Essays in Idleness

Nobody knows what country music is, or if someone does he has concealed it from me. I took it for an aerial collision of hillbilly boogie and cowboy swing, crashing into a honky-tonk bar with a banjo and a scatter of Gaelic fiddles. But I could be wrong.

As a lad I took to country and folk, in opposition to rock and metal, by the same instinct that drew me to Bach and Purcell and Mozart. It was musical. In retrospect I see that it was also religious, in the very broad sense of being animated by spiritual “concerns,” starting from a tragic view of life, yet hopeful, at the boundary of sin and redemption. As opposed to just sex and drugs. In that country universe, a melodic and harmonic and often comic joy carries a narrative in which things do not always work out; in which people don’t always get what they want, or even what they deserve; in which one mistake leads to another, until something bad happens. But as good narrative, it does not preach. It just sits back and describes.

I also took to jazz, with the help of my father, but I am writing here of low-class popular music, such as was shared and actually sung by e.g. my fellow high school students in an Ontario small town, dangerously close to a big city. Some time in the late ’sixties they began to divide into two camps. I will call this in my ignorance the country/rock divide. The rock people would migrate to the city, where they would live prosperously sterile lives; the country people would stay home and get hard jobs and raise children.

Not always in practice, or course, but consistently in principle: rock was from the outset an expression of alienation, starting from one’s family and immediate neighbourhood, and ending with an alienation from music itself. (To say nothing of sanity.)

Counter-currents should not be discounted, entirely: there were rock bands whose members had some musical training and might know, sort-of, how to play their instruments — the band Chicago swims into memory; along with irrepressible poets like Dylan, Simon, Cohen, or even a Beatle or two — a folk stream within the stone rock that broadened its melodic and lyrical capacities and made it, sort-of, compatible with country music.

Something should be mentioned of rhythm here, and the thumping base that inculcated “tribal.” It was barbaric, but also, hypnotizing. It pulled things into itself, like a black hole, dislocating the brain; it required drugs other than alcohol to appreciate. It should never have been tolerated. It went with lyrics that were rude and lewd, and I would guess some learned person, with tremendous stamina, or indifference to pain, could trace the further decline through punk and rap.

One could also hear, as the years passed, country music being lured into this hole, by the scent of money — into this death trap of contrived “relevance,” with its inevitable “rights” posturing, and the lifestyle that was rich and famous. But I know so little of popular music, today, that I cannot trace this history myself, and will be content with a swathing condemnation.

The music of the Church is another matter. Chant is its natural condition, and the Baroque assimilation of the new, “classical” genres worked only when they were carefully adapted to the strict requirements of the liturgy (of course, usus antiquior), and the internal, spiritual movements of the Mass. Modern hymns (Romantic era and forward) have, to my mind, no place in a church, though lots of room outside it. They are instead part of an “outreach,” or Christianizing of the world beyond the narthex, which we re-enter going down the steps. In a healthy society (one that is not poisoning itself) the “secular” music, or music of the streets and the taverns, will be shot through with nutrient religion.

For the musical mission of the Church Catholic is, as I see it, two-fold at the present day. First, to chase irreverent music out of the sanctuary, in the spirit of Christ whipping the money-changers. Then second, to invade their larger “marketplace,” systematically, with a view to eradicating godlessness entirely. We need, in effect, to re-invent country and folk traditions, from the hymn to the ballad, and the dancing jig, as loving expressions of life itself. And this, I suppose, is where Protestant and other converts can help us, for as a result of the desecration of the Mass (novus ordo), inside, we Catholics have also become deaf and unmusical outside the Church. Music is crucial to the binding of family, and neighbourhood, and to the direction of the human soul. We cannot simply surrender it to the Devil, in the Islamic manner.

This does not mean a cheap moralizing music, but a recovery of the poetry that embraces life in all of its facets, including sin and its explication. Great music, as great literature and art, conveys truths. It is the theatre of the world, in which the truth happens; or more succinctly, “the music of what happens” (Seamus Heaney quoting an ancient Irish definition of poetry, I think).

*

Woke this morning with an old country song in my head. Not that old: less than forty years, and therefore from the terminal phase of this art in its decadent, Nashville form. But it is good in its kind and will do as an example of something that embodies “truth to life,” without a heavy hand. I transcribe the lyrics below, minus repetitions, from the way Emmylou Harris sang it, back when she was young and before she became a “landmine commie.” (My crush on her is incurable, however.)

I’m sure she didn’t write it. (Gentle reader can do my homework for me.) She just knew how to sing it, perfectly with the fiddles.

Note, that the movement of the language is Shakespearean. Which is to say, like that of the later Will Shakespeare, it plays recklessly over the demands of drawing-room syntax and scansion, to convey movements of association, thought and feeling, that formalized language would only stiff. Colloquial, one might say, but not what the liberal academics mean by that. Rather, sharply elevated colloquial, tuned to serve the dramatically explosive:

Mary took to runnin with a travellin man,
Left her momma cryin with her head in her hands:
Such a sad case; so broken hearted.

She say, “Momma gotta go, gotta get outta here,
“Gotta get outta town, tired a hangin around:
“Gotta roll on, tween the ditches.”

Lord, she never woulda done it if she hadden got drunk,
Hadden started runnin with a travellin man,
If she hadn’t started taken … those crazy chances.

She say, “Daughter, let me tell yabout the travellin kind,
“Everywhere they goes such a very short time:
“He’s a long gone, before you know it.”

She say, “Never have I known it when it felt so good,
“Never have I knew it when I knew I could,
“Never have I done it when it looked so right.”

Down in the swampland, anything goes;
It’s alligator bait and the bars don’t close:
It’s the real thing, down in Lou’siana.

Didj y’ever see a Cajun when he really got mad?
Really got trouble like a daughter gone bad?
Gets a real hot, in Lou’siana.

Oh, the stranger better move it or he gonna get killed,
Gonna hafta geddit or a shotgun will:
Ain’t no time … for lengthy speeches.

Just an ordinary story bout the way things go,
Round around and no body knows
But the highway: goes on forever.

We are, and always have been homo rumoris, according to Jonah Goldberg in his (often) weekly newsletter; if not homo rumusculi, or homo fabulationis. Well, homos of one kind or another. That is to say, the whispering mob of rumour mongers, triflers, fabulists and storytellers, benign or possibly malign, was around long before the discovery of electricity; and in Goldberg’s view, as mine, it can have a useful function.

Morality requires shame, and the vindication of justice requires shaming people. The question has never been, should people be shamed? It has rather been, what should they be shamed for?

I would pause here, to consider the Catholic approach, embodied in the Sacrament of Penance, and contrast it with our North American Puritan conventions, going back to Salem, Massachusetts. That is to say, the focus on reconciliation with God, as opposed to reconciliation with peer pressure, or with the whited sepulchres who by their righteous sermons inspire the crowds. But this does not change the fact that we are, regardless of our religion, all humans — with copious actual sins to confess.

Are God and the mob always on the same side? Now there is a question that answers itself promptly.

Even the West Mercia Police were able to distinguish them, during an incident in Telford, Shropshire, on 14th March. It was one of those wee passing items in the news cycle, that grabbed my horrified imagination, so that I flagged it for this later use. Though in itself, only one horror among many, many.

A poor, distraught man had climbed to the top of a multi-storey car park, by the town’s shopping mall. Even from a distance, his emotional state could be seen; and from his position on the ledge, that he had contemplated suicide.

A crowd of teenagers gathered below. It was a Saturday, school was out, and the inmates lounging about this palace of consumerism. And there were some older, too — full adults — also with their social media in their hands, to capture the scene. (“Citizen journalists” shall we call them?) According to witnesses, at least twenty at a time were filming this exciting piece of “breaking news.”

But the man did not jump; he was frozen.

And so the crowd, getting bored, began to taunt: “Go on, do it. … Jump!”

The police were trying to reach him; trying to talk him back to safety. But the man could not hear them; he was mesmerized by the audience he had somehow summoned. They were screaming. He could see people running about, from one side of him to the other, to get better pictorial angles for their iPhones. He had their full attention; he had become the focus of a public demand to be entertained.

Time passed: more than two hours. The crowd’s frustration was growing. But with the man still at the edge of the car park roof, frozen by despair, they could hardly tear themselves away. A narrative like this requires a resolution.

“Go for it! … Now! … Do it! … Stop effing about! … Jump! … Do it!”

Finally, he obliged.

So that now he is dead, and beyond democracy. He cannot hear “the voice of the people” any more.

A second mob quickly formed, on the Internet, in response to the news report — to shame the members of the first. Clicking from their armchairs, cubicles, and car seats, the middle-class English declared themselves appalled. Mild, by the usual standard of public outrage, and utterly ineffectual; yet the noise was there. And when I looked for Comments, I found that these spokesmen for a forgotten mercy and compassion were, to a man, blood-curdling in their demands for retribution.

The West Mercia Police were likewise infuriated, promising legal action against those who had physically and verbally interfered with their work, if people would kindly step forward and identify the malefactors.

“Ah, to be in England, now that Winston’s out.” (That was how Ezra Pound put it, with his usual perspicacity as idiot savant.)

*

A mob is a mob is a mob. I was struck, too, glancing through Comments on articles about the shooting death of Cecil the Lion, by the bloodthirstiness. Most wanted the hunter dead, if not first tortured. But if, I should think, they had the means to kill him, another angry mob would come forward after that, to shame the shamers, and demand their punishment in turn.

For the time being, the Internet is mostly virtual. Further advances in technology will be needed, to allow for the dispensation of populist justice in “live time.” At present, unless one has command of a national guard or other armed forces, one must make do with information alone, such as broadcasting workplaces and home addresses.

Or, in the case of the AshleyMadison.com hackers, the identities of 37 million customers, who use this “matchmaking” site specifically to arrange adulterous liaisons. They may be “named and shamed” — curiously from the motive of punishing the website for inadequate attention to “privacy concerns.” And there is consternation about this, even though (as Goldberg mentions) adultery is considered an insignificant thing, these days. To many, it is no more a sin than sodomy, so what is the big deal? Yet oddly, it continues to matter to the adulterers’ live-in mates, and to their children, so far as their moral and emotional callusing is not yet complete. And so: “Let them suffer!”

Goldberg calls himself a Burkean conservative. (I think of myself as more the Jeremiah type.) There will always be something to shame; there will always be moral indignation. We can never become true libertines, for we are inextricably human; and seem to be “hard wired” to judge and to punish, others as well as ourselves. And by some kink, others in preference to ourselves.

Nothing has changed in this regard: the Internet is wringing with moral indignation, and the pundits are kept busy by it. Goldberg rightly sees that the effect of the imposed, ideological libertinism — as it is taught by our current elites, through the schools and the media and the courts they control — is only to change the rules of the game. The game itself continues. What is condemned was previously applauded; what is applauded was previously condemned; but the mob moves on. So long as it is still provided with scapegoats to damn, in the Forum of public opinion, one sin will do as well as another. And, new sins will always be invented to fill the spaces from which the old sins were winkled; the Macbeth witches promised no less.

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum; but it is important to discern that the Devil does not. He flourishes, for the vacuum has ever been his pleasure; his tube into the human heart. For him, the vacuum is like the caress of a breeze on a warm summer day; or like the puff of feather fans, as his enablers pump the air out of the old, crumbling Christian civilization; that gentle sucking action. Hell itself, like the inaudible whoosh of the black hole, a music to his ears; and all of God’s creation to be sucked, downward ever downward, as we glide down, to death beneath death beneath death.

[Recycled, and slightly rewritten from a couple of years ago.
One does this sort of thing in August.]

*

There is a nice alpine orogeny, running from Afghanistan, across the roof of Asia, then into Yunnan, through most of Burma, upcountry Thailand and Indochina. It is all contiguous, all elevated, all rather wild — this vast territory enheaved, where three continental plates collided. (Supposing one buys into the hypothesis of “continental drift,” which I’m beginning to find “too plausible.”) About a decade ago it received a name from the Dutch historian, Willem van Schendel. He called it, Zomia, from a root that means “highlander” in many Tibeto-Burman languages. Think of it as Appalachia, but on a hundred times the scale, and of twenty times the historical depth.

Notwithstanding my Gaelic genes, I was schooled to despise, or glibly to romanticize, the Highland types. (Two sides of the same flipping coin.) Everyone was schooled to do this; and with great ease, government and media have since “stereotyped” enemies of the State who lurk in such remote places as, “The caves of Afghanistan!”

But of course, the intrusion into their midst of rudely psychotic persons with post-modern ideologies, and lethal post-modern weapons, is what actually occurred. The Pathan and other hill tribes of the “Northwest Frontier” came to serve Al Qaeda as their ancestors often served the British: at gunpoint.

From my own experience, travelling in such parts, I would say the hill people wanted only to be left alone. To travellers they have no objection; are hospitable to a reckless degree. Their violence is directed instead against invaders; and they have little difficulty distinguishing an innocent tramping fool from an embodiment of evil, such as a government official. They had, they have, no aspirations whatever, to conquer the little creatures down on the plains, who call themselves “people” but seem to lack many of the defining characteristics of full-fledged, free-born men and women.

I cannot get my head entirely around Zomia, owing to its size. The scholars who now employ the term as a geographical concept disagree about its extent; van Schendel himself excluded everything west of Ladakh. The Tibetan massif is a different world from the lower mountains to the east and south, both geographically and culturally. The latter territories are more densely and variously populated. Inhabitants of the former (that massif) have more in common with the pastoral “hordes” of Mongolia and Central Asia; but were once more secure in their mountain fastnesses. Historical migrations from there and from elsewhere, through mountainous southern China and into South-east Asia, were vastly more complex; and whole peoples passed over and by each other at different altitudes.

Yet it is true to say they have all, always, been Enemies of the State, up there in the mountains — hence, too, our sneaking rightwing attraction. In the 1950s, thanks to curmudgeonly sociologists, even the highlanders of Appalachia were enjoying some good press. This spread to the liberal anthropologists when they began to realize that these Hillbillies had preserved folk customs and attitudes from the earlier and freer society of the rebellious Thirteen Colonies; and that there might be some point to their counter-cultural rejection of the later mass-market America. (In other words, the mass market for Whole Earth hippiedom was being conceived.)

It is of the easternmore reaches of Zomia that Yale’s celebrated anarchist anthropologist, James C. Scott, characteristically writes. A recent book is entitled, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009, and already out-of-print). I seldom read such books, but skim them with enthusiasm. The professor, who also raises sheep, has been at his hobby horse for nearly half a century now, starting about the same time my own father was travelling among “the Hill Tribes of Siam,” and learning to love them as this author does.

During the Vietnam War we got to know these people — “Hmong” has become our generic term — as perhaps our most effective allies against Uncle Ho. They truly hated Communism, and a few other things, in common with hill people everywhere: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour. And, epidemics. For they often live to advanced ages, and fear Lowlanders less as soldiers than as carriers of disease. Verily, territorial warfare strikes the Highlander as one of the diseases the Lowlander is carrying (according to Scott with my enthusiastic, if tacit, agreement).

In a sense, these are the things — various forms of legislated slavery — that define the State, or arguably, Civilization in the narrow (“civic”) sense. Men are put under burden, and told it is for their own good. They learn to salute Power; to obey, to conform, to march, and to serve the poster politicians, shouting Heil! as each new, fashionable, Dear Leader motors by. But there are men who don’t like to do this; who are too independent to appreciate “democracy,” and would rather move to the hills. Or else, they get chased there.

My own Caledonian ancestors showed all the traits, including the murderous contempt for Lowlanders. They showed, too, as if Zomians, considerable wit in the invention of methods for remaining stateless. They dodged the bullet for centuries, until the Highland Clearances finally caught up, and the jackboots of the Modern State kicked them over the hills and into the oceans.

I shall leave the curious reader to follow the proper nouns to the proper sources, should he wish to learn more about the Higher Asians — with their incredible range of ethnicities and languages; their resistance alike to literacy and to positive law; their millenarian and prophetic tendencies; their chameleon skills; their mobility — and with that, their ingeniously successful techniques of swidden agriculture (usually more varied and complicated than “slash and burn”).

At the opposite end of the spectrum of human barbarity, we have the urbane. Total mutual incomprehension can be assumed between these extremes. Glancing through rebuttals to the Zomian theses, from the Po-faced academic elite, I am again and again arrested by their unreachable stupidity. The agents of Po cannot understand (except in little twinkles) that these people do not subscribe to the premisses of political and economic “science,” any more than to the other premisses of the Lowland mindset; don’t get, that the hillsman does not consider himself inferior to the “insects of the plains,” and does not long for “inclusion” in their termite colonies.

*

It seems all my life I have been reading the English travellers, and those of other countries who penetrated the wilderness, and came to understand the motives of “primitive” peoples — invariably from some calling in themselves, to which settled suburban life did not answer.

For instance, Charles Waterton’s Wanderings in South America, which came back to me from a flea-market stall, after years of wandering on its own. (The same copy with my name in the front.) It is a memoir of deep incursions into the woods of Guiana in the early nineteenth century, to stuff birds, and collect snakes, and gather other items for his extensive cabinets of “natural curiosities.” Waterton was a brilliant naturalist, whose descriptions of new species, and explanations of their physiology and behaviour, have stood up through all the subsequent Official Science.

