Greetings from the Porch,

We're four weeks out from the FPR conference in Indianapolis. It's shaping up to be an encouraging and, in light of Wendell Berry's death, poignant gathering. I'm looking forward to seeing many of you there.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about hope, cheats, and labs.

• Mel Livatino shares the essay he wrote twenty-five years ago as he processed the 9/11 tragedy: "The herd: it is one of the things I most fear, not just from terrorists but from my fellow citizens, even from my friends and family."

• Sarah Reardon contemplates death with help from Berry: "Berry was the first writer I encountered who made me seriously consider death: what constitutes a good death, as well as the good of death."

• Jason G. Edwards articulates what Berry taught him about how to see: "Berry slowly gets the point across to readers: each life only looks small when viewed from far away."

• Elizabeth Stice reckons with the example Berry set of acting with courage even if your course seems unconventional: "It would be hard to imagine the existence of Front Porch Republic without Wendell Berry. FPR is a project that does not compute."

• Richard Bailey names some of the lessons he learned from reading and talking with Berry: "As I reflect on his passing, I do so with a particular hope for the peace that Wendell Berry’s legacy and life offer each of us as we strive to be the friends and neighbors this unsettled world demands."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about rivers this week.

John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Mean is a gripping novel. The plot develops wonderful meditations on faith and friendship, and it’s one of the Vietnam War novels that focuses attention on the cultural failures in the US, failures that haven’t been ameliorated in the past fifty years. Given my interest in the state of the news industry, I was particularly taken with the narrator’s addiction to and condemnation of TV and newspapers:

Katherine told me today that I should make an effort to not read any newspapers. She saw how The Globe and Mail ruined my day—and it is so gorgeous, so peaceful on this island, on all this water; it’s such a shame to not relax here, to not take the opportunity to think more tranquilly, more reflectively. Katherine wants only the best for me; I know she’s right—I should give up the news, just give it up. You can’t understand anything by reading the news, anyway.

If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with the same, shallow, superficial understanding that I’m sure I possess of world affairs—or, even, American wrongdoing—I would be outraged. I am a good enough English teacher to know that my grasp of American misadventures—even in Vietnam, not to mention Nicaragua—is shallow and superficial. Whoever acquired any real and substantive intelligence from reading newspapers? I’m sure I have no in-depth comprehension of American villainy; yet I can’t leave the news alone! You’d think I might profit from my experience with ice cream. If I have ice cream in the freezer, I’ll eat it—I’ll eat all of it, all at once. Therefore, I’ve learned not to buy ice cream. Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro