holier than character

Wright Morris’s 1948 book Home Place is about as dull and uneventful a book as I have ever read — and I could not love it more. An antidote for the times if ever I’ve found one. (An antidote for his times as well, it’s worth noting.)

Most of what Morris holds forth in this little book is held forth slant. Some of it is in the story, which is fiction and describes a single day with a man returned to his home farm from the city with his wife and two kids, and some in the images and in the layout, which contains for every page of text a black & white picture from a Morris family farm in Nebraska. (The final 20 or so pages, with only a portion of text on the page for each picture opposite it, is a stunningly slant move that works on memory in way you’d just have to read the book for.)

But Morris can also look a thing in the face in a way most of us would have to admit we are inspired and guilted by:

I put my hands up to my face, as it occurred to me, suddenly, how people looking in a Daily News photograph. A smiling face at the scene of a bloody accident. A quartet of gay waitresses near the body slumped over the bar. God only knows why I thought of that, but I put up my hands, covering my face, as if I was there, on the spot, and didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be violated, that is. The camera eye knows no privacy, the really private is its business, and in our time business is good. But what, in God’s name, did that have to do with me? At the moment, I guess, I was that kind of camera.

Was there something holy about these things? If not, why had I used that word? For holy things, they were ugly enough. I looked at the odds and ends on the bureau, the pin-cushion lid on the cigar box, the faded Legion poppies, assorted pills, patent medicines. There was not a thing of beauty, a man-made loveliness, anywhere. A strange thing, for whatever it was I was feeling, at that moment, was what I expect a thing of beauty to make me feel. To take me out of my self, into the selves of other things. I’ve been in the habit, recently, of saying that if we could feel anything, very long, it would kill us, and that we get on by not even feeling ourselves. To keep that from happening we have this thing called embarrassment. That snaps it off, like an antisepsis, or we rely on our wives, or one of our friends, to take the pressure out of the room with a crack of some kind. That’s what I was about to do. For once in my life I didn’t, but as I had to do something I went into Ed’s room, opened the bureau drawer, and called, “Oh, Peg!” When she came in I said— “Ed used to hunt. He used to go off for a day at a time, with a dog and a gun, up the river. When I was a kid there was still a wolf or two around here.” I said that, then I closed the drawer, making it clear that we could mind his public business, but leave his private business alone. There were several snapshots on the mirror and I looked at them—for my mother—but I didn’t turn them over to read on the back. “Well, she’s not there,” I said, and came back to the table, pulled out a chair, and looked at the old man’s shoes on the seat.

For thirty years I’ve had a clear idea what the home place lacked, and why the old man pained me, but I’ve never really known what they had. I know now. But I haven’t the word for it. The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn’t describe what there is about an old man’s shoes. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib, with the ironed-in stitches, of an old man’s overalls. Character is the word, but it doesn’t cover the ground. It doesn’t cover what there is moving about it, that is. I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That’s too bad. For this character is beautiful. I’m not going to labor the point, but there’s something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character. The same word, but a new specific gravity. Perhaps all I’m saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of Passion has made them holy things. That kind of holiness, I’d say, is abstinence, frugality, and independence—the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity. Not the land of plenty, the old age pension, or the full dinner pail. Independence, not abundance, is the heart of America.

cosmic connections

Blathmac son of Cú Brettan son of Congus of the Fir Rois, 8th century (via Conor McDonough):

A stream of blood gushed forth – too severe –

so that the bark of every tree became red.

There was gore on surfaces of the world,

in the treetops of every chief forest. It was fitting for God’s elements,

beautiful sea, blue sky, this earth,

that they should change their aspect

when lamenting their hero (ll. 241-248, 257-260).

”that children might be true children of God”

His Grace Bishop Irenei of London and Western Europe:

So there have been a few reports of late, including this most recent one currently making the rounds, about a number of young people converting to Orthodoxy, particularly young men, converting because they find in the Orthodox Church, according to these reports, an environment that preaches ‘masculinity’ and real ‘manhood’. And I want to say that if you’re here because you think that that’s what we are here to do, then you are a fool. This is stupidity. ‘Masculinity’, so far as I am aware, is not an Orthodox term. It is not a term that has any traditional place in Christianity. It is a term embraced by the secular world because this world has rejected normal concepts of humanity, in which of course there is male and there is female, there is child, there is adult. These are simply human beings. But because the world has lost sight of the basics of what it means to be human, it is forced to respond to the lack of clarity it has pushed on itself by fostering these concepts of ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, and so on.

None of this has anything to do with the teaching of Jesus Christ. This Church proclaims a simple reality that in Jesus Christ our Saviour, all of us discover what it means to be a human being, what it means to become a human person. And this is to live according to the Gospel after the image of Christ. If you have lost sight of what it means to be a man in this strange world, or if you have lost sight of what it means to be a woman in this strange world, this is hardly surprising. This world is more confused about these simple concepts than about almost anything else. So if you are here because you are confused and you wish to find sanity and normality in the teaching of Christ: God bless you, and may we by God’s mercy be of some help.

But if you are here because you think this is a place where you can reinforce some cultural masculinity, if you’re here because you think this is the place to rebel against what you see going on politically around you or socially around you, please keep on going — go somewhere else. We are not here for this reason. We preach one thing and one thing only: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord. We preach it without fear, and we preach it without agenda. Our only goal is that every single human being might become a living image of Christ Himself. That men might become Christ-like men; that women might become Christ-like women; that children might be true children of God; that the aged might find the real respect due to those who long live and struggle for Christ; that this world might come to understand what it means to be redeemed.

conscience and complicity

“I must get out of the business, or prove that this book is wrong,” declared Tom L. Johnson after reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879).

Johnson was not alone in having his world shattered by Progress and Poverty. The author and activist Emma Lazarus claimed that anyone capable of understanding the arguments would never again be able to “dine or sleep or read or work in peace until the monstrous wrong in which we are all accomplices be done away with”.

still still not for me

Nicholas Kristoff:

After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says — yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.

Girls will be particularly likely to die, because Yemeni culture favors boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married against her will at age 10. Aid programs to empower Yemeni girls and reduce child marriage are now being cut off as well.

I suspect that Elon Musk, who boasted of feeding aid programs “into the wood chipper,” would say that we can’t afford to help little girls in Yemen. He’s the world’s richest man, so he may have special insight into the optimal use of $1, the daily cost of a six-week course of peanut paste to save a starving child’s life.

Meanwhile, the real money America is spending in Yemen is on bombs — but Musk’s team of Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutters appeared oblivious to that expense. While the United States saved modest sums by allowing little girls to starve, it escalated the Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, striking targets almost every day. The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions. […]

…Yemen never presented us with good options. But in our unusually poor choices I see a cautionary tale of the cost of bumbling foreign policy, for this has been the result: starvation, dying girls and boys, weakened American security and a triumph for our adversaries, all at a cost of $7 billion in our taxes. Now, that’s a scandal.

Still: not for me. Too few people have bothered to ask the question that Wendell Berry asked over a quarter-century ago:

How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

you might be a Babylonian if…

Luke Bretherton:

[A]ny account of “living well” necessitates asking difficult questions about what needs to change in order to make life better. Asking questions about what needs to change is based on the realization that my life or the life of others is not all that it could be; to thrive, we will have to face head on the need to change. And this brings me to ask questions about, on the one hand, how to live truthfully and meaningfully in the midst of suffering, scarcity, and oppression; and on the other hand, to ask whether my well-being is built off the dispossession or oppression of others. If it is, then my life needs to radically change. To draw on scriptural motifs, ethical reflection necessitates asking what it means to live righteously in Babylon — and what it means to live righteously if it turns out we are the Babylonians. For in as much as we might identify with the prophets or a figure of liberation like Moses, we must also be ready to recognize ourselves as standing in the place of Pharoah.*

a ceaseless deluding

David Bentley Hart:

Of course, it is true, there are plenty of voters who are a bit dim or a bit inattentive or a bit mentally lazy; and some are nihilistic or fascistic or racist or all of these things; but then there are a very great many who are not ‘uninformed’ at all, but rather absolutely immersed in an atmosphere of total information. Not truth, mind you, and certainly not wisdom, but most definitely a ceaseless flood of information regarding what others say and believe and imagine, facts and fantasies and wild delusions, lies and misapprehensions and confusions, all of which render their minds ever more porous and suggestible, and render reality all the more impossible to distinguish from lunacy. This is neither a culpable failing nor an especially foolish one. Great intelligence can serve as a defense against the deluge, though even that is not a certainty in every case; but normal human intelligence, of the sort that allows one to live on equal terms with the world and make something of oneself, is rarely sufficient.

… And then also we are, depressingly enough, organisms, and our minds operate at only the speed and with only the capacity available to them through the neural complexity and electrochemical processes of the brain. In the ‘information age’, in which the sheer algorithmic velocity of communication within ever more integrated circles of association outpaces the workings of our feeble analogue intellects by an effectively infinite degree, it is only natural that delusion of even the most preposterous kind can easily become a widespread contagion.

“as in a church”

John Ganz:

For all of its real murderousness, there is something about fascist strutting that inclines healthy people to laugh, rather than admire or cower. Fascism, on some level, is just an ultimately buffoonish insistence to be taken very seriously or else, so one must reserve one’s right to mockery. […]

In the final analysis, the provocation is a successful one because it freezes us and leaves us with no good response: It’s an expression of defiant power. We seem to laugh or ignore it at our peril, but also to express outrage to no avail. This is the whole point. As Sartre said of the anti-semite reveling in his bad faith, he seeks above all else, “to intimidate and disconcert.” … But a new collectivity is also thereby born, as in a Church. When the fascist squads in Italy went out on their punitive expeditions with their clubs and castor oil, they sang songs together.

“chronological snobbery”

Charles Taylor:

The failure to recognize the interspace [the space of interaction between us and the world] as a third, irreducible domain is what underlies the dichotomous question, ontological or psychological? The distinction here is in fact threefold.

Recognizing this is extremely important for another crucial issue—if I can introduce a digression here: that of understanding the human past. Our attitude in the modern world toward earlier societies who saw themselves as living in an enchanted universe, where animals have souls, and sacred spaces emanate power, is generally one of dismissive condescension. These poor people were just deluded, projecting all sorts of wild features onto a dead, neutral universe. Once we grasp the independent status of the interspace, we can see that this condescension is misplaced.

We [may] not be ready to accept these earlier world views as literal truths, but we can now recognize them as earlier attempts to grapple with issues that we are not that good at dealing with, the more so in that many of us want to deny that they exist. From the standpoint of this discussion, we should rather be examining these earlier outlooks for insights which we could translate into our own terms. We badly need a lesson in humility.

the reality of birds

Ed Yong:

This is my second spring migration since becoming a birder, and this year, I have found it especially grounding.

The birds tend to arrive in a predictable rhythm. I expected Wilson’s warblers—yellow with black caps—to show up at the end of March, and they did. I figured that if I went out today, the blue grosbeaks—rich cobalt with rusty wingbars—would be back, and they were. I knew that calliope hummingbirds—tiny with streaky magenta throats—pass through specifically in the third week of April, and that if I went to places with flowering black sage, I’d find some. I did, and I did. I knew that the local canyon wrens—rusty red, white throat, long bill—would start singing, and if I went to the park where they’re sometimes seen, find the largest rockface, and whistle an imitation of their song, which sounds like a wren that’s running out of batteries, I might tempt one to pop out. I did, and it did.

We are suffering the rule of people so piteous that they can only exist in the world by concocting their own false version of it, and then imprinting that lie onto everyone else. America’s educational infrastructure and scientific enterprise are being sledgehammered to death. Government sites are now prime sources of disinformation. Doublespeak abounds. The attacks, and the feelings of overwhelm they engender, are relentless by design. Against that backdrop, I have found birding—and spring migration, in particular—to be a salve. At a time of chaos, it offers consistency. Amid a sea of lies, it offers reality.

Last week, I stood in a woodland just off the Texas coast, watching songbirds stream in after a long flight over the Gulf of Mexico—a reminder of the connectedness of the world and the utterly arbitrary nature of borders. And despite the slow season, I’ve largely found the birds I wanted to find in the places, times, and habitats in which I expected to find them—a reminder that the world is knowable, understandable, at least partly predictable, and all the more beautiful and wondrous for all of those things. When I scan the news, nothing makes sense. When I step outside and raise my binoculars to the sky, everything does.