Greetings from the Porch,

This week I started my first batch of garden vegetables in the basement and boiled off the last batch of this year's maple syrup. We also had temps in the 70s, so it's feeling like spring in these parts.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about gratitude, war, and play.

• Mel Livatino unleashes his inner introvert: "One recent morning I realized something I should have noticed years ago, namely that for much of my life the extrovert in me has been selling out the introvert, not totally of course, but enough that the introvert had been living, let us say, on limited rations. Why, I found myself wondering this sunny morning, had I done this all these decades?"

• Tim Milosch reviews Dan Darling's book on Christian patriotism and articulates a theological account of loyalty to our places: "Imagine a country whose greatness is built on a mosaic of local, political cultures that takes the greatest commandments seriously. Darling argues this hope is the essence of Christian patriotism, and pursuing this hope is the endeavor that has fostered American exceptionalism."

• Ben Darr reviews Christine Rosen’s recent book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World and finds it quite depressing: "The real impact of the digital revolution hits us directly in the place that matters most: our very experience of life."

• Ethan Jones ponders poems on joy: "Joy is a little word: three letters, one syllable. It is luminous. It is impenetrable. It is a word that offers much, if it doesn’t slip out of your hand."

• Casey Spinks responds to Ross McCullough's new, aphoristic book: "The present age has invented Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Bluesky, Truth Social, and Threads, but it hasn’t produced one great aphorist. Strange, since these media feed on the curt thought. But that laconicism all happens within a virtual sphere—pretended immediacy, frictionless scrolling, all flat as the screen. Type and post as soon as the take comes, hot and ready. But everything these apps emit seems rather cool and, almost as often, cruel. 'These media communicate the vitality of activity but not the vitality of sheer existence,' as an archbishop writes. By contrast, the aphorism 'makes plain its inadequacy.' It indicates, but does not pretend to comprehend, truths beyond its own words. It always goes a little too far, or not quite far enough. It leaves you wondering. Short proverbs, parables, pointers. What are they pointing to? 'They reach for the vitality of sheer being.'"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about waiting this week (and reads one of my favorite R.S. Thomas poems).

Guy Claxton is a seminal figure in the field of embodied intelligence, and his Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks is a good overview. He covers many ways in which we think with and through our bodies, but one anecdote that caught my attention (perhaps because I spend a lot of time right now with a baby developing his capacities for gesticulation) indicates why manipulables remain essential in teaching mathematical concepts. Drawing on work done by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Claxton writes,

It has been shown that children’s arm movements can actually convey a more creative part of their overall understanding than their tongues or pens (or iPad screens). As they talk, children naturally gesticulate, and their gestures carry part of the meaning of what they are trying to say. One classic test of cognitive development is children’s understanding of what is called ‘conservation of volume.’ If water in a tall think beaker is poured carefully into a short fat one, the appearance of the water is different but its volume stays the same. Younger children are unable to escape the appearance and say that the ‘amount’ of water has changed. If children are made to sit on their hands while they are talking about this phenomenon, they appear to be at this lower level of understanding. The unfurling of their understanding is hampered when they are deprived of gesture.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro