Luigi Giussani:

We are distinguished from other creatures inasmuch as we are aware of that by which we live; this consciousness is not complete if it does not touch the foundation from which it arises; the arc of reflection does not realize its fullest dimensions if it does not arrive at the point from which the I with all its gestures breaks forth. The ideal person—a person who is completely realized- should possess this uninterrupted awareness. Jesus said, “Pray always.”

But this awareness, except for a very particular grace and therefore a very particular function, is impossible for us. The transparency of the presence of our own being is normally opaque. We find ourselves truly—that is, we see ourselves according to this dependence on God—only intermittently, more or less frequently. The ideal which Jesus dreamed of can be translated existentially like this: “pray more than you can.” It is the formula of a conscience in front of the ideal; it is the formula of freedom for one who is on a journey. It is a formula that comprises our entire existence, with all its various limitations and the mutability of its conditions, and at the same time is a formula that inexorably affirms the incessant demand of a duty, whose call no limit or condition can silence.

Carl Sandberg:

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Al Zolynas:

I sit down on my desk to wait,
and it hits me from nowhere — a sudden,
sweet, almost painful love for my students.

“Nevermind,” I want to cry out.
“It doesn’t matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything’s
a fragment and everything’s not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can’t separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we’ll ever know of tomorrow!”

Instead, I keep a coward’s silence.
The music stops abruptly;
they finish their work,
and we go through the right answers,
which is to say
we separate the fragments from the whole.

Lars Mytting:

Yet the return of the log fire can hardly be reduced to a matter of money. Many people feel that a living fire gives a rich experience. We are drawn to the fire, just as we once gathered around the flames in former times. For many there is a qualitative difference in the heat supplied by a radiator and that provided by a woodburning stove. A stove can glow with heat. Your feet won’t get warm when you turn on the inverter, and a radiator has to be on for quite some time before it will drive the chill from a cold house. Electric radiators seldom deliver more than two thousand watts, whereas even a small woodstove is easily able to generate six thousand watts, and many stoves as much as fourteen thousand watts. Scientifically speaking, there is no measurable difference between the heat generated by electricity and that produced by combustion, but the body reacts in a different way to the more intense heat from the stove, not least because modern fireplaces with glass doors radiate heat. An ordinary electric radiator or heat pump warms only the air in the room, but flames and glowing embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation that has much the same characteristics as sunlight. Warming occurs in the skin and the body as the radiation arrives, with an immediacy and an intensity that bring a feeling of well-being and security. The indoor climate is also slightly changed. The consumption of oxygen encourages a degree of air circulation, and the stove absorbs a quantity of dust. These factors, combined with the smell of wood and a little woodsmoke, and the sight of the ever-changing play of flames, connect us with the primordial magic of the fireplace.

Something else to consider is the way the woodburning stove brings people into a very direct relationship with the weather. You are your own thermostat, you are the connecting link between the subzero temperatures outside and the relative warmth within. When you heat with wood you have to go out to the woodpile, come back in again, and start your fight against the cold. It’s bitter, and it bites, but you can do something about it. In this one small but vital arena you are in touch with the bare necessities of life, and in that moment you know the same deep sense of satisfaction that the cave dweller knew.

…wood is [not merely] a source of energy; it is … an extremely adaptable form of energy. It can be shared with your neighbor, it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t need cable, a match will light it, it can be stored for year after year, and even inferior-quality wood will still do the job for you. There is peculiar security in the fact that this is energy in solid and tactile form. You can carry it into your house and know that the weight of what you are carrying represents exactly the amount of heat you will be getting.

Meša Selimović:

And there you are, those were my only three opportunities, which, in fact, were not opportunities at all, but just false hopes, about as reliable as a cloud in the sky. Afterward, I didn’t even get this.

I went from office to office, from one man to another, but I got nowhere. Nobody was ever available. Minor officials heard me with boredom and disinterest, with blank looks, without even malice.

I spent hours sitting in waiting rooms, but those for whom I was waiting never appeared. They’d either crept in through the window or flown in like birds or were invisible, or perhaps there was some secret underground entrance that defended them from those of us who existed in a state of waiting.

My words sounded tired, my story tedious. People were bored at the sight of me. I’d become a man asking a favor, the lowest form of life on earth. There’s nothing lower.

Gradually, despite my efforts to avoid it, I began to feel a wall around me, invisible but impenetrable. It stood there like a fortress, without exit or approach. I was constantly beating my head against a brick wall. I was battered, bloody, covered in lumps and bruises, but I didn’t cease trying. For there always seemed to be a way round it. There had to be a crack somewhere; it couldn’t all be wall. And I wouldn’t give in to being walled up like this, as if I were a living shadow whom none could see but who saw all. Who talked in vain, shouted in vain, unheard, a nothing. It didn’t need much before they’d begin walking through me, as if I were made of air, or wading through me, as if I were water.

