Category Archives: personal essay

a note to the previous

Posted on by

The title of my last ramble was taken from a sixteenth century poem by the Englishman, John Davies. “Nosce Teipsum,” know thyself, interestingly, is misspelled at the Poetry Foundation website, here. I used Davies’ spelling, itself perhaps a variant of the popular aphorism nosce te ipsum, because my general subject was Christian humanism. Davies (1569–1626) was a courtier and a lawyer, not a professional poet. Almost all his poetry belongs to the early part of his life, before he bacame embroiled in public affairs. He sought and gained the favor of Queen Elizabeth, who appointed him to various public offices. After the Queen’s death he served among the delegation that brought James VI of Scotland to England to be king.

“Nosce Teipsum” is a long philosophical poem that is sometimes regarded as a compendium of Elizabethan knowledge. It is hardly that, but it is a profoundly conventional poem, essayistic, of that species of sixteenth century English poetry that C. S. Lewis called drab. It has two claims to fame, its early use of the decasyllabic quatrain (which Davies didn’t invent) a verse form sometimes known as the elegaic measure because of Gray’s later use of it in his famous elegy. But Davies’ poem is better known for the three quatrains that conclude its first section, subtitled “Of Humane Knowledge”:

I know my bodi’s of so fraile a kind,
    As force without, feauers within can kill;
    I know the heauenly nature of my minde,
    But tis corrupted both in wit and will:

I know my Soule hath power to know all things,
    Yet is she blinde and ignorant in all;
    I know I am one of Nature’s little kings,
    Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life’s a paine and but a span,
    I know my Sense is mockt with euery thing:
    And to conclude, I know myself a Man,
    Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.

Immediately prior to these stanzas, the poet avers: “My selfe am Center of my circling thought, / Only my selfe I studie, learne, and know,” in lines that suggest an acquaintance with Montaigne. But by 1599, the year of the publication of “Nosce Teipsum,” this idea, like the sentiments that follow it in the poem, was part of the conventional conception of Human nature about which philosophers from Descartes to Locke and Berkeley mused. A later, and better known, example is Pope’s aphorism:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

My point is not to argue for the correctness or the venerability of the caveat, though Davies invokes Socrates as an originator. I mean rather to allude to Davies’ poem as a typical product of Christian humanism in his time, not so beautiful or monumental as the 1559 Book of Common Prayer or the English Bible (KJV 1611) or so influential and original as the Institutes of John Calvin (1536), but perhaps more typical because more ordinary. In the first section of the poem Davies’ theme is the limits of human knowledge; in the second, the immortality of the soul. In both sections he draws upon a variety of classical and biblical sources in a manner thoroughly commonplace in his time.

The stone whose photograph I have used at the head of this post and the last may be found in a small garden in New Harmony, Indiana that contains the grave of Paul Tillich. I have referenced it once before, here, and noted its proximity to the Roofless Church, designed by Phillip Johnson.

Sidney’s reference to Anchises calls up a moment in Virgil’s Aeneid after all is lost and the city has been destroyed. Aeneas escapes carrying his father, Anchises on his back and leading his son, Ascanius, by the hand. His wife, Creusa, is unable to keep up with them and falls behind. When Aeneas searches for her after satisfying himself that his father and son are safely hidden, he finds that she has been killed. There follows a tender conversation between the living Aeneas and Creusa’s ghost. (Aeneid, II, 705–795)

Nosce Teipsum

Posted on by

I came across an email the other day from an old friend who sent me his address at the time by way of saying that I might need it in case there were some imponderable about which I needed to speak with him. Usually I get to the imponderables during Advent, but this year I’m late. It’s taken until mid January for the winter of my discontent to set in with its perennial itch.

But here goes—of all silly questions (silly in our sense of benignly foolish and also in Chaucer’s sense of blessed) perhaps the most sophomoric is what is the meaning of life. I spent the summer of my nineteenth year with it nonetheless, not mooning over it in the abstract but attempting to decide whether I would continue on the career trajectory to which I had at that time committed myself. I had grown up in church, by no means a bad thing; and I had announced to my family and my peers at the end of high school that I thought I had been called to the ministry.

In due course I had been appointed a local preacher in the Methodist Church, which meant that I was permitted to preach under the supervision of an ordained pastor and that I might serve as an an assistant, or apprentice, minister in a church. In the summer of my nineteenth year after my sophomore year at college I had a job as youth minister of Central Methodist Church in Dalhart Texas, It was not a job that involved onerous responsibility; I had a lot of time on my hands. There were no young people my age around that summer in Dalhart. I thought of the church youth group I helped to supervise as my clients, not as friends, and socialized with them only in very limited ways.

There was one movie theatre in Dalhart—films changed once a week or so. The primary entertainment of an evening was to drive your car up and down the town’s main street and honk and wave at your friends. I joined in that activity to some extent, but lacking friends and feeling some discomfort honking and waving at my youth group clients, though they were perfectly civilized young people, I didn’t do too much dragging, as the driving and waving was called. I spent some midweek time, twice I think, visiting a girlfriend who was working as a camp counselor five hundred miles away in Kerrville, but that was exhausting. Mostly I read.

I’m sure I must have read plenty of trash, but what I most remember is that I read War and Peace, pored over the agonies of Pierre Bezukhov in particular, and speculated about comparisons between Napoleon’s marches and Hitler’s (drawn by Clifton Fadiman for the Inner Sanctum Edition I found in the Dalhart Public Library). I read War and Peace twice through and continued to reread parts of the novel until I had exhausted the experience. When a voice spoke to me out of nowhere and announced that the meaning of life had to be lived, I thought for the first time that I might find meaning in my own life by throwing myself into the flux and complexity of lived experience, though I remained uncritically sure that questioning the meaning of life ought to remain the constant occupation of a serious person.

My idyllic time came to an end in late July or early August when I preached a sermon at the Sunday morning service. I naïvely and irresponsibly explained to the good folk who came to hear me that day that I was in some doubt about heaven and hell and was becoming what I would have called a universalist had I known the term. I presented what I thought were fine arguments for my emerging views and invited any of my co-parishioners who were so inclined to come and talk with me about them. Afterwards, the kindly minister who was my supervisor suggested to me that perhaps I didn’t really want to be a preacher and advised that I might want to think about doing something else.

Fast forward to the present year: I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson’s new book, The Givenness of Things, which I like a lot with some reservations. I suspect Robinson of a similar universalism to my own, though she claims to be a Calvinist. Still, after owning that Robinson has read Calvin more deeply than I have, I’m skeptical, primarily because the reformed tradition with which Robinson identifies places more faith in logic and theological correctness than I do. Having worried ontological questions most of my life, I have much sympathy with Robinson’s rehabilitation of ontology. But my own ontological meditations don’t inevitably lead me to affirmation of the Trinity or to a literal belief in a created universe.

I have no trouble claiming solidarity with the ages in the Nicene Creed, which we Episcopalians recite in the plural: we believe (I suspect Robinson would demur); but my submission to the creed is a concession to formulations I am bound to regard as metaphors. After I recite the creed, the fundamental ontological questions remain for me. What is reality? What is being? What is my place in the cosmos? What indeed do I mean by the locution, I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty? If this means that I am promoting the questions of Greek philosophy as the philosophers confronted the death of their ancient Gods over those that must have guided the Hebrew prophets as they confronted the death of their ancient Gods, so be it. Actually, I dont think there is such a conflict, as Robinson seems to do. I think in both traditions wonderful minds were at work on inherited pieties, transforming them into the poetry of new historical epochs.

The Creed, after all, is a political document, as I think all creeds are: ideology in Mannheim’s original sense of formalization designed to forclose discourse. It takes some stretching to assert that it is scriptural. Its primary purpose at the time of its adoption was the defeat of Arianism, which was the Christian religion of a substantial minority in Christendom of mostly Germanic origin. Its adoption represented the triumph of Constantine and the return of Rome to Romans; though Constantine was obliged to wage wars most of his life in that cause, and Arianism survived well down into the eighth century. Arius, himself, declared a heretic in 325, was exonerated in 335 only to be declared a heretic again in 381 after he had been dead almost half a century. Robinson’s loyalty is to the earlier Apostle’s Creed, though she mostly speaks of a Trinity that involves two persons only, hardly mentioning the Holy Spirit (or Ghost, as we used to say).

Robinson spends a good deal of time arguing for a historical Jesus, something I’ve never seriously doubted; though like Dostoyevsky’s inquisitor I think the magisterium of the Faith, Gospels, Churches, Dogma, the rich inheritance of liturgy, the terrible and cruel inheritance of sectarianism, all of it could exist on its own even if there had never been such a person as Jesus. Years ago I encountered in a book of sayings of Albert Schweitzer the statement that the quest of the historical Jesus fails because that Jesus inevitably returns to his own time; whereas the faithful who encounter Jesus in their own worlds and lives possess a wisdom that transcends mere history. Robinson is content to leave issues such as predestination and the problem of evil out of consideration and to treat them as mysteries. Though I do not doubt the historical Jesus, I will confess here that I regard the existence of a God apart from the world of worlds (saecula saeculorum) who numbers the hairs of my head—as a deep mystery, though I revere (and hope I keep) the first commandment. As to the second, I have broken it so often, committed so many offenses against my fellow creatures and myself that I am acquainted with grief.

I still worry the question with which I began from time to time, but from a different perspective. Closer to my eightieth year than to my teens I wonder occasionally what it might mean, beyond oneself and one’s selfish pursuits, to ask if one’s life has meaning? One answer, a moral one perhaps, might be to wonder if, at life’s end the world in which one lived and acted were at all changed by one’s passage through it. The question is still naïve, one’s life being subsumed in historical processes over which one has had no individual control and which remain hidden by one’s immersion in them. It is like asking whether a lake (or an ocean) is changed because one swam in it, or whether the air is changed by the flight of a bird. And the matter becomes more obscure if one asks the question in ontological terms. Is the void to which one’s being returns at the end of life the same void out of which one’s being emerged. Is the void of not life changed, indeed, by the emergence and eventual dissolution of any single life, or even by the emergence of life in the aggregate. Is life in the aggregate an accidental, a momentary disturbance in the great peaceful eternity of not life. Or does the emergence of life argue for something like emergent evolution, a process in which a new creation struggles to be born.

Robinson likens the universe to a storm, seeking to appropriate insights from physics and contemporary cosmology. I have no quarrel with that image, though I am more attracted to T. S. Eliot’s image of a turning about a still point, with its Aristotelian and Thomist resonances. And I am attracted as well to the ancient conception of peace as the primary characteristic of the world of worlds, the universe of universes which we have in idea, a little handful, to paraphrase a poem I love. I also think it does not diminish humanity to take the psalmist’s view, “what is man that thou art mindful of him.” I have always mostly thought that art, science, religion, and philosophy all lead our understanding towards wonder. Robinson takes a similar view. The Givenness of Things is a meditation on such wonders as quantum physics, Shakespeare’s poetry, and human forgiveness. The presence in our limited world of such wonders argues for a kind of cosmic optimism, in Robinson’s view, with which I can only concur.

And that brings me to the parts of Robinson’s argument I like the most. Wonder first, which Robinson evokes most poignantly with respect to human forgiveness and the largeness and generosity of spirit that can often accompany it. Robinson finds these displayed preeminently in the plays of Shakespeare. She argues that Hamlet’s famed hesitation should be understood as a humane shrinking from revenge, to be expected, to be thought normal, in a king’s son, especially perhaps in a king’s son who has been to the university and longs to return. It is the genius of Shakespeare’s language to model such things for us without sentimentality. The prince’s dispatching of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a necessary act of self-preservation. His killing of Polonius and his complicity in the death of Ophelia must be seen as more than problematic. But he refuses to the end to play the hero of a conventional revenge tragedy, refrains from exulting in Claudius’ death, and is at pains to beg Horatio to tell his story truly, not as one done in by the sour necessity of revenge, but as one who was “likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royally,” as Fortinbras describes him at the close. I am thinking of something Sidney says in the Apologie for Poetrie as part of his argument that poetry limns a world that might be, a world that ought to be. He describes a scene that men of his time often carried on their persons inscribed upon medallions. “Who readeth Aeneas carrying olde Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perfourme so excellent an acte?” And sometimes, as we can also see in Shakespeare, excellence is more than its own reward. What more unlikely than the restoration of Pericles’ daughter, whom Pericles had thought dead. It is “like a resurrection”. It “makes men glorious” as promised by the Prologue to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, “by allowing plausibility to drop away in deference to human particularity, human love and loyalty and worth.”

For Robinson the givenness of things is most displayed in the arbitrariness of our experience, which she links to what Jonathan Edwards called “the arbitrary constitution of the creator.” For Robinson as for Edwards, the fact that “We know only what we know only in the ways we know it or can know it” argues persuasively for “the creation’s arbitrary character, that is for its being composed to reflect the intentions of a creator, not as the elaboration of an order intrinsic to itself.” I think this is the weakest place in Robinson’s argument in that it requires the same unjustified leap from epistemology to ontology that positivists make in claiming that the limits of our experience require us to conclude that what we take for nature is of our own making. For me the givenness of things is palpable. I think of Wendell Berry’s reverence for topsoil. We cannot make it. It is my belief that we awake as humans (slowly, to be sure) to nature and culture as equal parts of our environment. I believe it is our gift as humans to stand apart from nature simultaneously as we are contained within it. That is what the story of the loss of Eden means to me. It is the measure of the problematic place of humans in the scale of being. “Who told you you were naked?” the Lord asks Adam in the cool of evening.

Yet it is that very problematic place that is our freedom, such as it is. Like Robinson I am unwilling to argue that the extremes of human sin are the price of that freedom. Such a conclusion is as vicious a reduction of experience as it is to claim that any chimpanzee with a typewriter would eventually write the works of Shakespeare. I am a brother to that chimpanzee. It is because I began my conscious life as a disciple of Jesus that I refuse the sort of arrogance that proclaims a human superiority that I cannot justify, since all I really know about my sibling chimp is that her thoughts, if she has them, are not mine. And I am as unwilling as Robinson is to reduce human nature to ‘hominid nature,’ as a friend of mind suggested in conversation a while back. The developed being is not reducible to her remote ancestor, however much we may agree about the genealogy. I think it was Annie Dillard who described the universe somewhere as feathered and free. I worry more silly questions: what accounts for difference, lissomness, the persistence of trees, turtles, cockroaches, and the thousand iterations of human excellence, pride, and meanness. I incline to the view that it is grace that accounts for these things at a level unknown to science or to theology; but I also believe that as regards culture it is we humans who must keep the balance. We seem now to live in a time characterized by meanness and the determination to reduce all of life to money. But I expect my little yard to bloom again this spring after I clear away my neighbor’s leaves. I expect science will deal with the virus that is presently decimating Missouri’s white tail deer herd. And because I began my life as a disciple of Jesus I hope for a resurgence of humanism in the world after I am gone. We need to learn again to love one another, to honor and to love the second commandment, however poorly we may keep it.

remembering a great singer

Posted on by

Jon Vickers is dead. A Google search for his name now turns up a number of obituaries. In the last century, so replete with great singers, Vickers stood out as monumental. His stage presence and vocal strength were widely celebrated and sometimes debunked, as were his intransigence, hot temper, and moral rigidity. But he was a great singer, a dramatic tenor who could sing a lyric line like no other if he chose to do so. His career encompassed the most demanding roles for dramatic tenor (except Siegfried, which tends to kill those who attempt it) and a number of big lyric roles as well. In all he sang with seriousness, to be sure, but also with that quality William Hazlitt famously called Gusto, “power or passion defining any object.” Hazlitt found this quality primarily in the works of Titian, Michaelangelo, Reubens, and in Greek sculpture.

Vickers’ held himself to a standard that required him to become fluent in German and Italian. He said in a late interview that his French was only passable. But he didn’t consult his vocal coaches, for whom he had high praise, in order to study the roles he performed linguistically. For that study he consulted language professors who could teach him idiom and nuance. He wanted to understand his operatic and oratorio roles comprehensively, like a method actor. Indeed he was a singing actor in an age that saw the revival of bel canto. Some did not think his voice beautiful. I did.

And I sang with him once, in 1958 in the Cherubini Medea in which he played opposite Maria Callas in the second season of what was then the Dallas Civic Opera. A few years ago I acquired the recording of that performance, released in 2000 after years of dormancy somewhere. I hadn’t known it existed until I discovered it quite by accident looking for something else. Singing as a chorister with such people—I had recently turned twenty-one at the time—was a heady experience for a very young man from West Texas, made more memorable by other aspects of the ensemble.

Our stage director was Alexis Minotis, of the Greek National Theatre, whose 1990 New York Times obituary credits with speaking “a resonant English.” We in Dallas experienced that resonance, but were very seldom able to understand Minotis’ directions—they were Greek to us. Fortunately, Franco Zeffirelli, on hand to direct the Traviata we also sang that year with Callas, was able to translate. I have sometimes wondered if Zeffirelli collected a fee for all his work on the Medea, for which, of course, he had no billing. Minotis would instruct us, and we would do our best to translate those directions into stage behavior with the result that Minotis would scream I don’t know what epithets at us and then hurriedly consult Zeffirelli in Greek, who would tell us what to do so that we could do it.

Rudolph Bing had fired Callas at the Metropolitan Opera just days before she was to perform in Dallas that year as well. We wondered if she would stiff us as she had Bing, but she came to Dallas, more or less resurrected her career, and acquired a devoted biographer in John Ardoin, who made his own career writing about her afterwards. Reviews of the Callas 1958/59 Medea focus on her—there were four performances, I believe, in different cities. But the Dallas performance may be the most renowned of her many performances of the role in and out of opera. And the young Vickers held his own as Giasone, bringing “his huge, glorious voice to this rather one-dimensional role,” as one reviewer put it. I remembered him as a big bluff man who liked to joke around about his ranching life until a Met broadcast of Das Rheingold in the late 1960s changed my perception of him forever.

Of all the Vickers postings I have seen around in the last day or two, this one is to me the most moving. I am grateful to my son, Julian, for it. Here, Vickers sings the great Aria “Total Eclipse,” from Handel’s Samson. The source is Milton’s closet drama, Samson Agonistes. Newburgh Hamilton’s libretto recalls the Poet’s language, often quoting directly. Here’s the specific Miltonic text that stands behind the aria, though Hamilton and Handel give most of the Poet’s theology of light to other characters and to the chorus:

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first created Beam, and thou great Word,
Let there be light, and light was over all;
Why am I thus bereav’d thy prime decree?

In his later career Vickers was known almost as much for the role of Handel’s Samson as he was known for Peter Grimes. I think Vickers understood the philosophical chiaroscuro of the Hamilton libretto. I have no idea whether he had read Milton, though it would fit the profile of a singer who consulted professors about turns of language if he had. I think I hear the Poet’s voice in Vickers’ reading of this aria, ‘finding no dawn.’ And I can characterize Vickers’ performance no better than to quote my son: “for me this somehow captures the enormous scale of his artistry in a way that many things don’t.” It’s the difference between Samson and Pagliacci, between tragedy and melodrama.

naming the animals

Posted on by

A Facebook friend has recently inspired me by quoting John Muir—“The mountains are calling, and I must go”—and I’ve been reading Wendell Berry this spring. It takes a poet to call up the land, whether wilderness or human land, with the understanding that land contains us. It takes a great poet, perhaps, to call up the great land or the great water we have never seen or touched with a similar understanding. “Much have I traveled,”wrote such a great poet of imagined encounters with oceans he had never seen, would never see, from the wine-dark sea of Homer to the great Pacific as it unfolded itself to the first European, Cortez, he thought incorrectly.

Summer is coming. As I mow and plant and plan, as I sit on my back porch at dusk and watch the fireflies begin their seasonal dance, I think it isn’t just land that contains us. After a year underground the common firefly makes a brief pilgrimage into the outer air, only to flash briefly, mate, and die; though the mating ensures that the cycle goes on, female fireflies being less than parthenogenetic creatures. And if I raise my eyes to those other beacons; the great ones, Venus and Jupiter—I’ve been searching for Saturn—that present themselves in the evening sky above the chimneys and rooftops that make up my back porch horizon, when I think of the distances that separate them from us who perceive their light after millennia, I think a great mystery contains us, and I understand the ancient psalmist’s need to call it Lord.

These things beyond us are so familiar as to have become clichés, breeding a contempt (as the saying goes) that can blind one to how remarkable they are. None of us was present at the making of any one of them, as El Shaddai reminded his servant, Job. We inhabit a place that is also theirs. We dwell alongside them. And my summer mood as it comes on tells me it is far better to hold these things in reverence, these things we cannot, did not, make: great land and water, the forest primeval that opens Longfellow’s poem, the heavens, the topsoil at our feet, our fellow creatures that inhabit various places alongside us, than to pursue the ruinous course of vandalism we call industry upon which we westerners have been embarked for the last four centuries or so. Industry has produced its own magnificence, but a survey of the world’s great cities, as they presently realistically are, does not engender much optimism as to the sustainability of present-day industrial logic. From Bangkok to Shanghai to Chernobyl to Detroit to the ruin of New Orleans’ wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico, we humans have left a trail of the waste of our passage that would be tragic if we did not arrogantly continue to pursue the same goals and strategies that have produced waste and destruction on such a scale in the first place.

But this summer of all summers time seems to be turning a corner for me. There’s a freshness in the air sometimes I can’t account for. Now and again I’m surprised by an impulse to be kind to a stranger. We went to the zoo last weekend, and the crowds hardly bothered me at all. We had gone primarily to see St. Louis’s new Polar Bear. I worried he might be too hot, but he had plenty of water to get into to cool off. I accept that zoos are problematic, but they are so familiar to me for so many years that going to the zoo seems normal enough, especially on a beautiful day with an explosion of sunshine and temperatures in the eighties. Though I sometimes think humankind is on the verge of calamity, I could find no presentiment of such a thing in my weekend thoughts, enjoying an afternoon in the park with several thousand of my fellow creatures, human and not. As we threaded our way across the big bridge that traverses the zoo’s central pond we watched pelicans and flamingos, swans and geese, a family of ducks with the little ones swimming after their mother. There we were, in the middle of a space created by capital and industry—everything we saw was named for some benefactor, from the benches and water fountains to the large program areas—and all of it a museum of a kind, built to contain not artifacts but specimens, semblances (some of them living) that put me in mind of the great worth of the world.

To walk in such a place with a cynical detachment seems wrong, no matter the morality of zoos. I thought of some lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high. . . .

But I think there is no innocence to which we might return, no illo tempore in which we might dwell as free animals amongst the unnamed others. The story of Adam naming the animals, like so many of the stories in Genesis, suggests that the rift in nature is aboriginal. We, the humans, stand one side of it, and the rest stands over against us. But what if it doesn’t? What if the rift is merely a trick of the light, so to speak, not so much a creation of human language as a condition of its use. Prometheus brought fire, but fire burns and cares not a whit who is scorched. It’s up to us humans to care. It’s up to us humans to take up the world in our arms, the world that includes ourselves. Wendell Berry’s critique, to which I mostly subscribe, is teaching me a way of thinking about this taking up.

Central to Berry’s conception of agriculture, which he distinguishes from agribusiness, is that agricultural husbandry (if I can use the old-fashioned expression Berry uses) is always local, always focuses on a particular place, its character, its qualities and capabilities, its particular weather, topography, and of course its history. Even wilderness as we think of it, has a history. There are now no truly wild places left on our planet, save in the great oceanic depths perhaps. I think it is important for us to continue to preserve what we call wilderness, albeit our habit of valuing wilderness areas as recreational places is now beginning to undermine them, with hotels, casinos, and condominiums threatening to overwhelm the Grand Canyon, to name one instance. But the great planetary need, as Berry argues forcefully, is for an adequate ethics in regard to working land. I think we Americans have had quite enough of the frontier mentality that regards land and water as resources to be used up before we move on to the next prairie, the next river, the next mountain, to be destroyed in the service of commerce.

And I think we postmodern humans might well ask ourselves what may be the end point of our extractive industrial logic. What will be the value of the money we have heaped in banks when the real wealth of the planet is gone. Having asked that question, I think we might collectively turn to the places where we live and find that we are native to them. When I lived in the south I thought nostalgically about place as a category of experience, the sense of place as a thing mostly lost; but I am learning from Berry to think that the sense of place is a function of attention and care. Most of us are now native to places that are not capable of the self sufficiency Berry envisions for the ideal family farm. But that’s a myth, even for Berry, or a transcendent archetype. What we could do, as citizens of the mixed places in which we now dwell, is to study the conditions that might enable their renewed flourishing. That flourishing would, for most of us, require the continued importation of many goods and concomitant reliance on services obtained from afar. But we might wish to study conditions required for the preservation and health of the local institutions on which we continue to rely to heal the sick, to educate our children, to put roofs over our heads and food on our tables, to get us from one place to another, to manage and store the funds required by our local systems of exchange, to preserve public order, in general the institutions that support the persons who do the myriad of local jobs that are necessary to the integrity of the local, civilized places in which dwell.

As I continue to think through the things I am learning from Berry, I’ll likely have more to say about these and other matters of local concern, more specific things. But for now, my summer is starting well. I can only wish a similar good fortune to all who read these pages.