Richard Wilbur:

One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. “Tragedy,” though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clichés. The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality. In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks, financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. No single vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts. And they cheat the rest of us, for readers need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us.

— Mark Noll, foreword to Roger Lindon’s
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, 1998

Driving home from a party, parsing
conversations, car windows down
to greet first real summer heat,
we pass through zones of peeper—

not song, not chorus, though
scientists no doubt find pattern
in the high-pitched whatever it is.
Nor peep, which reminds you of

silly chicks falling over each other
in an incubator. Every moist venue
between Pretty Marsh and Somesville,
every hundred yards brings

this antic singing, somewhat
alien in tone, magical too,
like fireflies but auditory,
not synthesized but a perfect

cacophony of the higher ranges,
tiny frogs doing their spring thing,
flinging music into dank milieu
of pond edge and marsh, inspiring

a certain joy in our recap of the evening
as if every fault could be forgiven
when you consider the rest of the world
wild and wet and flipping out.

— Carl Little

Miloš Miljković:

Yes, OpenEvidence, “the default operating system of medical knowledge in the United States” (their words, emphasis included), is a tech startup zipping through the first phase of enshittification, i.e. attracting users with a high-quality offering. …

I won’t cry for the billionaires involved. I will, however, mourn the opportunity cost of so many smart physicians and programmers on their medical and technical teams spending their time on point-one-percenter enrichment instead of truly building our generation’s PubMed. It would not even require compute! The true value of OE is the curated collection and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journals, treatment guidelines, and systematic reviews, supplements and all. Let me google all that — or better yet, look it up on Kagi — and I will not care at all for the LLM-generated veneer glued onto man-made knowledge. But good luck having NEJM, JAMA et al. open their vaults without the VC-backed carrot of (I suspect) God knows how many millions of dollars for access rights combined with the FOMO stick that Anthropic and OpenAI’s PR teams have been so diligently whittling.

… the mounds of AI slop added to OE search results aren’t just wasteful, they are dangerous. Back in the Triassic era when shmucks like yours truly were nursing their middle-finger calluses writing progress notes by hand you knew that every part of that note contained useful knowledge. With the electronic medical record mandate — thanks, Obama — much of it became an unreadable mix of computer-generated charts and copypasta; you had to look at the end of the note to find actual human thought, whether it is in the Assessment and Plan or the Attending Addendum section. Well, I can report from the front lines that much of the time even that one meager paragraph has become a copy/paste job carrying with it that distinct LLM waft.

I am not against using LLMs for progress notes — we have been using human scribes for decades to write up the facts of the doctor-patient encounter. But those are costly and your rural primary care physician certainly won’t have one, so why not delegate that work to AI? The assessment and plan, however, are where you infuse those facts with meaning and then act on them, which is the entire purpose of the physician’s job. Writing is thinking and millions of US medical professionals have decided to delegate the one job they have to AI while keeping all the moral and legal responsibility, reverse-centauring themselves willingly and with eyes wide open.

Jason Peters:

These reminiscences and the search for lost times I witness in others suggest to me that the means of passing the long days of a child’s American summer varied little from place to place. What differences there were owe to the places themselves, which all play and all pastimes, whatever their similarities, must suit themselves to. And this is as it should be: let the place decide. Our pond in the field out back meant skates and hockey all throughout the winter. The elementary school on our side of town sat on a good-sized hill, and so when the snow fell we went sledding all day long and into the night if we could get away with it. (You were king of the hill in those days if you owned a Brunswick Snurfer.) We sailed homemade boats in the cold tempestuous ponds of March and April. The place decided as much as we did what we would do, though what we did in our place was being duplicated wherever climate, landscape, and imagination permitted.

•

Christopher Lasch once suggested that nostalgia is a falsification of memory. My quibbles with Lasch are few, maybe next to nil, but here I must dissent. If for the moment we leave aside the complicated business of memory—and I am not alone in taking the Augustinian view that memory is, inter alia, the human faculty that reveals divine intention in the world—we are nevertheless obliged to treat nostalgia with some strictness of expression. Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. Odysseus is nostalgic for Ithaca. The wild civility of Ogygia and the island goddess won’t do for him.

Those who would avoid a proper understanding of nostalgia have the usual routes available to them: a careless and slovenly use of the mother tongue, the lethargy of custom, a weak capitulation to convention, an indifference to the rich history in words that waits patiently, like a genie in a bottle, to be set free. (There are wishes that that rich history fain would grant.) What I have so far been recounting, what I have been remembering, certainly qualifies as nostalgia, but it is not nostalgia in the sense that its future-mad naysayers mean by it: a “longing for a past that never existed,” which is a phrase nearly as idiotic as “the right side of history.” Nostalgia provides occasion for the attentive man, thinking back on his past and on his pastimes, to be a worthy pupil of his recollections.

Consider for the moment Wordsworth’s proposition that the child is father of the man and that any of us might wish our “days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Does it not seem that children—I mean children set loose into the given world, not into the world dominated by the devices and diversions emanating from hell and Silly Con Valley—does it not seem that they will perforce adapt their play to their places? This assumes, I grant, that they have actual places to be set loose into. … But it is not only for children to honor the law of local adaptation. It is for children to father such men and women as are likewise capable of such honor.

And grownups are, or at least were, capable of it. […]

In all things and in all matters the place decided ere the place-snubbing screens and smartphones came along to import a snobbish coastal monoculture, to banish meaningful pastime and elide the textured places we remember and practiced those pastimes in. These plug-in imps are a veritable scourge, lips dripping honey but tasting of wormwood. Let the upright turn away from them like pious Joseph from Potiphar’s slutty insatiable wife.

I’m not partial to the harsh language at the end there, but I don’t blink if someone wants imply that “Silly Con Valley” (how have I never heard that before?) has a nature that is both politically slutty and economically insatiable.

Let the upright men — someway, somehow, please — let us turn away.

Peters:

I recall seeing my older son, now perpetually within earshot of all the culture’s many sirens, and like all of his peers and most of their sorry parents perilously skirting those sirens’ treacherous shores, nary a mast to bind themselves to I remember seeing him pull on a ball cap, pluck a stalk of green foxtail from the ground, put it in his mouth, and head down a trail out back of our house, making for the woods, BB gun in his hand and his dog a few paces ahead of him. Maybe he will remember this. Maybe the memory will save him for the given world. Maybe the child will be father of the man, his days bound each to each by a natural piety.

Norman Wirzba:

I was the fourth of four kids, and my parents were obviously the ones who were running the operation with my older brother, but then a grandfather, who was my mom’s dad, was at our place almost every day, and probably the most important influence on my formation as a youngster, because he was one of these people who had a kind of uncommon attentiveness to where he was, and really was so gentle with the life that he took care of, and that made a deep, deep impression on me. …

There was never an occasion where he would get angry with the animals that he was taking care of, even when the animals could be rather rebellious, even cantankerous, and they could hurt you. He said, ‘These are animals that are taking care of our family, and we have to treat them with respect.’ This is an example of the way he thought about the animals in his care.

We had chickens … They could go anywhere on the farm that they wanted to. But in the summer months in particular, after lunch, he would often grab a scythe and a bucket, and he would go find some grass, six inches tall or whatever, and mow it down. This is really fresh grass, and so it’s just something the chickens would love. And he would walk to the chickens, and they would come running to him. He would throw the grass, and the chickens would jump in the air to catch the grass. And it was a totally unnecessary thing to do because these chickens could go anywhere they wanted on the farm, get their own grass, right? But he figured this made his chickens happy. So he said, I gotta take care of them because if they’re gonna feed me, I wanna make sure that their life is a good life.

[…]

And to bring it back to my grandfather, I think that is at root what prompted gentleness in his own demeanor toward other living things because he knew that if you’re going to eat a chicken, you’re going to take its life. And that’s a very sacred moment.

If you see it as a living being that is feeding you so that you can live, the hallmark of the sacrifice that you mentioned is, there’s always the question, ‘Why in cultures around the world is the animal that is sacrificed only ever a domesticated animal?’ Wild animals are never sacrificed in religious traditions around the world. And one of the best explanations I think that has come up for this way of living with creatures where you sacrifice them is that there are two offerings that happen at the sacrificial altar. One is the offering of the animal, yes. But the other thing that you’re offering is yourself. And if you’re not offering yourself through the care that you show to the animal that you sacrifice, your sacrifice is illegitimate.

And that’s why I think when you look at the Israelite prophets, they denounce sacrifice because what’s happening in Israel at this time is that people are showing up at the temple, and they’re just buying animals. And they’re at the altar, and the priests are saying, but there’s no life of self-offering. You’ve done nothing to care for this animal. And the way we know that you’ve done nothing to care for this animal is that you have an uncaring disposition. And that uncaring disposition is reflected in what the prophets denounce, which is the fact that there are orphans, there are widows who are not being taken care of.

So the whole sacrificial sensibility is dependent upon the people who offer sacrifice having cared for what they are sacrificing. And this is why I think the language of sacrifice has become so troublesome, is that we see in our cultures the language of sacrifice being used to oppress people or to diminish other creatures, right? When we send young people into war and say you’re making a sacrifice for this country, but the war is not a just war. We can see how sacrifice can be misused and distorted by taking out the self-offering care that is always the prerequisite for a legitimate offer.

Joseph Ratzinger:

“The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound.”

[…]

In his characteristically rigorous thought, [Nicholas Cabasilas] distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge through instruction which remains, so to speak, “second hand” and does not imply any direct contact with reality itself. The second type of knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge through personal experience, through a direct relationship with the reality. “Therefore we do not love it to the extent that it is a worthy object of love, and since we have not perceived the very form itself we do not experience its proper effect”. 

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality, “how it is Christ himself who is present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of men.”

[…]

Today … the message of beauty is thrown into complete doubt by the power of falsehood, seduction, violence and evil. Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn’t reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true “reality” has at all times caused people anguish. At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good. People wondered: where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one realized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was “the God” and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as “the truly divine” is absolutely no longer sufficient. 

In this way, we return to the “two trumpets” of the Bible with which we started, to the paradox of being able to say of Christ: “You are the fairest of the children of men”, and: “He had no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him”. In the Passion of Christ the Greek aesthetic that deserves admiration for its perceived contact with the Divine but which remained inexpressible for it, in Christ’s passion is not removed but overcome. The experience of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a realistic way. However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes “to the very end“; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence. Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world. It is not the false that is “true”, but indeed, the Truth. It is, as it were, a new trick of what is false to present itself as “truth” and to say to us: over and above me there is basically nothing, stop seeking or even loving the truth; in doing so you are on the wrong track. The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.

Flannery O’Connor, letter to “A”, 20 July 1955:

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to write me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Patrick Joyce:

Peasants are among the closest of humankind to nature, knowing intimately and with great depth what nature is, even though their idea of nature is assuredly not ours. Perhaps we might even learn something from them, something about the ‘nature’ we think we know, and something about what we call progress has done to nature.

Peasants were, after all, right to distrust progress. We may all have to learn before too long how to be survivors, and peasants, the class of survivors, have things to teach us. They face extinction just as we may do. Peasants come from a world that in essence is not capitalist, although they have coexisted with capitalism for cen-turies. They do not conceive of a world of unlimited increase, the world of progress that is, for they know things are finite. Capitalism lives for unlimited increase, which it sees only by looking to the future, upon which it depends (credit always refers to future possibility). In its nature capitalism must erase the past to realize this future. Peasants hope for the future but do not forget the past.

 […]

John Berger wrote in 1987 that ‘very few peasants become artists—occasionally perhaps the son or daughter of peasants has done so.’ He writes about the lack of records of peasant experience — some songs, a few autobiographies, very little: “This lack means that the peasant’s soul is as unfamiliar or unknown to most urban people as are his physical inventories and the material conditions of his labour. This is so. But while Berger is right, it is only in part, for if the peasant’s own speaking voice is absent (there are in truth only a tiny few memoirs, given the peasant millions who have lived and died) there are many more than a few songs. And through ethnographic study we now know a great deal of much else. Yet this is almost always mediated knowledge — vastly illuminating, but often historically about things called the ‘folk’ and their ‘lore,’ these terms meaning nothing to peasants themselves. Knowledge from the outside, in other words. There is also the knowledge as well of tax collectors, policemen, lawyers, recruiting sergeants, land surveyors and many others of the ‘official world.’ So we interpret, hearing only the echoes of the soul.

David Moreau:

Salt to the Brain

As a rule we are not the brain surgeons
or the bridge builders. We did not figure
how to make water flow in a pipe
or keep airplanes stable in flight.
Instead, we stood in a circle and chanted,
“All praise to the most beautiful bridge,”
then walked across it.

As a rule we do not meet the payroll
or keep the factories open.
Others figured how enzymes work
and built hydraulic brakes.
Instead, we were the ones at the machines
whose idea it was to sing, “Happy Birthday,”
or “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

In this world the moneychangers change money.
The nurses nurse and the lawyers lawyer.
My mother feeds the stray cats that come
to the screen door of her house in Marion Oaks.
The orange tiger has a nasty scratch.
The poets take note,
add this small pinch of salt to the brain,
our gift to the taste of existence.