News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy week on the Porch; in case you missed it, we released the cover of the spring issue of Local Culture. It's going to be another good issue. Subscribe by March 1st to get it in your mailbox.
-
In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on trees, old books, and local politics.
-
Amanda Patchin explores C.S. Lewis's and Joy Davidman's example of substitution, asking whether we, too, would "readily assume we could bear another’s burden and so sink ourselves under more than we could carry? Or, would our burdens be lightened by such sharing?"
-
Paul Krause praises Mark Clavier's new book for its sacramental vision, its "timely and eternal reminder to us that we should seek the encounter with God in the world."
-
Rachel Griffis reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel: "At the center of Klara and the Sun is irony—that the robot embraces faith through her dependence on the gifts of nature and acknowledgement of her own limitations while the humans resolutely wall themselves off from life through their technologies."
-
Alan Cornett talks with the author of the new book Swan Songs: Souvenirs of Paris Elegance. They discuss lost shops, lost skills, and, in many ways, a lost world.
I am teaching a course this spring on the writings of Wendell Berry. It's quite a treat to re-read some of my favorite works by him and discuss those with eager, motivated students. The first few weeks, we're reading through This Day, his collected Sabbath poems. Here's one from 1987 that has been on my mind this week:
Coming to the woods’ edge
on my Sunday morning walk,
I stand resting a moment beside
a ragged half-dead wild plum
in bloom, its perfume
a moment enclosing me,
and standing side by side
with the old broken blooming tree,
I almost understand,
I almost recognize as a friend
the great impertinence of beauty
that comes even to the dying,
even to the fallen, without reason
sweetening the air.I walk on,
distracted by the letter accusing me
of distraction, which distracts me
only from the hundred things
that would otherwise distract me
from this whiteness, lightness,
sweetness in the air. The mind
is broken by the thousand
calling voices it is always too late
to answer, and that is why it yearns
for some hard task, lifelong, longer
than life, to concentrate it
and to make it whole.But where is the all-welcoming,
all-consecrating Sabbath
that would do the same? Where
that quietness of the heart
and the eye’s clarity
that would be a friend’s reply
to the white-blossoming plum tree?