Chesterton, from Orthodoxy:
Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.
Thomas E. Miles on getting a liberal education in prison:
Brightness dawned over us. Our hearts and minds — our very souls — were bathed in “all the Light” Locke wrote about. It showed, too. It showed in our faces, in our comportment, in our demeanor, in our vocabulary, in our writing. Indeed, it showed in the mirror when we looked at ourselves.
This is why the professors came. They came to shed light on us: light that allowed the discernment of the new, resurrected image of each of us, formed by each new, additional bit of us, placed just so in a mosaic that made us once more visible to others, to one another, to ourselves. We were no longer shadow people, no longer hollow, condemned specters. We became men again. That is the point, and that is why college in prison is worth the bother.
I often wonder how things might have gone for my father, a highly intelligent but self-destructive and immensely cynical man, if an opportunity like this — or, altnernatively, Christian prison ministry — had been available to him when he was imprisoned. (He was a two-time felon.)
Study in blue
If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living.
Generative AI sabotages the proof-of-work function by introducing a category of texts that take more effort to read than they did to write. This dynamic creates an imbalance that’s common to bad etiquette: It asks other people to work harder so one person can work — or think, or care — less. My friend who tutors high-school students sends weekly progress updates to their parents; one parent replied with a 3,000-word email that included section headings, bolded his son’s name each time it appeared, and otherwise bore the hallmarks of ChatGPT. It almost certainly took seconds to generate but minutes to read. As breaches of etiquette go, where this asymmetric email falls is hard to say; I would put it somewhere between telling a pointless story about your childhood and using your phone’s speaker on an airplane. The message it sent, though, was clear: My friend’s client wanted the relational benefits of a substantial reply but didn’t care enough to write one himself.
If Frisbee Dan and Sun God can’t get along, what hope is there for the rest of us?