Daily Blague

This idea of taking stock on Thursdays is all very well, but it's the entry that drives me crazy week after week. Reviewing the Book Review can be like pulling teeth, but at least I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I had absolutely nothing even to work with - no, that's not true, but you don't want to know how desperately unattractive my fallback was - until I passed a few minutes at Sale Bête, where Édouard had just posted a nice new piece and, helpfully for me, some photographs. Dont celle-ci:

 If this is not a Roman Catholic church, I'll be very surprised. It bears the unmistakable stamp of a Catholic church in New England, striving with its pointed Gothic windows and doorways to remind the working-class parishioners of the glories of the True Faith - and to substitute a little pizzaz for the rectangular formality of the Meeting House. The façade is Orvieto in yellow-painted pine. and the squat tower a campanile, not a spire. There is also the fact - fact! and known to Édouard I'm sure - that no pristine Congregational church would be interfered with by so many power lines. There is, finally, the stunning lack of verdure. Well, at this time of year, of sere branches.

Besides, Édouard goes on to tell us that he attended a celebration of the Epiphany here. With clowns. Case closed.

Connecticut and Rhode Island (the church is in Westerly, Rhode Island) are home to arguably the largest population descended from immigrants from Portugal, Italy, and Quebec in the United States. I used to wonder how people from sunny Mediterreanea could survive in dour New England, but then I remembered Homer, and the fact that "sunny" is a recent innovation in those old countries. Life is hard everywhere, and, on balance, not quite so hard here, where there's no class structure.

Or where the class structure is elastic. Because there certainly is a class structure. Looking at this church, I feel once again the terrible shame that I would feel at prep school when I went down to Blairstown for Mass at the pathetic little church at the wrong end end of town and sat through imprecations hurled out by the wild Irish priest who'd have been happier as a Baptist, had he but known that. Or the church that I'd attend (rarely) with my aunt and uncle, in New Hampshire - the church from which my uncle was buried two years ago. What were they thinking, trying to do Gothic with planks of wood? Trying to imitate the glories of the Quattrocento in chromolithograph terms? These churches are temples of hideosity.

I suspect that everybody knows this, and that it doesn't matter.

It didn't, ultimately, matter to me. I never believed. I comb through my earliest memories, and I can remember not a single second in which, say, I hoped that my prayer would reach the Blessed Virgin Mary, or understood that Jesus was the Son of God. I think that, when I was a small child, I expected that I would eventually understand virgin birth and redemption; I'm quite sure that I wasn't a little critical thinker. But I was a born materialist, and revelation never came. There are so many things about life that I don't understand. Religion and sports would be at the top of the list, if I cared very much about either.