Frequently Asked Questions

Who are you?

 —God only knows. I can give you some of my attributes:  male, middle-aged, married, American, of British ancestry, Catholic.

Which of the attributes do you consider most important?

—That’s an interesting question. In the order of nature I suppose the most fundamental is “male;” in the order of super-nature, “Catholic.”

Actually the question was “most important,” not “most fundamental;” those are not necessarily the same thing, are they?

—No, they aren’t. I suppose the fact about me which is both most important and most fundamental is that I’m a person.

Is personhood an attribute or is it the essential nature of the thing?

—The latter, I suppose. But I must say that a little abstract philosophy goes quite a long way with me.

And yet it is known that you consider Maritain’s insistence that God is not a thing, but being itself, to be the most important thing to be said or indeed thought and known about God.

—Indeed, and no one can think properly about God without contemplating that fact. I say “contemplating” rather than “understanding” because obviously it cannot be entirely understood. And whoever has not grasped at least the significance of the distinction has not yet conceived of the idea of God.  However, Maritain was only stating abstractly what was said more concretely to Moses and to those who heard Jesus of Nazareth.

Why are you doing this?

—What?

Putting odds and ends of your writing on the web.

—Oh. Well, on Halloween 2003, a teenaged surfing star named Bethany Hamilton had her arm bitten off by a shark. Several weeks later, when asked if she would return to surfing, she said, “If I don't get back on my board, I'll be in a bad mood forever.”

You are on record as saying that life is too short to learn vi. What else is life too short for?

—Paying much attention to contemporary fiction and poetry. Learning to be a connoisseur of any food or beverage, especially if they are expensive. Reading reviews of museum exhibitions, concerts, and television shows.

And please note that if I had another fifty or sixty years to live I might be more interested in or at least patient with some of these things. But the number of years remaining to me is, based on statistics, more in the range of fifteen to thirty, and the list of things that I really want to do is quite long. Therefore I have become far quicker than I once was to abandon those which seem to hold little promise.

But don’t you watch a certain amount of TV?

—I’d rather not discuss that.

That remark about food and beverages—isn’t that a bit of inverted snobbery? Aren’t you holding yourself above and implicitly mocking those who care about such things?

—Not really. It’s a cost-benefit thing, you know? Frankly I can’t imagine getting more pleasure from any food than I do from catfish or barbecue at the Greenbrier Restaurant.

And that remark about contemporary literature. If I may say so, that seems downright obnoxious, since you evidently wish to throw your own literary productions into the maw of the public.

—Indeed, and frankly I am somewhat ashamed of myself, as well as apprehensive of being savaged by some practitioner whom I have offended. But I shall have more to say on this subject; for now let me observe only that I once loved bookstores but now find them depressing.

Did people really ask you all these questions?

—“People”? Well, as noted above, I am a person, and I frequently ask myself these questions.