Behind the JSTOR paywall, but the essay that made Wendell Berry an essential guide and companion for me is “Standing by Words.”
Against Mr. Winterowd's definition of literature, it will be instructive to place a definition by Gary Snyder, who says of poetry that it is “a tool, a net or trap to catch and present; a sharp edge; a medicine, or the little awl that unties knots.” It will be quickly observed that this sentence enormously complicates Mr. Winterowd's simplistic statement-message dichotomy. What Mr. Winterowd means by “message” is an “idea” written in the dullest possible prose. His book is glib, and glibness is an inescapable doom of language without standards. One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness — to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extra-linguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.
An Annie Dillard essay I think of often: “Singing with the Fundamentalists” (1985).
Every few years some bold and sincere Christian student at this university disagrees with a professor in class — usually about the professor's out-of-hand dismissal of Christianity. Members of the faculty, outraged, repeat the stories of these rare and uneven encounters for years on end, as if to prove that the crazies are everywhere, and gaining ground. The notion is, apparently, that these kinds can't think for themselves. Or they wouldn't disagree.
It’s always fun when Neal Stephenson goes down a physical-mechanics rabbit hole.
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore. It’s a brilliant book — right down my alley in a dozen different ways. There’s a problem, though: it’s a book, and the people in government and the tech sector who most need to understand the story it tells don’t read books.
Oh, a few of them read books for entertainment and maybe even inspiration, though, as Lepore points out, they reliably misunderstand the ones they do read. (One darkly enjoyable chapter is essentially an expansion of Alex Blechman’s famous Torment Nexus tweet.) But both Silicon Valley and our governmental offices are dominated by people who would never think it a good use of their time to read a book in order to understand what it is they’re doing. And while once upon a time such leaders would have relied on book-reading advisors — Tyrion Lannister types — I don’t think that’s true today. People making massively consequential decisions for the U.S.A. and indeed for the whole planet desperately need to know the history that Lepore tells. The question is, How can they be brought to know it?
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“Mr Pochettino? Call from London for you.”
She called herself a “gregarious recluse,” but there was in her single-mindedness no retreat from the world. She had simply found her place in it, and through luck and privilege (which is also, finally, at the individual level, just luck), been allowed to stay there. How few people get that opportunity! The Annie Dillard who celebrated her mother, in An American Childhood, for teaching her daughters to hate bullies and withstand oppressors, the Annie Dillard who mourned and memorialized anti-Chinese violence in The Living (1992) and who asked, in her great essay on the Book of Luke, why Christian churchgoers have so much money, would not want us to forget that everybody deserved the opportunities she got. But also: nobody else would have made of them what Annie Dillard did. Whether you looked at the hand, or at the things it pointed to, she shone.
A beautiful tribute by Phil. I was still reckoning with the loss of John Crowley when Wendell Berry died, and now Dillard! It’s going to take me months to sort out my thoughts and feelings about these writers, all of whom have meant a great deal to me.
On wherewithal and the lack thereof, for my BMAC supporters.
Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State:
This book is an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what I call the Artificial State. Yet little seems to me more inevitable than its eventual fall, the exhale that follows every inhale, the day that follows night, Icarus’s plunge to the ocean after flying too close to the sun. The Artificial State is a fantasy about humans, machines, and the earth. This book is an archaeology of that fantasy.
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