A Report on the "Tragic Adventure" Known as America, From the Most Beautiful House in California

It’s easy to miss the D. L. James house. Allegra, sometimes known as Jennie, had told us that it was directly across Highway 1 from the Tickle Pink Inn, and so with my eyes fixed on the left side of one of the narrowest and most scenic highways in America, I drove right past the unobtrusive entrance to what is probably the most beautiful house in California. After making a U-turn I catch fleeting glimpses of my destination while trying not to slide into southbound oncoming traffic. The entrance is easy to miss because it is simply a door placed in a rock arch which is part of a wall that extends along the highway for the length of the property. Aquinas said that happiness resulted from a sudden change in state. If so, the modest entrance to the D. L. James house gave rise to happiness as we opened the door, leaving the danger of the highway behind and entering an enchanted garden of indigenous trees shading a stone path which sloped gently downward toward an as yet unseen house. Both sides of the path were covered with exotic large-leafed plants that looked as if they belonged in a fantasy world. It was like entering Rivendell, which is the term which has replaced Arcadia in the English-speaking world when people talk about a mythical place where man can live in harmony with nature. I have talked about Bavaria as a place where one can find places which exhibit an almost perfect balance between culture and nature, but no one building in Bavaria embodies that perfect balance better than the D. L. James house in Carmel Highlands.

The path we have taken from the highway leads to an embodiment of that bifurcation at its terminus, where we are confronted with an arch, modeled on an arch that the architect Charles Greene saw on his honeymoon while visiting Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, and the courtyard of the house itself. Through the arch, one catches the first glimpse of the rocky coast of the Pacific Ocean 100 feet below, which is to say nature, but framed perfectly by the man-made arch and turned thereby into a work of art which provides the context for the courtyard on the right leading up to the house, which is again a work of art which responds to and organizes the natural setting on which it has been built. Art, as Aristotle told us, is imitation of nature. When the artist strikes the perfect balance between existence and essence, the result is beauty, and that is what the visitor experiences when the rock path reaches the house. The first and most natural reaction to beauty is to stop and stare as the mind struggles to comprehend the unity in all of the diversity he sees. Because the grandeur of nature has been framed by the rock arch, nature has been transformed into art. Because the house is now part of that same landscape, art has been transformed into beauty.

The idea of Arcadia was a prominent theme in the arts in America. Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia artist, did his rendering of Arcadia with three naked boys, one of whom is playing the flute on what looks like a lawn in Fairmout Park. Thomas Cole, the most famous practitioner of the Hudson Valley school, did a grander version based on his understanding of the Greek province of the same name which inspired Theocritus to write idealized descriptions of the peasants who were lucky enough to live there and not in “the squalid and disease ridden city of Alexandria,”1 where he was forced to earn a living by writing his poetry.

Over the course of the 18th century, the Virginia colony was portrayed as a real-life Arcadia in the New World by people like Jefferson, Beverly, and Crevecoeur. “America,” Leo Marx tells us, “was neither Eden nor a howling desert.”2 It was “a symbolic middle landscape created by mediation between art and nature.”3 Virginia, wrote Robert Beverley in The History and Present State of Virginia , was “so agreeable, that Paradice itself seem’d to be there, in its first Native Lustre.”4 America was “paradise regained,” and because of that fact the Enlightenment could invoke nature as universal norm, which, as Jefferson’s redaction of the Bible showed, could act as a corrective to those who believed in miracles, but also to those who succumbed to Calvinism’s denigration of human nature. According to the Enlightenment, man’s ability to live in “the state of nature” in places like Virginia abolished Calvin’s understanding of original sin. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur doesn’t mention Arcadia in his Letters from an American Farmer because Arcadia had become an unnecessary fiction. America had taken its place as a category of reality. “With the appearance of Crèvecœur’s Letters in 1782,” Marx tells us, “the assimilation of the ancient European fantasy to conditions in the New World was virtually complete.”5

Unlike the poets who praised it, the inhabitants of Arcadia lived during a golden age, which Christians referred to as prelapsarian because Genesis had explained that their ultimate forebears, Adam and Eve, had lived in harmony with nature before the Fall in the Garden of Eden. So, Arcadia was more a garden than untamed nature. It was a landscape that had been tamed by the human mind but not destroyed. Every Christian attempt to return to that prelapsarian harmony with nature, however, has been haunted by its impossibility, symbolized in the Book of Genesis by the angel with the flaming sword, who prevented return to the garden.

The attempt was made nonetheless, but always with a premonition that it was bound to fail. That ambivalence is best symbolized in Nicolas Poussin’s painting Les bergers d’Arcadie (The Arcadian Shepherds), which depicts three idealized shepherds and (presumably) a shepherdess contemplating an austere tomb on which is written the Latin inscription “Et in Arcadia ego,” “Even in Arcadia I am present.” The ‘I’ in the phrase refers to death. The motto seems especially appropriate at the D. L. James house because the only reason we were able to contemplate the beauty of this stunning piece of Arcadian architecture is because its owner had died.

II

Joseph J. Ritchie died on February 22, 2022. According to former Chicago Board of Trade Chairman Patrick Arbor, Joe died of COVID-19. Conversations with family members revealed a more complicated story. Joe began to experience difficulty breathing in the late fall of 2021. At some point his family decided to take him to the hospital, where he was put on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regimen, which included Remdesivir, which made a bad situation worse. Over the course of the next three months, Joe became a prisoner of the medical establishment, which determined his treatment even as his family moved him from one hospital to another as his condition steadily worsened until Joe was on the verge of dying of thirst. “He started crying,” Allegra recounted in her diary, “and said if a French nurse hadn’t given him water, he would have died. I believe him.”

No matter what the family did, they got countermanded by a medical establishment which seemed more concerned with following Big Pharma protocols than helping Joe recover. Frustrated by the intransigence of Big Pharma’s minions, the family asked for prayers, and Joe’s friends stormed heaven in a way that pointed out the Catholic-Protestant divide in his family of ten children. “My dad brought Protestants and Catholics, blue and white collar together to pray because those were his friends,” Allegra said. “Three prayer text groups of 19 each included general contractor, priest, cardiologist, home school mom, movie star, pilot, gymnastics coach, pianist. There was a theme of him bringing together these people in life and even after death.” Evangelicals commanded Satan to depart in the name of Jesus, and Catholics showed up with relics of Padre Pio as Joe’s condition continued to deteriorate in what could be described as hospital arrest.

Joe Ritchie started out in life as the child of an engineer who felt called by God to go to Afghanistan, which is where Joe spent four years of his life from 1957 to 1961. That experience would draw Joe and his younger brother James back to Afghanistan during the period of turmoil there preceding the 9/11 attacks.

The sense of calling which he got from his father found reinforcement at Wheaton College, where he studied philosophy. Or so he claimed. His wife Sharon claimed that he graduated third from the bottom of his class because he never prepared for class. Allegra disputes the claim, saying that he graduated 14th from the bottom of his college class but adds: “When I came home with a D+ in anatomy he said, ‘why did you do that? You only needed a D- to pass.’”

Joe was too busy having deep conversations with fellow students. Joe was a gambler and a missionary in a uniquely American way. Joe, according to his wife, “never read anything. He always felt there were more important things to do, like talking to people.” Joe was interested in people, not books. If he thought you had something interesting to say, he would contact you and offer to help you in what you were doing. My relationship with him began when he called the Culture Wars office and began a conversation with my wife, the business manager. “How are you doing?” he persisted in asking her. After hearing her say “the Lord will provide” one too many times, Joe finally got to the point of the call and asked if we needed money.

Over the years that I knew him, I would bring him the books I had written as they rolled off the press, and he would accept them graciously, but he never read any of them. If anything I wrote made it into his mind, it was during long automobile trips when Sharon would read and Joe would drive. When I presented him with a copy of Barren Metal, which is 1,800 pages long, I suggested a drive to Tierra del Fuego or Alaska. Apparently, he never read Rick Warren’s book on a purpose driven life either, although he recommended it to virtually everyone he met. Warren apparently held no hard feelings because he gave a eulogy at Joe’s memorial service.

After graduating from Wheaton College, Joe became a bus driver and then a prison guard, and then a DuPage County sheriff, and then an assistant to a man who needed Joe to find a commodities trader. Eventually Joe became the trader he failed to find.

If prudence bespeaks the ability to know the truth and to act on it, Joe was a very prudent man. His ability to act on the opportunities he could size up in the commodities market earned him a fortune. In 1976 Joe started trading on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, where he discovered that he could plug the Black-Scholes equation into his Texas Instruments SR 52 calculator, leading to a huge financial success on the floor.

In 1977, Joe founded Chicago Research and Trading, an options and futures trading firm that was one of the first to engage in computer driven trading strategies. Joe’s TI calculator made him the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. “CRT’s secret,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in 1988, “is a computer system that uses one of the most sophisticated trading models in the securities industry. By monitoring differences in the options and futures prices, the model developed mainly by Mr. Ritchie, the firm executed more than $2.5 billion in trades each day.”6

By 1988, Joe had turned an initial investment of $200,000 into a company which had $225 million in assets and over 700 employees. As an employer with that kind of workforce, Joe had to make hiring decisions based on computer backed intuitions that allowed him to see that people could be undervalued just as some commodities and stocks were, and that giving people in those situations a chance often paid handsome dividends. Eventually, after selling CRT to Bank of America for $225 million in 1993, Joe decided to focus on potentialities in human capital.

Joe’s ability to size up people and get involved in their lives led him from one adventure to another. When Joe eventually got tired of trading, he handed his TI calculator to Steve Fossett, whom he met while both men were working on a project for Marshall Fields. Steve eventually made a fortune of his own, and the fortunes they made enabled them to indulge in a shared fascination with flying and setting speed records, which they did in Joe’s airplane on the spur of the moment when Joe informed Steve that the jet stream was flowing faster than normal. Fossett would go on to circumnavigate the world in record time in a balloon, and the success of that mission happened largely because Joe could predict conditions in the same jet stream and the weather conditions beneath it. In 1998, on one of Fossett’s early attempts, Joe watched in frustration as Fossett’s balloon plunged into the sea in the South Pacific because the meteorologist Fossett had hired couldn’t adjust to changing weather conditions fast enough. On the final successful attempt in July 2002, Fossett put Joe in charge of the mission’s logistics, and Joe was able to guide the balloon around the world in record time, largely because he had learned how to act decisively on the trading floor, where what was the right decision on one day might be the wrong decision on another….

[…] This is just an excerpt from the September 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)