Kitchen Chalk Talk • This is Ursula Le Guin’s translation. The last two lines in this chapter read, “No competition,/so no blame.” Red Pine translates those lines “and because they don’t compete/they aren’t maligned.” I think Pines’s translation makes more sense, but Le Guin’s is certainly more abrupt and ethos-challenging.
And so [Weil’s] vision of God is different, her imagination of God is different, from how a lot of contemporary western people think about an all-powerful, all-knowing God. Weil thinks about God as having done exactly what she’s asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.
Reason versus The Bulwark has to be the most hollow, vacuous debate I have ever listened to.
Forgiving: A glimpse of a farther world.
It helps me to see that forgiveness isn’t so much a transactional repair of an old world. Rather, it is a glimpse of a more profoundly coherent new one. It is as we eventually come to feel ourselves at home in this new world that we experience the forgiveness given and received.
And this “new world“ (i.e., “reality”) is a world with an “inexhaustive range of future possibilities.”
This was good, and fits perfectly with James Lawson and Joseph Pieper. In my own brief obsession with Polanyi, Esther Meek was a delight. (See this “poem, prose, prose”.)
Patchwork Quilt • Flying into Bozeman, Montana. A throwback to June 2023, when this little guy was still breathing amniotic fluid and starting to curl his toes. (Clifford Besher’s “folds in the earth” reminded me of this.)
Diaper change
But my father’s is an artist’s eye as much as a craftsman’s, and it can see other things too—things thạt mine cannot. With his hands and face almost intimately close to the boards, he’s trying to divine the ebb and flow of the grain. To see, and to see past, the flaws. To intuit beneath the shrouds of grime the traces of a scene, a movement, or simply an energy. Something he can coax out and bring to life with his carving chisels.
My most commonly used dopamine habit comes from an entirely self-curated algorithm: Kindle. Sometimes I just scroll through highlights from the few books I’ve read there. Rereading Peter Hooton/Bonhoeffer on Thursday was plenty to mull over, but picking up Richard Wilbur Thursday night… Wow!