The Priesthood

The human race - or maybe it's just the male half thereof - has a deep affection for secret societies protecting supposedly secret wisdom. Opus Dei, Scientology, the Masons, and Dan Brown's spectacular literary career are all testimony.

Even subjects like literature, which intrinsically is accessible to all, feel compelled to conjour up some kind of arcanum acanorum just to be like the bigger kids on the block. Thus postmodernism. And thus a brilliant but mainly unsuccessful literary experiment, Ullyses, is regularly voted greatest novel by English majors and just as regularly left unread by almost everyone else.

There is a real arcanum arcanorum, though, and its name is String Theory. Neither money, power, nor fame is much help for the candidate in that society. Persistence, or rather a nearly fanatical determination is necessary but hardly sufficient. Only talent, and a very high degree of that, can close the deal.

All of which is prefactory to my usual lament that so many prominent voices of ST are - well, nevermind. But I am pretty annoyed that the string theory Brown Shirts have claimed Christine Dantas's very nice blog as their latest victim.

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