News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've got a date (Oct. 10-11), a location (Baylor University), and a keynote (Matthew Crawford) lined up for our fall conference. Make plans to join us, and stay tuned for more details. Also, some folks in the Los Angeles area are looking to gather FPR readers. The recent wildfires seem to have spurred a desire for fostering local community, so email Clark Stevens if you're interested in more details.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about journalism, fractures, and trash.
- Holly Stockley visits an old family farm and tries to find traces of its past: "Most of the acreage had been swallowed by new homes, a manicured clubhouse, and a community pool. But one hill remained untouched. It rose above the rows of tidy houses, crowned with a ring of old trees and a metal windmill, its bent fins spinning lazily in the hot July breeze. Clearly the site of the old farmhouse—though the house itself was long gone. No trace of even a foundation remained."
- Jason Peters regales us with an appreciation of the good things in life that he is, perhaps, denying himself during this season of mortification: "Another one of those things is The Clementine, a cocktail of my own invention. It is named for my first grandchild and will soon be accompanied by another cocktail, as will the grandchild herself. The only problem is that I haven’t begun work on it yet—the drink, I mean, not the baby—and damned if the arid fast isn’t already upon us, that all-bibulous-destroying and all-raucous-crushing tenebrous penitential Tartarus whence all steak tartare has been interminably—in the sense of temporarily—banished."
- Reid Makowsky describes his methods of gardening: "During the last few years a new hobby has taken hold of me, that of collecting seeds. After I collect them, I scatter the seeds on a likely spot in my one-acre garden. As I walk, as I drive, my hobby obsesses me. What unlikely souvenir will I bring home to the garden today? 'Souvenir' means 'memory,' and the bringing home of souvenirs is an attempt to remember the places you’ve visited. There is a souvenir-like quality to the seeds I collect and the plants that grow from them. My wanderings are the thread and the seeds are the needle that stitch my garden to the places I love to visit."
- Logan Hoffman offers three "perspectival points" that might guide more healthy conversations about immigration: "The ordo amoris is not an invitation to love some and not love others: Augustine makes this clear in the first sentence quoted above. It is, however, a recognition of human finitude that pushes us to be rooted more deeply in those places and communities which are constitutive of our finite lives."
- Bridget Ryder looks at the lives of some of those who come to America on guest worker visas: "Institutionalizing the use of foreign workers en mass in the form of tens of thousands of guest work visas supposes there are masses of disenfranchised people ready to leave not only their local communities but even their countries and continents simply to have a job. That these people should need to migrate to find work that can support their family is unjust, but on top of that, most of these guest workers are prohibited from full membership, essentially ever, in the communities they work in, live peacefully in, and pay taxes in (almost every jurisdiction in the US has a sales tax), because the US immigration system is designed to prevent the vast majority of those same guest workers from actually immigrating."
- Joe Duke muses on the vagaries of time: "The older I get; the faster time goes. Call it a hunch or a sneaking suspicion. I’m not suggesting it’s related to the theory of relativity or grounded in a study from Harvard Medical School. Instead, I’ll attempt a less sophisticated explanation of the speed of life. Here’s how I picture it: When the ball reaches the top of the roof and begins rolling down the other side, it picks up speed. Like that ball, life goes faster and faster. Time flies."
"A New Day" is a particularly haunting Wendell Berry story about the transformation wrought by introducing tractors into farming communities. It's a story about shifts in communal memory, the mysterious and tacit collaboration between humans and horses, and the joys of leisure:
By the effort and willingness of living creatures that labored, suffered, and grew old like themselves, they had joined themselves to the living world in which nothing is machine-like. But by their acceptance and excitement, and against the resistance of a few of them, the machines came. As I look back at those men across sixty years, I see that they had already come past a difference that most of them would not live to recognize. Their kind as it had been through centuries mostly forgotten was already being replaced by a kind that no farmers, and in fact no humans, had ever been before.
Though they stood in the shadow of a great and portentous story still ongoing sixty years later and so far without an imaginable end, they were nonetheless perfectly competent witnesses to the story of that day. They all belonged to the old story, the story of Port William before it was dominated by machines, the ancient story of people and animals moving over the earth.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro