In Radiance of the Ordinary, Tara Couture opens the chapter “The Dance” with a truly cozy (there’s that word again) description of an early winter morning on their farm. Waking up, starting a fire, reading on the couch, standing barefoot in the grass to greet the sun. She continues: It’s all lovely, yes? It’s as lovely as we’ve crafted it to be. And as much as I’d like to leave us there, cozied up by the hearth, I cannot.
I love this Robert S. Duncanson painting “Landscape with Cows Watering in a Stream.” It caught my eye as the cover image for Radiance of the Ordinary.
Since reading a great quote shared by @ReaderJohn earlier today, ordinariness has been on my mind and I thought I’d share a couple of books. Coincidentally, I received this in the mail today: Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind. Another book I came across a few years ago but still haven’t read: The Tao of Ordinariness: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissitic Age.
One of our senators is talking about a new national crisis: Americans being killed by illegal immigrant drivers. Dang straight! I’m surrounded by red-blooded American drivers who can do that job just fine, thank you very much.
Hooray! It’s woodland crocus time! Always the first thing to pop up in our yard.
I’ve found myself referring to the notes and bibliography of Finding Lights in a Dark Age even more than usual. One entry in the bibliography that grabbed my attention today: Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll.
I was reminded today of Alan Jacobs’ review of the final Harry Potter book. Calling the series “the greatest penny dreadful ever written” was just spot-on; I’ve thought of that several times over the years. It also reminds me that I’ve been reading Jacobs for something over twenty years!
Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age (thanks to Donny for the recommendation): Just as mainstream left and right politics realigns around a joint commitment to tech-heavy liberal-modernism, so it’s possible to imagine, in the words of Stephen Quilley, ‘a realignment built on the overlap between libertarians, Burkean localists, and religious communitarians currently (sometimes unwillingly) camped out on the political right on the one hand, and green/anarchist anti-moderns on the left!
Erik Davis reminded me of Finis Jennings Dake today: My favorite relic of those months is a version of the King James Bible I picked up at a Christian bookstore at a strip mall near the coast. The store, which I visited a number of times and was more important to me than any particular church, was one of the many nondenominational Christian shops that popped up in the 1980s, paralleling the New Age stores of the era with their spiritual lifestyle blend of books, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, statues, jewelry, and inspirational wall art.
Remember the recent article about young men watching hours of porn per day? We all understand that is deeply disordered. But how different is it from those who bathe themselves in political anger? Both anger and sexual pleasure are good things when channeled appropriately; they are terrible masters.