Greetings from the Porch,

The weather has been shifting from rain to snow and back to rain, but our peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, and cabbage and coming up inside, and they give my hope that spring is indeed on its way.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about meatpackers, Barnes & Noble, and Wittgenstein.

• Reid Makowsky describes an orchard's higher purposes and then lays out practical guidance on how we might cultivate good orchards: "It looks like families working together in their small plots of ground: tending, harvesting, processing, and sharing the bounty with their neighbors. In a small and very imperfect way, such places might hearken back to the orcerd of our first parents, and point us toward paradise."

• Jacob Adkins commends the benefits of intergenerational friendship: "The pendulum has swung a bit. When I was a kid, Dave picked me up to go work; now most days I pick him up for breakfast. His back relegates him to an advisor on most projects, but his voice is more valuable than he realizes, and his presence is always welcome. After helping and watching him do things for others for twenty years, I am able to do a few things for him now, which is a privilege for me and others, though perhaps humbling for him. He and Edna have modeled for me and my wife how to age with dignity, not bitterness or regret."

• Cameron McAllister reminds us that a village cannot be global. We need ordinary, annoying, local community to shape our identities and souls: "A healthy church is filled with recovering sinners who recognize their need for Christ and who work together to cooperate with his Holy Spirit so that they can lead lives of obedience to him. To the degree that a local congregation is committed to this aim, it will be a faithful house of worship. As Wallace said of AA, the confounding fact is that it works."

• Ilya V. Ganpantsura reads Pushkin's poetry and considers the possibilities for political poets today: "precisely because Pushkin was one of the first poets of Russia, it fell to him to be the first to look clearly at the political condition of the empire and hope for change. If in contemporary Russia a person seeks a freer form of life and relies on poets such as Pushkin, then in his own time Pushkin relied upon the hope of sustaining 'encouraging impulses' within himself. And his hope was indeed justified: he didn’t transform the political system, but he did establish a tradition of thinking against and beyond a authoritarian regime."

• Eréndira Ramírez-Ortega urges churches to welcome new babies with open arms: "Telling members to keep their distance challenges the fundamental identity of the church and creates division because they are implicitly presumed to be a threat or irresponsible. In any other country, it’s common for friends and congregants to hold new babies."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about Laurel Canyon this week--happy birthday, Victoria!

We had a lively discussion of Orthodoxy last week. Chesterton is not a systematic thinker, but he excels at sketching out “mental pictures” that illuminate thorny philosophical paradoxes. Ever since I first read it when I was in high school or college, many of his parables have remained key parts of my mental furniture. His account of insanity, for instance, as being perfectly logical but horribly cramped: “Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that [the mad man’s] mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.” This time, I was struck by his observation that laziness—or perhaps acedia—lies at the root of much modern busyness:

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motor-cars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro