<3 • Hobbit Beach—first time on the west coast
Finished reading (2021): Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman 📚
Not as deeply thoughtful as I had hoped. In fact, Lightman’s reflections are often quite simplistic. But, as someone who has also spent a good amount of time looking up at the stars in Maine, I sympathize with the sentiment of the book. Ultimately, I think he asks the exact right question in an early chapter: “Do I know too much, or too little?”
Geneva, NY
Be seeing this a lot this summer ✈️🌎
Quick stop at Cobbossee
🙂
Be like Jack: “I just wanna love the world. I wanna sniff it and pee on it (cf. Ricardo Castillo’s “Ode to the Urge”) and let humans scratch my ears while I lick their faces. Then we all take naps.”
Finished reading (2021): Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir by Charles Marsh 📚
I’m too lazy to figure out all the reasons why, but reading this felt a lot like reading Stanley Hauerwas’s memoir, Hannah’s Child —I loved reading both, but I also found them strangly… conceited. In many places throughout Marsh’s book, there is a real quality of openness and honesty. But his honesty often seems more self-indulgant than vulnerable. Having grown up an anxious evangelical myself, I really wanted to relate deeply, but I’m afraid the book is geared toward (and from) something stereotypical like, oh, philosophy majors and professors of literature—not because it’s too heavy on philosophy or literature; the book is front-to-back beautifully and accessibly written. But there’s something about the air of it that, if nothing else, didn’t leave me with any desire to recommend it, nor, more importantly, to learn from it. I liked reading it, and there are points of depth and insight, but there isn’t much I will ultimately take to heart.
Meet the new adoption and the happiest dog in the world. His name is Jack—not only because he looks like a Jack but because we found him in Jacksonville, and also because one of my favorite characters in a novel is M. Robinson’s Jack Boughton. Fitting in every way!
