Amazing story (via @ayjay) on newly discovered ways that redwoods survive fire. We went on Tom’s Muir Woods walking tour in 2022. He told us that redwoods are practically immortal, if only humans would stop screwing things up.
Amazing story (via @ayjay) on newly discovered ways that redwoods survive fire. We went on Tom’s Muir Woods walking tour in 2022. He told us that redwoods are practically immortal, if only humans would stop screwing things up.
Thank God for “thought leaders” who help us “pre-solve” problems.
For much of my life, I read books and other things in a frankly desperate, craving way, hoping to find The Answer to the problem that was given to me when I was born. It took several decades and college degrees, and the cultivation of a hyper-developed intellect stocked with more texts than the Library of Congress and the Library of Alexandria combined, for me to arrive, not through reading but through realization, at the recognition that the answer isn’t in a book at all but in the one who reads books in search of the answer.
Something like this realization—less fully realized, no doubt—has been nagging me for some time. Early January will be the 20th anniversary of our departure from Christian fundamentalism and for the entirety of that time I have been hoping to find The Answer in books.
The fundamentalism my wife and I left was intellectually incurious. I started to say it was anti-intellectual but that’s not quite right. Intelligence was valued as a gift of God. That gift, however, could only be put to narrow uses. College education was tolerated for men for the purpose of establishing a career. Reading was encouraged, as long as you limited yourself to the list of acceptable writers. Preaching was typically more emotional than intellectual, but intelligent teachers were valued for the purposes of Sunday School.
More than anything else, it was when Rachel and I realized that these bounds of acceptability not only ruled out people who were clearly devoted and sincere Christians but also were limiting us in harmful ways that it became clear that we needed to get out. We’ve often described our exit as the world opening up for us—an almost physical sensation of walking out of a dimly lit room into brilliant sunshine and blue skies.
So you can imagine how 27 year old me—curious and intelligent, finding the world open—devoured book after book after book. Even academic work that I barely understood but had the virtue of exercising my mind with ideas that were just out of my reach. After a few years of that, I had a broader and richer understanding of theology than some of the seminary-educated ministers I knew.
In the years that followed, I chased ideas—whether they appeared in books or online. With every new idea came the hope that this would be the one. Then the midlife transition arrived (I do not say “crisis,” though there were many critical moments) and I began to wonder if this was all just a monumental exercise in compensation and fear and trauma. This is the idea that has nagged me for much of my forties, particularly since that time in mid-2020 when I shut down all my social media accounts, quit the news, and started reading about hermits.
Wise teachers keep telling me that in order to become wise I must become a fool—yet I keep building teetering piles of books around me. Little by little, though, I manage to laugh at my piles and glimpse the lie hiding within them. Eventually, perhaps, I won’t need them any longer.
The holiday party at work did not go my way…
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is Polar Express but with Nazis
Wendell Berry, “Renewing Husbandry”:
I remember well a summer morning in about 1950 when my father sent a hired man with a McCormick High Gear No. 9 mowing machine and a team of mules to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall A. That memory is a landmark in my mind and my history. I had been born into the way of farming represented by the mule team, and I loved it. I knew irresistibly that the mules were good ones. They were stepping along beautifully at a rate of speed in fact only a little slower than mine. But now I saw them suddenly from the vantage point of the tractor, and I remember how fiercely I resented their slowness. I saw them as “in my way.” For those who have had no similar experience, I was feeling exactly the outrage and the low-grade superiority of a hot-rodder caught behind an aged dawdler in urban traffic. It is undoubtedly significant that in the summer of 1950 I passed my sixteenth birthday and I became eligible to solve all my problems by driving an automobile.
Two things:
Finished reading Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Beautiful and heart-breaking. I think I’ll keep working my way through his fiction.
Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (p248):
All I can answer is that I did love her all her life—from the time before I ever saw her, it seems, and until she died. I do love her all her life, and still, and always. That is my answer, but in fact love does not answer any argument. It answers all arguments, merely by turning away, leaving them to find what rest they can.
That’s certainly one of the most beautiful things you’ll read all week.
I’ve been an admirer of Wendell Berry for over twenty years now—but, weirdly, I’ve only ever read his essays and poetry. I finally picked up one of his novels, Jayber Crow, and it’s being narrated in my head in Uncle Wendell’s mournful baritone. It’s a lovely experience.
We often hear about child development, less so about adult development. There does seem to be an ideal pattern:
Each stage is necessary and beautiful. In a time where politics dominate the minds of so many people, this ideal pattern can be seen as a problem. As with everything it touches, politics transforms what is beautiful into slogan and tool.
If we can disengage from that way of thinking, however, we can see this progression as a breathtaking tableau. We feel love and pride for the young person setting out with passion and big ideas. We feel the gravity of middle age, and sympathize with the person who longs for simpler times. We reverence the elder, who through some mysterious alchemy, takes experience, blends it with resignation, and works wisdom.
This would seem to be the way most traditional societies saw the progression of life. We might find more peace if we didn’t struggle against it.
I readily admit that I know only a little more than nothing about classical music. A few years ago, though, Rachel and I came across the video of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony and, to our surprise, found ourselves crying by the end. So, yeah, I’ll be watching this movie.
So the lesson from this weekend’s hullabaloo at OpenAI appears to be that not even the board of directors of the world’s most prominent AI company can stop “progress” over concerns about the technology moving too fast. Duly noted.
Daniel Immerwahr, via @tinyroofnail:
If small, rugged farms have not filled the countryside, what has? … For the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments.
Yup, about right. The small town I live in depends economically upon a Navy installation, a GM plant, a cement plant, and Indiana University. The Ford/Visteon plant closed in 2007, and its space was filled with defense contractors. There are seven Dollar Generals within a ten minute drive.
If there’s a new Romanticism on the horizon, I’m here for it.
There’s a tiny town an hour or so away called Pumpkin Center—universally pronounced “Punkin Center.” I had occasion to search the name this week and came across this 1972 NYT story on the town. At this point I believe it’s been entirely taken over by an Amish settlement.
Alan Jacobs makes a good response to Freddie deBoer’s assertion that people believe in religions because they offer comfort. (The Freddie post is behind a paywall so I can’t access it.) Jacobs:
I might want to take one step back and ask: Do religions comfort? My experience as a Christian has been more about challenge than comfort, about figuring out how to respond to what I feel to be an unshakable claim on my life.
This is, of course, correct. The idea that religion persists because it’s comforting is the sort of thing that modern atheists say—that I myself have said—but a moment’s reflection shows that is not the case. Jacobs gives good examples in his post. Others could easily be multiplied. “Religion as comfort” seems to be an error that can be traced to our particular time and place, where modern, American, evangelical Christianity dominates the culture.
Jacobs again:
I can’t now remember who said it, but one scholar of religion said that the only thing all religions have in common is that they use candles. That seems right to me.
So “religion” is an intractably fuzzy concept, the many religions of the world do many different things and do them in many different ways, and even within a given religion people may believe and may commit themselves for as astonishing variety of reasons. The whole enterprise, if indeed we can call religion an enterprise, is so fraught with complications that I don’t think there’s anything that can be legitimately said in general about it.
Here’s where I would disagree: it seems to me that religion is universal and persistent because it gives meaning to human life. That is to say, religion is the answer to nihilism. Any religion. Even a death cult gives a reason for living—or, in this case, dying.
It appears that human beings can abide anything except meaninglessness. Even scientific materialist atheists (and I was one for a while) appeal to wonder and discovery as an organizing principle for life. That line of Sagan’s is popular among them for a reason: “we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”
I drifted away from atheism precisely because I needed something more life-giving than consuming science documentaries as if they were sacraments. I needed a scaffolding for my life. While I can’t say I have fully erected that scaffolding at this point, the work itself has been meaningful to me.
I could be wrong about meaning-making being the universal characteristic of religion—but it does feel more true than religion as comfort.
The number of books I’ve read has dropped over the last couple of years because I no longer have a commute during which I can listen to audiobooks. And given the choice of working from home and reading fewer books or working in the office and listening to more audiobooks–that choice is trivially easy for me.
One consequence of this, however, is that I’ve read nearly zero fiction since COVID. Audiobooks were always the way I read fiction; I found that the format was perfect for fiction, less so for nonfiction. So I’ve been feeling the itch to get back to some fiction this winter. I’ve been accumulating a list of possibilities and I’m open to any suggestions:
Finished reading When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Maté. Fewer case studies and biological details would have made this a perfect book for me—but I realize that’s a weird thing to ask of such a book. Nevertheless, extremely important ideas here.
I made Indian Pudding and whipped cream. (Not exactly the most accurate or sensitive name for it.) It’s pretty good! The molasses makes it taste old-fashioned, so maybe not for everyone. Rachel says it tastes like the Depression. 😂
Finished reading Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson. Great, short introduction to the subject by a Jungian analyst. It’s an important idea, despite its popularity among young people who have not lived long enough to have developed much of a shadow. 😉
New Aesop Rock album release day is a good day.
Thankfully most of my CPA continuing education can be done via webinar—but today’s is on the north side of Indianapolis, requiring ninety minutes of driving in heavy traffic to listen to an eight hour talk in a drab office park about what’s new in accounting. sigh
James Hillman, “The Poetic Basis of Mind”:
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind–that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard. So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home.
It was a great time tonight, despite the unseasonably cold weather. (36F!) Every year we have hundreds of kids through our neighborhood. The number was down a bit this year but still more than expected. It’s truly a special thing we have here.
Happy Halloween!
