News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
FPR's student intern Natalie Symons stepped down in recent weeks. She did a great job formatting essays, corresponding with authors, and even contributing a fine book review. Our new intern is Grant Bonnet, a student at the University of Dubuque. We're grateful to have Grant on the Porch and helping out.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Italian bears, middle age, and rural renewal.
- Grayson Walker reviews a new book on the value of minding your own business: "In a world in which there are so many problems to solve, solitude plays an important role in helping us remember that life consists of more than finding and righting wrongs. Time spent resting and recharging has moral value too."
- David Bannon narrates how grief shaped a president's life: "Theodore Roosevelt led a boisterous, strenuous life. That all changed with the loss of his son Quentin in the First World War."
- Rory Groves thinks there's a right way to harvest maple sap: "Do we treat the created order as if it belongs to God or exclusively to ourselves? Is dominion the same as domination? Is stewardship the same as subjugation? Such notions need to be worked through. Such notions have a profound impact on how we see and treat the world around us. And the people around us."
- Amanda Patchin commends the work of designer Christopher Alexander: "Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we can all imagine some beautiful and perfect home, complete with all its habits and accouterments, but we can’t say exactly what it is about that home that is so perfect without describing the whole thing?"
I recently finished reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, a sensational novel and also one of the pioneers in the genre of detective fiction. It does indeed have quite the plot, but perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of this novel, a feature it shares in common with many nineteenth-century British novels, is the verve with which its characters are set before the reader. Consider, for example, the way that one of the characters introduces Count Fosco:
I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation, and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell. . . .
How am I to describe him? There are peculiarities in his personal appearance, his habits, and his amusements, which I should blame in the boldest terms, or ridicule in the most merciless manner, if I had seen them in another man. What is it that makes me unable to blame them, or to ridicule them in him?
For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be found in all England, were not, for the most part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all England?—and so on, through dozens of other examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the subject with might and main as I do at this moment, here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day’s notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro