📚 Felice Benuzzi:

Time was no longer considered by the average prisoner as something of value to be exploited; time for them was an enemy, but for me this was no longer so.

I was already busy with a secret plan, a plan that was slowly taking definite shape.

A prisoner of the last world war wrote in his memoirs: “At the front one takes risks, but one does not suffer; in captivity one does not take risks but one suffers.”

In order to break the monotony of life one had only to start taking risks again, to try to get out of this Noah’s Ark, which was preserving us from the risks of war but isolating us from the world and its deluge of life. If there is no means of escaping to a neutral country or of living under a false name in occupied Somalia, then, I thought, at least I shall stage a break in this awful travesty of life.

I shall try to get out, climb Mount Kenya and return here. […]

I found it fascinating to elaborate, in the utmost secrecy, the first details of my scheme.

Life took on another rhythm, because it had a purpose.

Currently Reading: No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi 📚

The night sky was clear. There was a smell of good earth in the air such as I had seldom noticed in Africa. I was thinking, the future exists if you know how to make it, and it’s up to you, as I turned the corner of my barrack at the exact spot from which I had seen Mount Kenya for the first time, and from which I had always cast a look in the direction of the peak since that first view.

Now it was visible again and in the starlight it looked even more tantalising than in daylight. The white glaciers gleamed with mysterious light and its superb summit towered against the sky. It was a challenge.

A thought crossed my numbed mind like a flash.

Currently Reading: Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan 📚

I have loved a few of Kay Ryan’s poems for a time, but only recently have I read any of her poetry in bulk. (An awful word for poetry collections, I admit, but I’m not implying any sort of speed in reading them.) Then I found this collection of her essays and — between the poems and the prose, she has quickly become one of my favorite writers on the planet.

Writing about Marianne Moore’s poetry, Ryan remarks, “She commonly looks at something quite remote and rustic … and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions.”

“Yet in another way,” she says, “observation is just the detonator for an explosion of private associations, glittering in their rhetorical arcs, and upon there descent into the reader’s brainpan randomly meaningful and meaningless.”

I love reading, love all the glittering, meaningful and meaningless rehetorical arcs.

Finished Reading (2023): Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks 📚

An excellent biographical-philosophical flyover and a much needed spark to shift our thinking. There’s definitely room for her “Philosophy of Birth” to grow.

Each person, in simply being born, creates an opportunity for history to begin again. … We are more than history’s byproducts; we are instead creative participants in history, nature, and time. A human is born a tiny, infinitesimal piece of some massive whole, but that macrocosm is not impervious to the smallness of our individual births.

Finished Reading: Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person by Gilbert Meilaender 📚

Thoughtfulness is an understatement when it comes to Meilaender. In each of his books, I always appreciate his nonrelativist, both-and approach.

Thinking seriously about human dignity should compel us to ask whether freedom and consent are really all we ought to care about—to ask whether being human means nothing more than the freedom to shape and reshape ourselves, or whether it also means honoring the embodied character of our life and affirming some of its limits.

Finished Reading: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 📚

Third time in this book, and I love it equally each time — its meditative depths of simplicity, or some such paradox.

Nan Shepherd said that “simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.” I can think of no better description at the heart of this book, and of Robinson’s writing in general.

Currently Reading: Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks 📚

Finished Reading: Balkan Contextual Theology by Stipe Odak 📚

Tremendous. Refreshingly complex and open-ended. As one author puts it:

Autochthonous forms of theological thinking inspired by concrete lived experiences in the Balkans are mostly missing or are on the margins of the mainstream theological corpus.

I have been fascinated by writers from the Balkans from the moment I picked up Udovički’s Burn This House in a bookstore in Lancaster, PA in the summer of 2013. There is much to revisit in this collection of essays—much to hear and learn from.

The notion of border-living in the Balkans refers to a way of life that is historically grounded and which has long resisted the Western models of religio-national homogeneity by simultaneously affirming the borders among different groups and shaping the paths to cross those borders.

Finished Reading: On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt 📚

I have only ever dabbled in my reading of Hannah Arendt, but she has maintained a voice in my head for years. Not, in my experience, an easily accessible writer/thinker. Whoever put these chapters of hers together in this short book deserves credit for undoing this fact. Very essential questions that need to be asked by current and future generations are quite accessible in these pages. In fact, I don’t think there is one page or paragraph that doesn’t point to some question you should ask when you read tomorrow’s news.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my conclusions, my opinion. . . . Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge.

Finished Reading: American Journal by Tracy K. Smith 📚

I loved carrying this little anthology around in my pocket at work and having a good poem available at any moment. I couldn’t possibly say more than what Smith says in her intro. Here’s an excerpt.