Jeffrey Foucault’s latest is probably the best thing you’ll read today. Seriously.

I have two tickets to see him play in October and I am waaay excited. Summer had some unexpected twists and turns, so I haven’t touched as much grass as I intended. But then, fall is infinitely more my jam anyway. And I did feel some good cold air this morning :)

So here’s to some good music and good lyrics, to visiting more rivers, maybe even a few mountain peaks, and throwing fewer dead pigeons around. (You’ll have to read Foucault to get it.)

Currently Reading: In Search of the Human Face by Luigi Giussani 📚

Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimension of my I, nothing so rich in surprises as the discovery of my own human face.

Absolutely excellent so far. In comparison, today I was reading this review of Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job and a few things stood out — the magic and grace of connective labor being increasingly “disenchanted and automated”; Wall Street and Silicon Valley being “epicenters of the toniest nihilism”; and there’s this lovely view from the top:

As one venture capitalist muses, people “are interchangeable and not very mysterious, with behavior reducible to sixty-five steps.” Indeed, one technologist envisions the brave new world of cyber-connection as one in which we fleshly plebeians will have to choose whether we want to be “pets or livestock.”

But the review ends with this:

The drive to automate even the most intimate of human connections reflects one of the more insidious currents of our day: the desire to enter a prosthetic sublime, shorn of all the ineptitude and mortality of our condition. If we continue to make the work of connection a matter of data and algorithms—from the arduous work of therapy to finding romance on dating apps—we would certainly make our lives more rational, streamlined, and efficient. But if Pugh and her connective workers are right, we would also forfeit moments of “magic,” communion, grace, and love—experiences that open us up to the boundless and the ineffable. Perhaps, as those terms suggest, we defend the human best when we recall what is divine about ourselves.

Giussani seems just such a defender of the human, and a powerful one. So much of the above is adressed (all of it, even?) just in this short excerpt from the introduction. I even think it would be worth downloading a sample from Kindle just read the ~7-page introduction. There was also an excellent review of the book in Comment.

Perhaps… defining the ends of life requires a hermeneutic inquiry, which must grope toward an adequate language in which these ends can be fully brought to light.

Finished reading: Cosmic Connections by Charles Taylor 📚

I doubt I’ll find the time or mental capacity to elaborate on this any time soon, but much of this book was, for me, a wonderful extension and significant deepening of something from the introduction to his A Secular Age, a quote that, for reasons I sort of mentioned here, I very often think about, probably more so than any other from Taylor:

We are deeply moved, but also puzzled and shaken. We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focused, articulated, and hence let fully be.

I’ve tried for the last several days to summarize a little more than this, but… too many rabbit roles, not enough time. So I’ll coin toss on a good excerpt.

It was probably just me, but I had a couple false starts with this book and it didn’t really come alive until a couple hundred pages in, beginning with the chapter on Rilke, I think. (On a practical note: The 600 pages are not nearly as daunting as those of A Secular Age. For one thing, the footnotes, which are never longwinded, are where God intended them to be, at the bottom of the page so you don’t have to flip endlessly to the back. There are also long sections where poems are given in their original German or French, followed by English translations. And best of all, the poems are always given plenty of room on the page to breath.)

I found all the chapters where he focused on one poet — Rilke, Beaudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, Milosz — very enjoyable.

In any case, Czeslaw Milosz wins the toss:

In ages past, we often thought that religiously inspired philosophers were best suited to define to define this latter element (for Catholics, the work of Aquinas). In the contemporary world, we look to political scientists or historians to discern the trends. The daring idea that Milosz puts forward is that a poet can do that; and a poet with the means of a poet: that is, not the study of learned documents, works of Plato and Aristotle, or the works of social science; but the poet’s way of articulating the deepest intuitions that come to him/her as a spiritual being contemplating our present condition.

Which may simply say — at least says — along with the likes of William Carlos Williams and Nadezhda Mandelstam: before science, before philosophy, look for the “groping-toward-an-adequate-language” that is good poetry; it will bring you a lot closer to genuine reality.

Miroslav Volf:

But what makes love for the world also impossible are two related claims that are central for Nietzsche: that the will to power is insatiable, and that love ceases with having. The two together imply endless striving for an unending stream of new conquests, new achievements, new things. As a result, love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places; if it took an abode, it would die. [But] a better way of thinking about the relation between desire and possession is available. We can actually long also for what we have, and unless we do, we can never genuinely love the world — or anything that is in it.

This brief overview of The Occasional Human Sacrifice reminded me of this excellent piece from Taylor Dotson:

Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world.

“No want, no effort, no merit, no judgment.”

Glad I didn’t miss this piece Matthew J. Milliner.

On the bottom left of the icon is Joseph, who, traditional Christian orthodoxy and the Church of the East insist had nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy. Which is to say, his merit is not involved in salvation. Nor is anyone else’s. Because of this he sits to the side, but in this quiet contemplation, the food of the earth springs up nonetheless—that being precisely the image employed in the Jesus Sutras to illustrate the dictum of “no merit.”

The Nativity, Andrei Rublev, 1410, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

A line that stood out today: The necessity of a genuine exchange (not just fatuous “dialogue”) is as important as ever.

Trollope reboot?

Sunset crossing Cod Cove

“The collecting stands in for the doing…”