Listening to Charles Mingus: Blues & Roots. One of the masterpieces of jazz. Sounds brand-new every time, though it’s almost as old as I am. 🎵
Everybody who tries to read a page like this — typical of legacy journalism online — hits the “Reader View” button, or saves to Instapaper or a similar service, because if you want to read the article there’s no alternative. (I only saw the above because I accidentally hit the Reader View button a second time.) So how does this kind of thing make sense? Eventually, surely, advertisers will figure out that they’re paying for ads no one will see, and then what?
I had often pressed on [my father] essays and novels of Berry's. Like Berry’s father, mine was a white-collar professional who farmed on the side and deeply loved his rural community. He was perhaps the last of the country doctors to make a home visit and receive a cherry pie as payment. Yet it was also my dad who first pointed me toward a darkness behind the agrarian romance. Once, while handing back to me the book in which appears “A Defense of the Family Farm,” wherein Berry recommends the Amish practice of using family and horses instead of machinery, my father tersely noted that this idyllic vision depends on children doing forced labor.
Yes, but so does sending children to school. (That’s a minor quibble. The essay is superb and superbly provocative.)
Having done extensive research into the possibility of growing a lot of vegetables — after some halfhearted attempts in the past — I have come to two conclusions:
- I can’t afford the infrastructure that would be required to prevent my crops from being wholly consumed by squirrels;
- Even if I could afford that infrastructure, and installed it properly and devoted a great deal of care to keeping it up, the squirrels would probably find a way to eat everything anyway.
If I were fifteen years younger I would already have written a long post on the Sally Rooney kerfuffle. Ten years younger: I would want to write such a post but might be able to restrain myself. Five years younger: I’d be feeling that I probably should have an opinion on the subject and would worry a little about losing my edge. Today: I know that there is a kerfuffle but don’t know the details and don’t care. This is called Progress Towards Enlightenment. Five years more and, Deo volente, I won’t even know that crap like this is happening.
Finished reading: Distant Neighbors by Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. 📚 Berry to Snyder, 1978:
I am, I believe, a “non-violent” fighter. But I am a fighter. And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil?
Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil, and don’t fight “to save the world.”
It would have been nice if I had read that before I wrote this essay. It also would have been nice if I had remembered this quotation from Berry:
The problem, as it appears to me, is that we are using the wrong language. The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” “organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms,” and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.
The Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Some people want to build a Big Beautiful Wall right there.
Over at Personal History, I wrote about photography.