Several times in the last week I’ve been reminded of Kosuke Koyama and a book I’d like to get back to this summer.
Nice conversation between Jonah Goldberg and Luke Burgis about his book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.
Three things that stuck out toward the end:
- Jonah’s anecdote that quality time with your kids is overrated and quantity time is underrated
- Jonah also mentions two categories of thinking: stuff that pops in my head and I immediately want to write about it, and stuff that I think about and care about so much that I don’t want to write about it, or at least have a much harder time writing about it. Yes! And I’ve been thinking a lot lately/for the last couple years about how much of this falls into things that writing should and should not be used for.
- Given the negative responses to Magnifica humanitas on the topic of AI, it was nice to hear some praise from Burgis here:
He was wise not to weigh into the specifics. And some people were like, “Ah, you should have said more specifically about AI.” Paragraph 99 is the most important one in the encyclical, which is [where] he talks about the difference between machines and the human person. It’s an encyclical about the human person. It’s about anthropology. It’s not really about AI.
All of our biblical knowledge, doctrinal articulation, and apologetic prowess fail to resist the lure of cultural liturgies that so often bypass our intellects and shape our imaginations.
Excellent short foreword by James KA Smith for the German translation and ten year memory of his book You Are What You Love.
Presented without comment:
Threshold
I take back my fandom. 📚
I quit reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, round about page 100. At first, I thought “Perhaps I’ll set it aside and come back another time.” But the more I think about it, the more I doubt it.
At one point, in the most memorable line of those hundred pages, Fermor describes an uppity German house this way: “Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous – prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting.”
Mutatis ditto mutandis for Fermor’s use of words to build this literary construction.
Years ago, a British friend (think sheep farmer British, not Londoner British), upon hearing that I had fairly recently discovered a love of reading, insisted I simply had to read Laurie Lee As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. I don’t think I ever had the heart to tell my friend how unfinishable I found Lee. My memory of that book is over a decade old, but I’m certain it had at least a loveliness to it that I do not see in Fermor. I think I expected in Fermor something at least reminiscent of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but found something closer to, and much less lovable than, Lee.
But that’s the funny thing. Neither Jan Morris, who introduced the book, nor Fermor in his own introduction, make any mention of Lee or West. Morris even goes so far as to describe Fermor’s book as unprecedented. (“He has no rivals, and so stands beyond envy.”) I was happily willing to overlook that baffling fact (along with Fermor’s praise for Alan Watts, which raised an early red flag), but not no mo’.
I accept that I might be wrong or just weird. Sincerest apologies to those lovely people who recommended it, but I am so excited to be reading something else tomorrow.
Presented without comment:
