Allie521 on Rod Dreher's Diary

[Allie521]

Like I said, circular logic.

You misunderstood me if you think my feelings are hurt. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just commenting on the irony that Rod is always talking about how Christianity is dying out, and yet readers of his like you are doing your best to drive people away.

[Bobby Lime]

There is no question that nothing drives people away like truth. And no, I didn't think your feelings were hurt. I was playing according to your disingenuousness in that sentence.

What do you think I should do to avoid driving people away? I would like to know.

[Allie521]

I think Lewis Carrol answered that question the best in “An Aged, Aged Man”:

I tell thee everything I can;

There's little to relate.

I saw an aged aged man,

A-sitting on a gate.

"Who are you, aged man?" I said,

"And how is it you live?"

And his answer trickled through my head

Like water through a sieve.

He said, "I look for butterflies

That sleep among the wheat:

I make them into mutton-pies,

And sell them in the street.

I sell them unto men," he said,

"Who sail on stormy seas;

And that's the way I get my bread—

A trifle; if you please."

But I was thinking of a plan

To dye one's whiskers green,

And always use so large a fan

That they could not be seen.

So, having no reply to give

To what the old man said,

I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!"

And thumped him on the head.

His accents mild took up the tale:

He said, "I go my ways,

And when I find a mountain-rill,

I set it in a blaze;

And thence they make a stuff they call

Rowland's Macassar-Oil—

Yet twopence-halfpenny is all

They give me for my toil."

But I was thinking of a way

To feed oneself on batter,

And so go on from day to day

Getting a little fatter.

I shook him well from side to side,

Until his face was blue:

"Come, tell me how you live," I cried,

"And what it is you do!"

[Bobby Lime]

I suppose that's Lewis Carroll, Anglican clergyman, you're citing to try to evade matters.

[Bobby Lime]

I'm rather confident I have read a lot more nonsense/surrealistic literature than you have. Some of my favorite writers are Borges, Nabokov, the glorious Flann O'Brien. If you want to read something funny, there is something special for free online, John Lennon’s Sherlock Holmes parody, “The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield.” The chances are you are unaware that Lennon wrote two books of such stuff, which were published in the mid - 1960s. I love them both.

No doubt, you thought to shake me with nonsense. When you grow up, you'll learn that people are more complex than you ever imagined, and that your “cleverness,” at least currently, comes off more as sophomoric, brittle pseudo brilliance.