Nice conversation between Jonah Goldberg and Luke Burgis about his book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.

Three things that stuck out toward the end:

• Jonah’s anecdote that quality time with your kids is overrated and quantity time is underrated
• Jonah also mentions two categories of thinking: stuff that pops in my head and I immediately want to write about it, and stuff that I think about and care about so much that I don’t want to write about it, or at least have a much harder time writing about it. Yes! And I’ve been thinking a lot lately/for the last couple years about how much of this falls into things that writing should and should not be used for.
• Given the negative responses to Magnifica humanitas on the topic of AI, it was nice to hear some praise from Burgis here:

  He was wise not to weigh into the specifics. And some people were like, “Ah, you should have said more specifically about AI.” Paragraph 99 is the most important one in the encyclical, which is [where] he talks about the difference between machines and the human person. It’s an encyclical about the human person. It’s about anthropology. It’s not really about AI.

All of our biblical knowledge, doctrinal articulation, and apologetic prowess fail to resist the lure of cultural liturgies that so often bypass our intellects and shape our imaginations.

Excellent short foreword by James KA Smith for the German translation and ten year memory of his book You Are What You Love.

Deconstructed by frogs

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Threshold

So, how would a preliterate person attain such deep biblical literacy in a way that a literate person today, even a person of faith, typically can’t?

I suspect the conventional answer would be something like, “they were more religious than we are.” Which isn’t wrong, per se, but also doesn’t identify a specific mechanism. Instead, let’s go back to the idea of names-as-mnemonic-devices and reframe the question this way: what if a preliterate person could remember Psalm 22, and in fact vast quantities of scripture, precisely because they couldn’t read? Because memorization, or being “off-book,” was the only option?

Excellent post from @jordanellishall. I want to come back to it, but I can I confirm a version of this every single day. My 2 1/2-year-old son, Will, is “preliterate” — he swims in his own little oral culture, lives in it all day every day in a way that I do not and never will again. And it shows precisely in “reading” books. My wife and I have memorized more of his books than I’m sure we ever thought we would. But Will knows them. And he can recite them so well while we’re reading to him that I often have to remind myself that he actually can’t read. Just this morning I had to “read” him back to sleep in his room… at 4 am, in the dark, with a book we got last week. Which amounted to me misquoting every page and him correcting me until he fell asleep. Correcting me is actually just part of reading books to him now. And he’s never wrong. And I love it.

I take back my fandom. 📚

I quit reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, round about page 100. At first, I thought “Perhaps I’ll set it aside and come back another time.” But the more I think about it, the more I doubt it.

At one point, in the most memorable line of those hundred pages, Fermor describes an uppity German house this way: “Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous – prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting.”

Mutatis ditto mutandis for Fermor’s use of words to build this literary construction.

Years ago, a British friend (think sheep farmer British, not Londoner British), upon hearing that I had fairly recently discovered a love of reading, insisted I simply had to read Laurie Lee As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. I don’t think I ever had the heart to tell my friend how unfinishable I found Lee. My memory of that book is over a decade old, but I’m certain it had at least a loveliness to it that I do not see in Fermor. I think I expected in Fermor something at least reminiscent of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but found something closer to, and much less lovable than, Lee.

But that’s the funny thing. Neither Jan Morris, who introduced the book, nor Fermor in his own introduction, make any mention of Lee or West. Morris even goes so far as to describe Fermor’s book as unprecedented. (“He has no rivals, and so stands beyond envy.”) I was happily willing to overlook that baffling fact (along with Fermor’s praise for Alan Watts, which raised an early red flag), but not no mo’.

I accept that I might be wrong or just weird. Sincerest apologies to those lovely people who recommended it, but I am so excited to be reading something else tomorrow.

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