Brand Suburb from Rational Urbanism: "Convincing people to rethink auto-centeredness is akin to doing the same with patriotism or religion. The concepts are nearly identical in that the place where you are raised is so key to your mindset... If one has grown up in post war America, raising a family in a detached single family home in a community divided by the norms of Euclidean zoning practices is what one does if one is able to do so.
The difference between this 'American Way of Life' and other traditional ways of life is that the former is untried and untested over the long term. It has thrived for a brief period, propelled by an increase in the extraction of fossilized energy at a pace which will be impossible to maintain. As absolutely true and undeniable as the previous sentence is, for most American adults it is all they have ever known, and for many it is all that they have ever seen."
Better Angels: On Rilke in Translation by Drew Calvert for The American Reader. Rereading this now, it seems it was another nudge Church-ward; I believe it was around August that my mind starting whirling around itself, considering existence, running into a lot of the problems Rilke sees. Looking at it from my current interests, it reminds me of Charles Taylor, except it's someone writing from within the disenchanted world, longing for any sort of escape from the immanent frame but finding himself unable to accept the idea of transcendence: "Rilke has made you, however briefly, proud to be a human being, filled with sadness and wonder at the paradox we share: we want to live in a perfect world but don’t want to leave the one we’re in, despite its imperfections. . . If Rilke’s poetry has any relevance to twenty-first century Americans, it’s because we worry, now more than ever, that we are losing unmediated experience. We’re busy, we’re sleepless, we’re medicated, and we’re marooned in the everyday."
I am a cat guy. So is Tim Kreider, apparently: A Man and His Cat (NYT)
I didn't know at the time that Lev Grossman had written what amounts to atheist Narnia fan fiction, but I appreciated his probing thoughts on Lewis and fantasy in The Atlantic: Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy
"I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn't solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
The whole modernist-realist tradition is about the self observing the world around you—sensing how other it is, how alien it is, how different it is to what’s going on inside you. In fantasy, that gets turned inside out. The landscape you inhabit is a mirror of what’s inside you. The stuff inside can get out, and walk around, and take the form of places and people and things and magic. And once it’s outside, then you can get at it. You can wrestle it, make friends with it, kill it, seduce it. Fantasy takes all those things from deep inside and puts them where you can see them, and then deal with them."
The whole modernist-realist tradition is about the self observing the world around you—sensing how other it is, how alien it is, how different it is to what’s going on inside you. In fantasy, that gets turned inside out. The landscape you inhabit is a mirror of what’s inside you. The stuff inside can get out, and walk around, and take the form of places and people and things and magic. And once it’s outside, then you can get at it. You can wrestle it, make friends with it, kill it, seduce it. Fantasy takes all those things from deep inside and puts them where you can see them, and then deal with them."
It was still surprising even at this point to find that I could learn something from evangelical Christians. In this NYT piece, Kristin Dombek seems surprised as well: Swimming Against the Rising Tide: Secular Climate-Change Activists Can Learn From Evangelical Christians "It is hard to understand that the ways of the universe are not human ways. But it is hard, too, to face this ocean, so changed by us, without hiding in either fear or denial. To stay awake, active, useful, is a matter of feeling as much as knowing. You have to trust that your individual life is linked to something bigger: that you belong, body and soul, to a larger story for which you are responsible. In this, those of us who believe the science might take a lesson from the faithful. And the rhetoric that would pit faith against reason ignores the millions — all of us, perhaps — who live on both."
Robin Williams, another painful death and Playboy interview: "What do you do? Oh, God, the great abyss. Do you fall back on something old? Or do you die the death of deaths and try to go on? Can you find the courage to push yourself beyond the cliché and go to the next step? If you take the chance, sometimes you'll find something so magnificent that it was worth dying for, and sometimes you'll find nothing and have a horrible night. To go deeper with it, that's the most interesting challenge."
This meditation on fame and depression from Stephen Fry pairs well with the above: Only The Lonely "Some people, as some people always will, cannot understand that depression (or in my case cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder) is an illness and they are themselves perhaps the sufferers of a malady that one might call either an obsession with money, or a woeful lack of imagination.
'How can someone so well-off, well-known and successful have depression?' they ask. Alastair Campbell in a marvelous article, suggested changing the word 'depression' to 'cancer' or 'diabetes' in order to reveal how, in its own way, sick a question, it is. Ill-natured, ill-informed, ill-willed or just plain ill, it’s hard to say."
'How can someone so well-off, well-known and successful have depression?' they ask. Alastair Campbell in a marvelous article, suggested changing the word 'depression' to 'cancer' or 'diabetes' in order to reveal how, in its own way, sick a question, it is. Ill-natured, ill-informed, ill-willed or just plain ill, it’s hard to say."
I read Annie Dillard's Holy The Firm around this time, assigned for a summer class on Environmental Literature, and was struck by the meditation on death and mystery, observed with detail in a short time and in a specific place. "It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools - that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh."
When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, I struggled to find the "perfect" article about it to post and I remember feeling such despair that nothing I could think to share could ever be adequate to the urgency of the situation and its aftermath. I eventually posted James Baldwin's 1966 essay A Report from Occupied Territory from The Nation, but I was never settled; I think I had briefly seen the inadequacy of social media, and more importantly, of merely knowing the "right" things without action. With so much of our lives lived online now, this is still a difficult thing to acknowledge and remember. "These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom."
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