Michael Weinman:

As [Hannah Arendt] sees things, the “professional thinker” in the modern age—the theorist operating in academe—has forged an amalgam of the dispassionate and disinterested pursuit of wisdom performed by the solitary philosopher and the passionate and profoundly interested pursuit of pure, unworldly, goodness performed by the lonely saint. What is destroyed in that powerful amalgam—for which Arendt (quoting Alfred North Whitehead) gives ultimate credit to René Descartes and Cartesian radical doubt—is the very possibility of common sense: “Cartesian reason is entirely based ‘on the implicit assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced’…. For common sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses [were] fitted into the common world…now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. The sense now was called common merely because it happened to be common to all.^“ In other words, Arendt argues, with the triumph of Descartes, the common of “common sense” diametrically shifts from the world to its opposite, the inner faculty—thought—that forms the object that the sense perceives. Quite literally, modern Cartesian individuals become a world unto themselves: Small wonder that the prevalence of alternative facts becomes an ever more salient issue. […]

Arendt argues that the ability to act politically—in principle given to all human beings by virtue of their birth—is constrained by the conditions of modern life, with professionalization and its compartmentalization as one key element of that constraint. To act responsibly, human beings require a practical capacity to make themselves visible to their fellows in order, together, to open up the shared world in their unique ways. Such reflexivity is facilitated by the ability to think politically, if only that ability is actually practiced, such that reflective judgment is actually exercised in public. For Arendt, this is both the means and the end of her own “exercises in political thinking,” which are intended to help political actors understand the common world and communicate in it in a common political language. These exercises are the ongoing practice of reflection in which we engage together with her as we read, accept, reject, and modify her judgments in conversation with her work and that of others. When we do so, we and she are not “doing theory”; rather, we are thinking in concert against theory.

If we acknowledge that for Arendt, theorizing was an attempt to think about and understand phenomena of the world, and that her judging was more a practice than a theory, we notice that she aimed not to display a theory of judgment for others to implement but to describe a lived experience of judging as political thinking and to explore ways we can make the common world better. Or, of course, fail in the attempt to do so. The core of this experience is uncertainty. There is no human being in the world who always makes the right judgment. We never know in a particular present moment if our judgment is “right” or if the future will confirm its truthfulness.

Unlike that human birthright, action, the ability to judge requires development and improvement. Since the common world is a political space that people share with one another in its plurality, and since this world is by definition subject to constant change and development, the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized. The wealth of perspectives that can be taken into account expands again and again, and varies depending on the question the person making the judgment aims to address. Political thinking is therefore not a competence acquired once and for all, but must be grasped in its shifting dynamics.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh:

The island from which I come had no choice, really, than to find a name for these dancing, beating, healing places where the veil between so very many things is thin, where it has been known to lift, right before our humble, grateful eyes.

The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces—those in-between places—those unnamable places, not to be found on any map. Are these thin places spaces where we can more easily hear the land, the earth, talking to us? Or are they places in which we are able to feel more freely our own inner selves? Do places such as these therefore hold power?

We have built up a narrative over many years—decades, centuries?—of ‘nature’ as ‘other’. There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide humanity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the land and water that we share with one another—and with other species. What do we mean when we talk about ‘nature’? About ‘place’? I want to know what it all means. I need to try to understand. When we are in a place where the manmade constructs of the world seem as though they have crumbled, where time feels like it no longer exists, that feeling of separation fades away. We are reminded, in the deepest, rawest parts of our being, that we are nature. It is in and of us. We are not superior or inferior, separate or removed; our breathing, breaking, ageing, bleeding, making and dying are the things of this earth. We are made up of materials we see in the places around us, and we cannot undo the blood and bone that forms us.

In thin places people often say they experience being taken ‘out of themselves’, or ‘nearer to god’. The places I return to over and over—both physically, and in my memory—certainly do hold power to make me feel light and hopeful, as though I am not quite of this world. Of much more power, though, is the way in which these places leave me feeling rooted—as utterly and completely in the landscape as I ever feel, as much a part of it as the bones and excrement that lie beneath my feet, as the salt and silt that course through the water. For me, it is in this that the absolute and unrivalled beauty of thin places lies.

(This also reminds of a roof nail from 2021, about the dialectic nature of trees.)

“At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1:12-13)

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:6-7)

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Wikipedia:

The English word Lent is a shortened form of the Old English word lencten, meaning “spring season”, as its Dutch language cognate lente (Old Dutch lentin) still does today. A dated term in German, Lenz (Old High German lenzo), is also related. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the shorter form (? Old Germanic type *laŋgito– , *laŋgiton-) seems to be a derivative of *laŋgo– long […] and may possibly have reference to the lengthening of the days as characterizing the season of spring’.

