Balloons • These guys fly (float?) around Bozeman a lot

I’m rereading Gilead for a little bookclub with friends and really enjoying it. One of Robinson’s great talents lies in the centuries of thought — of “life” — that can hide behind the simplest of her lines.

By "life" I mean something like "energy" (as the scientists use the word) or "vitality," and also something very different. When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the "I" whose predicate can be "love" or "fear" or "want " and whose object can be "someone" or "nothing" and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around "I" like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.

Sometimes the simplest juxtapositions do an immense amount of work. Bonhoeffer, for example: “bear more than shape, hope more than plan, hold out more than stride ahead.” Or this one, from L. M. Sacasas: “Care, not control.” As Andy Dwyer said when he called Leslie Knope an amalgam: “Nailed it!”

Montana morning

True North Cafe, Livingston, MT

Jack’s gopher-scented breathing excercises are getting out of control.

Pals

Lady Bug

Finished Reading: On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt 📚

I have only ever dabbled in my reading of Hannah Arendt, but she has maintained a voice in my head for years. Not, in my experience, an easily accessible writer/thinker. Whoever put these chapters of hers together in this short book deserves credit for undoing this fact. Very essential questions that need to be asked by current and future generations are quite accessible in these pages. In fact, I don’t think there is one page or paragraph that doesn’t point to some question you should ask when you read tomorrow’s news.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my conclusions, my opinion. . . . Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge.