Greetings from the Porch,

I drove across the state this week to speak at Alvernia University (all their first-year students read The Liberating Arts this semester), and Penn's woods in late autumn are quite glorious.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about bookstores, hammers, and soybeans.

• Hadden Turner reviews Chris Smaje's Finding Lights in a Dark Age and weighs the prospects for an agrarian revival: "The collapse of the business-as-usual world—which has been the chief opponent and great inhibitor of agrarianism—creates an environment where agrarianism can position itself the best means to feed, clothe, and house people, and as the optimum pathway for conviviality and flourishing in the chaotic new world. In fact, Chris is adamant that it may only be through chaos and collapse that widespread agrarian localist communities are enabled to emerge and thrive."

• Dylan Reed points to healthy communities as the telos of economic policies: "The national dialogue has myopically focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs, which misses the point that the real goal should be stable communities."

• Colin Gillette describes the joys and challenges of riding his motorcycle: "Zen tells you to empty your mind. Motorcycles force you to sharpen it. Riding demands survival before it whispers meditation. Every curve insists on attention. Every patch of gravel or oil threatens to undo you."

• Austin Hoffman reviews Are We All Cyborgs Now? by Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling and engages with their analysis of technology: "Phillips and Pauling help us to consider new emerging technologies and how we can avoid becoming cyborgs living off grubs and gruel."

• Amanda Patchin reads Byung-Chul Han’s In Praise of the Earth and commends the way he models the very posture he advocates: "Han turns so completely toward wholeness that his writing seems an alien arrival: the work of a being that loves wholly, uselessly, openly. Writing, perhaps, not even to be read but simply to praise the living world for living, adding his voice to those of the stones that would cry out as we moderns ignore the glory around us."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about crying this week.

I was revisiting Alan Jacobs’s excellent book The Year of Our Lord 1943, and his discussion of T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe ” sent me to look that up. It’s a fascinating essay, and Eliot’s discussion of regionalism and industrialism is quite perceptive and still very relevant:

It has often been the weakness of "regionalist" movements, to assume that a cultural malady can be cured by political means; to ascribe, to individuals belonging to the dominant culture, malignant intentions of which they may be innocent; and, by not probing deep enough into the causes, to prescribe a superficial remedy. By the materialist, these regional stirrings are often regarded with derision. The man of letters, who should be peculiarly qualified to respect and to criticize them, should be able to take a longer view than either the politician or the local patriot. He should know that neither in a complete and universal uniformity, nor in an isolated self-sufficiency, can culture flourish; that a local and a general culture are so far from being in conflict, that they are truly necessary to each other. To the engineering mind the idea of a universal uniformity on the one hand or the idea of complete autarchy on the other, is more easily apprehensible. The union of local cultures in a general culture is more difficult to conceive, and more difficult to realize. But the man of letters should know that uniformity means the obliteration of culture, and that self-sufficiency means its death by starvation. . . .

I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro