Francisco X. Stork:

A group of engineers from MIT were asked to design a windshield for airplanes that could withstand the impact of geese crashing into it. When they finally invented what they thought was the right kind of glass, they had to devise a realistic method for testing it. So they came up with the plan of installing the new windshield on a train and then shooting a dead turkey, the kind you get at a supermarket, onto the moving train through a bazooka-like device. The speed of the moving train and the speed and weight of the turkey reproduced perfectly the impact of a goose on a flying airplane’s windshield. The experiment was so successful that a group of engineers, this time from Harvard, sought to reproduce it. This time, however, the windshield shattered and the rushing turkey almost decapitated the train’s driver. When the MIT engineers heard of this, they asked the Harvard engineers to describe exactly what they had done. After reading the description of the Harvard experiment, the MIT engineers sent back a single sentence message: “Defrost the turkey!”

Improbable as it seems, my friend’s e-mail got me thinking about why I write young-adult books. What if our world is such that at an early age we begin to shield ourselves from its pain and even its beauty by erecting impenetrable windshields? What if what really matters in our lives, the gladness in our heart and the world’s great need, can only be found in that pain and in that beauty, which our self-created shields now prevent us from fully perceiving? Wouldn’t one of the world’s deep needs be to create something that shatters the windshield of the banal, of all those values and worldly ambitions that keep us from experiencing the wonder of being unique and alive and burdened with purpose? And if so, how do you break through the barrier that protects us but also slowly smothers our heart’s breath? Maybe art can do that. Before the windshield fully hardens, at an age when our capacity to feel is heightened, before the numbing fully sets in, a book can break through and plant the questions that will burn and unsettle until they are answered, or at least attended to. Who am I? What am I supposed to do in this life? What matters?

How does art do that? How does it awaken us? For me it seems, the creation of that art involves tapping into the raw materials of my life, the losses and the joys, taking all that and “frosting” it with carefully and patiently constructed craft so that the end product has my flesh and blood, but it is also something more than me. It is art now, a mixture of my experience and of invention, of reality and imagination, of truth and beauty. […]

Is there such a thing as making a mistake in life? Absolutely. People take the wrong jobs for the wrong reason, they squander their talents, they live lives of quiet desperation never realizing who they truly are. But mistakes can be redeemed if we are willing. The wrong turn can take you to the right door, but then you have to open it and step in. I’m beginning to think that there’s no such thing as a wasted life. In ways that I am only barely beginning to fathom, every wrong decision is salvaged and used. The work of art that is our life is constantly shifting, adapting and changing to incorporate our mistakes and in the end what seemed wrong will be right, an indispensable part of the whole.

On the train ride home from my legal job and after I finish writing for the day, I say the same prayer [as in the morning], silently. “My Jesus, I offer you my work today, poor as it is. I know you will put it to good use.”

From the introduction to Tracey K. Smith’s American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time:

For the time that you are reading them, and even after, these poems will collapse the distance between you and fifty different real or imagined people with fifty different outlooks on the human condition.

Among the teachers of modern languages I encountered during all my years in provincial colleges, I only once met a true intellectual, a woman called Marta from Chernovitsy. She once asked me in a great surprise why all those students who thirst after truth and righteousness are always so keen on poetry. This is so, and it is peculiar in Russia. M. once asked me (or himself, rather) what it was that made someone a member of the intelligentsia. He did not use the word itself—this was at a time when it was still a term of abuse, [when “the real intelligentsia was mocked at, and its name was appropriated by those who surrendered”]—but that was what he meant. Was it a university education, he wondered, or attendance in a pre-revolutionary grammar school? No, it was not this. Could it be you attitude toward literature? This he thought was closer, but not quite it. Finally he decided that what really mattered was a person’s feelings about poetry. Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before—it is the golden treasury in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it is a fact.

. . . The new awakening is accompanied by the copying out and reading of poetry, which thus plays its part in setting things in motion again and reviving thought. The keepers of the flame hid in darkened corners, but the flame did not go out. It is there for al to see.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 1970

Revisiting Christian Wiman’s Joy:

True vision, the poem says, is reciprocal: the world looks back at the eye that is strong enough (fortified by memory, alert to goodness) and weak enough (made quiet, the ego not eradicated but refined) to see it. […]

Sometimes joy really can be an intensification of happiness. It can crown and ratify a flourishing life, or be the spiritual fruition of a happiness that is not quite grasped or realized or is gone. But joy can also compromise, even obliterate, happiness. It can reveal a happiness to be so tenuous and shallow that, on the other side of the rupture, you can find yourself with no tenable—or at least no honorable—way back. Or it can disclose a spiritual existence the full realization of which will require some sacrifice—of a very real happiness, say. But to acknowledge that the line is sometimes there is not to admit that it always is. In any event, poetry does not usually refine philosophical definitions so much as weaken one’s need to see them, even as it strengthens the intuitive trust, tolerance for paradox, and general spiritual fluency that are required to thrive without such definitions. […]

Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word “soul.” That sensation more exalting than happiness, less graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged, changed. That seed of being that can bud even in our “circumstance of ice,” as Danielle Chapman puts it, so that faith suddenly is not something one need contemplate, struggle for, or even “have,” really, but is simply there, as the world is there. There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only, like Lucille Clifton—who in the decade during which I was responsible for awarding the annual Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry for lifetime achievement was the one person who let out a spontaneous yawp of delight on the phone—try to make oneself fit to feel the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.

Matthew Boudway:

The law is one thing, morality another; they are always related but never the same. The susceptibility of our politics to moral panics, and of our moral commitments to new laws and legal rulings is a regrettable feature of our national life. Yes, some important legal and political reforms in America, such as the abolition of slavery, began as moral movements, but other moral movements, such as Prohibition, went astray precisely by seeking a legal enforcement of virtue. The law is a teacher, as the new integralists are always reminding us, but woe to the society for which it has become the only effective teacher, or the only meaningful test. A single-minded focus on legal and political reforms often simplifies complex social realities and preempts real moral reflection, replacing the full palette of values—of good and bad, better and worse—with the black-and-white of right and wrong or the gray of moral indifference. This tendency flattens our public morality into a deadening binary of what will land you in jail or get you fired, and what won’t. If it won’t, then, to use the current expression, “It’s all good.” But it isn’t all good. There are social evils to which the appropriate response is not primarily legal or political, just as there are political or legal resolutions that do not settle moral questions. Let both the holdovers of the old Moral Majority and the champions of the Great Awokening take note.

Meghan O’Gieblyn:

Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that the myth of Narcissus is frequently misinterpreted. It is not love that causes the youth to stare at his image, but profound alienation. The point of the myth is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Stare too long at the objectivized self and you will become the dead matter you behold. The alienation will eventually subside, and you will begin to identify so fully with the daimon that the interior self disappears. […]

Aristotle taught that knowledge of self could be found through knowledge of the other. We understand what it means to be noble and honest because we see and admire these qualities in our friends. We recognize that our own actions are vile only when we see someone else doing the same. One of his followers put it this way: “So as when we want to see our own face, we see it by looking in a mirror, similarly when we wish to know ourselves, we can do so by looking at a friend, for a friend, as we say, is another self.”

The drama of self-knowledge is often presented as a war between subjective and objective, an eternal tension between the first person and the omniscient third. We hunt for the perfectly neutral reflection, listen for our souls in the echo traveling down our communications channels. But a medium is only a medium if there is someone on the other end. A blank page is no more a mirror than an algorithm is. Consciousness can be reflected only by another consciousness.

Richard Hughes Gibson:

In keeping with wider Enlightenment thinking, [Adam] Smith saw sociability as one of the principal human traits. That social isolation was bad for our mental health was, in turn, an Enlightenment commonplace. “Man is born to live in society,” Denis Diderot wrote in 1780, “Separate him, isolate him, and his way of thinking will become incoherent, his character will change, a thousand foolish fancies will spring up in his heart, bizarre ideas will take root in his mind like brambles in the wilderness.”

Smith proposed that strangers play a special role in checking the growth of brambles. Unlike our friends and family, Smith observed, strangers aren’t already on our side. We can’t expect them to take our position in a quarrel or extol our successes. That’s good, Smith argues, because strangers can thereby serve as a corrective to our penchants to overestimate our joys and sorrows:

“In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to ourselves: we are apt to overrate the good offices we may have done, and the injuries we may have suffered: we are apt to be too much elated by our own good, and too much dejected by our own bad fortune. The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self-command.”

Notice Smith’s movement from friend to stranger in the center of this passage. Talking to a friend is better than chewing things over by yourself at home (or, we may add, blustering on Twitter). But if we want to achieve real equanimity, conversation with a stranger is still better because the stranger has no reason to buy our account of things automatically. Interacting with strangers thus requires us to consider how we might seem to an outside, disinterested perspective, and to adjust the pictures we’ve formed of our supposed “good offices,” injuries suffered, and “bad fortune” in turn. The stranger becomes the catalyst for a more even-handed self-assessment, her “real spectator” serving as a goad to the dormant “impartial spectator” we all harbor within.

Mary Harrington:

Where do we go now? A clue lies, perhaps, in those aspects of human existence edited out of Adam Smith’s framework. In Smith’s anthropology, morality is powered by a sympathy that renders the other a function of our own selves, while economies are powered by fundamental self-interest. What’s expelled from both these domains is the possibility that there might be something (or someone) outsidethe self to impel either moral sentiment or economic activity.

Smith’s framing of sympathy is as self-centered, ultimately, as his understanding of markets – and both are inadequate to explain why we grow food, sell goods, or seek life partnership. All these activities may be rewarding from an individual perspective, but they’re also relational: motivated by specific obligations, commitments, and devotions. And the act of embracing commitment to others is the key to finding a way beyond selfhood, to making space within our inner worlds for others not just as vehicles for projection, but in their otherness.

In this emerging order, the struggle is increasingly for space to be human. Our chief resource in this struggle is our capacity to love selflessly. We can resist the new regime of monetized narcissism insofar as we’re willing to embrace our obligations to others, without expecting them to be identical to us in every way. To put it another way: we’ll be able to resist the temptation to sell ourselves to exactly the extent we’re willing to belong to each other.

Jill Lepore:

The New York Times solicited testimonials from readers. “I used to be able to send perfect emails in a minute or less,” one wrote. “Now it takes me days just to get the motivation to think of a response.” When an assignment to write this essay appeared in my in-box, I thought, Oh, God, I can’t do that, I’ve got nothing left, and then I told myself to buck up. The burnout literature will tell you that this, too—the guilt, the self-scolding—is a feature of burnout. If you think you’re burned out, you’re burned out, and if you don’t think you’re burned out you’re burned out. Everyone sits under the shade of that juniper tree, weeping, and whispering, “Enough.” […]

“Every age has its signature afflictions,” the Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in “The Burnout Society,” first published in German in 2010. Burnout, for Han, is depression and exhaustion, “the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity,” an “achievement society,” a yes-we-can world in which nothing is impossible, a world that requires people to strive to the point of self-destruction. “It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

Buechner:

If you tell me Christian commitment is a thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your beds and ask yourself: ‘Can I believe it all again today?’ No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe even more so. The No is what proves you’re a man in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and … great laughter. Not a beatific smile, but the laughter of wonderful incredulity.

The Return of Ansel Gibbs, p. 303

Julie Mullins, in an excellent review/summary of reasons why I appreciate Frederick Buechner so much:

In many passages, Buechner’s prose rises into lyricism, as in his sermon “Hope”:

“I think if you have your ears open, if you have your eyes open, every once in a while some word in even the most unpromising sermon will flame out, some scrap of prayer or anthem, some moment of silence even, the sudden glimpse of somebody you love sitting there near you, or of some stranger whose face without warning touches your heart, will flame out—and these are the moments that speak our names in a way we cannot help hearing.”

Buechner revels in the beauty of the ordinary. Any fragment of experience is worthy of his attention. Christ’s indwelling seizes us in the kindness of a friend who sits with us for a while, the return home after a long journey, the smell of breakfast, a weathered tree, rush-hour traffic. Even a betrayal of friendship, the failure to be Christ to one another, can reveal Christ in some mysterious, apophatic way.

Those flashes of second sight, coming on suddenly and gone as soon as they came, are Buechner’s testimony to an understated kind of faith. For me, Buechner’s sermons are impossible to dismiss, first of all because he does not hold them hostage to their own obviousness. We are free to see or not. He confesses that moments of unveiling often slip past us, obscured by our own distraction and worry. In the title sermon, he says that revelation comes in a barely audible whisper. No wonder we miss it. Secondly, I know that when I have been awake enough, in my own secret betrayals and visions, I have experienced just what he describes.