We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.
[…]
But the possibility that concerns me is not the special province of this or any other culture: it is a vulnerability that we all share simply in virtue of being human.
[…]
We are familiar with the idea that we are creatures who necessarily inhabit a world. But a world is not merely the environment in which we move about; it is that over which we lack omnipotent control, that about which we may be mistaken in significant ways, that which may intrude upon us, that which may outstrip the concepts with which we seek to understand it. Thus living within a world has inherent and unavoidable risk.
“When’s mom getting home? Maybe she’ll take us for a walk…”
Lewis Hyde:
The problem with this dichotomy [between goodwill and bad] is that it omits another form of evil: the use of the will when the will is of no use. Such evil is usually invisible to a willful man. Goodwill can fight bad will, but only in those cases where will is called for in the first place. At times when the will should be suspended, whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Or to put it more strongly: at such times all will, no matter its direction, is bad will. For when the will dominates, there is no gap through which grace may enter, no break in the ordered stride for error to escape, no way by which a barren prince may receive the virtù of his people, and for an artist, no moment of receptiveness when the engendering images may come forward.
Season 9 of Poetry Unbound began with Kinsale Drake’s poem “Put on that KTNN.” Just lovely.
[…]
All contradictions
find a home in the body, the insect-skin
of the car sluicing the Arizona desert
as the cicadas pick up their grand
instruments. How else to know
you enter a land of monuments, not
a wasteland, loved by radio waves
and peach trees
and small, silly dogs that bridge
the distance between a chapter house
and the nearest Sonics in a city.
The moon rocks darken into pine,
pine into slickrock,
and the whole world remembers
what it once was—
grand ocean: sun, plankton, pearl,
blood, ancestor, cloud. Radio rainbows
the most violent parts of the land
thrashed by thunderstorms & sea
as the rattles pick up their backing track
and Hank Williams rolls in
all over again, easy and easy
and blue.
And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?
Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.
So, there’s Noah Millman’s post Biden Gives Up On America: The emotional subtext of the president’s nepotistic pardon.. And he links to comments from John Ganz and Ross Douthat.
I have no desire to comment specifically except to say this: Alongside what is surely some justified doubt, anxiety, and anger across the country and the world for any number of reasons, I’m worried about an exponentially malignant epidemic of self-fulfilling cynicism. One of the questions for myself going into the new year: How to maintain open and honest valuation, as well as real criticism, while avoiding cynicism and — somehow, somehow — spreading a little joy.
Wish me luck.
Just yesterday I was asking the bookstore clerk if they had this in stock. (They didnt.) Today, it showed up in the mail.
Note to self: Try to remember what you’ve ordered online.
Aaron Horvath’s piece in the fall issue of The Hedgehog Review is excellent. And it comes full circle from start and finish.
I remember sitting in the library and reading Ken Stern’s With Charity for All for a class discussion on genocide and humanitarian aid. It’s the appearance, the charade of excellence, not genuine need that generates big gifts, as Jack Shakely reminds us in a review of Stern’s book. Horvath reminds us that the trouble that plagues charities goes much deeper than the obvious scams. The charade of excellence is a feature, not a bug.
It’s a thin line… between a reality described by their abstractions and a reality constituted by their abstractions. And the more they, and we, fall under the spell of the latter, the more difficult it becomes to imagine how else we might contribute to meaningful social change.
A few other quotes here, one of which made me laugh out loud.
Caveman cartoons are truly one of my deepest little joys. A couple goods ones lately.
