Why does Scott Alexander devote 30,000 words to examining the Fatima Sun Miracle? Because “if the God of Fatima exists, we are in deep trouble.”
Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics. Local life may be as much endangered by “saving the planet” as by “conquering the world.” Such a project calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local nature and local community.
In order to make ecological good sense for the planet, you must make ecological good sense locally. You can't act locally by thinking globally. If you want to keep your local acts from destroying the globe, you must think locally.
An endlessly apt reminder. Berry goes on to say,
The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one's love for the place one is working in, and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results. An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.
Berry was thinking about the physical world, of course, but what he says applies to online life as well: the scale of social media is such that it cannot promote love, so “destruction inevitably results.” We need “ecological good sense” for our online lives also.
Just recently I posted on how great a record Black Messiah is — and now I learn that D’Angelo has died. An absolutely unique artist — who knows what he might have done had he been given more time.
And this by Matthew Aucoin is equally illuminating:
The writer of a newspaper-style review of a live performance is typically asked to experience a work of art only once and then to craft a coherent assessment of it, often in under twenty-four hours. The more one thinks about it, the more it seems like this process, with its frantic timeline, might be the worst of all possible worlds.
Why, then, this perpetual demand that performing arts critics make definitive proclamations about works they barely know? If the performance being reviewed is a program of Beethoven symphonies that the writer has heard a hundred times, that’s one thing, but a brand-new orchestral piece, opera, or play rarely reveals its secrets on the first night. I’ve spent countless hours listening to music, and never once have I encountered a worthwhile new piece that I felt capable of assessing after a single hearing. If a musical work is powerful, or mysterious, or beautiful in some new way, then the listener’s initial experience of it is precisely an experience of incomprehension. It’s only with time, reflection, and repeated listenings that any critic can hope to gain entry to a piece of music, to get inside it and understand its inner workings, in such a way that they’re ready to speak about it to others.
The great Jed Perl with an important insight:
Much if not most of what is today thought of as criticism is just nonfiction writing with a distinctive personal voice, attitudes and opinions without any underlying idea. My impression is that among younger nonfiction writers the central focus is on developing that distinctive voice, with less focus on what’s actually said. Janet Malcolm and Dave Hickey, whose work apprentice writers in BA and MFA programs are likely to encounter, are striking essayists who leave you in no doubt as to who they are and what interests them, but neither of them has what I would call an aesthetic position. Malcolm produced a kind of personal reportage, with readers invited and expected to be alert to the sharp edges of her personality. As for Hickey, although his writings about the return of beauty have made him something of a hero in the art world, I think what people really respond to in his writing isn’t what he thought about art but the battle-tested hipster personality that he cultivated in all his work, whether relating with wonderful panache stories of his childhood and his jazz musician father or the years he spent as an art dealer or his hours hanging out with artists and art students. Talking about art or writing about your experiences in the arts isn’t the same as being a critic of the arts.
In response to some emails I’ve received, I wrote my own little “Dear Colleague” letter.
I wrote a short post on a much-misused passage from Plato.
This is a carbonized loaf of bread recently discovered in Anatolia, probably from the 7th or 8th century A.D., that depicts Jesus as a sower. The Lord of the Harvest!
Paging Phil Christman! These guys will do most of the heavy lifting for you, Phil. They’re clear-eyed and fearless.
St. Basil the Great:
“I am wronging no one,” you say, “I am merely holding on to what is mine.” What is yours? Who gave it to you so that you could bring it into life with you? Why, you are like a man who pinches a seat at the theater at the expense of latecomers, claiming ownership of what was for common use. That’s what the rich are like; having seized what belongs to all they claim it as their own on the basis of having got there first. Whereas if everyone took for himself enough to meet his immediate needs and released the rest for those in need of it, there would be no rich and no poor.
St. Ambrose of Milan:
It is not from your own property that you give to the poor. Rather, you make return from what is theirs. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you have appropriated to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich. Therefore you are paying a debt, not bestowing a gift.
I'm very grateful for Stephen J. Schuler’s review of my biography of Paradise Lost over at FPR.
A fascinating and deeply encouraging post by @dancohen on how his library is connecting chatbot inquiries to library resources:
This output encourages the student — or the faculty member or the general public — to consult the texts themselves, which popular chatbots eschew during spasms of summarization. Instead, through our software we want to foreground the expressive works of human beings — the articles, books, documents, and works of art, rather than the AI’s digests of these objects.
Updated a post in response to a fierce correction from Phil Christman.
Re: my post from earlier today, my friend Jono Linebaugh sent me this picture of a sign he came across in his travels. This one has the added virtue of theological acuity.
An old theory of mine: Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.