News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Now that we're home, we're enjoying fresh tomatoes, peppers, and more from the garden. All quite delicious.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Robert Nisbet, fact-checking, and Aldo Leopold.
- Casey Spinks contemplates pity, Nietzsche, and the consequences of losing Christian morality: "our country has always depended on the pity one feels toward a crucified peripatetic and then extends to all people. Indeed, all politics, 'whether thrones or powers or dominions or rulers or authorities,' has always depended on that pity. And before that pity existed, or wherever it does not today or may not tomorrow, there was, is, will be, no politics."
- Sarah Silflow considers the pull of paranoia and draws on G.K. Chesterton (among others) to imagine possible responses: "While the details of their stories differ, the story arc is the same: tight logic driven by fear, and an inability to see circumstances from a different perspective."
- Joseph Toates cautions that maybe we shouldn't celebrate Marie Antoinette's execution too vociferously: "The use of the dead Marie Antoinette as a republican icon is something that ought to be carefully considered. It is a willful simplification of the past in order to tell a gentler and more fun story to a modern nation."
- Ethan Mannon reviews Tracy Farone’s Honey Bee Vet: "Even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful."
While walking down a street this summer in Toronto’s Greek Town, we came across a bookstore with a shelf of hardcovers set out by the street, all marked down to $5 (Canadian). I picked up a nice copy of Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries, a Calvin College grad and a longtime writer at the New Yorker. It’s a poignant novel, both funny and tragic, and it displays his keen eye for human foibles and the travails of belief in a world marked by seemingly arbitrary sorrows:
It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is. . . . My daughter Carol, then eleven, fell ill. . . . The week in the hospital was a long and exquisitely serialized course of suspense. [After running a series of tests, the doctor announces,] “You can take her home. But anyhow, we’ve eliminated everything serious.”
That was the happiest moment of my life. Or the next several days were the happiest days of my life. The fairy would not become a gnome. We could break bread in peace again, my child and I. The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page. Carol curled up with one in her chair and I in mine. And the bliss of finishing off an evening with a game of rummy and a mug of cocoa together. And how good again to sail into Tony’s midtown bar, with its sparkling glasses, hitherto scarcely noticed, ready to tilt us into evening, the clean knives standing upended in their crocks of cheese at the immaculate stroke of five. My keyed-up senses got everything: the echo of wood smoke in Cheddar, of the seahorse in the human spine (the fairy would not be a gnome!), of the dogwood flower in the blades of an electric fan, or vice versa . . . But you can multiply for yourself the list of pleasures to be extorted from Simple Things when the world has once again been restored to you.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro