Paul D. Miller’s analogy in the opening of his piece at The Dispatch this morning is good.

In one of Aesop’s fables, a deer fleeing hunters takes refuge in a cave, only to fall prey to a lion into whose den he had stumbled. The moral: Sometimes safety is an illusion hiding greater dangers.

Let me offer an updated version: The deer flees to the cave knowing the lion was there, hoping to hire the lion to take out the hunter. The lion takes payment, roars at the hunter, and eats the deer. Who got the better deal?

In case it’s not obvious, Miller makes it clear: “deer” is to “conservative Christians” as “hunter” is to “progressive left.”

Quite fitting. I would correct some misleading parts of the analogy, however. All of the deer that I know did not jump into a cave and make a deal with a lion. They carved out their own cave, invited a lion in for protection, and told themselves and everyone else that the lion is not, in fact, a lion but is really a fluffy bunny rabbit being framed as a lion by the hunter.

Anyway, we all know how it turns out with the fluffy rabbit…

Fleeing the conformity of what I viewed as an arbitrarily oppressive world, I’d flung myself into the service of something much more tyrannical: myself.

Jordan Castro’s essay on literature, escape, and addiction from the autumn Plough Quarterly, which I’m just now getting around to, was perfectly timed. About which I will hopefully say more.

“…and I’ll try to take the winning side.”

Two really nice conversations • Last week, I was thinking about Holcomb’s song “Live Forever” (particularly the live version at the Ryman), but it was especially nice to here from Audrey Assad. If you listen, make sure to stay for the short song she sings at the end.

David Dark: “Individuals within large robots speak of individuals within smaller robots freaking out and losing their humanity.”

So, this is what a diaper change currently always looks like around here:

Michael Oakeshott:

To ask the poet and the artist to provide a programme for political or other social action, or an incentive or an inspiration for such action, is to require them to be false to their own genius and to deprive society of a necessary service. What they provide is action itself, but in another and deeper sphere of consciousness. It is not their business to suggest a political remedy for political defects, but to provide an actual remedy for more fundamental defects by making society conscious of its own character. The emotional and intellectual integrity and insight for which they stand is something foreign to the political world, foreign not merely in fact, but in essence. This integrity and insight cannot be introduced into that world without changing their character; and to attempt to introduce them makes a chaos of what is otherwise a restricted but nevertheless ordered view. It is not their business to come out of a retreat, bringing with them some superior wisdom, and enter the world of political activity, but to stay where they are, remain true to their genius, which is to mitigate a little their society’s ignorance of itself.

That comes from this excellent post from Michael Rushton, who adds,

In other words, it’s not just that attempts to address Trump through art are almost universally unsuccessful, but that there is, as we economists say, an opportunity cost — we lose something of art actually can do, “making us conscious of our own character”, so to speak.

Alan Jacobs:

So it’s possible that The Green Bible is actually poised between two audiences: one unready for the message, one already tired of it. Meanwhile, the creation, still “subjected to futility,” continues to “wait with eager longing” to be “set free from its bondage to decay.” And we, even at our best, still strive to know what it means to hold this world in stewardship. Creation remains always too large for us, too abstract. What’s real is this furrow of black soil, that crabapple tree: These we can protect insofar as we see them, touch them, and therefore know them. But no general principle, no notion of greenness, can tell us how to care for what occupies our field of vision this moment, what sifts between our outstretched fingers.

Richard Wilbur (and my kitchen chalk board) would agree — or at least, I take this to be a sentiment cut from the same cloth:

And now the quick sun,
Rounding the gable,
Picks out a chair, a vase of flowers,
Which had stood till then in shadow.

It is the light of which
Achilles spoke,
Himself a shadow then, recalling
The splendor of mere being.

As if we were perceived
From a black ship—
A small knot of island folk,
The Light-Dwellers, pouring

A life to the dark sea—
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.