Field Notes

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Loveliest Grotesque

Sandra Lim

I kept the little ruin near me, I stowed it in the kitchen, it sat in the pantry, like a jar of reddest jam, it sang me songs of seafaring, it said the “weather being fine,” I listened to it breathe, shiver brokenly in time, I believed a multitude stood between us, four seasons, the meaningless physical world, and a grammar primer, you could see how I found it necessary, with its immodest appeals, its constant state of déshabillé, it is small for its age, it is too wide-awake, so my sewing came undone with the years, I stalked myself to the open door, the unlatched gate, ma petite is a world sold of charms, it loves a new act, has a leer for a mouth, has indecorous energy, I ran from the spring glee of it, I radioed ahead, oh I unplanned a lifetime, turned my gaze to the west, but then it said it would make something of us both, the sound of it touched me, fat in its cracked sadness, it was homemade all along, it was oddly necessary, I looked back like Lot’s wife, like the exhausted mirage that I was, and the loveliest salt taste was whelming us, both awash in a light of knives, and the wind it was shifting like this—

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We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

Annie Dillard

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I Dream a World

I dream a world where man No other man will scorn, Where love will bless the earth And peace its paths adorn I dream a world where all Will know sweet freedom's way, Where greed no longer saps the soul Nor avarice blights our day. A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the earth And every man is free, Where wretchedness will hang its head And joy, like a pearl, Attends the needs of all mankind- Of such I dream, my world!

 - Langston Hughes

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Bubbly

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Upside Downside

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"Walking" - Henry David Thoreau

"There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker."

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Waiting for the Barbarians - C. P. Cavafy

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?               The barbarians are due here today.     Why isn’t anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating?               Because the barbarians are coming today.             What laws can the senators make now?             Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.     Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?               Because the barbarians are coming today             and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.             He has even prepared a scroll to give him,             replete with titles, with imposing names.     Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold?               Because the barbarians are coming today             and things like that dazzle the barbarians.     Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say?               Because the barbarians are coming today             and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.     Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought?               Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.             And some who have just returned from the border say             there are no barbarians any longer.     And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. 

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Catherine Murphy

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Thanksgiving on canvas - Luis Meléndez

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Vilhelm Hammershoi

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Dear College Sophomore, A lot can change in a year, right? At this time last year, you were a wary and excited freshman. Moving into the residence hall brought both the thrill of newfound independence and nervous dislocation from home and family. But you soon settled in and focused on why you were here: to learn. Sometimes going to those first-year classes felt like drinking from a fire hose. But you couldn't get enough of the new worlds that your instructors invited you into: Homer's Greece, Augustine's Rome, John Locke's England, C.S. Lewis's Oxford, Toni Morrison's Kentucky. And trust me, we noticed. You are the student that teachers dream about, the one we talk about in the faculty dining room, the one who "gets it." You didn't just treat your freshman classes as an inconvenience, the price of admission to cheap football tickets and fraternity parties. You signed up for the adventure of intellectual exploration that college is meant to be. Yet I couldn't help but notice a change in you already last spring. And now that classes are starting up again, I see a familiar shift in your stance toward the world. If the past is any guide (and it is), I worry that this is the sophomore you might become: It's not just that you're a year wiser; you carry the air of the newly enlightened. Your curiosity has hardened into a misplaced confidence; your desire to learn has turned into a penchant to pronounce, as if wisdom were a race to being the quickest debunker. You used to wonder about the social vision behind Philip Larkin's poetry, or whether Thomas Aquinas's notion of natural law could really work in a secular age, but now you seem more intent on unmasking "micro-aggressions" and detecting colonial prejudice in a canon that you increasingly disdain. Enlarge Image Getty Images/Vetta I've seen it before—I see it every year. And I know where it is coming from. I know those colleagues who confuse teaching with advocacy—those colleagues who think they are broadening your horizons and opening up your world and disabusing you of your former narrowness. Teachers who delight in debunking "traditional" values that your parents espouse, teachers for whom cultural criticism consists of scoffing at anything "conservative." They were my teachers, too. I know how it feels to be invited into this exclusive club. I understand the joy ride of liberal enlightenment. But what if they're asking you to trade one sort of narrowness for another? It might feel like they're making your world more expansive, but they're actually closing it off. Dangling the badge of maturity and knowingness, they subtly replace teaching with indoctrination. Sharing the ironic distance that shores up this self-perception, they swap laughs with you in the morning about the latest takedown by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert (wink, wink, we are the ones who know how things really work!). Unlike during those first few months of freshman year, your thinking on almost any subject now is becoming easy to predict. The causes you're passionate about, while not without merit, are almost clichéd. You seem less interested in mining the complexity of problems and more interested in making a hasty display of moral outrage and coming down on the correct side of any debate—because of course there's only one right way to think. That didn't used to be the case. Last fall I could see the wheels turning for you. I could almost sense when your mind was swirling with discovery, entertaining unfamiliar ideas, forging a sense of yourself and your commitments—questioning some prior beliefs, to be sure, but with a sense of maturing conviction that didn't shut itself off from reality. You were coming to appreciate both the complexity of the world and the range of wisdom available to us from our forebears. That's a laudable posture, not just for college but for life. So don't buy the story that the really smart people on campus are the ones who parrot the platforms of progressives. Bring a little suspicion to those who delight in their hermeneutics of suspicion. Punch through the posturing and self-congratulation and ask the questions you were asking last fall—the ones that forced me to consider my own thinking anew. You're too smart to settle for ideology, and it's too soon to stop learning. We're just getting started.

Has Anyone Seen Last Year's Promising Freshmen?

James K. A. Smith

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He has another drink and tells a ribald story about the Bishop and a Warden's wife. His voice makes candles flicker while laughter pounds the room like heavy fists on tables. He drinks again when he is through. Then settling like a barley bag within his chair, annotates his friends with small, warm eyes. Next he talks of France, the ruin of the Calais road and this month's pairings in the beds of Court. At last he strengthens to go home and rising massively takes coat and leave. The silence of the night crushes rooftops overhead but laughter winds with him, disjointed in the streets. His hair is dank and snarled beneath his cap. Port pulses from him on every breath and step. His ankles hurt and he takes time now to hate tomorrow's duties and tomorrow too. So, gently canted, he discovers home and beds his genius down.

Chaucer

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Overall Rankings — The Good Country Index

The Good Country Index is pretty simple: a measure of what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

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Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

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Beach Exploration