Zadie Smith:

The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

An added note for clarity: I have my differing feelings about much of the protest-leaning middle ground in Smith’s piece, most of which, in spite of the “words,” does little to really address the Jew-hatred that thrives on these campuses. But the above point is sharp. And it’s a point I will not stop making.

Ivo Andrić:

There had been and there would be again starlight nights on the kapia and rich constellations and moonlight, but there had never been, and God alone knows whether there would be again, such young men who in such conversations and with such feelings and ideas would keep vigil on the kapia. That was a generation of rebel angels, in that short moment while they still had all the power and all the rights of angels and also the flaming pride of rebels. These sons of peasants, traders or artisans from a remote Bosnian township had obtained from fate, without any special effort of their own, a free entry into the world and the great illusion of freedom. With their inborn small-town characteristics, they went out into the world, chose more or less for themselves and according to their own inclinations, momentary moods or the whims of chance, the subject of their studies, the nature of their entertainments and the circle of their friends and acquaintances. For the most part they were unable, or did not know how, to seize and make use of what they succeeded in seeing, but there was not one of them who did not have the feeling that he could take what he wished and that all that he took was his. Life (that word came up very often in their conversations, as it did in the literature and politics of the time, when it was always written with a capital letter), Life stood before them as an object, as a field of action for their liberated senses, for their intellectual curiosity and their sentimental exploits, which knew no limits. All roads were open to them, onward to infinity; on most of those roads they would never even set foot, but none the less the intoxicating lust for life lay in the fact that they could (in theory at least) be free to choose which they would and dare to cross from one to the other. All that other men, other races, in other times and lands, had achieved and attained in the course of generations, through centuries of effort, at the cost of lives, of renunciations and of sacrifices greater and dearer than life, now lay before them as a chance inheritance and a dangerous gift of fate. It seemed fantastic and improbable but was none the less true; they could do with their youth what they liked, and give their judgments freely and without restriction; they dared to say what they liked and for many of them those words were the same as deeds, satisfying their atavistic need for heroism and glory, violence and destruction, yet they did not entail any obligation to act nor any visible responsibility for what had been said. The most gifted amongst them despised all that they should have learnt and underestimated all that they were able to do, but they boasted of what they did not know and waxed enthusiastic at what was beyond their powers to achieve. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous manner of entering into life or a surer way towards exceptional deeds or total disaster. Only the best and strongest amongst them threw themselves into action with the fanaticism of fakirs and were there burnt up like flies, to be immediately hailed by their fellows as martyrs and saints (for there is no generation without its saints) and placed on pedestals as inaccessible examples.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. This generation which was now discussing philosophy, social and political questions on the kapia under the stars, above the waters, was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling both of lighting the first fires of one new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another which was burning out. What could especially be said of them was that there had not been for a long time past a generation which with greater boldness had dreamed and spoken about life, enjoyment and freedom and which had received less of life, suffered worse, laboured more hardly and died more often than had this one. But in those summer days of 1913 all was still undetermined, unsure. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and men imagine or do.

Re: Why I keep a web-log

From Cory Doctorow:

The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

[…]

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

Paul Sellers:

The coming and going of handwork is the rhythmic pulse that comes no other way by any other method of working wood. In some ways, it’s an unintentional exclusivity we enjoy, an acceptance of organic noise types and the exclusion of mechanical others. The human engine has multidimensionality relying on great and minute manipulations and shifts in direction second by second––the complete opposite of machine-like, inline omnidirectionality with mere pushes along a straight corner where table meets fence. This rhythm, the pulse of all handwork, is the same with most if not all handcrafts. By repetition, the day comes and goes in unmeasured chunks of time as do the patterns by which we carry them out. It brings true order in the art of our working. We think ahead by tasks stacked in order by anticipating every effort ahead of the need. This prefacing is our making ready our sphere of forward planning but dimensionally there is no flat one dimension screen with the illusion of 3D, we’re working in 3D every minute. 

I meant to post this a while back, but like most things I intend to post, it never left the intention phase.

I’ve been reading (very slowly) through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (LPP), and one of the greatest pulls to read even the most benign and prosaic details is the depth of joy that is so ubiquitous throughout his letters.

On November 26, 1943, his friend Bethge visited him in prison and delivered a cigar as a gift from Karl Barth.

This image—to have had the four people who are closest to me in my life around me for a moment—will accompany me now for a long time. When I came back up here to my cell, I simply walked back and forth for an hour, my food sat there getting cold, and finally I had to laugh at myself when I caught myself saying to myself from time to time, quite clichéd, “That was really wonderful!” I always have intellectual reservations when I use the word “indescribable” for something, for if one takes the trouble and insists on the necessary clarity, then to my mind there is very little that is truly “indescribable”; but at the moment this morning seems to me to belong in that category. Now Karl’s cigar is here before me, a truly improbable reality—so, was he nice? and understanding?

Most of my highlights in the book are of this simple, joyful quality.

He goes on to talk about the

misconception that being imprisoned is perceived as uninterrupted torment. That’s not how it is, and precisely such visits ease one’s life quite perceptibly for days afterward, even if they also naturally stir up some things that fortunately had been asleep for a while. But that too does no harm. One realizes again how rich one was, becomes thankful for it, and musters new hope and will to live. I thank you one and all very much.

Not enough can be said about this — about the things that today are not enough for us but that by tomorrow we might realize were more than enough. Imagine if we all spoke to and about our neighbors, or even voted and practiced our politics, from this second, revised perspective.

(Of course, I mean “neighbors” in the Christian sense, not simply the geographical one. As Bonhoeffer put it, “The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbor within reach in any given situation.”)

More than a hypothetical, this is the “how” that Bonhoeffer stressed was more important than any other thing:

I now often think of the beautiful song by Hugo Wolf, which we sang several times lately: “Over night, over night, joy and sorrow come, and sooner than you thought, they both leave you, and go to tell the Lord how you have borne them.” Indeed, everything depends on this “how”; it is more important than any external circumstances.

One of the most edge-of-your-seat books for me, one that spoke perhaps more than any other to the religious bone in my body, was Peter Hooton’s Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context.

Speaking of Bonhoeffer’s use of the phrase “being for others,” Hooton writes,

The idea of “being for others” is not a new way of being human. It is, rather, the only way of being truly human and is as such characteristic of Christ’s inclusiveness; of life lived, theologically speaking, in the Christuswirklichkeit [“Christ reality”] shared by God and human beings, whence springs the sense of human wholeness, and confidence in God’s unfailing goodness and compassion. We may, of course, repudiate this, and cling instead to that illusory notion of the isolated individual which religion, as Bonhoeffer conceives it, shares with some expressions of secularity, but, for Bonhoeffer, the reality is that our “being for others” is synonymous with the life with God which is our life, and thus with our humanity.

For Christians, it’s epieikés or nothing. And I don’t think there can be any doubt that the joy visible in the letters from prison and the Christuswirklichkeit known through/as “human being for others” are a part of the same grace-infused feedback loop.

Much more could be said, but I want to avoid over-analyzing and lengthening this post.

…

Of course, several days later … I over-analyzed it and got caught up rereading highlights from Hooton’s book. I may put some quotes up, which is something I never got around to a couple years ago because I intended to write more about it.

Alastair Roberts:

Being familiar with the theological arguments for my position, and knowing the letter of the Bible very well, I was adept at using scripture to defend my positions and didn’t have trouble getting the best of many of my interlocutors, few of whom had given serious thought to the issues. Indeed, few things were more likely to strengthen my sense of the rightness of my stances than arguing with opponents. Spirited disagreements with adversaries can be curiously effective at heightening such confidence: the more focused one is upon the flaws in opposing positions, the less attentive one is likely to be to the issues with one’s own. […]

While considering myself to be championing the Lordship of Christ, I became fixated on contentious debates and increasingly dulled to the things of God. I openly affirmed Christian truths, yet they no longer stirred my heart as they once did, nor did they bear the same fruit in my life. The place that Christ had once occupied at the center of my thought and affections had gradually been crowded out with matters of culture war, theological, and political conflict, and party interest. […]

When I stepped back, the arguments, debates, and ideology no longer mediated my relationship with the text. I started to read it on its own terms; I started listening toit, rather than listening for things that served interests and concerns I was bringing to it. As I did, I began to feel the grain of the text and to learn to move with it. Biblical statements ceased to be brute facts to be marshalled into an extrabiblical system.

Kevin Williamson

One version of illiberalism holds that somebody wins and somebody loses, and that Christians, having the upper hand in terms of numbers and political power, are entitled to impose their religion on society at large, to whatever degree they feel necessary and with only those accommodations demanded by their own forbearance. (That this is a profoundly un-Christian attitude has not stopped many Christians from embracing it.) Another version of illiberalism disguises itself as liberalism, and it insists that both Christianity and Judaism be denuded of everything that makes each distinctive, that these and all other religions be reduced to some version of the Church of Niceness, and that this orthodoxy be imposed on society at large, through formal and informal means. Genuine liberalism takes a different approach: It takes for granted that people living in a free and open society of any meaningful size or complexity will have profound, wrenching disagreements about fundamental issues, and that the job of the state and of civic institutions (including the schools) is not to scrub religions, political platforms, and creeds of anything potentially offensive but rather to create a political space in which community life can be lived peaceably. 

Tyler Austin Harper:

“This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,” Cameron Wimpy, a political scientist at Arkansas State University, told me. It would be like undertaking a book-length study demonizing Irish people, refusing to define what you mean by Irish, and then drawing on studies of native Irish in Ireland, non-Irish immigrants to Ireland, Irish Americans, people who took a 23andMe DNA test that showed Irish ancestry, and Bostonians who get drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day to build your argument about the singular danger of “the Irish.” It’s preposterous. […]

Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas, the authors of White Rural Ragecontorted studies and called unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside the house. It is not primarily the rural poor, but often successful, white metropolitan men who imperil our republic.

---

We recently, upon recommendation, watched the film Paterson, and we loved it. It’s one of those movies that feels more like staring at a painting for two hours, rather than being strung along a narrative plot-line. (Not that there’s anything wrong with plot; I just don’t prefer it these days.) Nothing in Paterson is really discussed in the movie itself; its themes are remarkably silent. And one of these silent themes is repetition. In fact, I think its the main theme. From the wake-up scenes, to the walks, to the conversations with the supervisor, to the straightening of the mailbox. Even the appearance of numerous twins throughout the film would be an otherwise bizarre occurrence were it not there alongside all these other repetitions.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that new and beautiful things don’t come out of these repetitions. But repetition is the water we are swimming in — and being called to swim in more joyfully.

Too much further explanation of the film, in this case, would risk reducing some of its magic. The only reason I wanted to put a roof nail in it was because of a quote from Edward Mendelson that I read in an interview with Alan Jacobs today.

The quote comes from Mendelson’s Early Auden, which I happily pulled off the shelf this afternoon. Mendelson is explaining a significant change of view for W. H. Auden, beginning with his poem “A Summer Night.” Up to this point Auden had, like just about everyone else, viewed repetition as a curse, “a mortifying compulsion, a doom to which everyone was condemned and which heroes struggled to escape.”

All this changed with in “A Summer Night.” Repetition now became the ground of memory, the medium of love, and for the first time Auden praised events that occurred a second time.

This was a prodigious step, made in opposition to the reigning assumptions of almost two centuries of philosophy, psychology, and art. In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest force of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, repetition has a very different import: it is the sustaining and renewing power of nature, the basis for all art and understanding. The detailed history of repetition deserves a book to itself; here it will suffice to note that repetition lost its moral value only with the spread of the industrial machine and the swelling of the romantic chorus of praise for personal originality. Until two hundred years ago virtually no one associated repetition with boredom or constraint. Ennui is ancient; its link to repetition is not. The damned in Dante’s Hell never complain that their suffering is repetitive, only that it is eternal, which is not the same thing. … When [Goethe’s] Faust asks Mephistopheles if there is a way to regain youth without resorting to witchcraft, he is advised to take up the repetitive life of a rural farmer, cultivating his garden. This is precisely what Voltaire’s Candide learned to accept only a few decades before, but Faust will have none of it. He wants no reliable satisfactions of any kind, only continual change and a perpetual unease that will call into being ever new interests and desires. He accepts a wager with the devil which he can lose only when he asks the passing moment to linger, to repeat itself in the next moment. For Faust, accepting repetition means accepting death.

I didn’t start reading until my later 20’s. Until that time, I’m certain I could count on one hand the number of books I had actually read. Naturally, there was a lot to catch up on, and one of the first books on my list was G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. If I were going to recommend only one chapter in that book, it would be “The Ethics of Elfland.”

Here is a key passage from that chapter:

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. … Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Exulting in the monotony — not because we are limited, not because nature says we have to, but because it is “the ground of memory, the medium of love.”

Paterson emulates this wonderfully.