Ages of Consent

From History and Other Thoughts:

-7 or 8: a boy might be sent to sea, starting his Naval career as a cabin boy and going on to become a sailor or officer.
--9 or 10: boys might be apprenticed to learn a trade
--10 or 12: aristocratic boys might be sent to boarding schools like Eton or Harrow
--12: girls from poorer families might be apprenticed to learn a trade (although they often weren’t dignified with the name apprentice)
--12: girls can marry with their parents’ permission (but note that very few actually married this early)
--16: aristocratic young men with ambitions for politics, law, or the Church might head off to Oxford and Cambridge
--16 to 18: aristocratic young ladies are introduced to Society
--21: a young lady or gentleman could marry without parents’ permission
--30: a woman is considered “on the shelf” (given up all hope of ever marrying). Note that some people put this age considerably lower (like 26 or even 20), but that real-life examples don’t seem to verify this
(Read more.)

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The Last Rose of Summer

Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming all alone,
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
No flower of her kindred,
No rose bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one,
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go sleep thou with them;
'Thus kindly I scatter
Thy leaves o'er the bed
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow
When friendships decay,
And from love's shining circle
The gems drop away!
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

by Sir John Stevenson

Melody by Thomas Moore

(Image: "The Soul of a Rose" by John William Waterhouse)

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Suffering and Divine Providence

From Monsignor Charles Pope:

One of the great mysteries of God’s providence is that He often leaves things unresolved or unattended to for a very long time. Often, despite our fervent prayers, He doesn’t rush to fix everything, and He has His reasons for this.

Perhaps it is that we often grow through struggles. We discover strengths that we did not know we had.

Sometimes, suffering brings wisdom, and we learn more by living our questions for a while, rather than getting quick answers.

Suffering can also spur creativity. Many movies, works of literature, paintings, poems, and so forth are often the fruit of struggle and speak to the drama of our life and the conflicts we often endure.

Sometimes suffering brings growth. There’s an old saying, “Things do, by opposition grow.” Another one says, “Calm seas do not a mariner make.”

Perhaps, too, in rushing to solve things and frequently intervening, God would cancel too much human freedom, which He both respects and sees as necessary for us to be among those who love, those who are sons and daughters rather than slaves.

Finally, and most mysteriously from our perspective, fixing one thing often affects many other things. Very often, in a rush to fix many things in our culture we have caused a great deal of harm as well. Whatever our good intentions, many of our welfare programs have harmed our families and our churches, from which help, through the bonds of charity, traditionally came. Many of our technologies have had harmful effects on the environment. And despite our many labor-saving devices, most of us are busier than ever. Fixing things sometimes leads to more problems, or at least brings unintended consequences.

Yes, there are mysteries to God’s providence, and despite our many and seemingly reasonable requests that things be fixed (and quickly!), God in His wisdom often delays and leaves things unresolved. He has His reasons, but most of the answers as to why are none of our business.

I thought of this as I watched the video below. It is of a plumber who is determined to fix a leak. His frustration grows, and is understandable, but sometimes in fixing a drip too hastily we get a flood.

Be careful before you rush to fix things in your life or in the lives of others. Fixing is often required, but go slowly, carefully, and learn patience. Learn from God, who can fix everything instantly but usually does not. (Read more.)

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Photography and Empathy

From PetaPixel:

Our ability to identify with and imagine someone else’s point of view is deeply ingrained into the architecture of our brain. Photography plays a unique role in triggering the network of brain regions that underlie empathy.

To understand how photographs activate the aforementioned brain network, it’s first necessary to deconstruct emotional processing into simpler components. In this article I’ll describe the brain regions that support one of the most fundamental social skills that humans have: that of imitation.

Also, in using concepts from a subfield of cognitive neuroscience called the Theory of Mind, I’ll show how humans conceptualize the minds of other people and why this is important for our ability to empathize. (Read more.)

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St. Helena Island

Napoleon's last prison. To quote:

Saint Helena is a volcanic island located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, composed largely of rugged terrain and perpendicular cliffs rising 500 to 700 meters tall. The only practicable place for ship landings is on the island’s north-western side at James Bay, from which a narrow valley extends 2.4 km inland. In this valley, sandwiched between steep cliffs, is nestled the town, capital and port of Jamestown.

Jamestown is Saint Helena’s most peculiar settlement. The town is rather long, thin and densely populated, with tightly knit, long and winding streets. Shrubs and trees decorate some of the street corners. The surrounding terrain is rough and steep, and rockfalls are an occurrence, sometimes damaging buildings. The town's prominent features is Jacob's Ladder, a staircase of 699 steps, built in 1829 to connect Jamestown to the former fort on Ladder Hill. The ladder is very popular with tourists, is lit at night and a timed run takes place there every year, with people coming from all over the world to take part. Other interesting sites to visit include the Museum of Saint Helena, the impressive High Knoll Fort, and Napoleon's two residence - Longwood House and the Briars, and his tomb.

Longwood House, in the town of the same name, was the home in which Napoleon spent the great majority of his time on Saint Helena and also where he died. It has several wings and contains the type of furniture it would have when he lived there, though most of the originals have been carried off elsewhere. The house is now run as a museum and maintained by the French government. (Read more.)

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Through the Fair

My young love said to me,
"My mother won't mind
And my father won't slight you
For your lack of kind."
And she stepped away from me
And this she did say:
"It will not be long, love,
Till our wedding day."

As she stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her
Move here and move there
And then she turned homeward
With one star awake
Like the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake.

Last night she came to me,
My dead love came in.
So softly she came
That her feet made no din
As she laid her hand on me
And this she did say:
"It will not be long, love,
'Til our wedding day."

by Padraic Colum

Artwork by Sir John Lavery

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Oscar Wilde in America

Did the Irish writer invent celebrity? To quote:

It just might be, however, that Wilde's most enduring legacy isn't literary. It is cultural, in the largest sense of that term. For Oscar Wilde did more than create a body of work that's now in the Western canon. He created an enduring part of the world we all live in.

That part isn't a geographical entity. It is a constellation of values, attitudes, and poses. It is a mind-set where everyone thinks they could be famous and, even more to the point, should be. It is a belief system in which "celebrity," a word that once referred exclusively to persons of achievement--artists, athletes, politicians, and so on, even criminals, who left their mark on history through their deeds--has expanded its meaning to include persons famous merely for being famous, a status won by manipulating the media. It is a worldview where fame isn't the end product of a career but the beginning of one. It is the part of modern life we call celebrity culture.

Wilde called it into existence in 1882 in America, where he engaged in a nearly yearlong speaking tour, a tour de force of showmanship--and, more often than not, showboatmanship--that touched down in thirty states, covered approximately fifteen thousand miles, generated more than five hundred newspaper and magazine articles, earned him more money than he had ever earned in his life, and, when it was over, made him the second-most-famous Briton in America, behind only Queen Victoria. (Not bad for a writer who, at this point in his career, had only written a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play.) This "product launch" was all the more remarkable because Wilde had no training in business and only a little more in public speaking. In an era populated by several of the greatest product marketers in America's history--a list that includes H. J. Heinz, Milton Hershey, and Levi Strauss--Oscar Wilde, whose only product was a self-adoring dandy named Oscar Wilde, may have been the best of them all.

Other Europeans--Dickens and Tocqueville, to name but two--had toured our country before Wilde. But they came to learn about America; Wilde came so America could learn about him. Meeting his audiences in an impossible-to-ignore ensemble--satin breeches, black silk stockings, silver-buckled pumps, and a snug velvet coat with lace trim--Wilde sold himself to the American public as a "Professor of Aesthetics," a title for which he had no authentic certification, in roughly one hundred fifty lectures (most of them on interior decorating) that brought him face to face with farmers, poets, socialites, preachers, factory workers, prospectors, prostitutes, southern belles, Harvard intellectuals, and, if a newspaper account is accurate, a detachment of Texas Rangers who bestowed upon him the rank of colonel.

Traveling by rail, carriage, and, when absolutely necessary, mule, Wilde spoke on tasteful home design to crowds ranging from twenty-five to twenty-five hundred, often embellishing his advice with excerpts from his favorite poems. Maybe it's not surprising some American reporters mocked him as an "ass-thete" and, when other insults failed, as "she." But those rude hacks underestimated their target. Beneath Wilde's delicate persona--the rouge-wearing dandy languidly flinging his hand to his brow as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows--was a man on a serious mission: to make himself a star, no matter how little he had done (so far) to deserve it. (Read more.)

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Mass Rocks and Hedge Schools

During the years of the penal laws, the Irish would meet for Mass either in private homes or in country places at a "Mass Rock."

The mass rock field is away from the roads and well sheltered with trees. Lookouts were posted in case the soldiers or Red Coats were coming. Mass was held in secret and the priest arrived in disguise to say mass. Mass rocks were often placed near streams so it is possible that people walked on the bed of the Pill so that they would not leave any footprints behind...The custom of placing a lighted candle on the window at Christmas is also said to come from Penal times. It was a signal to the wandering priest that it was a safe house to visit and that the family wanted to receive the sacraments. After the Penal Laws the custom continued but the candle was now used to show the Holy Family the road to Bethlehem and as a welcome to Baby Jesus into the home. The custom is still carried on in many parts of Ireland to this day at Christmas.

It was forbidden to educate Irish Catholic children as well, hence the "hedge schools." To quote:

 Ye Hedge School is named after the clandestine schools run by the Irish during the time of the Penal laws which not only forbade the teaching of Catholic catechism, but indeed forbade all education for Catholics. Despite these laws, however, when my great-great-grandfather arrived in the United States from Ireland, he was well educated, knowing arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, history and geography, spelling and writing, and, of course, catechism. It is simply extraordinary that while the Penal laws prevented the Catholic Irish from voting or holding office, from owning or purchasing land, from engaging in commerce, and forbade them to educate their children in by any means, at home or abroad, education continued. Priests were banned and hunted with bloodhounds and the faithful Irish had nothing but the barest living in their countryside, on lands that had not (yet) been confiscated, yet all the while, priests and other educated Irishmen who were faithful to the Church conducted schools in inaccessible caves or tiny huts, or behind hedges.  The schools were called Hedge Schools. Seumus MacManus, in his book The Story of the Irish Race, describes them thus:

Throughout those dark days the hunted schoolmaster, with price upon his head, was hidden from house to house.  And in the summer time he gathered his little class, hungering and thirsting for knowledge, behind a hedge in remote mountain glen  where, while in turn each tattered lad kept watch from the hilltop for the British soldiers, he fed to his eager pupils the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. Latin and Greek were taught to ragged hunted ones under shelter of the hedges  whence these teachers were knows as "hedge schoolmasters."  A knowledge of Latin was a frequent enough accomplishment among poor Irish mountaineers in the seventeenth century  and was spoken by many of them on special occasions. And it is authoritatively boasted that cows were bought and sold in Greek, in mountain market-places of Kerry.

MacManus also tells of the eighteenth century Irish poet Owen Roe O'Sullivan who was a farm hand until he had the opportunity to help his master's son read a Greek passage; the son had just returned from college on the Continent. 

And he tells us that a friend's father used to hear whole conversations in Latin among the priests and schoolmasters of nineteenth century Ireland.

The hedge schools remind me a little of our contemporary home schools, which, of course, are not so rustic and not forbidden. It is amazing what determined Catholic parents can do when they place their children's faith above everything else, with God's help.

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There's More to Life Than Being Happy

From Atlantic:

In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness." (Read more.)

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