Monday, June 22, 2026
1633 Galileo Galilei recanted his heretical position that the Earth orbits the Sun.
1941 Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union during World War II, the largest military operation in history
1944 President Franklin Roosevelt signed the"GI Bill of Rights"
1970 President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the voting age to be 18 in all federal, state, and local elections
1977 Former US Attorney General John Mitchell started 19 months in federal prison for perjury regarding his involvement in the Watergate Scandal
1978 Neo-Nazis called off plans to march in Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois
2025 US joined the Israeli offensive against Iranian nuclear facilities, bombing three sites
In bed at 9:05, awake at 2:50, up at 3:20; 0335 144/76/55 xxx 206.2, 0345 127/76/54; 55/67/54, mostly sunny day ahead.
Morning meds at 7 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
Mrs. Dalloway. I finished it around dinnertime yesterday. It was a hard read, but worth reading. I especially enjoyed the sections dealing with (1) Elizabeth Dalloway's tutor, Doris Kilman, a born-again Christian filled with hatred, resentment, and jealousy of people better off than she is, especially Clarissa Dalloway, and (2) Septimus Warren Smith's psychiatrist Dr. Sir William Bradshaw.
A principal theme of the novel is Faulkner's famous line, "The past is never dead. It isn't even past." It's a story of a persisting, lingering mid-life crisis in Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh, and of his lost, lingering first love for her. A story of a life of trivialities. A story of our inability to know one another. It's a precursor of Elizabeth Strout's stories of loneliness. It's a critique of English society and culture and a rejection of Fulton Sheen's argument that Life is Worth Living, at least for some. It's a look at one form at least of shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD and of the death drive. There is a lot packed into this novel of no particular plot.
The novel's immediate setting is one summer day in London in the early 1920s, 100 years ago, but the foundational setting is Bourton, the country house of Clarissa's wealthy, upper-crust family, where Clarissa spent her youthful summers, where she first loved but then rejected Peter Walsh and chose Richard Dalloway, and where she had a crush on the vivacious, free-spirited Sally Seton. Bourton is where Clarissa made the decision that shaped the rest of her life: to reject Peter's emotional, romantic passion for her and towards life, and to partner up with Richard - staid, steady, kind, upwardly mobile, responsible, reliable, a member of the English Establishment. Quaere whether Clarissa's choice was a matter of "free will" or rather inevitable, i.e., determined.
Peter reminds me of myself and my history of carrying a torch for Charlene Wegge for nearly a lifetime, in the sense of never entirely losing the pain of rejection. At the very end of the novel, as Peter sits with Sally Seton, now Lady Rosseter, she tells him that Clarissa had cared for him much more than she ever cared for Richard. "No, no, no, said Peter - she had gone too far." It pains him still, at age 52, to think of it. His relations with Clarissa, he says, "had not been simple. It had spoilt his life." The closing lines of the novel show his still-bleeding heart:
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
The novel strikes me as a hoity-toity version of Johny Cash's I Still Miss Someone:
I go out to a party / And look for a little fun
But I find a darkened corner / 'Cause I still miss someone
Oh, I never got over those blue eyes / I see them everywhere
I miss those arms that held me / When all the love was there
I wonder if she's sorry / For leavin' what we'd begun
There's someone for me somewhere / But I still miss someone
Oh, I still miss someone
On the other hand, Clarissa, although she seems self-satisfied and fulfilled by her life among the 'swells' of English society, and to be fulfilled by her life of throwing parties and advancing William's career as a MP, identifies with Septimus and with his choice (?) to kill himself. What does this tell us about the meaningfulness of her life?
I started reading the book not because I was interested in Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, or Sally Seton, but because I was interested in the war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith. I stayed interested in him throughout the novel, and in his poor Italian wife, Lucrezia, who suffered with him. They reminded me more than a little of my mother and father, not because of the suicide, but because of the veteran's loss of belief in humanity. Homo hominis lupus. When I started writing this note, I thought of the novel as a period novel, because it was set a century ago, but the themes or subjects that Woolf addresses are timeless and universal, including those represented by Septimus and Rezia. The effects of war, and of violence generally, on those traumatized by it. I wonder too about her disdain for 1920s medical and psychiatric practice, from her descriptions of Dr. Holmes ('there's nothing the matter with you') and Sir William Bradshaw, and his 'treatment' of his patients by solitary confinement. I wrote much more about Septimus and Dr. Bradshaw in this journal two days ago.
Anniversaries. First, Galileo was forced to recant his theory of heliocentrism, i.e., that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. It took 359 years for the Church, which rejected heliocentrism based on Holy Scripture, to acknowledge that Galileo was correct and the Roman Inquisition was wrong. While the two situations are not at all alike, one involving science and fact, the other morals and opinion, I am reminded of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae in which he condemned birth control, other than by 'rhythm' or 'natural family planning', as sinful. The culprit behind Paul's rejection of overwhelming scientific authority was Cardinal Wojtyła, who would become Pope John Paul II, who argued that the Church had to protect its magisterium or teaching authority. To accept artificial birth control after long condemning it as sinful would support the argument that the Church didn't know what it was talking about:
“If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died).
“It should likewise have to be admitted that for half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]
Cardinal Wojtyła’s warning took root in Paul VI’s thinking, for in the ensuing encyclical, Paul wrote: “However, the conclusions arrived at by the Commission could not be considered by Us as definitive and absolutely certain, dispensing Us from the duty of examining this serious question personally. This was all the more necessary because, within the Commission itself, there was not complete agreement concerning the moral norms to be proposed, and especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church.”
Second, the anniversary of the GI Bill reminds me of how much my position and status in life owe to government financing and the nation's desire for a large and lethal military force: the NROTC scholarship to get through college away from home and the Vietnam GI Bill to get through law school. If I had received that assistance for other than military service, it would be called "socialism" and disparaged.
I took an uplifting ride in the country this afternoon, after dropping off 4 sturdy maple chairs at St. Vincent de Paul outside of Port Washington and picking up some more birdseed at Walmart's in Saukville. Hy. 57, to Jay Road, west to Ozaukee Hy. E, north to Hillside Road, west to Camp Awana Road, south to Ozaukee Hwy., east to Hwy. I, south to Cedar Sauk Road, east to Hwy. O, south to Hwy. 60, east to I-43 and home. Breathtakingly beautiful scenery, rich farmlands, many gorgeous homes, many interesting homes, corn only ankle-high in some fields, mid-calf in others, soybeans and alfalfa starting in others, while some lie fallow. Thousands of magnificent trees, billions of wildflowers, white and red clover, wild daisies or asters, dame's rockets, bright yellow something-or-others. I reflected that after I die and am buried, the corn and soybeans and alfalfa will continue to grow. The birds will continue to build nests and protect their young. All and everything will carry on on this glorious planet that is barely a speck of dust in the Universe. I thought of more GM Hopkins;
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I started Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove this afternoon. At 862 pages, this should keep me busy for a few days.
