Log24

"It never occurred to me that someone could so explicitly reject
the core experience of something like Chartres."

— Christopher Alexander to Peter Eisenman, 1982

For a less dramatic core experience , see Hitchcock.

"At the point of convergence the play of similarities and differences
cancels itself out in order that identity alone may shine forth.
The illusion of motionlessness, the play of mirrors of the one:
identity is completely empty; it is a crystallization and
in its transparent core the movement of analogy begins all over
once again." — The Monkey Grammarian  by Octavio Paz,
translated by Helen Lane 

A more specific "transparent core" —

See all references to this figure
in this journal.

For a more specific "monkey grammarian," 
see W. Tecumseh Fitch in this journal.

JOSEFINE LYCHE
ABSOLUTE ALT. VOL. 2
17. april – 23. mai [2015] —

"I kjernen av mitt arbeid er en pågående
utforskning av esoteriske konsepter…."

"At the core of my work is an ongoing
exploration of esoteric concepts…."

See also 
http://issuu.com/tmrk/docs/spritenkunsthall_2015_cut .

Related material:  Hard Core.

Mathematics vulgarizer Keith Devlin on July 1
posted an essay on Common Core math education.

His essay was based on a New York Times story from June 29,
“Math Under Common Core Has Even Parents Stumbling.”

An image from that story:

The Times  gave no source, other than the photographer’s name,
for the above image.  Devlin said,

“… the image of a Common Core math worksheet
the Times  chose to illustrate its story showed
a very sensible, and deep use of dot diagrams,
to understand structure in arithmetic.”  

Devlin seems ignorant of the fact that there is
no such thing as a “Common Core math worksheet.”
The Core is a set of standards without  worksheets
(one of its failings).

Neither the Times  nor whoever filled out the worksheet
nor Devlin seemed to grasp that the image the Times  used
shows some multiplication word problems that are more
advanced than the topic that Devlin called the
“deep use of dot diagrams to understand structure in arithmetic.”

This Core topic is as follows:

For some worksheets that are  (purportedly) relevant, see,
for instance…

http://search.theeducationcenter.com/search/
_Common_Core_Label-2.OA.C.4–keywords-math_worksheets,
in particular the worksheet
http://www.theeducationcenter.com/editorial_content/multipli-city:

Some other exercises said to be related to standard 2.OA.C.4:

The Common Core of course fails to provide materials for parents
that are easily findable on the Web and that give relevant background
for the above second-grade topic.  It leaves this crucial task up to
individual states and school districts, as well as to private enterprise.
This, and not the parents’ ignorance described in  Devlin’s snide remarks,
accounts for the frustration that the Times  story describes.

"Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.'
It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at
once, without regard to the specific movement
of the narrative. We may compare it to the study
of a music score, where we can turn to any
part without regard to sequential performance."

— Northrop Frye in The Great Code

Gardner reportedly died at 65 on February 19.
A post linked to here on that date suggests some
musical remarks.

The title is from today's noon post, Core.

It also appears, quoted from Popovič, in Susan Bassnett's
Translation Studies  (third edition, Routledge, 2002)—

"It is an established fact in Translation Studies that if a dozen
translators tackle the same poem, they will produce a dozen
different versions. And yet somewhere in those dozen versions there
will be what Popovič calls the ‘invariant core’ of the original poem.
This invariant core, he claims, is represented by stable, basic and
constant semantic elements in the text, whose existence can be
proved by experimental semantic condensation. Transformations, or
variants, are those changes which do not modify the core of meaning
but influence the expressive form. In short, the invariant can be
defined as that which exists in common between all existing
translations of a single work. So the invariant is part of a dynamic
relationship and should not be confused with speculative arguments
about the ‘nature’, the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of the text; the ‘indefinable
quality’ that translators are rarely supposed to be able to capture."

"A writer hopes to leave behind a work no one forgets…."

— Song sung on NBC's Smash  tonight

Fulsere vere candidi mihi soles….

— André Weil, The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician

nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque….

— Catullus, quoted in Bassnett's Translation Studies

Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat.

“Even when some parts of the show don’t feel like they’re working,
the production is always top notch and eye-popping. The score, too,
is top notch here, but it’s the use of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of
the Moon’ that resonates most.”

— Kevin Lever on the Westworld  May 3 Season 3 finale

Image from Log24 posts tagged Spectral Valhalla —

— Kastalia Medrano, "The Art of Space Art," Sept. 14, 2017

Ghost in the Shell

The opening lines of Eliot's Four Quartets —

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."

Perhaps.

Those who prefer geometry to rhetoric may also prefer
to Eliot's lines the immortal opening of the Transformers  saga —

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

One version of the Cube —

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction,
the reason why the artist works and lives
and has his being — the reward he seeks —
the only reward he really cares about,
without which there is nothing. It is to snare
the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation,
to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves
the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
   See also Blazon in this journal.

From this evening's online New York Times : 

"Eric Salzman, a composer and music critic who
championed a new art form, music theater,
that was neither opera nor stage musical, died
on Nov. 12 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 84."

^{. . . .}

"The first American Music Theater Festival 
took place in the summer of 1984.

Among that first festival’s featured works was 
'Strike Up the Band!,' Mr. Salzman’s 'reconstructed
and adapted' version of a satirical musical
with a score by George and Ira Gershwin
that had not been staged in 50 years. The director
of that production, Frank Corsaro, died 
the day before Mr. Salzman did."

Synchronology check :

"The day before" above was November 11, 2017.

Links from this  journal  on November 11 —

A Log24 search for Michael Sudduth and an 
October 28, 2017, Facebook post by Sudduth.

Detail of Sudduth's Nov. 11 Facebook home page —

Click the above for an enlarged view of the Sudduth profile picture.

Related material :

Aooo.

(Click to enlarge.)

For the paper on Steiner systems, see the bibliographic link in
the previous Log24 post.

See as well Cameron's posts before and after his post above:

← A sun dog    Core paths → .

"On April 23, 2009 ….

'I’m reminded of the character in "The Silence of the Lambs," 
Hannibal Lecter, a very brilliant man,' the prosecutor said,
recognizing 'his ability to intelligently and articulately discuss
things occurring in society.'

'But at his core, as with Mr. Lecter at his core, he is a sociopath,' 
the prosecutor said."

— David Stout in an obituary from this evening's online
New York Times

See also this  journal on April 23, 2009, and
a figure from this morning's link Cantina —

 .

Flashback in Genial, a post of March 6, 2017 —

From a New York Times  book review today by
James Ryerson, instructor at The School of The New York Times —

"Savvy philosophers distill their core insight into a short phrase."

"Let them eat cake."

Publishers Weekly  on a Nov. 1, 2011, book, Under Blue Cup —

"Krauss’s core argument (what she deems a 'crusade')
is that the 'white cube,' which conceptual and installation
artists have deemed obsolete, actually thrives."

For other "core arguments," see Satuday's post "Common Core"
and the Art Space posts "Odd Core" and "Even Core."

The second editor mentioned below reportedly died
on June 21, 2017.  A page in his memory —

See also "Detail for Hopkins" in this journal on June 21.
For a Maori finale, see "De Haut en Bas " (July 11, 2008).

From the 1994 film review linked to above —

Reality Bites – Peter Travers in Rolling Stone , Feb. 1994

"Life after college – the time between graduation and
finding a job that pays your rent without making you puke.
Panic time. By spinning something fresh out of something
familiar, Reality Bites  scores the first comedy knockout of
the new year. It also brings out the vibrant best in Winona
Ryder and Ethan Hawke as friends who resist being lovers,
makes a star of Janeane Garofalo as their tart-tongued
buddy and puts Ben Stiller on the map as a director." 

See also "Damning" in this journal on Feb. 8, 2017.

See also, on Feb. 8 in this journal, Damning.

“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature of modern science
is the emergence of abstract symbolic structures as the hard core
of objectivity behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale of
the subjective storyteller mind.”

— Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of  Mathematics and
    Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237

Harvard University Press on the late Angus Fletcher, author of
The Topological Imagination  and Colors of the Mind —

From the Harvard webpage for Colors of the Mind —

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts,
the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye.
This… book…  aims to open another field of study:
how thought— the act, the experience of thinking—
is represented in literature.

