But we still have to locate our work — even, or especially, when that work is play — and go like hell, and use what we have to help, however we can.

Much of the time it feels pointless, self-indulgent, and meaningless. But it’s everything. Every time you think of quitting, consider your life without the ones who lighted your way: the art they made, the stories they told, the songs they wrote, the love and work they put into the world. Then keep going. It makes no sense, and it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Jeffrey Foucault, after bringing the righteous thunder. Read it in full. Along with the quote I also added a message from Foucault’s newsletter and tour link below it. I got to see him along with the Old Hat String Band last October, and even got to chat a little after the show, about living and raising kids in that “digital funhouse.” Worth seeing, worth supporting, if you can.

^Beach day, last July

One of my favorite things about the cool weather this time of year is the regular reminder from New Englanders of Les Murray’s wonderful poem, “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever.”

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah—

[…]

Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you to notice it less.

Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack for self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts or similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.

Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,

shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!

Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind’s Sabine acres
for product or subsistence.

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,
to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further topics.

I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of “more jobs” as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it.

— WB

a donkey among the nudes

I’m going to try to post some stuff that’s been sitting in the draft folder, mostly to keep it from that substantial category “Stuff That I Want to Do More With and Therefore Do Nothing With.” I find there’s a fine line between waiting for the right moment to use or say something and “opening your safe to find only ashes.” (Incidentally, a quote from Dillard that inspired the opening of the other blog, as simply a place to share publicly, to begin with.)

Then again, there’s a lot to be said for just letting it go, yes?

Here’s one from just last Friday: “the third paradox of our thrownnesses”, with a brief note on Havel’s Letters to Olga that I also hope to think and say more about.

And for fun: if you’re curious what Havel would have to say about that lunar reactor business… (gift link to the Times piece included)

Jack Goldsmith says it well.

Positive takeaway: Focus on transparency; minimize legal action; forget all retaliation. Otherwise, “it’s a bleak future.”

Cynical summary: “It’s a bleak future.”

This is not a season of reading. I am mostly an early morning and late night reader. Neither of those times are much available to me right now.

But I’m not sad about it. For one thing, life is (stressful but) good:

OK, technically there’s lots of reading going on, just not of those unread books that I want to get to. But this also means that, as a substitute, it is a season of rereading. And that means a time of looking back, flipping pages, and taking stock.

On that note — and how fun is it that I can say this — I’m currently conversing with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Sayers, Vaclav Havel, Frederick Buechner, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Hopefully some of that conversation, which is dead-center stuff for me, will spill out on the page. For a taste of it, see this post on Bonhoeffer and Sayers from last year.

Anna Akhmatova:

this is bananas, ie: “nothing contrary to the norms of the market” (with an added, post-publish footnote)