I felt fear. How could they have killed me like this? I was not wounded, no one had killed me, I was not dead, but I didn’t exist. “For God’s sake, people, can’t you see me?” I’d say. “Can’t you hear me?” I’d say. But my face did not enter their vision, nor my voice their ear.

I did not exist.

Or was I dreaming this impossible situation that defied experience? For I was alive, I moved, I knew what I wanted.

I refused to be nonexistent. They could beat me, shut me away; they could kill me; hadn’t they killed enough people for no reason at all? But had they made a ghost of me? Why had they deprived me of my ability to fight?

I wanted to be a man! Let me fight like a man!

Useless!

The empty space around me grew ever emptier, my ridiculous rebellion ever quieter.

Andrew Davison:

The worries that de Lubac’s opponents presented about a natural desire for the supernatural can be addressed. For one thing, nature itself is already an entirely gratuitous gift. Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. To any attempt to rope off the natural from the supernatural we can reply “Too late!” To risk an understatement, the creation of everything out of nothing is not something that belongs to nature. At the outset, creation has the character of superfluity and excess that we otherwise associate with miracle and grace. […]

Taking a step back again and thinking again about the foundations of our theme in terms of the words we use, de Lubac has yet more to offer. He was keen that we should use the words “nature” and “supernatural.” That’s not two nouns (nature and supernature), or even two adjectives (natural and supernatural). It’s a noun and an adjective. De Lubac’s idea was that we are only ever talking about what God makes (nature) and the state to which God might elevate it (a supernatural state). God does not make a new and independent sort of thing (supernature); he takes what he has made and pours his grace upon it. God takes what he has created and while leaving it still entirely created, raises it up. That elevation doesn’t turn nature into something else, as if it were no longer nature. God doesn’t erase anything and start again.

The Tipsy Teetotaler ن:

One of the battles in many if not most Supreme Court cases is the “level of generality” of the “question presented.” The higher the level of generality, the more the court can just make up answers.

In the article linked in this reply, for instance, the discussion is about the court in Obergefell (the same-sex marriage case) deciding that the case was about a very-high-generality “fundamental right to marry,” concluding that there was such a right and that the meaning of marriage had expanded to include spouses of the same sex. But It could have asked, at lower level of generality, “is there a fundamental constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex?” That would have tended to throw it back into how marriage was understood at the founding and the adoption of relevant constitutional amendments, with a likely opposite holding.

That “the prime directive of the Constitution is liberty” feels like the ne plus ultra of high generality – so high a level as to be useless or to moot the whole text of the Constitution in favor of WWLD – what would Liberty do?

George Packer:

Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.

Since Trump’s return to office, and with Kirk’s murder, the roles have completely reversed. The left, which not long ago perfected mob-sponsored silencing, is (rightly) outraged at the Trump administration’s top-down cancel culture. Meanwhile, those former free-speech absolutists Trump, Vance, and Stephen Miller have become lord high executioners of thought crime. If a new Harper’s Letter defending the value of open inquiry were written today, many of the original letter’s fiercest critics would rush to sign it. Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.

Wendell Berry (1987):

I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

Nicholas Carr (2015):

While the presentation of text on shared computer networks does open up a vast territory for comment, what [Alan] Jacobs terms “digital textuality” is hardly promoting the kind of self-effacing commentary he yearns for. The two essential innovations of computerized writing and reading — the word processor’s cut-and-paste function and the hypertext of the web — make text malleable and provisional. Presented on a computer, the written work is no longer an artifact to be contemplated and pondered but rather raw material to be worked over by the creative I — not a sculpture but a gob of clay. Reading becomes a means of re-writing. Textual technologies make text submissive and subservient to the reader, not the other way around. They encourage, toward the text, not the posture of the monk but the posture of the graffiti artist. Is it any wonder that most online comments feel as though they were written in spray paint?

I’m exaggerating, a bit. It’s possible to sketch out an alternative history of the net in which thoughtful reading and commentary play a bigger role. In its original form, the blog, or web log, was more a reader’s medium than a writer’s medium. And one can, without too much work, find deeply considered comment threads spinning out from online writings. But the blog turned into a writer’s medium, and readerly comments remain the exception, as both Jacobs and [Andrew] Piper agree. One of the dreams for the web, expressed through a computer metaphor, was that it would be a “read-write” medium rather than a “read-only” medium. In reality, the web is more of a write-only medium, with the desire for self-expression largely subsuming the act of reading. So I’m doubtful about Jacobs’s suggestion that the potential of our new textual technologies is being frustrated by our cultural tendencies. The technologies and the culture seem of a piece. We’re not resisting the tools; we’re using them as they were designed to be used.

I can see Wendell Berry now, kicked back in his chair, pencil and notebook in hand, thoughts coming and going through a large multi-pane window, just out of ear-shot of this whole conversation.