Too, he was a fine Recusant Lord, from the vicinity of Wakefield, where the Catholics never quite gave up — just as their ancestors had never quite agreed to the Norman Conquest. He counts among the great English eccentrics; if also, alas, as a pioneer of the “ecology” business, for he surrounded his large estate with a tall wall, to protect the private wilderness around his moated castle, back home in Yorkshire. Conversant with both worlds, he adopts the prejudices of the British aristocracy, when mocking the tribesmen of Guiana; and of the tribesmen when mocking the British aristocracy — remaining Trump-like in his own indifference to criticism.

The History of Progress is highly biased, as I may have mentioned before in these electronic pages. It omits much more than half of human nature, and overlooks every fact that doesn’t fit. We need another account that will take in the whole, re-orient our attention to the immortal, and rescue us from the corvée frame of mind. A Highland version of history, if you will; a free man’s guide to how things really are, with some hints for escape from the labyrinth of totalitarian “good intentions.”

Indeed, Waterton found this just where I did, in the Gospels.

I try not to have “interesting” opinions on Scripture, and when I have them anyway, to mull them through myself, rather than sharing them with any who will listen. For it is not my place to usurp the role of the orthodox priest as interpreter, or to propose novelties. And even if, as sometimes happens these days, the priest is preaching heresy, it is not my place to add more. Rather, to recover, starting in myself, a few plain meanings.

For Christ’s teaching was meant for all men (including, all women). That’s the first clue that the more arcane interpretation of Scripture is unlikelier to be the correct one. Native reason, too, instructs us to start with the obvious, and pause — ideally, forever — before skipping to the Gnostic explanation, which only a few favoured “insiders” could possibly appreciate. Verily, we should examine our motives, before passing over what is plain to the brain.

For even the mystical turns out, on mystical examination, to be surprisingly plain, as a far countrie is revealed to plain sight when we travel to it. It remains “mysterious” in the human sense, of a puzzle, only because we haven’t got there yet. And there is always more beyond our getting: infinitely more, in Jesus Christ.

And so it behooves us to be plain, not arcane, when faced with plain matters, and to remain in the condition of faith, knowing Christ will not tax us beyond our means. There will be no mystery in the questions that appear, immediately before us. Only denial (that famous river in Egypt) prevents us from seeing what is directly before our eyes.

But here I am sounding like the Pharisee again, thanking God that I’m not like that Publican over there. (You see him? … Well, if you went to church you would.)

My mistake, openly advertised I hope, began with the words, “I try.” The implication is that others don’t; that I’m up against a wall of trees filled with obfuscating howler monkeys. Whereas, usually I’m up against the tendency to obfuscation in my own noisy soul. When what “I try” is to justify myself, I am playing the Pharisee for sure.

For it is very easy to manoeuvre into the position of smug, from any starting place that is not genuinely humble. The notion that, even if I’m bad, I’m not that bad, leaves open the low window for the devil we just saw officiously out the front door.

We live in glass houses it has been said; which, as any competent devil will observe, contain a lot of windows. Why throw stones and risk cutting hisself, when so many are habitually left open? And besides, stones wake up all the neighbours. Instead he carries a can of WD-40 in his toolkit, for the squeaky hinges. And a ball of wax for my creaky drawers. Never forget that he’s a smoothie; hardly trying to make a spectacle of hisself.

Saint Irenaeus (according to my 1962 Saint Andrew Daily Missal, which I can recommend to anyone) tied the two lessons in today’s (Old) Mass together — Paul’s to the Corinthians, and Luke’s to the planet — by a single scintillating observation. He defined man as, “the receptacle of God’s gifts.”

Saint Paul tells us to stop questioning each other’s gifts; Saint Luke, in effect, to stop questioning each other’s lack of them. (Jesus speaks through both Apostles.) The gifts we have are sufficient for our needs; more than sufficient, quite frankly — for beyond this, they are also sufficient for our contribution to the common weal.

Humility is enjoined in either case. It is incidentally the mark of the Saint: “a spirit of complete and constant dependence on God.” Which is among the reasons the Saints are so various, for contrary to current assumption, God is not narrow, boring, and repetitive.

