I'll be out of town the second half of next week for a book launch event in NYC. Since I'll be on the road, I probably won't have a chance to post a Water Dipper next weekend, but I'll...
This trend is peaking in a small rectangle, the smartphone. As Marc Barnes observes, the smartphone has replaced the TV. The smartphone is portable and personal and has enticed us to enjoy our shows in our private rooms. The ubiquity of the smartphone is an artifact of our own loneliness.
There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can be cozy and a crowded refrigerator reassuring. A room can be full of company. We can be and feel less alone. A full room can teach us to share.
It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an email for a few months, and then need to send a very thorough and sincere apology. In fact, it is possible that such an email is buried somewhere in one of my three inboxes right now, awaiting this very reply.
While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward) the dance of matter and spirit that constitutes human existence.
“Inis Cealtra.” Paul Kingsnorth explains—sort of—what he’ll be writing about for the foreseeable future. What makes it challenging to explain is that he’s after something beyond words: “The silence of the hermit, the reality of the well: the faith...
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of the cave” that occurs in every human heart. Babbitt and More’s roughly forty-year friendship produced scores of letters that take the reader from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s.
Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.”
I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular question. I’m not against finding your why. I just think it’s overrated. Particularly in suffering or pain, I’m not sure “why?” works.
You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it needs you to do.