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:

1. When I drive I become a different person. I am normally a patient person—but not when I’m driving. I become aggressive. I call people assholes. I would never do that in person! (And not just because I wouldn’t want to get in a fight.) I offer this as a counterpoint to those who would suggest that our tools (using that word broadly) are morally neutral. They do, in fact, train us in certain ways of being.
2. Berry’s story is another example of Illich’s ideas about the development of tools

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:

• Youth, with its hopefulness and orientation toward the future
• Middle age, with its wistfulness and orientation toward the past
• Elderhood, with its slow releasing toward death

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.