Greetings from the Porch,

It was a blessing to be away from the online world for a few weeks. One of those days, my brother and I set out early to try to climb a mountain. By mid-morning, it became apparent that we would be hiking inside of a cloud all day, and we headed to an alpine lake to do some fishing instead. But the experience of walking in a cloud struck me as an apt analogy for turning off the screen: screens enable me to see immense vistas, and this can be a great boon. But when this is my constant experience rather than a periodic grace, it becomes harder to focus on what's at hand. Sometimes, I need to lose access to the distant in order to recalibrate my sense of what's important and what's worth attending to. To shift metaphors slightly, it would be foolish to walk around all the time with my eyes closed, but I need to spend time each day with them closed in prayer. Periodic sensory deprivation becomes all the more important in these days of sensory overload.

Thanks to Adam Smith and Omar Drissi for keeping the website running in my absence. Lots of good essays were published, and FPR Books also released a new title this past month. There's quite a library growing, and we have some exciting books in the works as well.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about rest, patriotism, and reading.

• Jessica Burke describes her family's long road trips that mark the high school graduations of their children and wrestles with how to prepare them to enter adulthood: "Maybe that’s where I need to guide my children: to a place where they are mature enough to ask for help, to seek knowledge and wisdom, to confess and repent."

• D.P. Curtin traces the remnants of Sweden's colony in the Delaware Valley: "Every community is built upon foundations laid by older ones, and is at times the unconscious heir of the forgotten past. We inherit places we did not build and civilizations whose origins we do not fully comprehend."

• Cameron McAllister remembers a good dog and tries to answer his kids' questions about whether they'll see her in heaven: "Not only has Magnolia crossed over. She’s managed to go bounding straight into the troubling territory of heaven."

• Eugene Callahan looks to Aristotle for an understanding of what might make a price just: "While I can’t put an exact numerical value on what a just price is in every situation, I can state with confidence that this mutual feeling of equal benefit, much as Aquinas recommended, is the result of negotiating with such a concept in mind."

• Musa Bersunkaev explores the understanding of the cosmos and human culture conveyed in Chechen dance: "Through shared participation, people reproduced their identity, allowing each other space to be the center of attention, achieve success, and earn a reputation—either through ethical or aesthetic dominance."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about divorce this week.

I read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations this summer, and what a treat it was. Bleak House may still be my favorite Dickens novel, but his wonderfully vivid characters make all his books a pleasure. And this novel sharply portrays how discontent and ingratitude poison the many goods that Pip does receive. So many of the characters set their hearts on dreams that end up harming them, while the few who place their expectations on faithfully serving their friends find deep happiness. In this passage, Pip articulates well his foolishness in allowing the prospect of money to draw his heart away from home and family. In fact, he shifts from what Patrick Kavanaugh calls a parochial perspective to a provincial one:

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro