News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I've had a great visit to Lookout Mountain and Covenant College. The recent snow here closed part of the national military park, but I still got to do a bit of walking on a few of the trails and went through one of the visitor centers to get a sense of some of this place's history.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Seamus Heaney, isolation, and the Catholic Worker.
- Seth Wieck interviews Matt Miller about Matt's book Leaves of Healing: "Knowledge is a path to love, and so I’m bound to say that the book did change my affection for the place. But that’s complicated. Readers of the book will know that at the end of its garden year, my family began preparing to leave that home and garden; as of this writing, we are six months gone, moved into town closer to my job and our community."
- David Bannon reflects on the tenth anniversary of his daughter's death: "Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure."
- Dennis Uhlmann commends the humble coffee shop as a locus of community building: "Because of coffee’s popularity, coffee shops can draw people together like very few other modern institutions."
- Nathaniel Marshall reviews Connie Goddard's Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity and explores the tensions inherent in the different motives and methods of industrial education: "Industrial education combined the acquisition of manual skills alongside classical education (which was the ideal of the early manual education movement), an emphasis on self-initiative and fitness to the social and economic environment that the student would graduate into (which was the ideal of the new education), and for some it came to include preparation for specific job roles as in modern day technical or vocational training programs."
I’m a big admirer of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing, especially her first two collections of short stories and her little book on translation and language, In Altre Parole. Over Christmas break, I read her newest collection, Roman Stories. Despite being written in Italian and then translated into English, the prose is lovely and the narratives are well-wrought. But it doesn’t have the heft of her earlier stories; none of the characters have names, and they often seem like shadows of real people rather than fully imagined in their own right. Yet perhaps this is part of what Lahiri is up to. Rome is a place of migration and transience, and the characters find themselves passing through a richly storied place. Here’s a testimony from one such character:
Within a week I’ll be in the taxi again, on the Rome-Fiumicino highway, to fly back to the other side. Daytime flight, nine hours. Maybe the exertion does me good. I’ll go back to close out the semester and spend hours in the library, where I know where to drape my coat so that it stays toasty over the radiator. My ears will turn cold as soon as I step outside to go home. You can count the colored leaves still attached to the trees one by one. The dry rustle as they fall and strike the windowpanes sounds like rain. At dusk, once in a while, I’ll see a rabbit sitting on the grass, its body round and compact and that black marble eye staring out at nothing, or maybe everything. The animal emits terror or else it simply mirrors my own, and I wonder what it would have been like to live without moving so often between places, without the migrating spirit that has befallen me.
Were there people, in Dante’s time, condemned to have more than one life—that is, to never have one full life? It’s not easy to open the carriage house door with that bent key, when already at five-thirty in the afternoon it’s so outrageously dark outside, and to know that no one is inside waiting for you. Every time I squeeze between the front door and the storm door made of metal and glass, I feel a dreadful weight at my shoulders. It’s awkward searching for the key while the storm door presses against me, and I wonder if the tired breath the door lets out before closing comes from the stubborn hinges or from me.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro