Currently Reading: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor 📚

Instantly smitten, I am. (Excerpt from the introduction)

Finished reading: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi 📚

A very refreshingly lovely novel. I confess that I stalled a couple months ago, about halfway through. As curative as its loveliness was, I admit to getting bored; it seemed for a stretch that there really wasn’t anything “happening,” which I assume, and also confess, is my own problem. But it was worth returning to. The two people who strongly recommended this book — my mother-in-law, when she gave it to my wife for Christmas, and a surgeon I work with when he returned from vacation — gestured in the same way with their hand over their heart when they did so. A few others spoke similarly of it when it was brought up. I, too, offer that gesture.

I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us.

Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 📚

Delightful. Meghan and I had fun sharing the book. We’ll see the movie this afternoon at our quaint old local theater after some lunch-brunch in town, which will be our first second official date in, oh, 2 1/2 years 🙂.

Currently Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 📚

A surgeon at work has been recommending this book for months. The movie is also playing at our tiny little local theater next month for one week, which is unusual. I said at work yesterday that I think we may have found the thing that will finally unite the whole country — I don’t remember the last time I heard such wide and thorough praise for any one thing and from basically every direction. So, in the next month I should know what all the hubbub is about.

Finished reading: The Fortress by Meša Selimović 📚

It was my duty to defend Mahmut from humiliation. And myself, too. But I didn’t. I’d swallowed Avdagas insult, perhaps I’d even smiled, and now it stung me like a wound. I was ashamed of my cowardice, but still I thought, “Tis a good job I didn’t say anything to make him angry.” I thought both things at the same time! Inside me two men were living simultaneously and with equal strength, totally different, entirely opposite, the one glad not to have exposed himself to danger, the other profoundly unhappy that he was a shit, and both equally sincere and both fully justified. And only a moment before, under the eaves, I’d been thinking of the double narure of Mahmut Neretlyak as being a wonder. We’re all the same wonder, the same misery.

Loved this book! Bridge on the Drina meets All Quiet on the Western Front, at least at first. But the novel grows much lighter in weight before long.

The shop was in the bazaar, in the street called Mudzeli-ti, under the clock tower, tiny and insignificant, hot and stuffy in summer, cold as a dungeon in winter, close to the public toiléts that stank unbearably, so that Mula Ibrahim and I took turns to light incense and inulin, as in a church, to appease the evil power of stench. But our use of incense helped not at all, and we had no choice but to grin and bear it.
None of this mattered to me. I laughed, “A man can get used to any smell."
Mula Ibrahim just gave a good-natured smile and replied, without his usual mention of God’s name, since we were alone, “I always say: Let it be no worse."
“Which is what the wise man said when they were taking him to the gallows."
“And rightly, too. They could have killed him then and there, and he’d have lost even those few, last moments of life. There’s always hope, even on the way to the gallows."
“Pretty vain hope!"
“Still, hope. And that’s better than nothing. But this stench, mind you, suits me fine."
“How can it?"
“Well, it’s this way. Why do you think the public toilets are here? Because this is the center of the bazaar. And that’s just where I want to be, under everyone’s feet. Left to choose between pure air and paupers and a stink with profit, no wise man would hesitate. Two watermelons under one armpit won’t go, nor can two good things come together. So, let it be no worse."
“Amen."

I love the deep, relatable, every-day, often-funny, down-to-earth, hard-learned very-human wisdom that casually bounces across the pages of Serbian literature like this.

They were both silent, one dead, the other living but distrustful. Yet I wanted to know. Rarely had I ever wanted anything so much, as though that knowledge would have opened to me many secrets concerning humanity.
I’d seen the death of a powerful man, killed by grief. I’d seen what was perhaps murder from a distance. I’d seen human hatred, but I was obsessed by only one thing: Was his last thought vengeance or love?
It seemed as though my entire life depended on it.
I decided for love. It was less realistic and less probable, but more noble. And better: This way everything had more meaning. Both death … and life.

Currently Reading: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way by Lars Mytting 📚

Some books you pick up, open, and buy within the span of less than 60 seconds. This is one of those. Fun to flip through, yes, but thoroughly readable, as informative as inspiring — even for a Maine-born Ben-Logger (that there’s Hebrew, fyi… I think) like myself. And Mytting picked a whopper of a poem for his epigraph:

Finished “reading”: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth 📚

A man after my own heart — even where I have differed from him. I was quite moved by his Erasmus Lecture last year, but I have read and followed very little of Kingnorth, so this was a welcomed collection and update of his Substack writings. And I think — I hope — his is a voice more can listen to, can actually hear, and genuinely and generously converse with.

For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: to conquer death by birth. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’ — the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up the exhausted old plants if you need to – carefully, now – but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds.

This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a “West” that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires – fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths – and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

Consider me simpatico.

Finished reading: Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers 📚

The significance of entering into the world constitutes the value of philosophy. True philosophy is not an instrument, and still less is it a talisman; but it is awareness in the process of realisation. Philosophy is the thought with which or as which I am active as my own self. It is not to be regarded as the objective validity of any sort of knowledge, but as the consciousness of being in the world.

I would love to do a better write-up here, but time ain’t on my side. Instead, some notes I took along the way:

• Just about everything I feel about the modern precarity of being, knowing, doing, nicely contained in a little book nearly 100 years old; just about every criticism of the modern age — the modern age even up to now — that I have ever heard or felt is right here, written in 1930. Our modern malady is a lot older than the iPhone or the internet or the ubiquity of home televisions.
• Of course, there’s nothing in the book about AI, but several passages could easily be aimed at it. And I think every single problem we face with AI is essentially a problem that preceded it.
• Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun and whatnot. Most meaningful day-to-day questions were in some form faced by humans thousands of years ago as well as now. (No chronological snobbery, even in our maladies.) But if there are some forms specific to the “modern age” — and I believe there are a few — none of them are essentially new to our century or to my generation.
• Though many have taken the critique to greater depths and aimed at more specific targets of modern technology, Jaspers’ precedes Ellul, Mumford, even Heidegger, I believe. (I’m certain other writers preceeded Jaspers as well. You may even be thinking of some right now that make all this seem obvious.)
• It’s hard not to see Jaspers as helping to lay some of the groundwork for 20th-century writers who show a desperate need for, if not anarchism, at very least James C. Scott’s “anarchist squint.” When Jaspers says that, against the “herding of the masses” and the “increasing technicisation of daily life,” people cling to a “primitive world with increasing tenacity,” he means it as a good thing: what he means by “primitive world” is mutual, unofficial trustworthiness and “reciprocal obligations.”
• Though not simply a nay-sayer of liberalism, he clearly (fore)saw the same lack we are experiencing: the vacancy of liberalism’s meaning for life.
• I’m currently, along some other fine microbloggers, who are miles ahead of me in this (and probably every) regard, reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. So it shouldn’t be surprising that there is copious overlappage. Take this for example, the language of which will probably give away Jaspers, but the substance could easily be Kingsnorth today:

  The present moment seems to be one which makes extensive claims, makes claims it is almost impossible to satisfy. Deprived of his world by the crisis, man has to reconstruct it from its beginnings with the materials and presuppositions at his disposal. There opens to him the supreme possibility of freedom, which he has to grasp even in face of impossibility, with the alternative of sinking into nullity. If he does not pursue the path of self-existence, there is nothing left for him but the self-willed enjoyment of life amid the coercions of the apparatus against which he no longer strives. He must either on his own initiative independently gain possession of the mechanism of his life, or else, himself degraded to become a machine, surrender to the apparatus.

• Jaspers may have, in philosophical terms, predicted the mid-life crisis. 🙂
• In the end, he gives a decent description not just of our dilemma but of a responsible Yes to the world.

Finished reading: In Search of the Human Face by Luigi Giussani 📚

Splendid. I haven’t read a devotional-type book like this in quite a while. And never one so thoroughly quotable.

This [unbearableness due to the clamor of our weakness] is a great occasion for love, a great occasion for a loving affirmation.

The truth about our humanity cannot be reduced to the observation of its misery but to the wondrous and exalting announcement that this misery is loved. This loving, strong, and faithful presence, more than the fickle and vulnerable fragility that is the substance of humanity when left to itself, is our true richness.

Hopefully I’ll follow up with a few more, and perhaps a larger sample of quotes.

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.