By anybody’s standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves. “I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time,

Lign in drerd un bakn baygl! There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. —Hilair

History is not false but true when it is put dramatically. It is not true but false when it arrives anyhow, proceeds at random like an unconsidered run of nature, and ceases unravelled without the gathering of the threads into a conclusion. — Hilaire Belloc, "The Historian" In 1955, Hollis and Carter published a volume of Hilaire Belloc’s uncollected essays under the title One Thing and Another. Lafferty was an avid reader of Belloc, so it is unlikely that he did not know the

Today I found myself thinking again about Hilaire Belloc, which brought to mind Lafferty’s satirical “Rogue Raft.” The piece lampoons the self-assured certainties of science, specifically how public boosters can go too far, missing the larger questions. While the theme isn’t unique in Lafferty, his thought-experiment and essayistic approach is. Everyone takes a turn in the crosshairs, including Lafferty himself, who colors his persona as tender-hearted, dreamily scientific, a

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! A Catholic tale have I to tell!” — Hilaire Belloc, "Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! "(1910) "I stand by all that I wrote in the ‘TOLKIEN AS CHRISTIAN’ essay, but I don’t understand why Tolkien acted and wrote as he did. One of my friends has insisted that ‘EVERYTHING that Tolkien wrote was in a sort of cipher.’ Well, I haven’t been able to uncipher it, nor to uncipher the effect he has had on so many people." — Lafferty, Letter to Al Doty, September 4, 1993 “

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) ​​​R. A. Lafferty unequivocally, categorically denied the Jewish Holocaust. This is sad, and inevitably complicates any discussion of his work, though the fact itself is not complicated. I used to be annoyed by Robert Silverberg’s comment that people knew there was great sadness in R.A.L. It was patronizing, and it didn’t make sense, but it is coming into focus for me. The Holocaust materials should be documented in the Tulsa archive in the McFarlin

Lafferty had a soft spot for Neanderthals and every kind of ape-man. My favorite instance of this appears at the end of Arrive at Easterwine (1971), his most spiritual novel, where Epikt adopts his walking ape extension, carrying a huge tin plate and a giant knife and fork. Lafferty’s fascination with prehistoric hominids has made me wonder what he knew about them. Had his library survived, it might have revealed something about his reading on the subject. In its absence, we