News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Despite some wrinkles obtaining paper, the new issue of Local Culture hit the mail this week and should be arriving in subscriber mailboxes in the coming days. Enjoy!
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on Roger Scruton, globalization, and concentric roots.
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Kyle Childress reviews Daniel Grothe’s The Power of Place and commends its vision of rooted, Berryian pastoral ministry.
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Russell Arben Fox wrestles with the tensions inherent in utopian projects: “If you’re looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communal–with, say, better food practices, more responsible energy usage, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantage–well, that doesn’t make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you share more with those inspired folk than you may think.”
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Matt Miller commends Matthew Milliner’s The Everlasting People, concluding: “It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s ‘penitent Midwest regionalism’ is first of all an attempt to heal within himself the disease and discontentment produced in those of us who have been told that what matters about us is that we are white.”
Our Wendell Berry class has now moved on to his fiction. As Jack Baker and I have argued, this is probably his strongest genre–it’s certainly my favorite. This passage from the short story “Misery” (collected in Place in Time) resonated with me when I re-read it this week:
Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.