News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last week, the college's outing club hosted their annual pig roast. The weather was ideal, and it was a treat to enjoy some good food in the woods with good company.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about syncretism, saints, and childhood.
- Casey Spinks begrudgingly sings the praises of his e-bike: "Automobiles shield you from the outside world, its sounds, its colors. But on my bike, I encounter my environment directly."
- Jason Peters commends the well-turned political barb: "In other words, knowledge and reason are no match for our gargantuan vices. The giants passion and pride cannot be held at bay by the ignorance that prevails in public discourse and certainly not by the bluster it hides behind."
- David Bannon chronicles the life and art of a little-known but talented German poet: "She was once a darling of Berlin’s literati, recipient of the prestigious 1932 Kleist Prize for Literature. Now, less than a year later, she is threatened, beaten, and forced out of the city. Her only son is dead, and she is running for her life. Brilliant poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler is a Jew in Nazi Germany."
- Jon Schaff attends to Nadya Williams's reliance on narrative in her new book: "We might say that liberal education helps us not to live, but to live well. Story and narrative, what we sometimes call the humanities, are not the whole of the liberal arts, but they do seem to be at the core. Liberal education is like people: valuable even when it is useless. Williams’s book, then, is itself a kind of story."
- And Rebecca Skabelund pens a more traditional review of Nadya Willimas's Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity: "So whatever value motherhood gets assigned on earth, it’s pretty clear what position it holds on high. You may feel invisible here, but you certainly aren’t in Heaven."
I’ve been wanting to read Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi for awhile now, so I was glad when a book group I’m in selected it. It didn’t disappoint: it’s a haunting, marvel-ous book. I don’t want to spoil its mysteries, but I’ll offer two contrasting images the book gives of what it might mean to explore mystery well:
I think of Dr Ketterley and an image rises up in my mind. It is the memory of a statue that stands in the nineteenth north-western hall. It is the statue of a man kneeling on his plinth; a sword lies at his side, its blade broken in five pieces. Roundabout lie other broken pieces, the remains of a sphere. The man has used his sword to shatter the sphere because he wanted to understand it, but now he finds that he has destroyed both sphere and sword. This puzzles him, but at the same time part of him refuses to accept that the sphere is broken and worthless. He has picked up some of the fragments and stares at them intently in the hope that they will eventually bring him new knowledge. . . .
In my mind Raphael is better represented by a statue in an antechamber that lies between the forth-fifth and the sixty-second northern halls. This statue shows a figure walking forward, holding a lantern. It is hard to determine with any certainty the gender of the figure; it is androgynous in appearance. From the way she (or he) holds up the lantern and peers at whatever is ahead, one gets the sense of a huge darkness surrounding her; above all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no on else as courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro