Conservative Sensitivity Training

Chesterton compares the difference between people who bore others versus people who get bored very easily, and he noted that it's the people who bore others that actually have higher qualities. They retain enthusiasm about subjects, happiness, and interest. They've got that spark for Life still going. The boor is stronger, and more joyous, than we are. He is a demigod, nay, he is a God. For it is the gods who do not Tire of the iteration of things. To them, the Nightfall is always new, and the last rose is as red as the first.

An Iteration:

 

In “The Little Prince,” the fox wants to be visited by the little prince always at the same hour, so that his visit becomes a ritual. The little prince asks the fox what a ritual is, and the fox replies: “Those also are actions too often neglected. … They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.”

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration.

As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we can enter in celebration do not pass away. Without such temporal structures, time becomes a torrent that tears us apart from each other and away from ourselves.