. . . .

Fletcher’s resources are large, and his step is sure.
The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton’s

Satan, the original Thinker,
leaving the pain of thinking
as his legacy for mankind.

A 1992 review by Vinay Dharwadker of Colors of the Mind —

See also the above word "dianoia" in The Echo in Plato's Cave.
Some context …

This post was suggested by a memorial piece today in
the Los Angeles Review of Books —

A Florilegium for Angus Fletcher

By Kenneth Gross, Lindsay Waters, V. N. Alexander,
Paul Auster, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, K. J. Knoespel,
Mitchell Meltzer, Victoria Nelson, Joan Richardson,
Dorian Sagan, Susan Stewart, Eric Wilson, Michael Wood

Fletcher reportedly died on November 28, 2016.

"I learned from Fletcher how to apprehend
the daemonic element in poetic imagination."

— Harold Bloom in today's Los Angeles florilegium

For more on Bloom and the daemonic, see a Log24 post,
"Interpenetration," from the date of Fletcher's death.

Some backstory:  Dharwadker in this journal.

BuzzFeed, Tuesday, January 10, 2017, on "the damning letter"—

From the Jan. 10 BuzzFeed story —

A searchable text of the alleged 1986 letter, along with the
alleged attached statement, is now available at
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/08/
coretta-scott-kings-letter-opposing-jeff-sessions-1986-full-text/21709762/.

A search of the letter and statement at that webpage yields
no instances of the phrases "racial practices," "established and enforced,"
or "personally hostile."

Hence the word "alleged" above.

Update of 1:44 PM ET on Feb. 9, 2017:

A relevant Wikipedia article —
Questioned document examination.

Accepting for Professor Corey … Thomas Pynchon.

From "Core," a post of St. Lucia's Day, Dec. 13, 2016 —

In related news yesterday —

California yoga mogul’s mysterious death:
Trevor Tice’s drunken last hours detailed

"Police found Tice dead on the floor in his home office,
blood puddled around his head. They also found blood
on walls, furniture, on a sofa and on sheets in a nearby
bedroom, where there was a large bottle of Grey Goose
vodka under several blood-stained pillows on the floor."

See as well an image from "The Stone," a post of March 18, 2016 —

Some backstory —

“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical.  Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”

—Many Dimensions  (1931), by Charles Williams

See also related remarks.

The New York Times  yesterday evening —

Butor reportedly died on August 24.

This journal on that date —

From Butor's obituary —

"He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne
under the phenomenologist
Gaston Bachelard, writing a thesis on
mathematics and the idea of necessity."

"In 2013 the Académie Française awarded
Mr. Butor its Grand Prix for his life’s work.

Explaining his philosophy in an interview
with the critic and television producer
Georges Charbonnier in 1965, Mr. Butor said,
'Every written word is a victory over death.' "

A search for Bachelard in this journal yields remarks
related to Bachelard's Poetics of Space  and to the above
phrase by Wallace Stevens.

For a  Monkey Grammarian  (Viennese Version)

A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —

The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).

Shown below are a few variations on the figure by VCQ,
the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology —
 

(Click image to enlarge.)

A review of the phrase "Innermost Kernel" in this journal
suggests the following meditation …

"Who am I?" — Existential cry
in "Zoolander" and "Zoolander 2."

A similar question occurs in "Peer Gynt" —

Ben Brantley in yesterday morning's print New York Times *
expressed a nihilistic view of Peer as an onion-peeler —

"Toward the end of Ibsen’s 'Peer Gynt,' a saga of self
under siege, the title character is discovered peeling
an onion, finding in the layers of that humble vegetable
a symbol for the chapters of an eventful life . . . .

… [the director’s] approach is the same one that Peer
applies to the onion: Keep stripping until you find the core.
Of course in Peer’s case what is finally found is
plenty of nothing, an apt conclusion for a man
for whom a solid self remains elusive."

I prefer a view from what Fitzgerald called
"the dark fields of the republic" — the Dordt College view —

* The Times — "A version of this review appears in print on May 26, 2016, 
on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline:
'A Saga of Self-Identity, Stripped to Its Core, Still Provokes.' "

The New York Times  this evening on the late Rita Gam:

"After generally being typecast in supporting roles
in two dozen films for what Life described as
'her sultry face and insinuating voice,' she recalled
in 1992, 'I looked into the black pit at 40 and
wondered, what do I do for an encore?' "

See also Sidney Lumet in this journal as well as
"Some cartoon graveyards are better than others."

On film director Stanley Kubrick:

On physics writer Peter Woit:

Illustration from a post of
Schicksalstag  2009

Track listing

1. "Dirty Laundry" (Henley, Danny Kortchmar) – 5:36
2. "The Boys of Summer" (Mike Campbell, Henley) – 4:45
3. "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" (Kortchmar) – 4:28
4. "Not Enough Love in the World" (Henley, Kortchmar, Benmont Tench) – 3:54
5. "Sunset Grill" (Henley, Kortchmar, Tench) – 6:22
6. "The End of the Innocence" (Henley, Bruce Hornsby) – 5:14
7. "The Last Worthless Evening" (John Corey, Henley, Stan Lynch) – 6:05
8. "New York Minute" (Henley, Kortchmar, Jai Winding) – 6:34
9. "I Will Not Go Quietly" (Henley, Kortchmar) – 5:41
10. "The Heart of the Matter" (Campbell, Henley, J.D. Souther) – 5:21
11. "The Garden of Allah" (Corey, Paul Gurian, Henley, Lynch) – 7:02
12. "You Don't Know Me at All" (Corey, Henley, Lynch) – 5:36
13. "Everybody Knows" (Leonard Cohen, Sharon Robinson) – 6:10

Two pieces by NPR education writer Molly Bloom:

See also yesterday's post on another NPR / Princeton education figure,
Keith Devlin:

An illustration (click for larger view with context):

From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —

See also searches in this  journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.

Continued from Putting the A in VANITY,
Putting the AI in FAIR, and Core Problem:

Continued.

"Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind— as Eddington puts it— the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind."

— Hermann Weyl in Philosophy of Mathematics
     and Natural Science , Princeton, 1949, p. 237

Tom Wolfe on art theorists in The Painted Word  (1975) :

"It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde  understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene."

The Weyl quote is a continuing theme in this journal.
The Wolfe quote appeared here on Nov. 18, 2014,
the reported date of death of Yale graduate student 
Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal.

Directions to her burial (see yesterday evening) include
a mention of "Paul Robson Street" (actually Paul
Robeson Place) near "the historic Princeton Cemetery."

This, together with the remarks by Tom Wolfe posted
here on the reported day of her death, suggests a search
for "red green black" —

The late Chichilnisky-Heal was a student of political economy.

The search colors may be interpreted, if one likes, as referring
to politics (red), economics (green), and Robeson (black).

See also Robeson in this journal.

John Baez at Google+ has an interesting post on crackpots,
dated September 13, 2014.

Related recent material from this  journal:

Sense (Sept. 13) and Sensibility (Sept. 14 and later).

See also a New York Times  piece from 2009:

Related material:

An Apple for Devlin and

“You don’t need to eat a whole apple to know it’s rotten.”
— Warren Siegel

The Los Alamos Vision

“Gates said his foundation is an advocate for the Common Core State Standards
that are part of the national curriculum and focus on mathematics and language
arts. He said learning ‘needs to be on the edge’ where it is challenging but not
too challenging, and that students receive the basics through Common Core.

‘It’s great to teach other things, but you need that foundation,’ he said.”

— T. S. Last in the Albuquerque Journal , 12:05 AM Tuesday, July 1, 2014

See also the previous post (Core Mathematics: Arrays) and, elsewhere
in this journal,

“Eight is a Gate.” — Mnemonic rhyme:

For the late Bob Stewart:

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'"

Translation Studies Continued:

See Cameron's Kernel and…

 (Click image for some background.)

From a search for Mirror-Play in this journal:

That search was suggested by a much lengthier
search, for Core, that itself was suggested
by yesterday's post (on Katherine Neville's birthday)
titled A Philosopher's Stone.

See, too, Tom Hanks (shown above as symbologist
Robert Langdon) in "Lucky Guy" (reviewed by TIME
yesterday), and a related poem:

Yes, you! You’re the Lucky One…

Prospective purchasers of the poet's work
may consult a press release from LSU Press
dated 4/4/2013. The poet died, apparently*
unlamented by his publisher, on 3/30.

* But only  apparently.

"Core" (in the original, Kern ) is perhaps
not the best translation of hypokeimenon :

See also Heidegger's original German:

Related material: In this journal, "underlie" and "underlying."

Denzel Washington in Deja Vu  (2006), directed by Tony Scott—

Click to enlarge.

See also Tony Scott and four and a half days ago* —

  
Japanese character
       for "field"

Related material from five  days ago—

* More precisely, what will be 4.5 days ago at 3:09 AM ET.

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

Yesterday's post in memory of Octavio Paz—

An earlier post yesterday, Fashion Notes, linked to a Sting video—

"If you have to, start out 'Once upon a time.'"

Yesterday's Paz post was at 6:48 PM EDT.

For the autistic, here is some related mathematics.

Yesterday's Fashion Notes post was at 1:06 PM  EDT.

A related chronological note from Rolling Stone  yesterday—

"Levon Helm, singer and drummer for the Band,
 died on April 19th in New York of throat cancer.
 He was 71. 

"He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon…."

Helm and The Band performing "The Weight"—

"I pulled into Nazareth, I was a-feelin' 'bout half past dead…"

(Continued from March 9.)

A detail from "Feist Sings 1, 2, 3, 4"—

"Uploaded by SesameStreet on Jul 18, 2008"

Those who prefer, as Weyl put it,
"the hard core of objectivity"
to, as Eddington put it,
"the colorful tale of the subjective storyteller mind"
may consult this journal on the same day… July 18, 2008.

	An image related to the Flesh obituary below— See "As It Lays" in this journal. (Not as it lies .)
New York Times  obituaries today— Click to enlarge.

     "That's GUY-ler, not GAY-ler."

      See also Time and the River, Number of the Beast, and Story Theory.

This screenshot was suggested by the word "metalibrarianship" in a Bloomsday 2011 post by artist Steve Richards.

Note the words in the search field.

The phrase "Dublin Core metadata" refers to a city in Ohio, not in Ireland.

Related material— The highlighted phrase below is in the epigraph to Borges's "The Library of Babel"—

"I would, for these causes, wish him that is melancholy, to use both humane and divine authors, voluntarily to impose some taske upon himself, to divert his melancholy thoughts; to study the art of memory, Cosmus Rosselius, Pet. Ravennas, Scenkelius Detectus, or practise brachygraphy, &c. that will aske a great deal of attention: or let him demonstrate a proposition in Euclide in his five last books, extract a square root, or studie Algebra: than which, as ^gClavius holds, in all humane disciplines nothing can be more excellent and pleasant, so abstruse and recondite, so bewitching, so miraculous, so ravishing, so easie withal and full of delight, omnem humanum captum superare videtur . By this means you may define ex ungue leonem , as the diverbe is, by his thumb alone the bigness of Hercules, or the true dimensions of the great  ^hColossus, Solomons temple, and Domitians amphitheater, out of a little part. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…."

^g Ad. 2. definit.2. elem.   In disciplinis humanis nihil praestantius reperitur: quippe miracula quaedam numerorum eruit tam abstrusa et recondita, tanta nihilo minus facilitate et voluptate, ut, &c.

^h Which contained 1080000 weight of brass.

— The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 4

John Hooper in The Guardian  quotes the Pope in Westminster Cathedral this morning—

"Here too I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the church and by her ministers. Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes.

"I also acknowledge, with you, the shame and humiliation which all of us have suffered because of these sins; and I invite you to offer it to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of the victims and the purification of the church and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people."

The pope made his comments at a service that was the occasion for religious pageantry of a sort rarely seen in Britain. He was preceded into the cathedral by more than 100 scarlet-robed priests and a constellation of bishops and cardinals. To a volley of applause from the congregation, he appeared at the climax of a musical build-up that could have come from the score for a sci-fi movie epic.

Related material— Childhood's Rear End.