I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success

“How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”

So asks Gabriel Keith, and proceeds to put a little chest in it by talking of maniacs of materialism and egoism and the soft narcotizing patter of pragmatists, too. So on he goes, pressing the point that those who may have taken on aspects of the preceding generation of sheep may come out with reddened tooth and claw, the better defend the practice of having conviction. In the name of conviction those sheepish aspects are made ravenous, going on and on exhorting and declaiming their very selves at dawn and midnight alike.

I for one am not well versed in this practice. My conviction muscles atrophied and kinked up with each episode of early Mike Judge. And as I start this particular book, which came to me at a slant and with a kind of wolfish hunger for a less kinetic theorizing than the the critique involving a dwarf, a puppet, and a fair amount of jokes about Slavs and Kompromat in which I first saw reference to this bracing orthodoxy. I wonder if there are a kind of spiritual exercises (whether as Pierre Hadot might conceive or Joel Osteen might loan on high interest credit) by which to test whether those conviction muscles are gone or capable of coming back into round.

Who would you rather have at your back or next to you on the charge, a passel of Davening mystics who truck with the emptied idea of this-is-all-as-it-should-be because it is all illusory and because suffering is constitutive of whatever is not illusory, or four jesuits in hairshirts on whose visage emaciation is quite becoming? Odin and Mithras besides . . .

I have some more orthodoxy to witness. It is no small thing to be able to look up in wonder.