Language, ritual, and a strange concert ..

... le rime aspre e chiocce | Elberry's Ghost. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

?.. real knowledge need not preclude childish frivolity. But the more i thought about it, the more i decided that it rang as false as when the Viking talked of “getting Poped up” (becoming a Catholic). It’s a way of denying the strangeness of this encounter; it denies the sacred, tries to make it profane and ordinary and matter for cheap jokes; it is of a part with the modern Catholic Mass and Satanically awful modern translations of the Bible (the Viking objected to the King James, saying it is impossible to understand).

The Church's failure to appreciate its cultural artifacts is one cause of its decline in the West. It runs counter to its pro forma support of tradition.