News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We did something a bit unusual for FPR this week: we published three different review essays responding to one book. But Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places has much to say, and each of these essays picks up on a different theme. Early next week we’ll be publishing Douthat’s response to these essays, so keep an eye out for that.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on idols, democracy, and communion.
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Jon Schaff relates his own frustrating, ongoing experiences with undiagnosed illness and draws on this to reflect on Douthat’s account. Such challenges point us to the heart of the human experience: “Beneath these critiques of the American medical system and the biological mysteries of the human body throbs a more existential question: How does one deal with suffering?”
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Lucas Nossaman considers the fraught history of romantic views of the land and how Douthat’s book fits into this history: “The Deep Places elucidates creation’s shadow side, the abyss of suffering that leads us to search for answers to our most profound questions of creation, pain, and evil.”
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Brian Volck writes from his perspective as both a medical doctor and a student of narrative: what are the different ways we might narrate our experiences with disease?
In the Wendell Berry course that I’m teaching this semester, we’ve moved from his poetry to his essays. As I re-read “A Native Hill,” I was newly struck by Berry’s contrast between a path and a road. Perhaps, in part, this is because I’ve been blazing a path through the snow and ice this week when I walk to campus:
The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.