In the coffee shop,
I saw a customer reading a big thick book,
It looked serious, printed on heavy paper, hardback with a jacket.
I tried to see the title, but he packed up
Before I got a look. Now I’ll never know.
A woman sat in the same seat after him.
She also brought a book. This one,
I could see the title.
Comfortable With Uncertainty.
… I am a small-government, traditional conservative who thinks the Constitution is a deeply moral expression of liberalism.
And that’s why I like it.
Unlike the common good constitutionalists and postliberals and many of the nationalists, I think its liberalism is the most important thing about it. Postliberals like to argue that it is simply a morally neutral “procedural document.” Sure, it lays out some procedures. But it does so to codify some of the hardest-learned moral lessons in human history. A fair trial is procedural. Your right to one is a profound moral statement and commitment. Your right to worship, speak, move, and associate as you please may come from God, the author of our rights, but the commitment to recognize and protect those rights is not morally neutral at all. Just because people take these rights for granted doesn’t mean that they’re just the natural landscape. They are hard-won moral victories.
Starting with The Crying of Lot 49; any thoughts before I get very far into it?
Do you know Dust to Digital? Its Instagram feed of worldwide crowd-sourced musical performances is one of the few good reasons to use IG.
Hot in 1925: “Moonlight Memories” and “Oriental” - from the Library of Congress’ National Jukebox
Watched: Past Lives 🍿 Very tender. Excellent acting. I’ll remember it.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
I was going to say that my faith, like my doubt, mostly involves my mind and not my stomach. Basically that’s true. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to behold the Lord and not as a stranger. I’m not a saint, so I haven’t had that experience. And yet, even as a not-saint, I get glimpses. I think we all have, and may there be many more of them for all of us.
The Remarkable Ordinary (2017)
Jonah Goldberg:
The kinds of things one might say in private, to close friends, for shock value, as a joke, or out of a shared hateful anger at this group or that, are now welcome or at least tolerated in the public square.
This is but one of Trump’s (and Twitter’s and Reality TV’s, et al.) malignancies: it’s now OK to say nasty things out loud that once were hidden or, at least, circumscribed.