I was gonna post this as a quote, but the whole thing is one of the most riveting things I’ve read in awhile.
Potlatch paper mill, Lewiston, Idaho.
Beneath Joso Trestle
Joso Trestle, Union Pacific Railroad, Lyons Ferry, WA.
“Childhood is plenty commercialized before we do anything to help train a new generation of consumers to be as greedy, materialistic, and self-centered as we adults are. Instead of supporting free play in the fresh air, or role-play that comes anywhere near teaching empathy or compassion, KidZania teaches children the importance of the next paycheck. It’s incredible that they can get it all so wrong. After all, it’s child’s play.”
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon, creator of The Wire →
your monkey called: Q: How many Cormac McCarthies does it take to change a light bulb? →
A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot,…
“It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, ‘What laws shall we make?’ In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, ‘What laws can we obey?’”
Storms are taller than mountains.
Closeup of snow-covered field.
Ponderosa
Filling up What is Lacking →
Peter Leithart in Credenda. This is, more or less, his Ash Wednesday homily. Theology needs to be terrifying and brilliant like this.
Cumulus clouds like that mean Winter has given up the ghost on the Palouse.
Train Crossing Desert near Kelso, California, by one William Garnett.
“Anyway, it is tragic but interesting to contemplate how transplanting living cultures into the soil of modernity so often results in the culture and its people withering and dying. Why is that? I don’t think there is a material explanation for it, at least not one that is satisfactory.”
Rod Dreher, in the comments to this brief Front Porch Republic post.
Given the aridity of modernity, the way it manifestly does not care for humanity—whether individuals or congregations of people—how does it consistently win out over traditional cultures? What about it is appealing or powerful enough that people let it erode the cultural soil that sustained them for so long?
Is it that the razzle-dazzle of stuff and “freedom” and all the other crap modernity pitches is superior to the old ways—that is, when those old ways have become fossilized by a generation or two that never understood them to begin with? When the older generation no longer believes what was promised and no longer lives as if those promises were ever true…
If that’s the case, how about this: I think we are in that fossilization phase with modernity, whose promises remain unfulfilled and have been found out as utterly false.
Waiting Room, former Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad, 1966. David Plowden.
Wind-bent icicles.