Sorry I Accidentally CC:ed You on an Email Insulting You

Recently I came across this delightfully sarcastic (although often vulgar) e-card site. These cards capture the modern irony of communication and relationships in a brutally honest and very insightful manner. These e-cards capture the attempt at universalism and the turn away from particularism with catch-all phrases such as "Sorry about where I took you on our first date" or "I think we are moving too fast or too slow." They capture the fact that most of us have too many acquaintances to keep up with well and the nuances that technological friendship brings to our interpersonal communications ("I still want to be facebook friends" or "I'm ready to change my facebook relationship status if you are").

For Myrrh (!)

If the World Had a Front Porch

It was where my Mama sat on that old swing with her crochet

It was where Granddaddy taught me how to cuss and how to pray

It was where we made our own ice cream those sultry summer nights

where the bulldog had her puppies,

and us brothers had our fights

There were many nights I'd sit right there and look out at the stars

To the sound of a distant whippoorwill or the hum of a passing car

It was where I first got up the nerve to steal me my first kiss

and it was where I learned to play guitar and pray I had the gift

If the world had a front porch like we did back then

We'd still have our problems but we'd all be friends

Treating your neighbor like he's your next of kin

Wouldn't be gone with the wind

If the world had a front porch, like we did back then

Purple hulls and pintos, I've shelled more than my share

As lightening bugs and crickets danced in the evening air

And like a beacon that old yellow bulb, it always led me home

Somehow Mama always knew just when to leave it on

Treating your neighbor like he's your next of kin

Wouldn't be gone with the wind

If the world had a front porch, like we did back then

The chorus of this song make interesting points: When he says, if we had a front porch, "we'd still have our problems but we would all be friends," the author rightly points us to the importance of local community and politics and concrete, face-to-face relationships for solving the prudential questions of politics. It isn't the case that we shouldn't disagree, but rather that when we disagree we know who it is that we are disagreeing with in order to preserve respect for others as persons. At the same time, the fact is that the world can't have a front porch. This shows an inadequacy of globalism in its detraction from local political interactions, which help us know our neighbor as a person rather than abstractly.


Another good point that this song makes is that treating your neighbor like family will contribute to more stable communities and can prevent the mobility that blows us from place to place with the wind.


So here's to front porches (even make-shift front porches) and smoothies and summertime and good Virginia crops.

To Market, To Market

The pleasure of going to Central Market in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania is almost as great for me as the displeasure of going to Safeway or Giant (note: this definitely qualifies as a grocery store discussion, which, in other instances, I abhor). Although, I'm not going to lie, I definitely bought some kiwis from New Zealand, much of the food at the market is locally produced. And the people who sell it are some of the same ones who I've seen selling it there since we started going to market there when I was 10 or 12. I remembered, for instance, up seeing the man again, the 15-minute lecture he had given me on the benefits of mangoes for digestion upon selling me a mango some years ago (or was it about papayas?). And can you imagine how upset I was to discover today that Michael's bread is closing down its stall in the market tomorrow? This is upsetting on several levels: A) I despise change; B) It is a result of Michael's downsizing from a few of its locations, which means that the man who sells the Michael's day-old cinnamon raisin bread we always buy is not actually Michael (I had always assumed that this was Michael's only store).

Market also reminds us of our particular cultural traditions: my dad brought scrapple today and it was sold right next to the pickled tripe and tongue souse, which reminds me of visiting my great-grandmother when I was a young girl and noticing a cow's tongue boiling in a little water on her stove.

On Education and Home

"Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him." --Luke 8:39

"[B]ut he charged them that they should tell no man what was done." --Luke 8:56

The first of these verses comes after Christ heals the man with a legion of demons and sends the demons into the pigs. The second comes, two miracles later, after Christ raises from the dead the young girl who had died. I find it interesting that in one instance Christ commands the man who had been healed to tell about his healing and in the second instance, He commands that the miracle not be told.

Additionally, the first verse provides a helpful commentary on the de-homing aspect of education. The man who was delivered from demon possession had come into contact with the Truth. And what was he to do with that truth? Return to his people and proclaim it. In one sense, then, he was de-homed. But in another sense, this change was meant to be shared with his own people.

On Talking Too Much

"We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human." --Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times"

Clearly, this was written by a woman. And this is why the discourse of friendship is political and humanizing and ever connected to the world.

Facebook as Self-Portrait

In this, at points, cliche analysis of facebook and friendship, the author interestingly understands facebook as an attempt at self-portraiture. This, in turn, raises questions of the conception of the person that the act of making self-portraits and writing autobiographies reveals. Facebook seems to be another instance of preparing a face to meet the other faces that you meet.

I am a real Catholic!: I received a rosary in the mail.

I wonder who told the people who send the rosaries?

The Ancient/Modern Split in Fashion

Hegel, on the art of fashion:

"[T]he cut of our clothes today is inartistic and prosaic in comparison with the more ideal drapery of the ancients. ... [T]he clothing portrayed in the art of antiquity is a more or less explicitely formless surface and is perhaps only determined by the fact that it needs a fastening on to the body. ... In our modern dress, on the other hand, the whole of the material is determined by the stitching, and, in general the cut and fall of the garment is produced technicaly and mechanically by the tailor. ... [T]he clothes are precisely only a poor imitation or a disfiguration of human limbs according to the conventional fashion and accidental whim of the day; once the cut is complete it remains always the same, without appearing determined by pose and movement."

Hegel continues by saying that clothes are an "untruthful imitation of our natural form" that is not shaped by our inner life, as clothes were for the ancients. And there were still tailors all about in Hegel's time!

Modern Love

One of the delights of the weekend (or, more specifically, of Friday night between 1 and 2 a.m.) is the New York Times Modern Love column (found on the Style page). Mostly, it is interesting as a sociological commentary on the bizarre-ness of love in the contemporary world. You know, the I-fell-in-love-with-a-convict sort of thing, with occassionally more upbeat I-adopted-20-children columns. It is my goal in life to have all of the people I know read this column (apart from my mom, who mumbles that it is "all trash").

This week's column, however, is not for the faint of heart--it is about "suspension," which seems to be another imaginative way for people to break out of their loneliness (by hanging by their skin!). This really is pushing existentialism and the idea that there is no such thing as human nature to the limits.

From My Mother or What is Better than Football and Apples in the Fall?

Good Saturday morning my little ones,

It is a lovely late summer morning here and we are soon heading up to Canton to pick a bushel or two of Cortlands [this is a type of apple]. Hopefully your sister and whoever else slept over will want to go with us. Then there is the Penn State game at Grandma and Poppop's house at 3:30. Your cousin will be at the game itself, I've heard. Then the high school football team is playing at 7 p.m. tonight.

Tomorrow is a church picnic, so today I will cook and make kitchen curtains.

I love you and miss you and hope your weekend is blessed with the presence of Jesus in everything you do.

Mom

On the Fashion of Mothering

This dress seems to be a celebration of the creativity of women's fertility. As the film of The Children of Men illustrates, declining birthrates have the positive effect of renewing an awe and appreciation of childbearing (the striking scene from that film is the one that alludes to the flight into Egypt--the baby's mother carries her child through the soldiers in a moment of reprieve from fighting; people are filled with such a great awe that they reach out to simply touch the baby).


Alternatively, it could refer to the creativity of digestion...

Dancing as the Salvation for Civilization

The music video below is a poignant reflection on the changes that occur over generations in a family and the corresponding problems of the modern world. The song emphasizes the connection between generations and the implication of the actions of one generation on the lives of other generations.


It also shows the desire of modern man to be connected to the land in the way that previous generations were: "[Y]ou dream at night of having your own little piece of earth." Just as men have moved away from the land and long for it again, so women have moved away from childbearing and embraced birth control and abortion. This leaves women dissatisfied: "But there are mornings you awake crying / When you dream in the night of a large table surrounded by little ones."

The music video shows the precariousness and the loss involved in the process of inheritance--as we pass the land and values down to our children, the soil is depleted. The quickening tempo of the song parallels the increasing desperation felt in the contemporary world.


What to do about these problems of the modern world? "To alleviate your desire to hold up a bank / You read books about voluntary simplicity." This isn't a real answer, though--to return to the past and disconnect oneself from the modern world (in fact, in the music video, the boy does not hold on to the picture of his ancestor that he finds in the dirt; rather, he buries it, and from this seed, grows a bright flower in the midst of the barren land. Here we see that it is through involving the present itself with the past, rather than holding the past up as some ideal time, that we are able to escape the corner we've been backed into in modernity). The song teaches us that you must get outside of your isolation and engage others--turn of the TV, "happily some things in life never change / Put on your best, we're going out tonight dancing!" Here, the artists present the Tocquevillian answer of voluntary associations and interacting with others face to face (okay, not necessarily in the political arena, but at least on the dance floor). In dancing, men and women (who we see the song treat as essentially different in their connection to the world) come together in a complementarity within society. We are engaging in an activity in dancing that our ancestors engaged in, not as an attempt to get back to our ancestors, but as an attempt to place ourselves within the tradition that we have from them.

Mes Aïeux - Dégénération (English Subtitles)

On the Virtues of Hyperbole

Hyperbole taps into people's dramatic, poetic, aesthetic side, which it is essential to cultivate. If we leave everything to cool, calculating reason, then we will just be enlightenment clones or Rawls or something equally as horrible. I really cannot understand people's aversion to my bits of exaggeration from time to time (okay, inordinate amounts on a regular basis...).

Either way, this was the message of the delightful Big Fish--sometimes the best (and always the most fun) way to get to the truth is through an exaggeration. A life that seeks to eliminate the urge for poetry and adventure (such as that of the son, at the beginning of the film, when he was seeking the truth in such a manner that prevented him from hearing it) is lacking, to say the least.

I find it dull when people point out dryly that I am exaggerating. Of course I realize I am, that's the point. I find it much more endearing when they laugh at me and shake their heads.

Worship the Basis of Leisure

"Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole."

"The soul of leisure ... lies in 'celebration.' Celebration is the point at which the three elements of leisure emerge together: effortlessness, calm and relaxation, and its superiority to all and every function. ... There is no such thing as a feast 'without Gods'--whether it be a carnival or a marriage."--Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

Contemporary understandings of leisure are ill-informed. Leisure is now "time for yourself"--which means time that does not have to even pretend to be useful, neither for the body, nor for the soul. It is, at least for introverts, time that belongs to oneself and not to the community--a private time to be withdrawn and engage in private "hobbies" or other amusements. Contemporary approaches to leisure compartmentalize time for worship as something that has to "get done" (another chore to do as part of our busyness), rather than characterizing it as a way of being--a different involvement with and use of time, one that is intended, not for usefulness, but for sacrifice.

And From the Introduction

...In which the All-Wise One tackles the problem of philosophy:

"[T]he reason for my dissatisfaction with philosophy as a profession--I now believe to lie in the divorce of philosophy from theology."--T.S. Eliot in the Introduction to Leisure the Basis of Culture

We must remember that Eliot consciously chose away from a profession in philosophy, for which he had been preparing himself, to work in a bank and then as an editor, and through that all, as a poet and literary critic. Just as Eliot sees the need for culture to be founded on Christian principles, so he sees Pieper's emphasis on his faith as connected to his philosophizing as one of his most significant contributions.

On the Difficulty of Self-Knowlege

"[I]t is more than likely that the 'who,' which appears so clearly and unmistakeably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters." --Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

When someone asks me if I behave in a certain way (are you an obsessive person? are you introverted or extroverted? etc.), if another person is present who knows me well, I immediately turn to that person and ask them. This often cracks up my friends--imagine, the person who ostensibly knows herself best defers to her friends. But I'm convinced that I miss much of what is going on with my own personality and behavior, and I would infinitely more trust another's evaluation of my actions than my own.

The Nymphs are Departed

It's great that we have science now to tell us that our founding myths are false and have no implications for our lives. In fact, our sole standard is efficiency. Superstition is nothing more than an impediment to progress. In the contemporary world, we know that nothing in nature should get in the way of our attempts to reconfigure it. It is a matter of time and education and then people will know what is really in their greatest good.

On Philosophy and Theology Or On Love and Truth

From John Paul II's homily at the canonization of Edith Stein:

Dear brothers and sisters! The love of Christ was the fire that inflamed the life of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Long before she realized it, she was caught by this fire. At the beginning she devoted herself to freedom. For a long time Edith Stein was a seeker. Her mind never tired of searching and her heart always yearned for hope. She traveled the arduous path of philosophy with passionate enthusiasm. Eventually she was rewarded: she seized the truth. Or better: she was seized by it. Then she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ. From that moment on, the incarnate Word was her One and All. Looking back as a Carmelite on this period of her life, she wrote to a Benedictine nun: "Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously". ... Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was able to understand that the love of Christ and human freedom are intertwined, because love and truth have an intrinsic relationship. The quest for truth and its expression in love did not seem at odds to her; on the contrary she realized that they call for one another.

The faith and reason stuff hear is great and clearly the stuff of Fides Et Ratio (which was published in September of 1998, a month before this canonization). Seeing philosophy and religion as two parts of the same cloth requires an affirmation of searching and seeking in itself (although not as an end, possibly, but certainly as a means).

Berry.3

The Country Of Marriage

I.I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

IV.How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

V.Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are--
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.

Wendell Berry

This poem is long, but ought to be read for the remarkable way in which Berry reconciles seeming contradictions and ties the particular to the universal--his need to wander to his love for place, his love for a woman to death, love to rest. Marriage and love are, for Berry, something that point us toward, and yet keep hidden, their own limits--it is the known through which one moves toward the unknown (much like myth). It is the very act of loving and in the detachment and lack of control that must be involved in loving that prepare us for death and for the detachment that must be involved in death. Berry also emphasizes the grace and unexpectedness of love--the fact that we cannot command it to exist, but that it is a surprise. This is particularly relevant given the contemporary tendency to attempt to control all of nature--we think that if we use internet dating and matchmaking services we can find the perfect person (this takes matchmaking out of its previous community context and seeks to globalize it and make it all-encompassing). Finally, we see that it is not some word or promise (or mere contract) that binds him to his wife; it is, rather, an Aristotelian friendship--a friendship based in shared activity.

In human closeness there is a secret edge,

Nor love nor passion can pass it above,

Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,

And hearts be burst asunder with the love.

And friendship, too, is powerless plot,

And so years of bliss with noble tends,

When your heart is free and known not,

The slow languor of the earthy sense.

And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,

But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard --

Now you know why beneath your hand

You do not feel the beating of my heart.

--Anna Akhmatova

How beautifully Akhmatova captures the pain, which she knew well, involved in knowing and being known. It is this communication, which does not occur through institutions and roles and masks, prepared to meet the other masks that you meet, that is (perhaps?/almost?) unbearable.

Mothers and Sons

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son."

John 19:26

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

John 14:26

The latter passage was the text of the homily today. My priest pointed to the tension that we ought to feel when receiving this command. We ought not be happy about the potential pain we cause others as a result of following Christ.

Christ's own submission on this point is interesting to consider--when calling His mother, "woman," He is, on the one hand, relinquishing His mother/son relationship with her for the good of the whole. And, on the other hand, He is identifying her, His mother, with all of humanity and particularly with all women in a way that draws us into the particular relationship that He has to her.

The question of friendship (given its exclusionary character) and the tension of friendship with agape--which has universal tendencies--can be seen in this passage. The question is also raised of whether it is best to connect with people through social roles and institutions (see Tocqueville on this point) and whether true person to person connection is even possible.

On the Philosophy of Fashion

I think that this is fashion week (?), although I'm not at all sure what that means, aside from some allusions to it in The Devil Wears Prada. But perhaps it is in fashion that some deep insights regarding our culture can be found. In his essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" Dana Gioia laments the disconnection of poetry from the people and the culture and sees it as engendering a self-selecting community that is isolated from the rest of the culture. The same cannot be said of fashion--people attend to it (perhaps largely due to marketing?); they respond to it and give it feedback at some level (either they buy and wear particular clothes or they choose something else); and they are influenced by it.

A recent New York Times article raises the question of the philosophy that the designer holds with clothes like these. What are these clothes saying? It seems that they are commentary on contemporary America--on our purportedly patriotic obsession with work, on our puritanically repressed and yet over-sexualized culture, on our appreciation for (and seeking of) laurels for our efforts. What does this say about manliness and Calvinism? Perhaps fashion is the poetry of the contemporary world.

On the Possibility of Communitarianism

In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about a gathering of intellectuals attempting to live together in a farming community in a satire of the transcendentalists. He writes that they joined together "not by necessity, but choice." The narrator asserts, "Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again, tomorrow."

I wonder if real communitarianism is possibly in the contemporary world. Or perhaps it is only available to some people and not to others. Real community necessarily involves a recognition of an actual need and dependence on particular people. I'm not sure that we can have that need, really--globalism makes localism at best one option among others. And that is not what communitarianism itself claims to be.

Checking the weather is, I think, of less value to me than to the average person, because I have great difficulty imagining the implications of the temperature for my what I choose to wear. Mostly, I choose my outfit based on how the temperature felt the day before, which works some days and fails miserably on others.

While I would never give up the ability to know in advance about the likelihood of rain (I abhor being caught umbrella-less in the rain), I wonder if we don't lose something important with the increasing predictability of weather. Rain or snow is never a surprise these days (I remember waking up when I was little to a deep snow that happened overnight and being absolutely surprised). Also, we rely less on our connection to nature to predict the weather (i.e. looking at the sky or noting the frizziness of one's hair) and more on our connection to the Internet.

The obvious objection to what I'm saying is that predicting the weather allows us to save lives in big weather events.

On Flirting

I don't think that I ever fully understood Oakeshott's distinction between technical knowledge and practical knowledge (Technical knowledge is "susceptible of precise formulation," while practical knowledge "exists only in use, is not reflective and [unlike technique] cannot be formulated in rules.") until a friend asked last night for me to teach her how to flirt. I realized A) I really need to improve my teaching skills and B) flirting is practical knowledge--it can't be formulated in rules.

On Foundings

Typically, I prefer not to think about the American Founding. I think it is too thoughtlessly esteemed and praised (and too closely related to history for my tastes). In her essay, "What is Authority?" in Between Past and Future, however, Hannah Arendt (ohh! pretty young picture!) argues that looking back at a founding moment is positive in the sense that it respects and affirms the present authority of tradition. Furthermore, other foundings can be understood as attempts to get back to the quintessential founding--the founding of Rome (the raises questions in my mind of the legitimacy of appealing to a tradition of foundings).

Arendt also, interestingly, talks about the Romans as showing their respect for their ancestors by most highly regarding the oldest among them because of their closeness to their ancestors. For them, it seems, time and eternity spilled seamlessly into one another--immortality, for instance, was not something out of the realm of possibility, but rather something expected.

Sonata for a Good Man

The Lives of Others forces the viewer to consider the revolutionary power of love, which is all tied up in the hope that love will endure, even through its imperfections (and the opposite of this, as seen in the problem of suicide). It is love and art that refuse to be contained by the dehumanizing forces of the Soviet system. And the hope that we see throughout the film is that people change--the faults that they have, then, are not final, nor are they unforgivable.

The film is set in communist Germany and centers around a playwright and his girlfriend, who are being followed by the secret police. As a result of their love for one another, they find strength to rebel against the system. When she is caught, however, the playwright's girlfriend looses strength and offers evidence against her boyfriend in order to save herself. In a Romeo and Juliet-esque ending, we find that the officer who had been assigned to follow the couple in fact destroyed the evidence in order to save them, but the girlfriend doesn't know this, gives up hope, and kills herself. The film is not a tragedy, however, for we see the complete change and awakening that occurred in the officer who was assigned to track the couple--the humanizing in him that occurred as a result of their love for one another and their art.

We see, then, that the only irremediable sin is the sin against hope. And what makes a good man is precisely his ability to change when confronted with love. Here, as in Fiddler on the Roof, we see the revolutionary power of love. And yet it is revolutionary not in the abstract, unsubstantializable way in which communism was, but rather in a concrete, incarnate sense. It is the love between one woman and one man that changes the life of another person. It is revolution, then, in the particular, as connected to and defined by the truth about the person, that is held up for us as a model.

Architecture and Politics

I would like to study, eventually, the connection between aesthetics (specifically architecture) and politics. When I told this to my mom, she laughed at me disbelievingly and then said she was sure I'd find a way to make it work (recent conversation with my mom: Me: "Mom, do I have a nasally voice?" Mom: "No. Yours is piercing."). This just doesn't seem like a far-fetched idea to me. Politics is concerned with what it means to be human, what it means to live in society, what man's relationship is to the divine (esp. insofar as it interacts with the political order). Clearly aesthetic considerations are important to us as humans in our interactions with others. The very urge to construct beautiful, gratuitously beautiful, things, itself, points to something that is profound and interesting and unique in humans. The decorative elements that we add to the places that we live, work, and worship could be explained as part of a struggle for power and position, but I think that they offer much more insight than that. Our urge that is expressed in what is not necessary points at the divine and spiritual part of people.

Hegel on art: "...[A]rt is often key, and in many nations the sole key, to understanding their philosophy and religion. Art ... [displays] even the highest [reality] sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling and to nature's mode of appearance."

And Hegel on architecture: "[Architecture's] task consists in so manipulating external inorganic nature, that, as an external world conformable to art, it becomes cognate in spirit. ... [A]rchitecture is the first to open the way for the adequate actuality of the god..."

Berry 2: On Death and Imagination and Farming and Politics

"I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day." --A World Lost, by Wendell Berry

Within the context of the novel, this quotation points to how the very existence of death points to the afterlife, and our closest acquaintance with the afterlife is through stories (which always fall apart and are inadequate, necessitating imagination to shore up their truth).

In A World Lost, Andy Catlett seeks the details behind his uncle's death, which happened when Andy was a child. He finds that the truth about his uncle's death exists, in part, in the stories that the town creates in order to help them make sense of his death. A friend of mine complains that Berry never has any representatives of the law and politics in his novels. In this one, however, Andy's father is a lawyer, there is a law-suit in the background (over the punishment of Andy's uncle's murderer--who is sent to jail for two years), and there are court records from the trial.

Also, on the question of whether one can be an agrarian if one isn't a farmer, I think that Andy's father provides a good insight. Andy's father was a lawyer and a farmer and all of his lawyering was connected to his love for farming: "Farming was his passion, as the law was; in his the two really were inseparable. As a lawyer, he had served mostly farmers. His love of farming and of farming people had led him into the politics of agriculture and a lifelong effort to preserve the economy of small farms."