Currently Reading: On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald 📚

These essays are made up of a series of lectures Sebald gave in Zurich in the autumn of 1997. The letters of response to which, as Sebald mentions in the foreword, were telling.

The inadequate and inhibited nature of the letters and other writings sent to me showed, in itself, that the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of [World War II] had never really found verbal expression, and that those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation. 

This is in some ways perfectly understandable, he adds, “given the force of the absolute uncertainty that emerged from our order-loving minds.”

In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization …

I am not German and I cannot confirm what Sebald says about German culture. But I can say that I recognize something of what he is talking about in my own culture. And I will certainly be reading this book, as I’m sure Sebald intended, with at least one eye on the fact that he acutely describes a more universal problem, and one that we are intensely suffering from in the U.S. right now.

“We are always looking and looking away at the same time,” he says, and so we are left with “a half-consciousness or false consciousness” that serves to consolidate moral resources in a culture that has been, or ought to have been, morally discredited. “The redefinition of their idea of themselves … was a more urgent business than depiction of the real conditions surrounding them.” 

Sebald notes that, in response to these lectures, he received “sharp reprimands from people unwilling to see that … a basic stance of opposition and a lively intelligence … could easily turn into more or less deliberate attempts to conform, and that later a man in the public eye … would therefore have to adjust his presentation of his career, through tactful omissions and other revisions.”

From my perspective, this is not only shockingly and obviously the case in American culture and politics, but it is in no way limited to the “man in the public eye.” To expand on Sebald’s terms: Every single citizen is preoccupied — at first naturally and then, apart from great effort, militantly — with an ongoing and retrospective improvement of the self-image that they wish to hand out and to hand down. The result is the inability of an entire generation, if not multiple generations, to describe what we see and to convey it to each other’s minds.

Finished reading: Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets by David G. Firth 📚

This managed to be both a quick read and an excellent depth of study — one, in fact, much more biblically scholarly than anything I have read in a while or that I expected to find here. I don’t recall how I came across this one, but the title attracted me for what should be obvious reasons.

Here’s Firth on why he focuses on the narrative materials of the Former Prophets rather than the legal texts:

There is value in a more focused study that considers the contribution of the Old Testament’s narrative materials. Walter Houston has pointed out that laws can change a society’s behaviour only when justice is taught and not only enforced, and one of the key ways in which this teaching happens in the Old Testament is through its narrative materials.

There are, however, more fundamental reasons for turning to Israel’s wider narrative traditions. One important point is that the law provides not an ethical maximum but rather a minimum. That is, law recognizes a problem that needs to be addressed, but what it provides is the least that should be done, not necessarily the ethical goal towards which a people should aspire. By contrast, [Gordon] Wenham has argued that the narrative texts of the Old Testament are didactic and so try ‘to instil both theological truths and ethical ideals into their readers’, and that therefore the narratives offer a form of paradigmatic ethics. […]

In the end, although there is no one method and there are some figures whose status is never entirely clear, many foreigners are mentioned in the Former Prophets, with many of these included among the people of God so that the boundaries of this people is constantly being challenged.*

While I wish Firth had said more in the closing pages, what he has done — what he draws out of the text and into proper attention — is remarkably important.

A few summary take-aways:

• Ethnicity itself is never a problem. (Hear ye, hear ye, fellow descendants of those belligerently god-awful — but sometimes fun — “New Atheism” debates: Ethnicity in the Bible is never a problem.)
• Often within the narratives, groups of people or even prominent characters themselves who we today might assume to be ethnically Israelite are not.
• Not only are “foreigners” generally viewed in a positive light, but they are often, and in some narratives usually, the ones who understand Yahweh and his purposes much better than “God’s people” do.
• The only Israel in the text that matters — and by extension, for Christians, the only church that matters — is neither ethnic nor geographical nor national. The only one that matters “is the the one that is continually reminded that their existence is for others, for foreigners.”

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at age thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

—Wendell Berry

A long time ago, I had as a signature for personal emails a quote: “Reform is born aloft on the wings of song.”

That quote came from Mark Noll’s book God and Race in American History:

As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.

That comes to mind because I just started reading Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler 📚

From the intro:

Typically history is written without much regard for music, and music is often heard as residing outside history. This book instead asks what might happen when we peer at each through the prism of the other—that is, when sounds are entwined with stories and we listen to the past through music’s ears. I have taken this approach not for the sake of “filling in some gaps” but in the hope of illuminating and activating the possibilities that open when we attempt to hear music as culture’s memory. And because these goals are fundamentally generative, because they relate to how we live today and how we experience art in the here and now, I do not consider this book primarily a work of elegy. Instead, among many other things, it becomes an experiment in the reciprocal enchantment of music and history. That experiment will have succeeded only if each one becomes fuller, and more luminous, in the presence of the other.

📚 I feel like I enter a dream-state — a wonderful but nevertheless enigmatic one — whenever I read Fanny Howe:

Blessed is the person who shall find her own special function flowing from one remarkable notion, and who shares it. But even in this fortunate case the ego behind the ego is unable to identify the consciousness that had the sense to follow that notion through! Only the sharing is a comprehensible form of seeking the answer to this remarkable event.[…]

The world rolls around and around, and each day I take a walk with the weight of a man’s spirit which pines for worldly success, but crying out, I must help others!

Finished reading: Shield the Joyous by Chad Holley 📚

I loved this little book so much! Brief thoughts here.

Finished reading: Ingrained by Callum Robinson 📚

Excellent.

Because to my great shame, the coasting was something I had drifted into not merely in my working life but in my consumer life as well. With more and more choice out there at the touch of a button—same-day delivery, landfill-black-Friday-buy-it-online, and a hundred other kinds of commercial awful—it has been all too easy to forget that independent local businesses, the kind of hardworking businesses that are right here on my doorstep, may be waiting in the silence for someone like me to swish through the door. That no matter how original or full of charm and quality they may be, many will not be able to survive without our support. And that they aren’t really businesses anyway; in towns and villages up and down the country, they are the lifeblood, the culture and the character of communities. They are somebody’s hopes and dreams.

Currently Reading: Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson 📚

Martha Nussbaum:

The vine-tree image, standing near the poem’s end… confronts us with a deep dilemma in the poet’s situation, which is also ours. It displays the thorough intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made, that are present in this and in any human life.… Human excellence is seen, in Pindar’s poem and pervasively in the Greek poetic tradition, as something whose very nature it is to be in need, a growing thing in the world that could not be made invulnerable and keep its own peculiar fineness.

The crucial question for us:

To what extent can we distinguish between what is up to the world and what is up to us, when assessing a human life? To what extent must we insist on finding these distinctions, if we are to go on praising as we praise?

📚

Currently Reading: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy by Martha C. Nussbaum 📚

We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change.

In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.

(Extended quote here.)