News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The redbud trees are in full bloom. What more can be said about such glorious trees?
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on work, time, and seeds.
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Grayson Walker draws on C.S. Lewis and others to remind readers that while “pundits and politicians may tell us otherwise, . . . harrowing times really do call for ordinary measures.”
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Elizabeth Stice reviews Charlie Hailey’s The Porch and considers the ways in which “a porch is both an architectural feature and a way of seeing and being in the world, even a ‘place to weigh the world.’”
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Christian McNamara delves into the roots of the opioid and meth epidemics: “The decline of local institutions creates a vacuum of isolation and hopelessness in which drugs can gain a foothold, despite all efforts to keep them out. Reading The Least of Us, one is struck again and again by the seeming futility of efforts to solve the drug problem by limiting the available supply of illicit substances.”
We are wrapping up a rich semester of reading and discussing Wendell Berry’s writings with Jayber Crow. Several of the students have read this novel previously, but as one of them commented in class this week, there is so much going on in this book. It bears many re-readings, and it’s especially delightful to read it after spending the last few months pondering the broader context of Berry’s thought. This passage from the beginning of Chapter 13 struck me in particular this time through the novel:
You would need to draw a very big map of the world in order to make Port William visible upon it. In the actual scale of a state highway map, Port William would be smaller than the dot that locates it. In the eyes of the powers that be, we Port Williamites live and move and have our being within a black period about the size of the one that ends a sentence. It would be a considerable overstatement to say that before making their decisions the leaders of the world do not consult the citizens of Port William. Thousands of leaders of our state and nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing or pronouncing the name of Port William. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.
A town such as Port William in this age of the world is like a man on an icy slope, working hard to stay in place and yet slowly sliding downhill. It has to contend not just with the local mortality, depravity, ignorance, natural deficiencies, and weather but also with what I suppose we might as well call The News. The obliviousness of Port William in high places unfortunately is not reciprocated. The names of the mighty are known in Port William; the news of their influence is variously brought. In modern times much of the doing of the mighty has been the undoing of Port William and its kind. Sometimes Port William is persuaded to approve and support its own undoing. But it knows always that a decision unfeelingly made in the capitols can be here a blow felt, a wound received.