Greetings from the Porch,

Sophie Spilak has joined FPR as our editorial intern. If you enjoy the images chosen to accompany each essay, you now know who to thank.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Annie Dillard, friends, and sin.

• Teddy Macker probes the debates around data centers and AI and wonders what a wise and human response might be: "Would they remind us that reality—despite the numbing phantasmagoria of figments, fragments, and shocks that is the Internet—is still real?"

• Adam Smith praises Berry's great soul: "Wendell Berry, more than most, showed the rest of us what it's like to choose membership over celebrity."

• Russell Arben Fox considers the myriad ways that Berry influenced him: "For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated, Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes."

• Emily Johnson ponders the nature of our grief when someone like Berry dies: "[Your grief] is unique to you, shaped by your memories, abstracted and then made concrete in ways I am not privy to."

• Maurice Manning remembers his teacher Berry and tries to distill what he taught: "If we take care of this holy Creation, we will meet our human purpose. We will also take care of our families and our communities"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about self-destruction this week.

I think I last read Chaim Potok when I was a teen, but I recently reread The Chosen and was reminded of why his novels meant so much to me. He focuses in on theological and communal tensions and narrates these in such compelling fashion. It’s an odd coincidence—I think—that the plots of both Potok’s novel and Irving’s novel turn on baseball accidents. Both also refer to the logical philosophy developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but more on that later. Danny’s account of how studying Talmud teaches him how to learn deeply particularly struck me this time through the novel:

When I got to the library the next afternoon, I found [Danny] seated at the table. There were three books open in front of him. He smiled broadly and waved me to a chair. He had worked out a method of doing Freud, he said, and it seemed to be going all right, so far. He pointed to the three books. One was a volume of Freud’s early papers, he told me. Some of them Freud had written together with Josef Breuer, a Viennese physician; others he had written alone. Another was the Cassell’s German-English Dictionary. The third was a dictionary of psychological terms edited by someone called Warren. The Freud volume was open to a paper entitled “Ein Fall Von Hypnotischer Heilung.” “Fall” meant “case,” he said. The rest of the title I could figure out for myself from my Yiddish, he told me.

“I forgot what it was like to study Talmud,” he said excitedly. “Talmud is so easy for me now, I didn’t remember what I used to go through when I first started it as a kid. Can you study Talmud without the commentaries? Imagine Talmud without Rashi. How far would you get?”

I agreed with him that I wouldn’t get very far at all.

He had been going at it all wrong, he said, his eyes bright with excitement. He had wanted to read Freud. That had been his mistake. Freud had to be studied, not read. He had to be studied like a page of Talmud. And he had to be studied with a commentary.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro