Greetings from the Porch,

Despite the cold, my environmental ethics class met outside one day this week. We gathered next to the creek, which is mostly iced over, and kicked things off by singing "How Great Thou Art" while standing around the fire with the snow falling thickly. Since we were discussing an essay in which Wendell Berry calls the Bible a "hypaethral book," it just seemed wrong to meet inside. But windchill in the single digits or below for the foreseeable future will keep us mostly penned up for a while.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Polymarket, data, and clear cuts.

• Dixie Dillon Lane suggests ways to build community when people shun commitments: "whatever our particular lives look like, it may be wise to start looking for opportunities for friendship on the path that is already rising before us, rather than trying to create some sort of social ideal that just isn’t working. We do need to stretch ourselves in order to build and maintain friendships, but are we stretching ourselves toward something we simply wish were true or toward accepting the gifts that are actually already at hand, even when we struggle to see them?"

• Alex Sosler reviews Jeff Crosby's World of Wonders and ponders the power of reading: "No one comes out of the womb ready to read. But it took me longer than most. It wasn’t until college that I fell in love with reading. It all started with a book. The title is unimportant, but it changed me. It seemed to have chosen me and sent me on a quest to read more, deeper, wider."

• Elizabeth Stice describes how a culture of participation is forming at her honors college: "When the fall semester began, several classes attempted streaks. No one expected all the classes to succeed, but it seemed especially unlikely that underclassmen would. Yet they succeeded."

• Geoffrey Smagacz praises Aaron Poochigian’s Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park: "Poochigian also seems to love America; not in some jingoistic unrealistic manner, but in the way Shakespeare loved his England or Frost his New England. If he has any quarrels at all, they’re lover’s quarrels."

• Morgan Vannell reads David Foster Wallace's Something to Do with Paying Attention and wrestles with what real attention entails: "being in the moment and doubling are not the same either. You could get pressed so close to reality that it’s all just scenery. It’s all equally acceptable data. It’s all facts requiring no further justification. . . .Is doubling the goal anyway—seeing everything, and feeling it, and knowing that it’s there, and knowing that I’m there, all at the same time?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about suffering this week.

Charles King’s Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah explores the eighteenth-century world of politics and philosophy in which the most popular English-language oratorio was composed. At times he wanders quite far afield from Handel and Charles Jennens, who assembled the libretto from biblical passages. Most of these digressions remain intriguing, but what justified the long sections about Ayuba Suleiman Diallo never became clear. King's efforts to articulate Messiah’s hope even for non-Christians are interesting, but of course for the original auditors, this hope was grounded in a conviction that the composition’s narrative is in fact true:

Thinking in this way is not really a disposition or a philosophy but more like a skill, something that requires practice as well as a good model. To posit a believable version of a brighter future takes faith—if you want to call it that—or to put it another way, a facility for reasoning contrary to lived experience. The first step is to hold fast to the conviction that the world to come need not look like the one we set before us. That is one of the reasons the Messiah continues to move listeners without demanding that they share its religious point of view. At its most profound, the Messiah lays out an entire method for seeing the uses of adversity—not by naively claiming that life is easy or always beautiful but by starting from the premise that the world, long before we enter it, is already infused with purpose.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro