News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Fall temps have come early to western PA this year, which suits me so long as the frost holds off long enough for my tomatoes and peppers and squash to finish bearing.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about family doctors, designer babies, and bug farms.
- Madeleine Austin cherishes the virtues of paths: "When the wood deepened, the clean wearing of the earth itself wore away into indistinguishable concord."
- Zachary Michael Jack praises the mundane work of mowing lawns: "In the ultimate form of mimesis, the well-seasoned mower who comes to know every inch of the property he maintains, also comes, in the end, to know the contours and corners of his own mind, given sufficient time."
- Perry Glanzer remembers James Dobson and reflects on his strengths and one consistent weakness: "Dobson knew his influence was on one side of the political divide and kept his focus and advocacy there. Political loyalties came first."
- Frank DeVito observes how passengers on a flight use their time and considers what good leisure looks like: "How we use our free time might be the difference between a professionally successful but ultimately mediocre life and the life of a saint."
- Jordana Rozenman shares the joys of reading Rainer Maria Rilke in a Catherine Project reading group: "these insights into this work and Rilke are available to me only because I read him in community with these minds. For that gift, one that is like the tilling of a very fertile soil, I’m forever thankful to them."
- Michial Farmer listens to songs about fame and shares some ancient wisdom about the burden of being well known.
I reread Till We Have Faces this summer, and I can see why Lewis thought it was his best book. It really is a remarkably perceptive tale about the ways in which what one thinks to be love can in fact be utter egoism. The corruption of the best is the worst, to quote Illich out of context. I recently reread That Hideous Strength and Abolition of Man as well, and I’m thinking I may need to reread other Lewis books that I haven’t read for more than 20 years now. But I guess one of the pleasures of getting older is the opportunity to revisit books and see how they reveal new delights that I missed the first time around. Here’s a taste of Till We Have Faces as Orual is wrapping up her indictment of the gods:
Now, you who read, judge between the gods and me. They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me. But that was not enough. They then brought me to her at such a place and time that it hung on my word whether she should continue in bliss or be cast out into misery. They would not tell me whether she was the bride of a god, or mad, or a brute’s or villain’s spoil. They would give no clear sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess. And because I guessed wrong they punished me—what’s worse, punished me through her. And even that was not enough; they have now sent out a lying story in which I was given no riddle to guess, but knew and saw that she was the god’s bride, and of my own will destroyed her, and that for jealousy. . . . I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s buff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro