"Because they are"

Anecdotal Evidence again.

"without gratitude ... life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies"

And the granddaughter and the steam engine -- I resemble that...

Best Wrong Answer

I was pointed to a blog post by the now-dead D.G. Meyers (no, I'd never heard of him either, but his last post is worth reading), and browsed around a bit. Here he praises an influential teacher: "Cunningham read my pitiful effort aloud to the class and said, “In twenty-five years of teaching, this is the best wrong answer I have ever received.”"

Sing

I'm not quite sure why "Sing" wound up fixed so indellibly in my memory. I wasn't exactly in the Sesame Street cohort, and the Carpenters recorded in in '73. Maybe it played in the dorm at college?

At the time I didn't think much of the metaphor. What did that have to do with physics research? Some decades later, I notice that life (even in the lab) has had a lot of rhymes and rhythms to it. Granted, I've been off-key a lot, but "song" doesn't seem as inapplicable as it used to.

If life is a song, it's a canon, with new generations of voices starting up the melody and the old voices dying away.

Taken for granted

"I love you like salt"

How much of my world is invisible? Air is, usually--and I tend to forget about it until I either get pneumonia or try to swim.

Unless you live in hurricane country, food generally just arrives at the store. Maybe some things get scarce for a while, but even in poor areas something shows up.

If you tent camp regularly you don't take electricity for granted, but it's so ubiquitous that it's easy to overlook.

I've read the "privilege knapsack" stuff and don't consider it particularly useful, but yes, imagine living among people who are radically different from yourself, and who don't like your tribe. If they express the dislike violently (as in inner city Chicago or the old "Don't let the sun set on you here" towns): just imagine how you'd watch your back. Non-violent expressions of tribalism (e.g. in universities) induce you to watch your mouth.

Even the antifa and blm folks rely on the police--as one can hear in the Kenosha video. Yes, if you're black encountering the cops you're more likely to get roughed up (and less likely to get shot) than if you're white--but you don't have to worry about just disappearing. Everybody assumes they'll get a day in court, and that the rest of the world will be able to hear from them. That's not a small matter.

We have vast machinery to supply parts and drugs and food and information and legal help and clothing (ever notice how often a suit of clothes is mentioned as a great gift in old stories?) and loans and things that aren't easy to get without that machinery.

Some of those invisible things we should be grateful for. Ingratitude is ugly--though excuseable in babies. Some things, maybe we should change--but don't forget Chesterton's Fence. Other things--do "window treatment" fashions matter? (You should probably not trust my aesthetic judgment on such matters.)

---

How do we see the invisible? A few things come to mind; there are probably plenty of others.

You can have someone sit you down and explain in detail why you are a bad person and never knew it before. I assume that corset and riding crop are extra cost options.

The Grand Tour is nice, if you have the money. But having money makes a lot of things invisible, even in a foreign environment.

You can try to get to know someone from a wildly different environment. But then, are you treating the person as a means to an end--your enlightenment? You won't really meet them that way, and it may rankle them. If you aren't, there's some goal you both share that brings you together--which is good and also means they may not be as different from you as they could be.

Read. Read the foreign stuff first, and then maybe the careful explanations. How do those foreigners like to think of themselves? Poetry, folk stories, other literature--if you feel brave tackle some internal debate. Their arguments seem sound from their point of view--why? Assume they're not deliberately malicious--though some people are.

Read stuff from the past. Your grandfather's worries were generally quite serious ones--why are yours different? Hint: it isn't because you're smarter or more moral. You aren't.

Read stuff you disagree with. Assume for the sake of argument that the writer isn't deliberately malicious. Sometimes even the beyond-the-pale ones see something you don't, though their cure may be wicked.

As mentioned above, camping can, if you cut out the electronics and other luxuries, make some everyday things like waste disposal rise up out of invisibility. (The same is true of hunting, if you want to avoid spooking the deer.) Try mending with needle and thread. (I'm not very good at it.) Exercise your imagination when visiting one of those museum displays of ancient villages--and try not to be a smartass in your fantasy. You wouldn't know any more than they did.

Cut out all electronics for a week or two. What was harder/impossible? What was better and why?

You're not trying to become cosmopolitan =home-less, just see more--and maybe be more grateful for what you have.

FURTHER Another little thing: how much money do you need to buy groceries today? We don't have hyperinflation and prices are posted--you can estimate how much you need, and not have to spend time dickering and hoping there's not just one item left (driving up the seller's price).

Incarnation

I don't have the skill to do justice to Jesus' Incarnation, nor even to the distant echo of it that is my own.

I'll limit myself to the shoe and the bookcase and hope I can manage those and not ramble too much.

I'm facing three large bookcases--2 of them 6' x 6'. I built them back when money was a lot tighter, and they've made several moves with us. I spent quite a bit of time measuring and drilling freehand, and learning the hard way about decorative brackets (an invention of the devil), and realizing after a few years that I had to bite the bullet and unload and varnish them.

My time and effort went into them, and if my time and effort are part of my life there's something of my life there. Ever since I made them they've been part of the background and tools of my life, and of my children's lives, and of my wife's life (sometimes to her chagrin, for I was far from an expert carpenter). Although it isn't good to be overly attached to things of this world, when we use something it leaves a mark on our lives and we leave a mark on it.

