Robert Frost and the composition of our lives
Also thinking of these reflective epigraphs from Eichler’s first chapter:
I would resist describing us as more masculine, as some of the characterizations in recent media stories implies. Such characterizations often overlook the fact that during the persecutions of the Soviet era, it was women—and primarily grandmothers—who were active in the Orthodox Church and who kept the faith alive (if often on life support). It was Baba who came to Liturgy, lit candles, prayed for her children, and saw to it her grandchildren were baptized.
While men and women are no doubt different physiologically, there is no such thing in Orthodoxy as “men’s” spirituality as distinct (or what is worse, opposed!) to “women’s” spirituality. Men and women, young and old, are all asked to pray and read Scripture daily, fast, give to the poor, work with their hands, confess their sins, join with the church in the worship of God, and receive Holy Communion. A godly Orthodox man and a godly Orthodox woman will live similar spiritual lives.
To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive. It was not a conclusion that I came to in time. It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me. God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling.
—Frederick Buechner
“But Dad, I don’t wanna go shovel snow.”
Augustine of Hippo:
Let the reader, where we are equally confident, stride on with me; where we are equally puzzled, pause to investigate with me; where he finds himself in error, come to my side; where he finds me erring, call me to his side. So we may keep to the path, in love, as we fare on toward Him “whose face is ever to be sought."
Disclaimer: While I have certainly vented my share of explitive-saturated frustrations about it, I am not, on a personal level (or at least not at this moment), overly critical of people who enjoy what are user-friendly and, really, the default cultural platforms for social media. (I get it.)
I also reserve the right to regret posting this.
But I’m just throwing this out there:
I have been soapboxing all things anti-Facebook for close to 15 years now and FWIW: none of the arguments I was making 15 years ago have changed — and no new ones have been added.
Neither symbolic Tech Bro pocket-change donations nor some commercially driven virtue-signaling on a certain “manly“ virtue-signaling podcast amount to anything truly new. In my view, these are hardly more than — to borrow and slightly bastardize a line from William James — “the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show.”
That said, do continue the evacuation. (Just don’t forget who owns the real social media darling.)🙂
A long time ago, I had as a signature for personal emails a quote: “Reform is born aloft on the wings of song.”
That quote came from Mark Noll’s book God and Race in American History:
As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.
That comes to mind because I just started reading Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler 📚
From the intro:
Typically history is written without much regard for music, and music is often heard as residing outside history. This book instead asks what might happen when we peer at each through the prism of the other—that is, when sounds are entwined with stories and we listen to the past through music’s ears. I have taken this approach not for the sake of “filling in some gaps” but in the hope of illuminating and activating the possibilities that open when we attempt to hear music as culture’s memory. And because these goals are fundamentally generative, because they relate to how we live today and how we experience art in the here and now, I do not consider this book primarily a work of elegy. Instead, among many other things, it becomes an experiment in the reciprocal enchantment of music and history. That experiment will have succeeded only if each one becomes fuller, and more luminous, in the presence of the other.
Yesterday, I couldn’t find Fanny Howe’s book in the micro.blog library, but I found this review while creating a link to it and meant to include it.
From the start of its beginning section, first published in a now out-of-print edition from 1987, the best describer I can muster is movement. The poem, I’ll call it that, picks up and carries forth with the decisive power of thought. The intelligence and brilliance of its author builds paragraph by paragraph in evocative descriptions and lines that punch a cerebral TKO. The mind is only half of the trip, though, as it is spirit that animates the story: a struggle, a quest, to understand and embrace the unknowable. Such musings find me with not only the expected sense of awe that comes with the divine, but provide a tonic to the selfishly depressive state that I often dwell. For me, it is this reaching past the comfort and security of facts to the uncertainty and wisdom of not knowing that is one of the myriad things that makes life worth living.
I would only clarify that, if movement is even the right word for it, it’s a very circular movement that adds a unique (but still dream-like) texture along the way.
Howe is certainly over my head, but still worth an afternoon.
📚 I feel like I enter a dream-state — a wonderful but nevertheless enigmatic one — whenever I read Fanny Howe:
Blessed is the person who shall find her own special function flowing from one remarkable notion, and who shares it. But even in this fortunate case the ego behind the ego is unable to identify the consciousness that had the sense to follow that notion through! Only the sharing is a comprehensible form of seeking the answer to this remarkable event.[…]
The world rolls around and around, and each day I take a walk with the weight of a man’s spirit which pines for worldly success, but crying out, I must help others!