Posts in: Books

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: 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.

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.)

Finished reading: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine 📚

The resonance overflows. I will be revisiting this one, and hopefully posting more about it. One thing that kept coming to mind thoughout the book was an essay I wrote for a global health class in 2020: What kind of expertise shall we look to? For me, it’s never been Hans Rosling. It’s Paul Farmer!