Hammock skepticism
Taking a walk at Clark Cove Farm
The happier the dog, the stinkier the breath
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.
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
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.”
