News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Spring is on its way! I biked into work this week in my shirtsleeves and the lake I ride past is more than half clear of ice.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Chinese censors, Trappist Beer, and America's regional inequalities.
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I reflect on Gracy Olmstead's new book and how it might help us discern our responsibilities to our places.
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Casey Spinks considers a possible strategy for third parties to gain a toehold in US politics: winning a bit of land.
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Naystneetsa Katharsia commends Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Lutheran Letters as a way of understanding the consequences of our "COVID-induced Screen New Deal."
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Will Hoyt reviews a collection of letters between John Médaille (who gives voice to the poet or myth-maker) and Thomas Storck (who speaks on behalf of the philosopher or logician).
What's on the docket for the coming week? An agrarian perspective on Daylight Saving Time, another review of Gracy Olmstead's book (this one from a fellow Idahoan exile), a report on Boise's mask-burning protest, and an account of buying some Texas land and beginning the work of stewardship.
I had occasion this week to re-read Berry's essay “Uses of Adversity." It is a wise exploration of two Shakespeare plays---As You Like It and King Lear---and the way they invite us to imagine the hope-giving power of faithful service. Here is Berry on the latter play:
To this great force of relentless if self-doomed evil Shakespeare opposes the counterforce of good and faithful service. As Lear and Gloucester are made powerless, poor, and helpless, the theme of help manifests itself in the presence and the acts of people entirely dedicated to serving them. But Lear and Gloucester in their selfishness are too vulnerable and the wickedness of their adversaries is too great to permit to the good servants any considerable practical success. They can give no victory and achieve no restoration, as the world understands such things. Their virtues do not lead certainly or even probably to worldly success, as some bad teachers would have us believe. They stand by, suffering what they cannot help, as parents stand by a dying or disappointing child. This assures only the survival of faithfulness, compassion, and love in this world—which is no small thing.
But this play refuses to stop at what the world understands of service or success. For Lear and Gloucester worldly failure is fully assured; it is too late for worldly vindication. What the good servants can do, and this they succeed in doing, is to restore those defeated old men to their true nature as human beings. They can waken them to love and save them from despair.