News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
For me, this week held several bonfires, morning walks, and mountainside scrambles mixed among my everyday tasks and work - a good week, in my book. The Porch held several interesting and important ideas this week, too:
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Robert Thornett delves into the parallel struggles between various vast societies, from China to America. His essay begins with the notion that “open societies are pushing the limits of openness. Closed societies are pushing the limits of closure. And we are seeing the consequences when both open and closed societies go too far.”
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David Eisenberg inquires how to practice faithfulness. Riffing off Eliot and others, he argues for the cultivation of simple virtues: “Everyone has the ability to do good, to care for virtue, to leave the world, however small a part of it, in a better state than the one in which he found it. And in many ways, that is what keeps the world going: the minor acts and modest deeds that go unrecorded in the annals of history, unobserved by historians and chroniclers, unsung by poets and dramatists.”
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Corbin Barthold portrays renunciation as a way to live following Eisenberg’s recommendation. Through history, mysticism, Peter Akroyd, and Paul Kingsnorth, Barthold connects the “search for the eternal things” with giving of self.
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Again, if you haven’t had the chance, take a look at Associate Editor Matt Stewart’s new book on Wallace Stegner, his story, and his place.
Amid work and walks this week, I’ve also started George Eliot’s Middlemarch, inspired in part by Eisenberg’s essay. Though I have not yet gotten to the stellar last paragraph he quotes, this passage about “interdependence” struck me:
But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like an calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.