I love this medium. Y’all do my research for me. A friend sent me the relevant passage from ‘A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.’ I read it as a Catholic teenager and it obviously resonated. I’m sorry my addled brain ascribed it to Waugh rather than Joyce. It makes much more sense than Waugh. Here it is:
— Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?
— The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.
— Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?
— I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.
— Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
— I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
I take his point.
CAN LAW FUNCTION? He can’t even go to a graduation. Rome’s self-interested attempt to keep him on – to prevent the deluge – seems to me to be an exercise in short-term preservation at the expense of long-term self-destruction. But we’ll see, won’t we?
GAY MARRIAGES LAST LONGER: Fascinating, if small study, reinforces the lesson from Scandinavia – that same-sex marriages, far from weakening marriage, could strengthen it. They seem to last longer than straight marriages. But shhhh. Don’t tell the social conservatives. They have their preconceptions to protect.
The Dish 