Greetings from the Porch,

I've spent the past couple of days at Baylor for a conference on AI. It's been encouraging to talk with some very thoughtful people who are seeking to support human thought and community in less-than-propitious conditions.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about the seeds, scribes, and Jeremiahs.

• Teddy Macker offers a parable that might inspire healing acts in our diseased body politic: "It’s vitally important, I believe, for us to see that Donald Trump is not anomalous, is not inorganic, is not separate. Rather, he seems a logical symptom of our unwell status quo, a magnified image of some of our habitual—and most damaging—tendencies, an exemplar of the 'thoughtless, heartless, greedy plunge' (Wendell Berry’s words) that characterizes much of our history."

• Joe Pitts watches Marty Supreme for the questions it poses about greatness and heroism: "The film presents us with two climaxes: Marty narrowly defeating Endo in Tokyo, and Marty returning home to stare into the eyes of his newborn child. These peaks typify the choice Marty, or any person deeply attracted to and capable of greatness, faces."

• Aimee Davis draws on Charlotte Mason to consider how teachers--and all of us--might learn to see each child as a person: "Mason’s foundational first principle, every child is born a person, caused me to rethink and question everything I had learned about education, in particular, educating students with physical and learning challenges. As I endeavored to understand one of my own children, I struggled to separate all the things I had been told about labeling, supporting, and prescribing from the idea that this child of mine was born exactly the way they were born: a person of infinite possibilities."

• Christian McNamara reviews The Perfect Neighbor by filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir and ponders what really makes a good neighbor: "The film takes its title from a statement that Lorincz makes during a call to deputies. She describes herself as 'the perfect neighbor—you barely ever see me.' The cruel irony, of course, is that we already know Lorincz is anything but. Yet for many Americans, there is nothing to fault in Lorincz’s definition of neighborliness, just in her failure to live up to it. Had she in fact made herself invisible, she would indeed have been the perfect neighbor."

• Mina Menyhert wrestles with the complicated relationship between clichés and truth: "The more I came to know my students, the more the songs I formerly despised emptied themselves of their triteness. They became, in their own way, sacred."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about insomnia this week.

This is Happiness is a beautiful novel by the Irish writer Niall Williams. It’s set in rural Ireland during the summer when electricity comes to town, and part of the story entails the promises and costs of modernizing. But as the protagonists respond in their various ways to the imperative to “keep up with the times,” they also pursue the old human longings for love, drink, music, and, well, life. Williams’s lyrical writing celebrates the deep contentment that some find in the midst of great hardship. Even the marvels of electricity can’t heal all sorrows. At several junctures, the narrator notes that in these earlier days, there were more real characters inhabiting the town:

Faha then had more to it too than it does now. The shops were small but there were more of them, grocers, butchers, hardware, draper, chemist and undertakers, each implacably marked by the character of their owners. You shopped by blood and tribe. If you were related, however thinly, to Clohessy, or Bourke, who both sold the same tea, flour, and sugar, the same three vegetables and tins of imperishable foodstuffs, that’s where you did your business. You didn’t darken the door of the other. One of the privileges of living in a place forgotten is the preservation of individuality. In Faha, because the centre was distant and largely unknown, eccentric was the norm.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro