I am literally never not pleasantly surprised by joy when I pick up Richard Wilbur. Here’s his “Digging for China,” posted on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. You can also hear Wilbur recite it here. (I love the chuckle at the end. “And it seemed to me I was acquitted.”)
And here is Wilbur’s translation of Francis Jammes, A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys, which you can happily also hear him recite. 😀
John Milton:
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised & unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
This comes from Karen Swallow Prior’s essay on Christian nationalism, kicking off the new Dispatch Faith newsletter, which I’m very happy to see.
Il Grillo Parlante, aka Jiminy
Time for the annual Wall Street Journal Subscription Cancellation Dance. I usually accept the lower offer to stay onboard, because while the “normal” prices for WSJ are outrageous, I do believe in paying for subscriptions. This time I let it go. Honestly, less the 1% of anything of value that I read comes from them. In fact, I read it almost exclusively for Peggy Noonan.
I believe my watch just told me, “Your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash.”
This is AI’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Economist (2024)
…
The highest expression of human dignity and human nature is to try to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution, and our environment.
—Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology (2005)
…
It is a loathsome and cruel trick that nature takes such an exquisitely wondrous creation as the human brain and imprisons it inside the weak, inefficient, fragile, and short-lived structure that is the human body.
—Mike Treder, “Emancipation from Death” (2004)
…
Is the finitude of human life, as our ancestors experienced it and as our faiths and our philosophies have taught us to understand it, really just a problem waiting to be solved?
The anti-aging medicine of the not-so-distant future would treat what we have usually thought of as the whole, the healthy, human life as a condition to be healed. It therefore presents us with a questionable notion both of full humanity and of the proper ends of medicine.
—BEYOND THERAPY: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, issued by the President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington, D.C. (2003)
…
Thomas [Aquinas] saw that a being obviously directed toward something else “cannot possibly have as his ultimate goal the preservation of his own existence!” In other words, the allaying of the thirst cannot consist simply in the mere continued existence of the thirster.
—Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation (1957)
With the exception of Kurzweil, these quotes come from Gilbert Meilaender’s excellent and timeless treatment of the topic of human life and frailty in his book Should We Live Forever?
In the end, “more time” would not quench the thirst that drives us to look for ways to retard aging. We need a fuller conception of our humanity and a deeper and richer understanding of love — one that is shaped by patience and hope in the struggle to understand what, really, is good for us.
Clearly Meghan does not share my enthusiasm for printed magazines, especially this one. Otherwise she would have told me this arrived yesterday. 🙂
While I was reading JD Hunter’s recent book, the routine was to take 5-month-old Will and before reading to him ask, “Do you wanna read about demooocracyyy?” The subject matter is more or less as bleak, but now that I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff that routine has taken a more ominous tone…
”Do you wanna to read about surveillance caaapitalism?”
He prefers Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. 📚
Jürgen Moltmann:
Hope alone is to be called “realistic,” because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught.
