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.

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.

Finished reading: The Home Place by Wright Morris 📚

I put a roof nail in it here.

Finished reading: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond 📚

One city must build; another must destroy. If our cities and towns are rich in diversity—with unique textures and styles, gifts and problems—so too must be our solutions.

Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

📚 Happy New Book in the Mail Day! (I love it when a forgotten preorder shows up in the mailbox.)

Got pulled over Friday night for the first time in years. Nine years if memory serves, which is a pretty good stretch considering that in the years preceding that I estimate being pulled over between 30 and 50 times. (Don’t ever let people tell you you can’t change 🙂)

Last week’s warning (phew) could have been avoided if I had

• put my front license plate on (don’t like it because it makes the collision sensors wonky)

• consented to have the vehicle pass an inspection (disagreed with the service department about some very mild uneven tread wear and the necessity v. wastefulness of replacing tires which have plenty of good tread left on them)

• bothered to get the car reregistered … last October (oops)

I’m not a rebel, I’m just stubborn.

Which reminds me…

I’m currently reading: A Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism by Žiga Vodovnik 📚

Some initial thoughts and sparks flew…