To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Holy cow! I just love to hear the cicadas’ whirring/clacking. Sounds of summer in Texas.
I was in the backyard this evening just before 7 o’clock when a squall line blew through. In less than five minutes, the temperature dropped probably 10 degrees, the air — which had been heavy and muggy, a real swampy, soupy gravy — suddenly lightened and dried. The wind kicked up and the trees all whooshed and swayed in their tops. Seven or eight birds — just crows, I think — soared, wings spread to the max on the waves of air. The sky darkened. Not to the green light of tornado weather, but deep gray-blue. And something inside me absolutely vibrated with excitement and a kind of joy.
In five minutes the wind died. And… nothing happened. No rain. No thunder. No lightening. No wind.
But for those few minutes when it felt like a little charge, a little danger, a little excitement, like a little (or a lot of) weather was on the march, it was a happy, thrilling joy. Joy is perhaps too strong a word, but I cannot come up with anything more accurate. I prayed a thank-you prayer, and then came inside.
I am certain that were it not for Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry — their books and their poetry — I wouldn’t have noticed; I would have come inside too soon and missed that brief interlude of aliveness. Thank you, God, for their teaching.
Worth your time. Noah Eckstein, Harvard 2026:
The older concepts of civic virtue emphasized self-mastery, conquering your impulses to serve a higher cause. Today’s politics treats self-mastery as suspect, a form of fakery or selling out, while asinine self-exposure is proof of depth and authenticity. The older republican tradition asked whether a man could govern himself before entrusting him with power. The new authenticity politics asks whether he seems sufficiently ungoverned to be trusted. [See, e.g., Graham Platner]
“Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law” is the line from “America the Beautiful.” That idea is a joke…, increasingly, in Washington.
N.B. The next line, “Thy Liberty in Law,” is also a (cruel) joke in Washington these days.
A very David-French-y column (that’s a positive adjective in my personal dictionary):
In fact, as the show [Hacks] illustrates, concentrating on differences and even mutual interests is a bit beside the point. The question isn’t “How much are we alike?” Rather, it’s “Can I appreciate and even love the person you are?”
Matthew Crawford, via Damon Linker
Capital is concentrated to the point that it operates in quasi-governmental ways, abetted by ever more powerful information technology. Arguably, one of the most important functions of the (actual, elected) government, now, is precisely to restrain and regulate the explosion of unaccountable governmentality in our dealings with outsized commercial enterprises.
Ah! If only…