Image from Steve Robinson

Also this:

This hand learned to print, color inside the lines, bathe a dead man, draw outside the lines, build houses, churches, high-rise offices and coffins, write cursive, wipe a tear, change the diapers of a child and a parent, pour a beer (both into a glass and down the drain), dig a grave, knead a loaf of bread dough, type a Master’s thesis, a blog post and a book manuscript, put a Band-aid on a boo-boo, cook for dozens and for one, turn a page, pull a trigger, bait a hook, clean a toilet, pet a mean dog, sew a button, point in the wrong direction, flip off an idiot, shake hands, beat an adversary, dress a bishop, caress a beloved, anoint the dead, wave goodbye, build a bobber motorcycle and twist its throttle, make a bar-chord and play the blues, torque a bolt, snap a picture, cleanse a chalice, handle a snake, slap my forehead, hang on too long and let go too soon….

“Whatsoever thine hand shall find to do, do with all thy might…” Ecclesiastes 9:10, and I have done so.

And there’s much more from Robinson’s “Free Pithless Thought.” That was a lovely gift in the inbox this morning. I’m going to feel like a glutton reading anything else today.

Flipping through Berry’s A Timbered Choir. I do think you can see the love and even the cheerfulness that Andrew Peterson has seen in Berry’s personality and hospitality.

Russel Moore’s tribute to Wendell Berry here is lovely.

I was at a medical conference at some mega church — and I do mean mega — in Louisville 6 or 7 years ago. This church had an enormous lobby, complete with its own giant escalator and substantial bookstore. I remember one of lecturers (half?) joking that if you wanted to know what was wrong with the church today, just go down to the bookstore in the lobby. “One of the best living writers lives 50 miles from here and there isn’t one of his books on the shelves.” He added that he’d asked the people who ran it about Wendell Berry. They said they’d never heard of him.

Conversations stopper of the day:

“Have you seen that trend on TickTock…?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!

Looking forward to adding We Have Ceased to See the Purpose to the bookshelf.

Anne Fadiman:

In San Diego, the manager of an electronics plant was so enthusiastic about one Hmong assembly worker that he tried to promote him to supervisor. The man quit, ashamed to accept a job that would place him above his Hmong coworkers.

For the many Hmong who live in high-unemployment areas, questions of advancement are often moot. They have no jobs at all. This is the reason the Hmong are routinely called this country’s “least successful refugees.” It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. Instead, we have trained the spotlight on our best-loved index of failure, the welfare rolls.

Life is not the Olympics…

David Whyte:

I often think that one of the great qualities that’s necessary for every human being, besides a generous and attentive heart and mind, is a sense of self-compassion for the way that you’re made in particular. That you wouldn’t lose faith, no matter what, in your own difficulties and awkwardnesses. And that some of your own awkward ways of being in the world are actually necessary to your final confrontation with existence. And that you couldn’t get there without somehow being bereft in certain ways, by having certain failings, that those failings are actually a core part of our experience of the numinous.

I do think that we diminish ourselves with many of the images that we hold for success in life so that we feel as if in order to get to any kind of extraordinary experience in life we have to cross the finishing line like some Olympic athlete. But I do believe that there are many experiences in life, many extraordinary edges that you can only actually crawl into on your hands and knees. That part of the experience of the final meeting would be missing if you did not actually follow the whole vulnerable contour of your own imperfect belonging into the fullness of the experience.

Jack and Jerry • This had all the makings of a great slapstick comedy routine. And this is after Jack chased him halfway around the pole several times in each direction.

David Whyte, on Goethe’s poem “Holy Longings” (which you should click-n-read):

So Goethe is looking at the way that we often feel like troubled guests, that we’re somehow slightly out of sync, not completely present, somehow have missed part of the information.

I always think it’s quite fascinating that we are one of the few corners of creation that’s allowed to feel as if we don’t belong. A stone is a stone; a hawk is a hawk; an armadillo is an armadillo — in its armadillo-ness. And each of the creatures in the world, and the inanimate objects of the world, or a tree, or a bush, just gets to be itself, with no argument. Whereas human beings are one of the few creatures of the world that can actually seem to be there while a good part of their identity — their imaginations, their senses of vitality and presence — can be absent completely.

Some sort of anxious not-at-home-ness is a negative potential that has probably followed human beings for our entire history. But I doubt if humans have ever more willingly made themselves — and, more importantly, their offspring — feel less at-home than we do now.

I was flipping through Nicholas Carr’s 2014 book The Glass Cage yesterday and stopped on this highlighted quote (emphasis added):

“A map is not the territory it represents,” the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously remarked, and a virtual rendering is not the territory it represents either. When we enter the glass cage, we’re required to shed much of our body. That doesn’t free us, it emaciates us.

The world in turn is made less meaningful. As we adapt to our streamlined environment, we render ourselves incapable of perceiving what the world offers its most ardent inhabitants.… The result is existential impoverishment, as nature and culture withdraw their invitations to act and to perceive.

To my memory, Carr never explicitly defines the “glass cage,” but describes it by way of a simile. A glass cage is like what pilots in the 70s and 80s started calling the “glass cockpit,” as the analog gauges in the newer flight decks were replaced with “glowing glass screens” displaying data from a computer, and the mechanical controls, with their cables and their pulleys and their tactile feedback, were replaced with “fly-by-wire” systems. This and the increased ubiquity of “autoflight systems” led to the 2013 FAA Safety Alert for Operators, with which Carr begins his book.

It may sound a little silly, but the FAA really did feel the need to write a letter saying that people who fly planes need to spend more time actually flying planes. The concern was that pilots were experiencing “skill fade” and that in situations where they were forced to manually, you know, fly the planes, they would be overwhelmed by the task of actually, you know, flying the planes.

It’s an analogy perfectly fitting for the age no less than for Carr’s entire career.

Living too much of your life through a screen — and “too much” is not much — makes even the front door of your house an increasingly overwhelming object, and the other side of that door an increasingly unwelcoming place — not because the world outside has changed, but because we have changed. As Hannah Arendt put it (in 1977!), we’ve created a radical world-alienating situation “where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.”

All this makes David Whyte’s poem “Self Portrait” all the more pressing and heartening.