In languages spoken where Christianity was earlier established, such as Greek and Latin, the term signifies the period dating from the 40th weekday before Easter. In modern Greek the term is Σαρακοστή (Sarakostí), derived from the earlier Τεσσαρακοστή (Tessarakostí), meaning “fortieth”. The corresponding word in Latin, quadragesima(“fortieth”), is the origin of the terms used in Latin-derived languages and in some others.

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Jack Gilbert:

Horses at Midnight without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Naomi Shihab Nye (wonderfully read and illuminated by Pádraig Ó Tuama here):

I FEEL SORRY FOR JESUS

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember ‘Telephone’, that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

I wasn’t sure what this would turn out to be, but in the end it seemed to fit with the Poem, Prose, & Praise theme, which is something that I thought was going to be a bigger Covid project three years ago, but it turned out to be just a fun couple writing activities.

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IT HAS COME TO THIS

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I have been thinking about this poem by Wisława Szymborska every day since I read it on one of the flights coming back from Ukraine in December:

In a sense, it’s obvious why the poem would be meaningful. Coming from a hospital in eastern Ukraine, how does the daily, constant sound of rockets and artillery, destruction vibrating nearly every air molecule, compare to time off in Savannah, Georgia. One train and three flights, and I’m back on the other side of the world. How do you go, in less than two days, from a war-torn oblast, with Smerch rockets rattling the doors to the basement you’re sleeping in, to a peaceful walk through Forsyth Park with your dog? Last week, I sat on brick steps that today lie blown to pieces and looked out through empty autumn branches onto a cityscape that might as well have been colored in black and white. This week, I’ll be taking the brick sidewalk down a bright and sunny Bull Street to the Marsh Island Channel, surrounded the entire time by evergreen oak and Spanish moss that seem to have no end, in space or in time. The contrast between the two could not be more stark. And yet, in the middle of that transition, I find myself on a plane reading a poem that seems to say that the movement of an oval pebble with the tide could somehow be commensurable to my movement across the globe.

Still, I can’t help loving this poem. It helps that I don’t think the poem is saying that one thing is never any more or less significant than another. Obviously, for us—each of us or all of us together—there will be moments in life that are more significant, more condensed with meaning than other moments. But the poem is at least saying that we can’t know, with absolute certainty, what is and is not ultimately important—even for ourselves. And the reason we can’t know, says the poem, is because “the tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.”

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The other day, I was flipping through an old commonplace notebook from 2018, and I came across a line from this passage in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun:

The phrase “beyond interpretation” has a lot of depth. It’s not beyond experience or observation, not beyond meaningfulness or praise, but it is beyond interpretation. I think the point, at least for me, is not that it is beyond interpretation but that it should be beyond interpretation. It belongs there. It should be the way things are for us. There’s no reason, it seems to me, that “the extravagant, fish-eye view” of our own lives should be any less confounding, whether we are standing at the Grand Canyon or standing anywhere else.

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When I thought about trying to write something, anything (though I admit, it isn’t much) about coming back from Ukraine, the first thing that I could think of was this: “Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.” In fact, for several weeks, those two sentences are almost all that came to mind.

I walked into that sandbagged hospital in November and one of the first people I saw was my friend Bill. He looked at me, shook his finger in my direction, smiled and said, “You said you weren’t coming back.” And he was right. When I left Ukraine at the end of March last year, I did say I wasn’t going back, and I did think that I wasn’t going back. But like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I am becoming more and more okay with this.

Also in that little commonplace book is a quote from Gilbert Meilaender’s The Way That Leads There, and it is one of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite thoughts in the world:

We cannot really know ourselves, Augustine concludes. Only God manages that—only God can catch the human heart, see it whole, and hold it still. Hence, only God can discern the ultimate significance of any moment in a person’s life.

We don’t know all that brought us here or all that will bring us there—or even where “there” is. We don’t know exactly what it will take to make the world right, or totally wrong, nor how big or small or numerous the steps might be that send us in one direction or the other. To step back for a moment and to view myself as one tiny speck within that intricate and dense tapestry—whether that speck-that-is-me is on this side of the world or the other, in a hospital or a coffee shop—is to see that any moment in life might be “bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful or more frightening than we know.” And hopefully then we might admit that humility is the most necessary human quality, that life has seasons as well as days and moments, and that I cannot know which ones will ultimately be the most fruitful or the most meaningful.

Sometimes, all I can say is, “It has come to this: I am sitting in a coffee shop.” And sometimes, that’s enough, that’s all I need to know right now.

Peggy Noonan, on last week’s Superbowl ads:

What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.