Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: We do not easily remember peasants. The realities of their lives are a dim presence in the historical record. We catch only glimpses in the great obscurity that is the centuries-old peasant past of Europe. The first is from the Poland of a century ago: Every field knows its owner, the Earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face. The moon watches and prayers are still said to it.
Gregory Cello: “Your town needs you, not your nation.” Or to quote myself: On a human scale, nationalism is no better than globalism.
Pull quote from an interview with Kingsnorth in the latest Mortise and Tenon.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
Saving this here for future me.
Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: The free play of patriarchy within the household is arguably conditioned by the free play of patriarchy outside it. At the extreme, this involves a kind of untrammelled and predatory male collective violence - essentially the Viking problem of a heroic-styled warrior culture or of what’s sometimes termed ‘masterless men’. Many societies have recognized the dangers of this and sought ways to counter it.
Tara Couture, Radiance of the Ordinary: We douse the meat in chemicals to make it look vibrant and fresh, then wrap it in cellophane. We wash the eggs and dip them in chlorine to ride them of the gift of a feather from the soft underbelly of the mother hen. We remove all trace of connection—a leaf, hair, bones, hide, crumbs of soil. And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness.
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.
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!
Leaving aside my nagging worry about what this meant in terms of pollution, the following is beautiful simply as a piece of prose personifying the river flowing through the Clairvaux Abbey. From Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine), as quoted by Michael Updegraff (“Transitions of Power,” Mortise and Tenon tenth anniversary issue): The river enters the abbey as much as the wall acting as a check allows. It gushes first into the corn-mill where it is very actively employed in grinding the grain under the weight of the wheels and in shaking the fine sieve which separates the flour from the bran.
A portion of “The Deer’s Cry”, or “St Patrick’s Breastplate”:
I arise today
through the strength of heaven, light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
Reminded of this by John O’Donohue in Anam Cara. Also, don’t miss Arvo Pärt’s setting of another portion of the prayer, if you’re not already familiar with it.