News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The Wendell Berry conference we hosted at Grove City College last week was a real delight. Many Porchers were in attendance, and it was an opportunity to renew old friendships and start some new ones.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about pilgrimage, translation, and control.
- Casey Spinks reviews James Rebanks's new book and finds it quite good: "Farm work demands constant, well, work. Something’s always trying to break or die. Rebanks expected much the same from island life. But when he joined Anna and her friend Ingrid on a tiny, isolated island with little more than a cabin, a barn, and a rowboat, he found most of the work was in waiting, watching—women’s work, of a sort. It was hard for a shepherd and activist, and a man, to learn to sit still."
- David Bannon looks at how various presidents have responded to the loss of a child: "A shocking number of United States presidents were bereaved parents. John Adams lost three children; John Quincy Adams, two; Rutherford B. Hayes, three; Thomas Jefferson, five; John Tyler, three. William McKinley and Franklin Pierce watched all their children die. Grover Cleveland described the death of his twelve-year-old daughter as 'almost unbearable.' Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan also knew the burden of parental sorrow. The list numbs us, unable to comprehend such heartbreak: nineteen presidents in all."
- Judd Baroff wraps up his three-part interview with Ashley Fitzgerald: "people who say agrobusinesses are more efficient almost always leave out the total fossil fuels as counted calories. The same with Walmart being 'more efficient'; nobody ever does a life cycle analysis where they actually look at all the energy embedded in every part of the system, including all the fossil fuel subsidies. It’s actually less efficient by the measure of anyone who looks at the total energy use."
- Tony Woodlief responds to a recent Harper's essay on how to save art from political ideologies. Woodlief has his own suggestion: "If beauty can save the world, maybe it can even save the art world."
- Kirk Brooks relates a lesson he learned while chasing sheep around the pasture with his children: "Sheep can be nervous. They’re suspicious animals too. That’s what keeps them alive. Friendly, trusting, naive sheep, are stupid. They make good pets, but they also die easily because they need to be coddled. Our sheep are neither friendly nor stupid which makes them tough and tough to work."
Wendell Berry's essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” follows up on his arguments in "Why I am Not going to Buy a Computer" and makes some striking observations on the possibility of working for love, of aspiring to a ripe life rather than merely a long one:
Some people would like to think that this long sequence of industrial innovations has changed human life and even human nature in fundamental ways. Perhaps it has—but, arguably, almost always for the worse. I know that “technological progress” can be defended, but I observe that the defenses are invariably quantitative—catalogs of statistics on the ownership of automobiles and television sets, for example, or on the increase of life expectancy—and I see that these statistics are always kept carefully apart from the related statistics of soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, and so forth. That is to say, there is never an effort to determine the net result of this progress. The voice of its defenders is not that of the responsible bookkeeper, but that of the propagandist or salesman, who says that the net gain is more than 100 percent—that the thing we have bought has perfectly replaced everything it has cost, and added a great deal more: “You just can’t lose!” We thus have got rich by spending, just as the advertisers have told us we would, and the best of all possible worlds is getting better every day. . . .
After several generations of “technological progress,” in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do? Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities. When else in history would you find “educated” people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro