Alan Jacobs

From an extraordinary essay by Paul Kingsnorth:

It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being ... hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.

These are things I think about a lot. I can only answer briefly now, because having returned home I am in serious catch-up mode, so just a couple of thoughts: I really like the space-program metaphors Walker Percy uses in Lost in the Cosmos: the idea that circumstances can sometimes throw us, not into the world as Heidegger had it, but out of our lifeworld, out into a deep-space orbit, from which we don’t know how to return. Thus what Percy calls the problem of “re-entry”: take too shallow an angle and you bounce back out into space; take too steep an angle and you burn up.

I think a lot of people in our world are terrified of being cast out into an orbit from which they don’t know how to return, so they use social media to perform, daily, their obedience, their fealty to the Zeitgeist. Because once cast out, how could they ever get back?

In Underworld Don DeLillo has Lenny Bruce say, “Love me unconditionally or I die. These are the terms of our engagement.” (And because he didn’t get it, Lenny was cast into deep-space orbit, and burned up on attempted re-entry.) But what people today know in their bones is that love is never unconditional. So they strive ceaselessly to meet the conditions. Which would be a great opportunity for Christian witness, if we had a church that wasn’t too busy fighting the culture wars to remind people of the one who says, “Come unto me, all ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

I am just back from a visit to my son in Chicago and the rest of my family in Alabama, and am still frazzled — I’m definitely out of traveling shape. Moving around the country was simultaneously delightful, exhausting, and (sometimes) disconcerting. One of the disconcerting elements was the almost complete absence of masks in Alabama, the least-vaccinated state in the USA. I’m now back in Waco, which seems by comparison to offer a model of responsible masking. As a native of Alabama, I want to say to my people back there: Just get vaccinated, and then ditch the masks. 

Anyway, here are a few things I might write about at greater length if I were a little more coherent and energetic. 

My friend the Rev. Jessica Martin has begun her Bampton Lectures at Oxford, and all signs point to a brilliant set of discourses. I am looking forward to listening to them all and talking copious notes. 

Re: this thoughtful post by another dear friend, Adam Roberts, if I were to write an essay for the Journal of Controversial Ideas I would make the argument that “gender” is a word that is meaningful only in the context of grammar.

Yet another dear friend — I have so many smart friends! They are amazing! — Rick Gibson, writes in the Hedgehog Review about “the newest inhabitants of ‘liquid modernity.’” I’ll definitely comment further on this one. 

Ted Gioia: "We have nurtured two sharply contrasting musical cultures over thousands of years. One celebrates conciliation and the settled life of the rural world, while the other revels in the nomadic triumphs of the fierce and passionate human predator.” Country music is for herders and their animals; drum-driven rock is for predators. 

Every summer needs a song, and pretty obviously this is the one for 2021. One note: it’s significant that Lake Street Dive has been around for about a decade and is very much an indie band. How can you tell? Because the song begins with a slow intro before kicking into that irresistible groove. A song calculated to maximize streaming-service revenue would never do that: because Spotify only pays artists for listens of 30 seconds or more, studios are forcing their songwriters to frontload their songs’ choruses. “Hypotheticals” as a composition is a relic of the past; we’ll get fewer and fewer songs structured that way. Another reason — along with that sweet groove and Rachael Price’s amazing voice — to appreciate a terrific pop-R&B throwback number. 

My sister lives out in the country, in the ridge-and-valley terrain of northeastern Alabama, so this is where Bella gets to play. She’s a lucky girl as well as a good one.

This is my sister’s dog Bella. Bella is a rescue and a very good girl.

Cardinal Newman distinguished between notional and real assent to a given proposition. Since I wrote this post three months ago, I have achieved real assent to the propositions listed there. Heck, now I can even watch Arsenal play without agony. But of course this tranquility comes at a price: the complete abandonment of hope for any significant improvement in the next few years. 

This is either the cover of the Turkish edition of Breaking Bread with the Dead or else the album art for my new ambient jazz record.