L. M. Sacasas:

[N]ot all forms of waiting imply a negative relation to power and agency. For his part, [Harold] Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.” 

We can describe waiting as a condition that is, as it were, imposed from above, but it is also possible to describe urgency, hurry, and immediacy as conditions imposed from above. In such cases, waiting could be conceived of both as a form of resistance and as a warranted insistence on the space for deliberation and reflection, which are the preconditions of freedom. Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace. Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.

We can also frame such waiting as a resistance to what I have elsewhere described as the enclosure of the human psyche. But to get there, let’s backtrack just a bit. It seems to me that there is a family resemblance between Pascal’s explorations of a spiritual restlessness that cannot abide inactivity and Bergson’s elision of waiting and being. In both cases, we come painfully close to something more basic and real than the illusions with which we ordinarily make do. 

To put matter this way recalls how the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.” “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see,” Murdoch argued, “that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.” And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” Thus, in her account, “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.”

The line from waiting to the form of freedom as contact with the real that Murdoch is advocating runs through attention. Accurate vision, a form of seeing that is indistinguishable from love in its selflessness and which generates a freedom from fantasy and for action, arises from attention, which following Simone Weil, Murdoch defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” “It is a task to come to see the world as it is,” Murdoch acknowledges, and that task is chiefly the task of patiently and lovingly paying attention.

[…]

To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance. It is to learn to see independently of our desire to do as we ought. It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.

Also worth noting:

Reading Schweizer’s book, I discovered the lovely notion of “Sabbath eyes” articulated by Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia. “The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes,” Adorno wrote. “They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”

Sabbath eyes, in Schweizer’s lovely summation, are eyes that “rest on their object.” May we strive to see with such eyes in this new year.

One day, Pooh was walking along on a mission to find the lost tail of his friend Eeyore…

It was a fine spring morning in the forest as he started out. Little soft clouds played happily in a blue sky, skipping from time to time in front of the sun as if they had come to put it out, and then sliding away suddenly so that the next might have his turn. Through them and between them the sun shone bravely; and a copse which had worn its firs all the year round seemed old and dowdy now beside the new green lace which the beeches had put on so prettily. Through copse and spinney marched Bear; down open slopes of gorse and heather, over rocky beds of streams, up steep banks of sandstone into the heather again; and so at last, tired and hungry, to the Hundred Acre Wood. For it was in the Hundred Acre Wood that Owl lived.

“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” said Bear to himself, “it’s Owl who knows something about something,” he said, “or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh,” he said. “Which it is,” he added. “So there you are.”

Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:

PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.

Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:

PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.

These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.

Winnie-the-Pooh read the two notices very carefully, first from left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some of it, from right to left. Then, to make quite sure, he knocked and pulled the knocker, and he pulled and knocked the bell-rope, and he called out in a very loud voice, “Owl! I require an answer! It’s Bear speaking.” And the door opened, and Owl looked out.

“Hallo, Pooh,” he said. “How’s things?”

“Terrible and Sad,” said Pooh, “because Eeyore, who is a friend of mine, has lost his tail. And he’s Moping about it. So could you very kindly tell me how to find it for him?”

“Well,” said Owl, “the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”

“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh. “For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”

“It means the Thing to Do.”

“As long as it means that, I don’t mind,” said Pooh humbly.

“The thing to do is as follows. First, Issue a Reward. Then——”

“Just a moment,” said Pooh, holding up his paw. “What do we do to this—what you were saying? You sneezed just as you were going to tell me.”

“I didn’t sneeze.”

“Yes, you did, Owl.”

“Excuse me, Pooh, I didn’t. You can’t sneeze without knowing it.”

“Well, you can’t know it without something having been sneezed.”

“What I said was, ‘First Issue a Reward’.”

“You’re doing it again,” said Pooh sadly.

“A Reward!” said Owl very loudly. “We write a notice to say that we will give a large something to anybody who finds Eeyore’s tail.”

“I see, I see,” said Pooh, nodding his head.

Of course, Pooh gets distracted by the grumblings in his belly, while Owl goes “on and on, using longer and longer words.” But this does not prevent the simple bear, standing again outside Owl’s house, from finally noticing what the wordy Owl misses.

“Handsome bell-rope, isn’t it?” said Owl.

Pooh nodded.

“It reminds me of something,” he said, “but I can’t think what. Where did you get it?”

“I just came across it in the Forest. It was hanging over a bush, and I thought at first somebody lived there, so I rang it, and nothing happened, and then I rang it again very loudly, and it came off in my hand, and as nobody seemed to want it, I took it home, and——”

“Owl,” said Pooh solemnly, “you made a mistake. Somebody did want it.”

“Who?”

“Eeyore. My dear friend Eeyore. He was—he was fond of it.”

“Fond of it?”

“Attached to it,” said Winnie-the-Pooh sadly.

So with these words he unhooked it, and carried it back to Eeyore; and when Christopher Robin had nailed it on in its right place again, Eeyore frisked about the forest, waving his tail so happily that Winnie-the-Pooh came over all funny, and had to hurry home for a little snack of something to sustain him. And, wiping his mouth half an hour afterwards, he sang to himself proudly:

Who found the Tail?
“I,” said Pooh,
“At a quarter to two
(Only it was quarter to eleven really),
“I found the Tail!”

Read the whole little story here; I haven’t excluded much.

Presented without comment (by me at least):

Demographic collapse is the good news.

Falling in love and having babies is among the most natural and powerful impulses a human being can have. If billions of people are just vaguely saying they “don’t feel like it”, something has gone profoundly wrong, and the appropriate response is not a symptomatic policy band-aid.

If you find yourself trying to justify or sell this basic human imperative, as one lifestyle choice among many, or as a vehicle for delivering some other good — or, God forbid, as a means of wringing a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system — you’ve already lost.

People aren’t having babies because the system they live within is profoundly unnatural and anti-human, and it needs to fail.

Trying to make people breed in order to save that system is precisely backwards. The only good reason to care about the economy, or the budget deficit, or house prices, or the state of the military, is because those factors either support, or suppress — or, worst of all, derange — healthy family formation.

Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to liveas psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way.

This means that the processes that generate our present predicament really are self-terminating — which is very good news.

This, says Mary Harrington, is “Either more or very much less pessimistic than the Kingsnorth take on modernity, depending on your priors.”

Okay, fine, I’ll comment. I don’t hate “liberalism” enough, nor do I have enough knowledge or wisdom, to cheer along here. But I certainly nod, because I do hate the anti-human nature of the system being referred to. And not enough defenders — today’s poor-weather defenders or, if you can find them, real defenders — of “liberalism” take this seriously.

In any case, it’s not simply good news, as the post goes on to explain, if that wasn’t obvious enough. This collapse — or transformation, or whatever — will not go gently into that good night. Brace for rage, rage against the dying of the light and all that.

Oh, and there’s specifically good news, too. There will be Opportunities!… for the courageous, the energetic, and the excellent.

Whoever Mr. Kevin Dolan, the apparent writer of the Substack above, is, I do not endorse him, at least not based on a 5-minute perusal of his writing. And I’m guessing his ilk will mostly succeed in adding to that rage — calmly, with unwitting cleverness and composure, of course, to go along with all the excellence.

I don’t get the impression that the excellence he has in mind is the right kind, though I get the impression that he thinks it is exactly that.

But I think there are going to be some weird overlaps to navigate in the now and near future. For example, the only one who has put a finger on my own hesitation with Paul Kingsnorth, and only for a brief moment (most of his thoughts were as Blaaah as others’), was David Bentley Hart, when he pointed to some odd overlapping “comfort” Kingsnorth seemed to have, “sitting down with Wendell Berry one night and with Eric Metaxas the next and seeming equally at home with both.” I don’t think that’s entirely a fair statement, but I get it. I know what my gut reaction was when I saw he’d done a Metaxas interview. (I have not listened to it.) But, I also have to admit that I don’t know that I’m entirely justified. I might be right about my discomfort with the interview; or I might be wrong about my purity-test revulsion to it. (I’m much encouraged by Jennifer Herdt’s recent piece on James Pennington: “Today, when purity-seeking and critique so often stymie our capacity for commitment, Pennington embodies a generative alternative.”)

I anticipate more such headache as the wave of 2026 crashes over us.

No way out but through, I suppose.

‘I do not know which to hope,’ said Boromir grimly: ‘that Gandalf will find what he seeks, or that coming to the cliff we shall find the gates lost for ever. All choices seem ill, and to be caught between wolves and the wall the likeliest chance. Lead on!’

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Don’t worry (I say to myself but also to anyone reading), my next post will be from Winnie-the-Pooh, who speaks to me more clearly and luflyly.

Austin Kleon:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; 

Death closes all: but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

…I have been thinking a lot lately about, not just the shortfalls of writing, but the… — I’ve struggled to find the right word here, but it’s very close to corruption, the at least nearly built-in corrupting capacity of writing.

Describing the Fall in Genesis, Paul Kingsnorth says, “Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn … A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again.… We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.”

In an interview with Russel Moore, he puts it this way:

Writing is perhaps the original technology, language is the original technology. The minute you have a language like the one we’re communicating with, you’re subtly abstracting the world and turning reality into words and symbols. So it may be that the minute that humans can develop abstract language, and certainly when they later were going to write it down, they’ve already distanced themselves in some dangerous way from the natural world.

Tara Isabell Burton, one of the many on my list of bad reviewers of Kingsnorth, points out the obvious: “And yet we had language in the garden—Adam names the animals in Genesis 2:20. Christ himself is understood, in standard Christian theology, as the incarnate Word.” She also adds that “Genesis 1 reminds us that human beings are to be understood in the image and likeness of God: an image and likeness that traditionally has been associated, from Irenaeus to Augustine to Luther to Herder to Pannenberg, with our intellectual and creative capacities.”

What an impressive list of names!

I’m no theologian, nor even an especially wide reader of theologians, but I’m fairly certain there is a long history of admitting that, really, we have no idea what precisely is meant by the term imago Dei. In “standard Christian theology,” we understand that we are made in the image and likeness of God. That’s it. “Traditionally,” anything more is quite contestable. Within the tradition, association of that image and likeness (these are two different Hebrew words, but almost certainly used synonymously in the creation narrative) with our “intellectual and creative capacities” has a long history, but it is one strand of interpretation, and even a cursory reading reveals it to be a pretty weak and very complicated one.

Irenaeus, to take one of Burton’s examples, had a much wider “body, soul, and spirit” understanding of the imago Dei. In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus wrote,

Now God shall be glorified in His handiwork, fitting it so as to be conformable to, and modelled after, His own Son. For by the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit, man, and not [merely] a part of man, was made in the likeness of God. Now the soul and the spirit are certainly a part of the man, but certainly not the man; for the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God.

Irenaeus may have also associated it with the intellect — though, mainly understood as the quality of a rational soul and morally free agent capable of knowing God — and he may have attempted to differentiate between “image” and “likeness” and their pre-and post-Fall and eschatological status, but it’s hardly a thing you’d flippantly highlight as standard or traditional theology when it so clearly is always-has-been-always-will-be contested theology.

Again, I’m no theologian, but I also think a look at the theology of any of the names Burton appeals to, including the very post-Enlightenment Herder, would almost infinitely complicate her hand-waving summary. In any case, we don’t know — have never known — what the image of God is because the Bible does not say.

(Kingsnorth’s book “is just a bit too simplistic” Burton’s subtitle reads. In my estimation, one of them is being “a bit too simplistic” — and it ain’t Kingsnorth. In fact, it’s more than a little ironic that one would casually assume “traditional” association of man’s God-image with our intellectual capacities. Take just one further point: Regardless of one’s view of the Fall, you’d be hard-pressed to find many theological views that would not see human intellect as being corrupted by it. Yet, as Karl Barth puts it, “neither in the rest of the Old Testament nor in the New is there any trace of the abrogation of this ideal state, or of the partial or complete destruction of the imago Dei.” Whatever the image and likeness of God is, the Bible doesn’t seem to associate the Fall with a loss of that image or likeness. Nor does it, or its writers, seem interested at all in defining that God-image for us. So it’s “traditional association with our intellectual and creative capacities” is dubious and, yes, simplistic.)

Regardless, Kingsnorth has not said anything about the image of God. He is entertaining a theological thought experiment — not a very wild one in my view — where somewhere in early human prehistory language creates an abstraction and division between us and the world, and between us and God. And any normal person, from Mom to Dad to Steve to Ashley to Joe, who has tried to follow the intense intellectual arch of a Pannenberg (whose imago Dei is found not in something called our “intellect” but in an “openness to the world”) will know that Kingsnorth has a very good point: the creative intellect of great theologians can very quickly abstract you from the world. There’s a very good, very healthy reason that most people don’t have or want the Summa Theologica sitting on their shelves. In fact, it’s tempting to wonder how much more love and attention there might be in the world if all such endeavors would start where Aquinas’s ended: “All I have written is so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”

In something of an uncomfortable way, Burton seems to me to be demonstrating Kingsnorth’s point. Dumbed down, disorienting, and deceptively graspable theology — and anthropology — results from this kind of writing. Lazy is the summary, and lazy the dismissal.

Which really gets at one of my biggest and, frankly, across the board gripes with all the “there’s nothing new here” reviewers of Paul Kingsnorth — and especially the “Wellll, I wouldn’t go that far” dissociating safe-distancers and subtle, unwitting, annoying perpetuators of the status quo. Lazy, boring, and annoying is their dismissal. (BlaaaAAh!, would be my wordless summary.)

Let me partially concede an obvious point, although I think it’s important that I don’t fully concede it. All of this has required language: Kingsnorth needs language, Burton needs language, theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Pannenberg need language, etc., etc. All of them are reading, all of them are writing. (So am I, you may have noticed.) And the kind of language we’re all using could, in theory, be a neutral medium of communication and creativity, ready for glory or disgrace. (Kingsnorth doesn’t, as far as I can tell, offer a hard distinction between language and the written word, which is fine, I think, for the kind of thing he’s wondering about.) But as many of us have learned so well from folks like Neil postman, mediums ain’t neutral.

In fact, Postman would, I’m quite sure, have a jolly good chat with Kingsnorth on exactly this subject. In the first chapter of his Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman quotes Ernst Cassirer:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

As well as Northrop Frye:

[T]he critics of the god Thoth, the inventor of writing,… did not realize that the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

That sounds pretty darn conversant with Kingsnorth to me. Give me a Neil Postman, and not one of his lazy academic “fans,” who can actually engage with what Kingsnorth is saying. There’s paradox here that these guys have an appreciation for. Postman, I think, loved the written word. And I’m guessing Kingsnorth does too. But Postman would not have balked at the power — even the portcullis-like power — of language.

That’s what I mean by not fully conceding the point, and it’s why I’m annoyed by lazy dismissals. You will miss the significance of what Kingsnorth is saying if you try to make language neutral to your experience of the world, and you will certainly miss it if you use pathetically referenced bible passages to excuse a shrug.

I have no idea what precisely the Fall was (I doubt it was something punctiliar at all) and I don’t know what the imago Dei is (I doubt, also, that is one thing, but tend to think of it as relational — God’s attention and affection toward us in the world, and the infinite relational stuff that follows). I do think there is something significant, and significantly missed, in Burton’s reference to Christ as the incarnate Word (you know, that “standard Christian theology” business), something that would help her, and us, understand Kingsnorth’s point.

We are what we are — glorious, fallen, intelligent, stupid, emotional, stoical, relational, solitary, and language-saturated animals. The question to ask is, In what direction are we, are they, are you using language? Burton — again, dumbly in my view — reminds us that Christ is the incarnate Word, as though that pointer solves the issue. Keeping in mind that “Word” is a (less than adequate) translation of Logos, which, like the image language in Genesis, is a borrowed term, it’s also something we are not told anything about. What we are told is that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The direction is from “word” to incarnation; we have a tendency to go from the incarnate to the word. And the point to take seriously is that language tends in that separating, knowledge-over-communion direction. (Think of the ways that Adam and Eve talked themselves into eating the fruit; think of God intervening to confuse language at the Tower of Babel; and think of the reversal of that confusion finding its one and only true fulfillment in the incarnating Word.)