A shoe is almost silly. There's this reflection of my foot sunk into the material. If another one of those accidents at 1st and Washington takes me out, there'll still be this ghost of me in the shoe. It isn't an important thing, but it illustrates.

When our time ends, I suspect we bring into eternity what we put our selves into. Keeping the home clean is an action and not a thing; that comes with us too. My body has some trivial little quirks that don't seem important--the remaining hair keeps growing and needs to be cut now and then. Care for those trivial things is part of my life anyway. So is digging in the garden, an easy job that leaves a useful mark on the world. (but what inertia I have to overcome to do it!) So, I'm afraid, is procrastinating--and an absence of action is a very strange thing to bring into eternity.

The things we do and care for don't last in this world. The board is erased and the next boy steps up to the chalk. But I was put here to invest myself in work and people, for God. One way and another I've done that; put myself into things and people. This seems almost like a kind of incarnation of me in the things around me. I wonder what that will look like from eternity.

Most important

A colleague told me this week of a Psych professor he had who told the class that self-justification was more important than sex. The class of college students was duly startled, and he followed it with "Try to go a day without self-justification."

Trying to do without self-justification seems like a mandatory discipline for a Christian, but I'm still not very good at it.

Summarizing marriage advice

Eldest Daughter and Maggie’s Farm both recommended 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage (two of them). His advice: Don’t stop holding her hand; don’t call names; don’t stop being attractive; don’t stop having fun together; don’t stop kissing her, and so on.

Quite a few of these are consequences of some simple principles.

1. You don’t know when you are going to die. What do you want her last memory of you to be? A kiss, maybe? Not being a slob or of angry words?
   
2. She wants to feel she can trust you. Around other women, dealing with the children, etc.
   
3. She likes to feel wanted. Though I’m given to understand that proving this can be overdone.
   
4. Try to keep alert to what she needs. "But the game is on!" or "I’m posting on the blog" don’t quite cut it
   
5. If you give up a sense of entitlement, everything is a gift. Best if both of you feel that way; something to figure out before you get married
   

For better or for worse, an adventure, with surprise traveling companions along the way.

Wisdom again

Age is supposed to bring wisdom. I’m not notably wise now, but I’m a bit more so than I was when I was young, so perhaps it’s true.

But what is the difference? Most of what I know now I heard long ago—I just didn’t think much of it.

Faithfulness, for example: I heard sermons on it when I was a babe in arms, though, now that I think of it, not much on how faithfulness played out in everyday life. Hmm.

Woody Allen said "90% of life is just showing up." Just showing up, day after day, is one aspect of faithfulness. When you persevere you make the choice day after day after day to ratify the original decision—a choice that spreads out over years and flavors all of your life. We’re not eternal, but faithfulness makes our lives reflect a little eternity.

I didn’t think much of that when I was young—I didn’t think of it at all. Since then I’ve had some experience of having vinegar on the teeth and smoke in the eyes—and realized that I’ve been that to other people. And I’ve seen what’s happened to the iffy. All this I sort-of knew before, but I hadn’t experienced it. Or I hadn’t internalized it.

What does it mean to have "internalized" some knowledge? We know the difference between rote and internal, but it is hard to articulate exactly how the knowledge has been made integral to our way of thinking and acting instead of just being something we can take or leave. Language is frail sometimes.

The song I’m glad there is you describes "this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures," and somewhere along the line you start to realize how underrated some of those treasures were—even by you, who gave lip service to knowing better.

"With knowledge you pat yourself on the back for being so smart. With wisdom you kick yourself in the butt for having been so stupid." Peter Sinclair

Down's

The Anchoress has a warm post around George Will's column about 40 years with his son Jon. She says it well, and so does he.

This year Jon will spend his birthday where every year he spends 81 spring, summer and autumn days and evenings, at Nationals Park, in his seat behind the home team’s dugout. The Phillies will be in town, and Jon will be wishing them ruination, just another man, beer in hand, among equals in the republic of baseball.

Then what?

At the Anchoress go read about Katie Davis.

Saint Philip Neri used to listen to the dreams of those around him, and ask, "and then what?" If someone mentioned a lofty ambition, Philip would tease them about what comes next: "you become rich and successful, and then what?"

"And then I marry a beautiful woman and we travel and enjoy life!"

"And then, what?" Philip would gently ask, over and over, until the dreamer was forced to acknowledge that beyond their dreams lay only death, and an eternity reflecting the values and choices of their relatively short blip of a life.

"And when shall we begin to do good?"

Visualizing a life

We love narratives. In the fairy stories, almost every incident along the way had a bearing on the climax. If the heroine shared her bread with an old woman the old woman later proves essential to solving some puzzle before the young lady. Good narratives are clean, if not always orderly.

That’s a useful way of looking at our lives. There’s a start, turning points, struggles and falls, and an every-day-moving-on until the end.

But I think it misses part of the big picture.

Think of every day as another scan line across the picture, building up an image. A big change in direction can change the image, but so can the thousand dots of daily little acts that nobody would put in the story.

So what picture have my habits and choices drawn? Is it clear or muddy, and what is missing? The narrative description won't tell me.