He only repeats what we haven’t yet learnt, as we are obliged to discover. From the human side, this is called “punishment,” and it is invariably thoroughly deserved. That is what the Publican grasps, and the Pharisee apparently doesn’t. And it is because he gets it that the Publican, instead of trying to justify himself, beats his breast for his own sins, and begs only for mercy.

And note, with Christ, that it is the prayer of the Publican that is answered. And note further, that this really isn’t very surprising.

Instead, it is quite plain.

Lucky for me I’m not a dentist, and therefore can’t afford to shoot a lion in Zimbabwe. That means I don’t have to hide from the angry, democratic mob. (Millions of them on the Internet, demanding capital punishment for this solecism alone.) And what is worse, their post-modern reasoning.

Instead, I can sit here quietly with my tea, and indulge my own post-modern thoughts. And read old poems about Africa:

Young muscular Edwardian
Swings through trees,
Stops carnage at Karnak,
Whole trains at Windhoek,
Dances waltzes simianese.
Lord Greystoke jad guru! …

Truth to tell, even if I were rich beyond the dreams of avarice, like a dentist, I would probably want to shoot something else. For after all, lions are cats, and cats have souls. Everybody knows that; or at least, everyone on Facebook and Twitter. (Do dogs have souls? Depends on the breed.)

Maybe I wouldn’t shoot anything at all. The automobiles seem to be taking care of the raccoons. (We have glorious big ones in Parkdale, here; big like bears! Take out the front of your Honda.)

And anyway, I’m more into books.

A dumb yellow drum
Hangs down from the night.
For the rite of the Dum Dum
Come the cousin apes.
He who would wear Bond Street
And opera capes
Prefers loin cloths of
Impeccable cut.
Lady Jane Greystoke jad guru! …

Will the media be there, I wonder, when the beta male in that lion pride steps up to fill Cecil’s empty … paws? For he will then, I would think, in the lion way, snuff all of Cecil’s kittens. That’s what the new alpha lion does, according to the best BBC documentaries. He starts by wiping out the old lion’s progeny.

Sort of the way Mugabe did, when he came to power.

Perhaps someone else has made this point: I haven’t surveyed the controversy as thoroughly as I might have. Only enough to see that Cecil spent most of his time smiling for the cameras.

Nigel (or whatever the beta-male lion was called) must have spent his time sulking, and dreaming of the day. You know, that very moment — the moment Cecil got blammed.

For alpha males (whether lions, or dentists) don’t waste much time thinking about the optics. But beta males are Darwinian; they think about what it’s going to look like, every day. (A little sidelight there, on evolutionary biology.)

“There is no gay in a lion pride.” You can quote me on that. … Er, on second thought, don’t quote me.

Instead, quote James Reaney. He’s a white male who is safely dead:

Mazumba waves his spear!
Oh the white beach and the green palms!
Stygian night between the ears!
Oh Prince of slaughter do not bungle
My jugular vein within the jungle.
And springboks flee across the plains
From apes with silver headed canes.
Edward VII jad guru!

No, no, I have changed my mind. I think maybe I’d like to shoot a Barbary Lion. Nobody’s done one of those, lately.

They are something to look at: narrower faces, meaner expressions than your standard East African. A bit taller, too, and heavier: hard to miss. … (Easier to weigh them, once they are stuffed.) … Lots of testosterone (before that)!

The last one was observed to be extinct, by the Frenchman who shot it, in Morocco back in 1922. Or so it says here. (It says something different in the Wicked Paedia.) But someone said he saw a live one in the Atlas Mountains, a few decades after that.

Let’s go for it, I say.

Barbaries are (unless they were) big-hair lions: rich, dark, resplendent manes, of hippie length. (Such a wonderful target!) Indeed, better than hippies, because sans the ponytail, and the thinning on top. More closely related to the lions of India, I have heard. Ate lots of natives in their heyday, I’ll bet.

And Christians, I suppose, in the Forum. The Romans must have got their lions from around there.

(As a child in what was once British India, I used to wonder on this account. What was the score this month? How many lions had killed villagers? How many villagers had killed lions? And which side were we rooting for?)

Yes, yes, suddenly I see it: the head of a Barbary Lion would look rather fetching over the hearth. Glaring across the library towards a crouched Bengal Tiger, atop the glass cases on the opposite wall.

So I’ll also need to bag a Bengal Tiger.

And get me a place with a grand hearth. And maybe a higher ceiling.

(But darn, I forgot. I’m not a dentist. I can’t afford swag like this.)