We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering.

A famine is a tragic cluster of events. To which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time.

Currently Reading: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger 📚

Opening pages reminds me of Ethan Hawke’s answer when asked “What happens when we die?.”

Also, I love the simplicity of the first page:

My friend Luke, when I apologized for not yet reading that book he got me a decade ago: “All good; books are like a fine wine that need to age properly in the cellar, waiting for the proper time to be consumed.”

Amen.

For I’d arrived at that place past meanings, where the soul’s only choice is to open itself to signs, and the sign that I received was one of mercy. Yet, in the wake of a vision, reality’s wickedness is particularly fresh.

Finished reading: Holler: A Poet Among Patriots by Danielle Chapman 📚

Highly recommend. I hope to write some about it soon. For a good interview with Chapman, see No Small Endeavor.

“Here I am! Send me to do the bombing!” — Isaiah 6:8b (NCNV)

Term o’ the day: mutual forbearance (a.k.a. firmly liberal

“Everywhere millionaires”

Neither heroes nor shoppers but divine philanthropists.

I’m sure I’ll recommend every page from cover to cover, but right now I think Kent Dunnington’s piece on “Addiction, Control, and Recovery in the Modern World” is one you should share with all your friends.

Fresh off a few conversations about teachers who use AI, teachers who instruct their high school kids to run their essays through an AI program before handing it in, and one parent who was instructed to buy headphones for his kindergartener(!) to use with the tablets the school provides — Evan Rosa took the words right out of my mouth:

I recall from 2006 and the first iPhones on, the pacifying nature of holding a … I guess it would have been Blue’s Clues at the time … up in front of a child in their backseat who’s screaming, and just out of a desire for some sanity, you turn on that blue light and you dazzle them with this thing. And then you hand it to them and they start interacting and you start congratulating them for how easily they got it and how amazing it is that kids know how to pinch to enlarge — there is a tragic and so… such a sad and, I think at an aesthetic level, an ugly thing about that.