In the final analysis [history] can be understood and illuminated only by sympathetic insight.
Nacho breath … and smile
Neil Postman, on “image politics” as a form of therapy:
In the shift from party politics to television politics … We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election. And Donald Trump, a malicious man and a petty president, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He is the same fire hose of lies he always was, obsessed with his grievances…
I’m going to have to start doubling down on what has been my lackadaisical use of Instapaper if I’m going to justify their doubling down on the price tag, for what I’m yet to be convinced are “improvements” that I need or want.
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
