Debbie Chachra at Comment (emphasis added):

At the city water treatment plant, I learned that someone comes in each and every day of the year to take bacterial plates out of an incubator and verify that there are no pathogens in the drinking water. Then they prepare another set to be read the next day. And the next, and the next. Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people. They’re more than just the technological systems. They’re also a connection to the expertise, labour, and care of all the people that make sure that the water is safe to drink, and a recognition by the city’s residents that they are connected to each other through the landscape and the human-made watershed of pipes that are laid on top of it (or buried beneath). In the rainy northeastern United States, municipal water and sewage systems function as the smallest-scale proof of concept for the value of building out collective systems to provide for our bodily needs—not for nothing is “indoor plumbing” still a metonym for “civilization.” And it’s just one of many infrastructural systems that we rely on.

Rhina P. Espaillat, on the poetry of Anthony Hecht:

More important than bringing indictments against specific institutions, what Anthony Hecht does in much of his work is to warn, convincingly and justly – which is to say, with love – of those elements in religion that allow it to degenerate into zealotry or cant, and make possible behavior that runs counter to the avowed intent of religious faith. To deny that such dangerous elements exist, even today, in institutions we may value – and even deep in the impulses that gave rise to them – is to deny that fire is capable of burning, disfiguring and destroying what it touches, on the grounds that we are disloyal and ungrateful to find fault in what warms us so well when we are cold.

No poem or prose, however good, is going to bring about a change in human nature that will do away with injustice, cruelty, or cynicism, whatever its source. But excellent writing can sharpen the senses, challenge the intellect, kindle the imagination, and encourage the reader to generous thought. And great writing – like that of Anthony Hecht, which so qualifies on all counts, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual – can do more. It can teach us to confess doubt, to acknowledge the moral ambiguities inherent in every human impulse, and to guard against self-satisfied overconfidence in ourselves and in those institutions we have created in our image.

From Jennifer Frey, reviewing Phil Klay’s Missionaries and Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts:

Many reviews of Klay’s novel have focused on what it reveals about the unjust economic and political order that drives globalized combat. But these systems, while undoubtedly corrupt, are symptoms of the deeper issues that interest Klay. His novel suggests that the human story will always take shape in response to our wounds. For each of Klay’s characters, as for us, trauma and the possibility of transcendence, suffering and redemption, are mysteriously and irrevocably intertwined. […]

If Beha’s novel explores two competing philosophical pictures of human freedom—Frank’s liberal humanism and Sam’s reductive naturalism—in the end the reader is left to wonder whether we need a third option, one that is adequate to the mystery of our nature. For it is in our choices that we experience the limits of our self-understanding and the pressures of our unchosen circumstances. We are forced to make our decisions within the liminal space between the generality of what we know and want and the particular demands of our circumstances. It is a shadowy realm, between the possible and actual, and it is here that human freedom becomes both real and burdensome. It is the place where we feel most deeply our helplessness—and our need for outside illumination or aid.

In the end, it seems that Frank points us to the possibility of a third way. For Frank recognizes that our actions are meaningless without others to interpret them; he affirms, with Wittgenstein, that the “sense of the world must lie outside the world.” Frank sees, in a way that Sam does not, the need for transcendence, because the contradictions of human life cannot be resolved from within it. To see and accept this truth is to catch a glimpse of what true freedom might be.

While Klay’s novel is more explicitly theological in its vision and Beha’s more philosophical, both deal with the reality of the woundedness of human nature, and both connect this woundedness to our struggle to make sense of our own lives and to attain even a modicum of self-knowledge. Each novel suggests that we cannot heal or fix ourselves, and that if our longed-for redemption ever comes, it will not be at our own hands, or of our own design.

Alexa Hazel on the Pomodoro Technique:

Beneath videos explaining the PT, people will often comment that they have been unwittingly using the method for years — Taylor’s logic endures, but its mechanism has shifted. For many, what was once an external system of control has been internalized. Factory managers discipline the bodies of their employees; white-collar workers now discipline their own souls. In Nikil Saval’s neat formulation, “the arc of scientific management is long, but it bends toward self-Taylorizing.” [Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]

In 2020, “self-Taylorizing” is not about optimizing paid work, but about optimizing everything, including one’s method for optimization. The influential political theorist Wendy Brown calls this contemporary subject Homo oeconomicus. All human activity, regardless of whether it bears the potential for financial profit, is modeled on the market. We understand ourselves as human capital. We self-enhance to “attract investors” and “strengthen competitive positioning.” Before COVID-19, Homo oeconomicus spent his long weekend in Peru for a course on leadership development and posted pictures from Machu Picchu to Instagram. Or, he criticized the course, skipped it, accumulated social capital as a renegade, and still posted pics from Machu Picchu. All returns on self-investment ought to be optimized. And because optimization cannot be established without data, all human conduct must also be quantified. A body that measures calories, steps, heartrate, Pomodoros, sexual potency, sleep, swipes, likes, content output, and optionality is a perfectible body. What’s quantifiable is certifiable and comparable. Humanity’s coarse incommensurability is smoothed into a universal language of winners and losers. For a fee of 325€, it’s possible to become an official Pomodoro Technique Certified Practitioner. The user need only demonstrate how the tomato allowed her to “[overcome] a personal challenge.”

Honestly, the essay could end, full stop, with the next line.

No one should be surprised by what psychologically follows.

It goes on, and it’s fascinating, true, and necessary to say, but also easily summed up:

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.

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P.S. This paragraph:

It may seem strange that we need scaffolds in the realm of freedom, but life-defining activity isn’t necessarily fun or easy. It’s often stressful and boring. Let’s say, for example, that you identify as a writer. Hägglund reminds us that being a writer consists in the daily struggle to be a writer. The daily struggle to be a writer often looks appalling. “Precisely because [writing] is so important to me, I can become paralyzed by anxiety over the stakes and do something else instead.” To have writer’s block does not mean that you no longer care about writing. Just the opposite: writing is so important that the risk of failing to write or failing to write well is almost inarticulable. It’s easier to write for an hour today than to write your novel today, and there’s a difference between the fruit of a practical identity and its everyday experience. Tedium, however, resists representation, which is why it’s easy to forget that unremarkable hours are at the heart of every breakthrough. A little rule can help you step outside of a vicious loop and begin.

Mike Rose at The American Scholar:

Our culture—in Cartesian fashion—separates the body from the mind, so that, for example, we assume that the use of a tool does not involve abstraction. We reinforce this notion by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and numbers on IQ tests. And we employ social biases pertaining to a person’s place on the occupational ladder. The distinctions among blue, pink, and white collars carry with them attributions of character, motivation, and intelligence. Although we rightly acknowledge and amply compensate the play of mind in white-collar and professional work, we diminish or erase it in considerations about other endeavors—physical and service work particularly. We also often ignore the experience of everyday work in administrative deliberations and policymaking. […]

True, many uses of writing are abbreviated, routine, and repetitive, and they infrequently require interpretation or analysis. But analytic moments can be part of routine activities, and seemingly basic reading and writing can be cognitively rich. Because workplace language is used in the flow of other activities, we can overlook the remarkable coordination of words, numbers, and drawings required to initiate and direct action.

If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will affect the work we create in the future. When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If we think that whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation—are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.

Affirmation of diverse intelligence is not a retreat to a softhearted definition of the mind. To acknowledge a broader range of intellectual capacity is to take seriously the concept of cognitive variability, to appreciate in all the Rosies and Joes the thought that drives their accomplishments and defines who they are. This is a model of the mind that is worthy of a democratic society.

Paul Kingsnorth:

The entirety of the system of global governance and the ‘laws’ of classical economics, based as they are on notions of humans as rational actors weighing up their enlightened self-interest and deciding accordingly between Pepsi and Coke, is also holed below the waterline. Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed.

If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking – mythology, oral storytelling, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith – might have been onto something after all. What we are seeing now, I think, is that the standard choices presented to us – reason versus superstition; progress versus barbarism; past versus future; Earth versus space; growth versus stasis – were always chimeras. The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.

Perhaps this is why artists, saints, poets, mystics and storytellers often have a better handle on what reality actually looks like than those who sing the praises of Science or Reason. The English painter Cecil Collins, for example, explained his view on the matter in a beautiful mid-twentieth century passage which is worth quoting in full:

Rationalists are very fond of saying that without reason the universe would be a mad place; but of course it is a mad place even with reason. Any artist, or poet, or really alive person, knows it is mad. It is a horrible and terrifying place full of a bitter cruelty and obscenity. It is a place full of wonderful, profound beauty, and the tenderness of vast mysterious sacrifices. What it is not is a nice little rational puzzle that works out in the end.

No, the universe of experience is a different matter. It is a deep abyss, full of voices, some whispering, some shouting, the voices of frustration, the voices of unfulfilled longings, the voices of mysterious lusts, of mystical desires that can find no place in the world, the voices of deep, buried wrongs that cry out from an abyss of world desolation, the voices of misfits, neurotics, failures, the weak, an abyss full of the ecstasy of the poet, the glow of the praise of life, full of an incomprehensible love and an incomprehensible destructiveness.

All these voices are centred in man’s consciousness and in order to escape from them he builds in his mind a prison of rationality, and then tries by the aid of the official world, to shut them out.

Frederick Buechner, “Jairus’s Daughter“:

It is a quiet, low-key little story and in some ways so unclear and ambiguous that it’s hard to know just why Mark is telling it or just what he expects us to make out of it or made out of it himself. It’s a story not about stained-glass people at all but about people who lived and breathed and sweated and made love and used bad language when they tripped over furniture in the dark and sometimes had more troubles than they knew what to do with and sometimes laughed themselves silly over nothing in particular and were thus in many ways very much like the rest of us. […]

Little girl. Old girl. Old boy. Old boys and girls with high blood pressure and arthritis, and young boys and girls with tattoos and body piercing. You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don’t believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could. You happy ones and you who can hardly remember what it was like once to be happy. You who know where you’re going and how to get there and you who much of the time aren’t sure you’re getting anywhere. “Get up,” he says, all of you—all of you!—and the power that is in him is the power to give life not just to the dead like the child, but to those who are only partly alive, which is to say to people like you and me who much of the time live with our lives closed to the wild beauty and miracle of things, including the wild beauty and miracle of every day we live and even of ourselves.

It is that life-giving power that is at the heart of this shadowy story about Jairus and the daughter he loved, and that I believe is at the heart of all our stories—the power of new life, new hope, new being, that whether we know it or not, I think, keeps us coming to places like this year after year in search of it. It is the power to get up even when getting up isn’t all that easy for us anymore and to keep getting up and going on and on toward whatever it is, whoever he is, that all our lives long reaches out to take us by the hand.

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.”