News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I pulled the taps from the maple trees and ended up with about a gallon and a half of syrup. Not bad for a very amateur operation. Now the crocuses are blooming, and garden plans are afoot.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on public writing, fences, and neighbors.
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In an essay initially published in the most recent issue of Local Culture, Robert Elder surveys the recent discussions surrounding the possibility--and the desirability--of succession. As he reminds us, "reinvesting our identity in local institutions, local communities, local politics, and local environments may also be a path back to some form of mutual feeling in our national politics."
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Matt Stewart discusses Roosevelt Montás's book and the broader questions it raises about liberal education with Jessica Hooten Wilson, Doug Sikkema, and Christine Norvell.
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Eric Adler praises Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates and argues that many of its critics are misguided. He concludes that Montás "deserves great credit for illuminating the perverse priorities of American higher education."
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Alan Cornett chats with Allen Mendenhall, Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University, about Harper Lee, Russell Kirk, and more.
The title story of Berry's A Place in Time is in many respects a perfect Berry short story: it has humorous anecdotes, lyric descriptions, and a set of analogous plots whose resonances are harmonized in a beautiful conclusion. One passage describes the way in which Elton and Mary Penn inspired and influenced Andy Catlett with the beauty of their way of life:
For Andy Catlett the story of Elton and Mary Penn, from the time he was included in it, became one of the shaping forces of his life. Their example, reduced to instruction, told him this: Grow up. Learn to be a good hand. Learn to be a good farmer. Marry for love. Get a place, a farm of your own. Shape your life to the needs of your place. So far as you can, without hurting it, shape your place to your needs. Live from it and for it. Always try to make it better.
But to reduce that formative example to instruction is to misrepresent it, for instruction cannot even suggest the passion and the beauty, the difficult requirement and the hardship, of the example. What Andy took from the Penns was not instruction so much as a series of memories, visions, that ruled over his young life and still imposed their attraction and demand upon him when he was old: visions of Elton and Mary delighted with the first ripe tomato from their garden; of Elton plowing in the spring, his mind alight with the thought of the made crop; of Mary and Elton butchering their meat hogs, and then of the cured hams, shoulders, bacons, jowls, and the sacks of sausage hanging in their smokehouse; of Elton's best days lived from dark to dark in the excitement of going ahead, leaving a good difference behind him.