage it seems to me as compared to French, Spanish or Greek.
The highest compliment my Auld Pop could give a man was to call him a “leal mon a goodjin” (a loyal man a thorough good person someone you count on to the death and I mean to the death.) If you could not be counted on to the death in all circumstances to behave with honor , fidelity and courage you were not a ‘leal mon.” (the Highland word is dileas meaning faithful, loyal, loving, trusted)
A good man to Auld Pop was simply a man who would not forsake “his lass nor his brother in arms”.
A man of justice and courage who would never turn his back to his friend or in the face of the enemy.
That was what was a “leal mon,”
The concept is analogus to what the Jews would call a “mensch” (a man of integrity and honor) or the Spanish would call (un hombre de bien) Leon Rosten defined a ‘mensch” as . “Someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous. “ There is no question in my mind that there is such a thing as “leal mon” and it is an ideal I hope my son always follows.
But for the sake of this short commentary I will use the world man or true man as the synonym for “leal mon’, mensch or hombre de Loyalty denotes a relationship that is based on truth and commitment. If we are fortunate, we have companions who are loyal to us—but we must be loyal to others and other things as well. I have always tried to be loyal to my school as my grandfather was to his Regiment and I was to the Marines. Remember, loyalty is a virtue to cultivate, even when it is not reciprocated.
To me fidelity –fidelity to what is good and true- is one of the highest virtues. Fidelity is faithful love to love and through love. We owe fidelity to selfless courage, to suffering, to the blood of martyrs and heroes, to sacrifice, to endurance and to love.
“Remember the people you came from” is a call for giving your forefolk their just due and, I believe gives one a stronger identity.
According to Montaigne in fidelity lies the true basis of personal identity: “The foundation of my being and identity is purely moral; it consists in the fidelity to the faith I swore myself….I take the responsibility of a certain past as MY OWN, and because I intend to recognize my present commitment as still my own in the future.”.
The past is no more ; the future is still to come. The past is in need of our compassion and gratitude; for the past cannot stand up for itself. Such is the duty of memory: compassion and gratitude for the past. Yet in the face of oblivion there is memory. This fragility is the essence of mind, which no less mortal than we, is yet alive within us, as mind in remembering its mortality.
Once again I prefer the Spanish here over English because it distinguishes clearly between an ephemeral hook up and un matriomonio which is one thing: husband-and-wife. Gaelic also has one word for married couple and that is ‘caraid’ which also means a pair (or twins).
There is no question in my mind that when it came to the importance of fidelity in marriage my Spanish wife and I had completely the same culture of fidelity and sincerity. Even though I was an American –it was more important that I was the son of Scottish Catholic and a devout Christian mother –an Islander of the Free Church tradition- because it meant I shared with my Spanish fiancée the common values of the Old Europe or Christendom.
There is no question in my mind so many Irishmen and Highlanders in particular marry Europeans such as Poles, Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards because they feel closeness to those cultures than many English –being highly secularized- simply do not feel. There is no question that Rome and Jerusalem were more important to us than London –a place where no one in my family ever lived or had any special allegiance to.
People often express surprise that I never married a Scottish or Irish girl (I dated a few point of fact) but the simple fact is most of the British or Scottish girls I met were very secular, progressive and left wing even anti-American. Even many of the Irish-American New Yorkers I met were far too avant guarde for me and few were serious Catholics.
By contrast, the Italians I knew and the Spaniards and Cubans I knew were pro-American and held traditional values very similar to mine. There is no question that for me, it was in the cards I would marry someone devoutly Christian who had strong family based values. Marrying someone in my faith and who shared my faith was far more important to me than marrying someone of my parent’s nationality or my nationality. Sharing the faith of your spouse is an important foundation in maintaining fidelity in the marriage.
Mere sexual congress, how often repeated, is, it should be obvious, is insufficient to create a bond of fidelity. Most men, I know would do anything to have (to speak bluntly) “a piece of ass”. I believe mere cohabitation, however lasting, is not true fidelity.
A man who pledges his love and protection to a woman wants her to have the honor and protection of sharing his name, his children, his home, his property and the support and love of his entire family for her sake and for sake of the children. The passion of deep sexual attraction must be in a serious heterosexual relationship at some time but this intense passion cannot last except in memory. No married couple could ever last without this kind of fidelity of each spouse to his shared history, which is a mixture of trust and gratitude that makes a married couple happy. This kind of love, which we observed in our parents who were married 59 ½ years and separated only by war and death, is more moving and impressive than the narrow love of Hugh Heffner or even the pure passionate love of young lovers. To me this kind of fidelity is more precious than any other kind.
There is no such thing as an ‘open marriage’ and divorce is a great betrayal of fidelity. I consider myself very lucky to have avoided the scourge of divorce. My Auld Pop always emphasized there was no word for divorce in his language –one was separated by war or death only. When I asked him, as a small boy, what this divorce was –it seemed to me something very sad , perhaps a form of torture , like tormenting Christ with spears- and he answered somewhat ironically, “Dinna fash yersel’ (bother) about THAT; it’s something they do in America!” To which of course I protested we WERE living in America and he replied, “Aye, but that dinna mean we have to pick up their bad habits.”
One of my uncles married an American born girl and she divorced him, after just a few years and two children, in a most savage, cruel and selfish fashion. But my uncle , a very religious man, treated her with respect long after the divorce, picking her up at the airport, putting chains on her tires in the snow even lending her money. He explained to me that “in the eyes of God we are still married.” He never spoke ill of his ex-wife and he had ample cause to do so. THAT is fidelity. I tried to learn from my Uncle’s mistake. He got talked into marriage by his mother and the woman who turned him down several years before but then found out he was the best prospect she had met. So before she lost her looks and figure –she was pushing 30- she wrote to his mother to find out where he was –he was stationed in Germany at the time- and basically threw herself at him and he fell for the bait. It is good advice never to marry someone who tries to win over your parents more than you. It is also good advice never to go back to someone who “dumps” you and then has “second thoughts.” In my opinion, one cannot trust the fidelity of such a person. “Better to have loved and lost than never have love at all, “ was a saying I heard my Uncle say many times. His wife came to his funeral –he is buried in Arlington Cemetery- and told me that my uncle was better husband than she was a wife. By then she was an old, stout lonely woman well past middle age and nothing like the angry avant guarde confident feminist I had met thirty years before. She had a chance of fidelity and she threw it away. I think she regretted it. She must have known she sinned gravely against the duties of married life and betrayed a trust. She probably never did love my uncle and so did not respect him either. In my opinion, she was a terrible example for her children. How can one swear to love somebody forever and love no one else as husband and wife? If the love dies what’s the point –some people might say- of maintaining the fiction and responsibilities and demands of it? Some people seem to say “I will not love you forever but I will be grateful that we shared love for a while.” That is more than nothing but it is not fidelity. It says love me for a long as you want to –as long as I am young and physically attractive or successful- but then ditch me when something younger or better rolls along. That kind of attitude must be something but it is not fidelity.
There are at least six reasons NOT TO MARRY (a gentleman thinks of such things for himself , his charges and his friends).
#1 Don’t marry someone you don’t really know. If you are pressured to rush to the altar as my Uncle Norman was you have to ask yourself. “What is the reason for the rush?” If he or she truly cares they will give you time to be sure.
#2 Don’t every marry someone you don’t like or have anything in common with BESIDES sex and physical attraction. Everyone I have ever known married someone with whom he or she felt a strong sexual attraction. I could be wrong but this is the easiest part of a relationship. Speaking as a man most women 16 to 60 are sexually attractive at some point in their lives. Once again, speaking from personal experience, most women hit their peak attractiveness from age 25 to about 42. Most women, just like most men, unless they work very hard at it, start to lose the battle of the bulge in their 40’s. Once again, perhaps it is just me, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. If I compare the looks of my friend’s wives who are excessively thin they seem more pinched, more wrinkled and less attractive with each passing year. Other women, with a more matronly look, remain very pleasant to be with and to look at. Some women are astonishingly beautiful for a short period of time and others have a high lifetime batting average and remain attractive for a longer period of time. There is such a thing as growing old gracefully. I can think of nothing more hideous and ridiculous for a 60 year old woman trying to dress like a 19 year old virgin. I once had a chance to meet the opera singer Beverly Sills. She had a wonderful smile and personality. She was a very attractive woman but no one would ever say that she was girlish or thin. She merely looked her age and looked good at it. By contrast I met Eleanor Parker in 1976 –one of Hollywood’s great beauties of the 1940’s and 1950’s now most famous for the role of the forty something Countess in The Sound of Music. She was getting ready for the previews of a rival of Pal Joey. She looked ghastly. She had obviously had one facelift or several and her face was so taut she could hardly smile or make any expression whatsoever. Miss Parker was overweight but less so than Beverly Sills but she was obviously wearing a tight dress one or two sizes too small for her. She could hardly walk it was so tight. The story was the managing director of the Circle in the Square Theater told her to get in her costume or she was fired. I think he knew she COULDN’ T get IN her costume. He must have also been shocked at her appearance as well and must have felt he wasn’t losing anything by firing her. She had obviously lost her looks. But the point is Beverely Sills and Eleanor Parker were both about the same age (in their 50’s) but Beverley Sills still looked like Beverley Sills; Eleanor Parker looked like a zombie with a mask. She was almost unrecognizable. Anyway Eleanor Parker was fired and I never saw her performance. The bottom line is if you can’t respect the behavior, habits and values of your potential mate, rethink the situation. What will it be like with this person once the haze of romantic love fades? Could you love your wife (once again, speaking as a man) if she lost her size 6 figure? Let’s face it multiple pregnancies and the years usually wreak havoc with a woman’s figure. And time does not remain still for any of us in any case. It is a mistake to marry for beauty alone, a very big mistake.
#3 If the people around you who know you well and love you –your parents, siblings, close relatives, teachers, and wise friends- are counseling you against marriage to a certain person, you must pause. Although they don’t know your potential spouse as well as you do, they are not as emotionally mixed up as you are by the strong sexual attraction or romantic feeling you have for that other person. This is particularly true if the couple is sexually active. Nothing fools you that you have to have your spouse like an active sex life before marriage. I wonder what purpose a honeymoon serves for people like that. And why even wear white? But if people around you are expressing doubts you should at least give yourself some time to think about what you are doing. Imagine, for example, if your spouse had no money, lost all of his or her teeth and gained 100 pounds. My father always said to me that I should look at the mother of the potential bride because it was a reasonable indication of what the daughter would look like in 25 or 30 years with 25, 30 or 50 additional pounds. I would add another proviso too. I don’t think it is important to marry for money and position. I think marrying for personal happiness and family reasons are the most important. But that having been said there is something one should always consider. It is one thing to marry someone who has next to no money but it is another to marry someone with extravagant tastes and $50,000 in debt!!!! Most marriages fall apart for two basic reasons: lack of sexual compatibility and financial distress.
#4 building upon that last point. Never marry anyone in whom there are signs of unstable behavior. If you beloved needs to be drunk or high to have a good time, I think it is a serious cause to worry. If he or she can never hold down any kind of job at all in the last few years find out why. Can’t he or she get along with the boss or with coworkers.. Is the discipline of work too much for him or her? Once again, I have never been a great success in life but I have always worked. I worked my way up from being a laborer in construction and unloading rail cars to sales, to being a bank employee, then finally a Community College instructor and high school teacher. No one has ever asked me for me resume or offered me a job but I have always been respected as someone who was a hard worker, honest and loyal.
#5 A lastly to reiterate a point mentioned before if your primary drive for getting married is an overpowering urge to have –or continue to have –sex with this person, STOP. Sex is important for a good marriage but sex is NOT love. It is absurd to overvalue physical love. Speaking as a man, men are beasts and I think it is true to say, that in the dark, as has been said, women are all the same if that’s all you want from a woman. But once again that is not love. Real love is sharing laughter, sharing experience, sharing children, sharing affection, trust. Physical love (eros) can provide the spark and the glue for the beginning of a relationship but it cannot provide the substances. Being in love and having love in a marriage is something other and something more than being sexually aroused. Not all desire is love though it may always be lust. The desire for a woman period might just be lust but the desire for a specific woman is another. Some people say this is love too but I do not ; love that is merely transitory and sexual is not love merely as Anthony Burgess called it in A Clockwork Orange, “the old in and out”.
Nonetheless, alienation of affections is one of the primary reasons marriage fail. They say the French (the elite anyway) have their solution –it seems horrible to me and contrary to fidelity and honesty- a man keeps his lover and his wife separately. That is to say one has (presumably young, thin and attractive) temporary lover and a permanent mother-manager. Virtual bigamy or polygamy you might call it. It seems like a bore to me. If you wife is your partner and best friend don’t you want to spend as much time as possible with your best friend? But there is no question, however, the issue of extramarital sex is present in many marriages. Once again, speaking as a man, one must avoid excessive temptations and exercise self-control. Most of my women friends are safely married or far away. I never pretend to be unmarried and do not socialize with younger unmarried women. It seems to me Lotharios must neglect their families, their work or their intellectual life because if one is dedicated to those things one simply has no time to roll up ephemeral sexual contests. Once –just once- while I was studying at UVA I went to a spaghetti dinner at the Catholic parish in the university. What a mistake! The participants were overwhelmingly young women in their early to mid 20’s. I was in my late 40’s at the time. I was very polite but I did not stick around and I never took the bus to that church again. If I am alone I make sure I go to early Mass. Sometimes when I am alone on a business trip or home alone I may have a conversation at restaurant or bar with a younger woman –a college student for example- but only in an avuncular fashion. I can’t understand teachers who want to date their students. Of course, I love my students and want to best for them but because I love them I want to do them no harm. I am there to teach them not to seduce them or abuse them.
#6 Never get married because you feel you have to or everyone else is getting married. It is chivalry to treat your date with respect. It is foolishness to marry someone because OOPS she says she is pregnant. I have known friends who married their pregnant girl friends but did not know if they were the father. That is no way to start a marriage. Once again fidelity and trust are the basis of any good relationship.
In choosing this unique person for our mate, this combination of history and charm, this merging of flesh and soul, we are looking for a lifetime of love that will sustain us. If we are wise we will come to understand that genuine love is not a free gift but an earned achievement. Perhaps we catch love when it comes our way like a fever or virus; I do not know. But I do know this true love is based on fidelity and it is up to us to learn how to grow in love.
A marriage, or matriomonio presupposes love and duration. My father knew Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 by heart and I often heard his collection of Roland Colman recordings of the Sonnets. As a small boy it was made clear to me that Shakespeare was almost as authoritative as the Bible or Burns and there is no question it was an important part of my education as man or gentleman. He also made it clear to me how much he loved my mother. And let me say that my Auld Pop was widowed never talked about any other woman except his wife. She was so talked about and so quoted by my father and mother and grandfather that I almost came to think as if I had known her myself though she died almost twenty years before I was born. That is fidelity –to love someone who gave you so much love during your life that you never forget that person. Certainly love of that kind is a selfless love because the dead cannot do anything for you themselves except perhaps connect to you in communuion and comfort you through their souls and memory.
One of our favorite modern movies is Sense and Sensibility which uses this poem to show Marianne Dashwood’s conceptions of love. Ah, yes, love’s not Time’s fool:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I have been called a hopeless romantic but to that charge I say romantic Highlanders have more fun and sing the best love songs because they know what chivalry and love is all about. As Burns sang “Gae seek your pleasures where you will etc.”
Chivalry speaks about romantic love and Highland Gentleman know about and care about romantic love and fidelity. They also know “modesty is the true beauty of woman”’; in other words modesty and chastity are sexy and very desirable. People today have lots of sex –or at least they boast about it- but they find relationships flat and devoid of romantic love. That is because Eros-love (sex) promises more than it can deliver, especially in regards to companionship, trust and permanence.
Why? Because we perceive romantic love as something spontaneous, something that does not demand work patience and a strong moral base. The wisdom, literature and songs of our forefolk tell us something that is quite the opposite. The very essence of romantic love, true love is commitment. This is where, in my opinion, chivalry provides a vital ingredient. Love relationships provide the laboratory where the virtues of chivalry are tested to their fullest, and the manliness of a “leal mon” is proved. With time and fidelity true love grows and true love not only stimulates the best in us but it is a recipe for happiness and love that can last a lifetime –and beyond.
Aye. “S truth I am telling ye!”
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