News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I made some jelly this week from the berries on our black gum tree. It required a lot of honey to make palatable, but the final result is quite tasty.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about hermits, homesickness, and barbarians.
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Adam Smith reflects on homemaking after taking a last family camping trip before the end of summer: "You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it needs you to do."
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Alex Sosler describes the humbling realization that his efforts and achievements have almost nothing to do with the good gifts he's enjoyed in life: "[Wendell Berry] suggests that submission to his life, to his circumstance, to his marriage has led to happiness. He didn’t manufacture his life but lived into it. And as he reflects from near the end of his life’s pilgrimage, he realizes how much of its goodness lies outside of his control, how much comes as a gift."
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Barbara Castle review Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer: "Nolan ... uses the poetic—language arranged to evoke emotions through meaning, sound, and rhythm—to hint at the paradoxical possibility of light breaking in upon the dark souls of men at war. Redemption only has a slight chance in the film, as the ending portrays an overarching trajectory of doom."
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Jon Schaff reviews Eric Adler's edited volume, Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt-Paul Elmer More Correspondence, and describes it as a "delightful read": "Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the 'civil war of the cave' that occurs in every human heart."
Last week I finished drafting my current book project and am now working on revisions. The last chapter focuses on Melville's brilliant poem Clarel. At nearly 18,000 lines, the poem defies summary, but suffice it to say that it stages a rollicking conversation among a motley group of pilgrims and voices pretty much every major religious or political or scientific current in nineteenth-century discourse. Even though Melville's poem doesn't endorse the views of any individual character, it puts their vivid perspectives into a polyphonic drama. One of the pilgrims, Ungar, is a “wandering Ishmael from the West” who is a bitter Confederate officer with Catholic and Native-American ancestors (in other words, he’s trebly on the losing side of American interpretive conflicts). Many of his discourses foreshadow integralist narratives heard today. Take, for example, this one where he looks back rather nostalgically on Christendom and warns that mass literacy has just made people more susceptible to demagogues:
Men were not lettered, but had sense
Beyond the mean intelligence
That knows to read, and but to read--
Not think. 'Twas harder to mislead
The people then, whose smattering now
Does but the more their ignorance show--
Nay, them to peril more expose--
Is as the ring in the bull's nose
Whereby a pert boy turns and winds
This monster of a million minds.
Men owned true masters; kings owned God--
Their master; Louis plied the rod
Upon himself. In high estate,
Not puffed up like a democrat
In office, how with Charlemagne?
Look up he did, look up in reign--
Humbly look up, who might look down:
His meekest thing was still his crown:
How meek on him; since, graven there, Among the Apostles twelve behold,
Stern Scriptural precepts were enrolled,
High admonitions, meet for kings.
The coronation was a prayer,
Which yet in ceremonial clings.
The church was like a bonfire warm:
All ranks were gathered round the charm."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro