Finished reading: The Best of It by Kay Ryan 📚

I’ve been reading this without an ounce of haste for two years. Not once did I feel the need to hurry up and finish it.

Leah Libresco Sargeant:

If parents are increasingly relying on professionals to guide them in shaping their chil-dren, it may be because the parents are not confident they have a normative vision of human life to pass on. The rise of parenting influencers who offer scripts for talking to your child is a response to parents who don’t want to raise their children as they themselves were raised, but don’t possess a positive vision of their own. […]

In my own life as a parent, l already practice some of what Abigail Shrier recommends. I don’t run toward my children when they fall, and I wait for them to tell me if they’re hurt, rather than coaching them into anticipating distress. But resiliency is always an intermediate good, a virtue I want them to have so that they can rush on in pursuit of higher virtues. Parents aren’t called to simply make their children strong, but also to make them sensitive to the right things—to beauty, to sorrow over evil, to wonder. Taking a step back from the present therapeutic culture requires parents and children to take up philosophy instead.

😆

“Shield the joyous” — A short piece that is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

And it reminds me (with goosebumps) of Tom Wayman’s wonderful poem “What Good Poems Are For.”

There is also (though this is more rare)
Bob Smith’s story about the man in the bar up north,
a man in his 50s, taking a poem from a new book Bob showed him
around from table to table, reading it aloud
to each group of drinkers because, he kept saying,
the poem was about work he did, what he knew about,
written by somebody like himself.
But where could he take it
except from table to table, past the Fuck offs
and the Hey, that’s pretty goods? Over the noise
of the jukebox and the bar’s TV,
past the silence of the lake,
a person is speaking
in a world full of people talking.
Out of all that is said, these particular words
put down roots in someone’s mind
so that he or she likes to have them here—
these words no one was paid to write
that live with us for a while
in a small container
on the ledge where the light enters

“Lab diamonds are a testament to the principle that what nature can do, man is capable of doing better.”

Don’t get me wrong, lab diamonds are cool and all, but the headline could also read: “After billions of years evolving in nature, species congratulates itself on beating nature in its widdle waboratory.”

Also finished reading: The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann 📚

Some thoughts (and a poem from Kay Ryan) here.

Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚

Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now.

Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book:

It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

…He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful—the questioning faithful—to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture. Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it exists with faith—truth faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endō understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

Lately we’ve been watching Raising Hope for our highbrow entertainment needs. With this show, it’s the little things you might miss whilst digging for cookie dough in the ice cream bowl that are the funniest. Fortunately Meghan caught this one.