Conversation

We were invited to Evan and Leslie Wilson's home for dinner last Sunday after church. It was very nice, Lasagne, red wine, salad, and Boston Cream Pie for dessert. The Wilsons have been living in a large Tudor-ish house, dubbed "The Big Haus" in the old part of town. They have been running it as an old-fashioned boarding house for Christian singles for around thirty years, so some of the young people at dinner were the children of of former boarders.
After dinner we retired to the 'Library', where the comfy chairs were. There were indeed books in the library, but I think they prefer to use the room for talking and smoking pipes and cigars. The conversation meandered around Christian manliness after one young woman expressed some dissatisfaction with the young men who wanted to date her but were content with spending their time playing video games and other forms of self-indulgence. "'Call me when you've conquered Norway.'" she said. Then we spent a couple of hours talking about what she meant.
A couple of thoughts. I have spent quite a bit of time myself like that: content to be taken care of, to live off of the wealth of others. I would probably still do so if I could, but I need a bigger budget for cars.
Is this a local concern, or a bigger cultural issue? I know that Evan's brother Douglas has been talking about manliness, in fact it seems to me sometimes that manliness and manly authority has become the whole theme over at Christ church. It's hard sometimes being in the middle of a culture to spot what people are being counter-cultural about. It isn't about bigoted anti-egalitarianism, as Leonidas would say, "Clearly you haven't met our women." What I think Doug says it's about is that it's how and why men either shoulder their responsibility or they don't, and the conditions under which they either cheerfully adopt an attitude of self-sacrificial love or not. So the women have a clear interest and preference in that outcome as well, even if they express it in enigmatic terms. I'll have to come back to this topic. It merits more thought.
I think I'm starting to get a bit of it, at least, family culture here in Idaho. I certainly have plenty to think about going forward, things to cultivate and things to repent of.
There was one other thing, unrelated. At some point Evan asked me who my favourite authors were. I want to blame the wine, but perhaps I really have been so immersed in math and computer stuff that I can hardly talk about anything else. I couldn't think of who they were, it was all kind of distant, a memory of a memory. 'Neal Stevenson' was all I could think of. I am now sitting next to my bookshelf. I can turn to the left and look at my books. Ribbons from old campaigns.