News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Watch out for those late frosts that threaten fruit trees and young plants. As Matt Miller writes, “What better teacher than a late frost or a sudden downpour? I’ll take my lesson, but I’ll be darned if I will like it. Life lessons are well and good, but peaches are more filling.”
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays on mother trees, an intergenerational community, and Madeleine L’Engle.
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What happens when cancel culture comes to an Old Woodworking Machines discussion forum? Aaron Weinacht mourns the way partisan politics can inhibit neighborliness.
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Alex Sosler considers the necessity of leisure and liberal education during seasons of loss and hardship: “To develop depth as human beings requires slowing down and self-reflection. And the liberal arts cultivate this slowness—a slowness forced upon many when the pandemic shut things down.”
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Taking an observation from Simone Weil as his starting point—“The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’“—Michael Sauter relates the way we imagine love to the way we imagine space.
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Jeffrey Wald reviews Andrew J. Graff’s Raft of Stars: “The question of how to live, or what makes for the good life, is at the center of the story. Graff takes seriously–without any hint of irony–questions of fatherhood and motherhood, family, faith, evil, prayer, friendship, Providence, and loss; namely, the stuff of life.”
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In the latest episode of the Brass Spitoon Podcast, John Murdock talks with Os Guinness about place, the current challenges for liberty, and his hopes for the future.
What’s on the docket for next week? An essay reflecting on gratitude, a review of a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer, an essay responding to two recent books about the Midwest, and a review of Aaron Poochigian’s new book of poems.
I recently re-read Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory. It’s a remarkable book for many reasons, one of which is the wealth of botanical, sylvan knowledge it conveys. I’m also intrigued by its exploration of what one character calls “unsuicide,” which reminds me of Walker Percy’s notion of “ex-suicide.” I may have more to say about this later, but for now here’s a passage where Patricia Westerford (a character based in part on both Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben) is trying to teach a class about the wonders of photosynthesis:
It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antennae arrays form up into thylakoid discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious ginkgo. . . . They think she’s nuts, and that’s fine with her. She’s content to post a memory forward to their distant futures, futures that will depend on the inscrutable generosity of green things.