News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a hectic week with the beginning of the semester and work on our house, but it's always a delight to be back in the classroom with eager students.
-
In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays on gratitude, competence, and libraries.
-
Ben Christenson argues that menial work helped the musician Wayne Coyne cultivate his creative work: "Coyne’s life turns the trope of the starving artist on its head. His restaurant work catalyzed his creative work, and his path illustrates the “embodied cognition” that the craftsman-philosopher Matthew Crawford praises in The World Beyond Your Head."
-
Nadya Williams suggests that part of the reason why having a baby can be so expensive is that the US hospital system tends to medicalize what is a natural process: "Having experienced pregnancy and childbirth with both a traditionally trained OB/GYN and with midwives, the philosophical differences are abundantly clear."
-
Dixie Dillon Lane reminds us that sometimes less is more. Her children don't just learn from all the enriching activities she organizes for them. They also learn valuable lessons from their own project of producing and publishing a paper: "Being a teacher is a demanding job, whether in a college, school, or home setting. It requires tremendous energy, responsiveness, and mental flexibility. It requires that you, the teacher, also be willing to let yourself be taught."
-
Matthew Smith considers the implications that ChatGPT and other AI writing technologies have for our understanding of the purpose of language: "If humanistic society has any future at all, we must hope for teachers like Plato who understand the word as a means to personal wisdom—a logos rather than lexis."
I read a lot of classical and medieval books with my students to prepare for our trip to Rome, but I particularly relished the three short stories set in the Eternal City that are collected in Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Reading her narratives and then walking through the places she describes brings home the observation that one of her characters makes about the time warp that is contemporary Rome:
Now she was free of both of them, free of the past and free of her future in a place where so many different times stood cheek by jowl like guests at a crowded party. She was alone with her work, alone abroad for the first time in her life, aware that her solitary existence was about to end. In Rome, she savored her isolation, immersed without effort in the silent routine of her days.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro