Finished Reading (2023): Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura 📚

Simple and elegant, pointing clearly toward (and from) the profound.

We swim in rivers of culture that are “blackened and uninhabitable with utilitarian pragmatism and over-commodification.” But in that culture, we must “always be willing to present a bouquet of flowers” — even to those “who may not yet know that they desire beauty.”

Currently Reading: Aimless Love by Billy Collins 📚

I think this is my favorite piece of cover art for a book. Also one of the most fitting

📚 Felice Benuzzi:

To be perfectly honest, there were occasions when the thought of our impending adventure made me frightened. Sometimes, returning late to my barrack on a cold and rainy night, I thought what it would be like lying out in the dark, wet forest; dead tired, exhausted by hunger, drenched to the bone, in imminent danger of being attacked by wild beasts. That prospect I compared with the warm blankets in my bunk, the familiar oil-lamp and the good book I was now preparing to read.

At such moments it was the thought of the security offered by a regular even though an unpleasant life, the spirit which dooms the canary bird to its caged existence, a natural tendency to follow the line of least resistance, that predominated.

On the other hand, standing in the ranks at morning roll call and seeing Batian beckoning me with its shimmering glaciers, I sometimes felt like running away on the spot, to seek and to meet adventure halfway.

We poor mortals are made like this, a mixture of contrasts, shade and light, fears and exaltations.

📚 Felice Benuzzi:

Forced to endure the milieu we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality. Sometimes one felt a childish urge to assert one’s personality in almost any manner, shouting nonsense, banging an empty tin, showing by every act that one was still able to do something other than to wait passively. I have seen normally calm people suddenly rise from their bunks and climb the roof poles of the barrack, barking like monkeys. I felt I understood them, and they had my full sympathy.

📚 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.