[Update: JuanPueblo, whose blog I have enjoyed reading for several years now, has a response. And I have a response to his response in the comments. Readers might find the discussion illuminating, especially if they think I've mischaracterized what philosophy does and why.] 

I'm over at Sayable.net today, talking about living love like a philosopher. Join us?

Seven years

I had been driving past the oak tree in the foreground of this photo for almost five years before I noticed it. I came around the corner one day, shortly after my return from Toronto, and there it was--limbs blazing greenly, aching with lichen. How could I have missed it for so long?

***
Seven years ago today I wrote my first blog post. It contained picture of a tree and a single path with the caption "two roads diverged in a yellow wood." As one of my siblings is fond of pointing out, there was no divergence whatsoever in the photo.

Things have been diverging though, haven't they? It has been one foot in front of the other and no looking back. Except for the trail of breadcrumbs I've left here, scattered across 84 months, two moves, and three graduations.

Annie Dillard says, "Beauty is there whether or not we will or sense it. The least we can do is try to be there."

E.L. Konigsburg talks about "reading the ocean by the cupfull."

And one of Oscar Wilde's characters reminds us that, as one should always have something sensational to read on the train, a diary is requisite.

***
So I write. For the sensation of it, partly. But also so that the trees show up and the oceans lap out of my hands. Because it's the very least I can do.

Oregon spring (II)

Today was about threes

My flight to CN is now less than three months away. Less than! (It's hard to believe that my trip to NC is now already three months past!)
My sister's wedding is in three weeks and three days. Soon our house will be full to overflowing with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and childhood friends.
And my philosopher of course. He will be here in exactly 21 days.

Have I shared this picture of us yet? It's on facebook, so most of you have probably seen it.

But it's my favorite.

Tomorrow evening family will arrive to celebrate the long weekend with us. There will be babies, which Chesterton will not like, and food, which Chesterton will love. He's a very consistent creature.

My plan, when I'm not celebrating, is to alternate chapters of Greek grammar with philosophy. I'm learning about future conditions: future most vivid, future more vivid, future less vivid.

I think I prefer the future most vivid, most of the time. It's the only one of the three that aspires to certainty.

Rachel Held Evans on Huck Finn, revelation, and true faithfulness:

But another part of me worries that a religious culture that asks its followers to silence their conscience is just the kind of religious culture that produces $200 rewards for runaway slaves. The Bible has been “clear” before, after all—in support of a flat and stationary earth, in support of wiping out infidels, in support of manifest destiny, in support of Indian removal, in support of anti-Semitism, in support of slavery, in support of “separate but equal,” in support of constitutional amendments banning interracial marriage.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Oregon coffee shop

Gov' Cup (Salem, May 2012)

"The Proxy Marriage"

Even a fake marriage to Bridey Taylor filled his heart with unaccountable joy, and he went home after school and put on his dark-gray recital suit and a tie. He and Bridey were getting fifty dollars each, and he thought he should dress for the job. (p. 62)

This week's fiction piece, by Maile Meloy, in The New Yorker: nothing fancy here, just an old-fashioned plot with a heartwarming ending. But I loved it. June is just around the corner!

Recommended.

Philosophy and her mercenaries

In North Carolina in February, some of the conference organizers were very impressed by my graduate school options, but also very mistaken: they thought my options were job offers. "If all those places want you," they asked, "then what are you doing here, at our conference?" A month later, in the Borough of Princeton and then in Ithaca, cynical remarks were made about attending any school ranked lower than the top-20.

Comments like these discourage me because I actually think it's a professional duty to philosophize entirely indiscriminately, no matter how famous or smart you take yourself or your interlocutors to be. Otherwise, I suspect, you're only using philosophy for your own advantage and not really devoted to her project; that is, you're a mercenary and not a patriot. (Always better to be a patriot.)

One of my best conversations this spring was with a taxi driver in the Silicon Valley. We talked about religion, morality, and objectivity. It was a good reminder of how perplexing and important these questions are.

***

Of course, philosophers aren't the only ones to use and abuse philosophy. The taxi driver told me I had beautiful eyes and asked for my email before dropping me off at the San Jose airport. "I can sense that you have knowledge," he told me, "and I would love to have more of it."

Right.

My considered view is that the professional duty to philosophize indiscriminately does not extend to giving out one's email indiscriminately, no matter how famous or smart or flattering your interlocutor may be. So, I politely refused the request. My religious taxi driver will have to continue his ascent to the good without the help of my blue eyes.

Of all these shining, diamond days,

I love most the weekends. Late Friday afternoon, the flock comes home to roost: my brothers arrive with bags of books and tales from the work week, my sister and her fiance from their concerts and classes; the kitchen and the family room fill with laughter, tangled skeins of conversations, and the scent of roasting coffee. We do things together: attend dance concerts, go for walks, study at coffee shops, play tennis in the gloaming, drink wine. We talk about everything polite conversation avoids: politics, religion, what we're learning in class or at home or at work; we often disagree about many of the things we discuss, but that doesn't diminish our enthusiasm for the talking or our affection for one another.

This weekend we also gave thanks for the sun--our first extended taste of spring--and celebrated our Mama.  

She is a wonderful woman, the most beautiful one I know. I will be lucky if someday I can give my own family half of what she has given us.

Happy Mother's Day, Mama! We love you!

Napoleon's Creperie & Gelateria  (May 2012)

Remaining

This month we celebrated five years in the big house on the hill. Disregarding the year in Toronto, this is the longest time I have lived in one house, ever. It has been long enough that things have collected: there's a tide of books that keeps washing up by my bed and a perpetual sludge of bric-a-brac underneath it; my collection of letters and bills is overflowing its holder; and pools of college papers are splashing over the edges of closet shelves.

I am grateful for these five years, though. Five years perched on the top of a hill, weathering rain and basking in eventual sunshine, is no small thing, even when the clutter threatens to drown. Someday I even think I'd like to live in the same place for a whole decade (will let you know how that goes). Until then, however, the good thing about moving is that it forces you to unstop the drain or else ship--and shipping, I have discovered, is expensive.

Bad uses of good books

Moll Flanders begins with a stern injunction to the reader: What you're about to read is sensational, Defoe says, but don't let that distract from the morals! The work is "chiefly recommended to those who know how to read it, and how to make the good uses of it which the story all along recommends to them." And in what remains of the preface, the author pedantically sketches the lessons learned by our brave heroine--the just desserts of lewd living and the rewards of repentance and virtue.

The moral logic is impeccable:

Throughout the infinite variety of this book this fundamental is most strictly adhered to; there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor a virtuous just thing but it carries its praise along with it. (p. 11)

And yet, it is when Moll is at her most unrepentant, and the narrative at its most scandalous, that I find it all most compelling. Perhaps I am not the right reader for this book.

Oregon spring