The astonishing thing for us humans is not that we are gifted with language and creativity but that we might imitate our Creator, taking our intellectual, creative, language-animal, tower- and head-in-the-clouds selves and incarnating them by attending, with real loving attention, to the world and the people around us.

And yes, that attention can certainly involve words — if we can keep them from distracting and abstracting us.

I feel no need to defend Kingsnorth to the hilt. But what I do think, quite strenuously, is that you will get so much more to chew on in your real, human, embodied life if you take him seriously. And you’ll get much less wishy-washy nonsense if you ignore the simplistic winkers at the status quo who review him.

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In a previous post that basically got this one rolling, I quoted Rachel Aviv from her article on Oliver Sacks’s private writings, which revealed a wild lack of honesty in his published words:

Sacks once told a reporter that he hoped to be remembered as someone who “bore witness”—a term often used within medicine to describe the act of accompanying patients in their most vulnerable moments, rather than turning away. To bear witness is to recognize and respond to suffering that would otherwise go unseen. But perhaps bearing witness is incompatible with writing a story about it.

Something is lost — a witness deceptively born — when life is converted to words. Sacks did it extremely dishonestly, but the essential problem with language is one I think Aviv would appreciate. And it’s a point worth keeping in mind — even as we, sometimes quite gloriously*, use words.

This will all be heavy on mind in the coming year.

__

*Everyone knows that Wendell Berry’s novels were also not affected by the Fall. Rest assured, Jeremy, if you are reading this 🙂 But seriously, Berry’s use of language is incarnating word-flow par excellence, as any reader of his can attest.

I’m officially adding an organ-powered silent to my bucket list.

Alex Ross:

Audiences tend to come away from theatre-organ screenings in a jubilant mood, and I think I know the reason. Here, passive consumption becomes active and creative: the performer reacts with individual spontaneity while summoning sounds of orchestral heft. The technological mastery of cinematic spectacle is humanized by the immediacy of live performance. You understand why an artist like Murnau considered silent film the perfect medium. ♦

Kevin Williamson:

Donald Trump is no kind of Christian—he is a toxic blend of atheist and idolator—but he knows that those in the pews are his most unshakeable supporters and that he is going to need all of the support he can get as his failure to deliver on his absurd economic promises becomes a more painful and undeniable fact of everyday life for millions of Americans watching the national debt skyrocket even faster than their grocery bills. Trump wants to pose as a crusader, coming to the aid of persecuted Christians—but only when doing so is a very low-cost proposition. It is not clear that the abuse of Christians in Nigeria is anything more than incidental to the general banditry and oppression of Lakurawa et al.—it takes too credulous a view of the fig leaf of “zakat” covering ordinary robbery—but there are places in the world where the active, brutal, ruthless repression of Christians is a real thing: In the so-called People’s Republic of China, for example—but Trump is far too low a coward to try to do anything about that, in much that same way the Russian shadow fleet is permitted to flout U.S. sanctions while Venezuelan boats are blown out of the war on unsupported drug-war pretexts that would not render the attacks any less illegal or immoral even if they were true. It is not the case that all bullies are cowards, but many bullies are cowards, and Trump is one of those, as are many of the men and women who serve him.

… Every time Putin murders a hospital ward full of expectant mothers, you can count on Donald Trump to out-Mahatma even Mohandas K. Gandhi himself in speaking of peace. But a carelessly executed and bloodthirsty crusade on the probably pretextual and certainly exaggerated assertion that the victims of ordinary banditry, terrible as their situation is, are Christian martyrs threatened by scary-looking, fez-wearing, black Muslims? Sign the Trumpkins up for that.

Matthew Crawford:

There is a cloud of lousiness that hangs over many products and services these days, as though the people responsible for making it, or doing it, weren’t too concerned about the result. Sometimes this can shade over from insouciance to real perversity. As my friend Matt Feeney put it to me about a year ago, “Capitalism seems to have moved into an actively misanthropic stage. Corporations don’t just hate their workers. They hate their customers.”

Tee hee. Yeah, it’s almost as though the people responsible aren’t concerned with the quality of the results…