A fascinating 2018 documentary on Paul Kingsnorth’s changed relationship to the environmentalist movement he once passionately identified with. This is Kingsnorth prior to his conversion to Orthodoxy and relative popularity for his online writing at The Abbey of Misrule, though it is interesting to see certain spiritual ideas and trajectories already percolating in his mind by this point.

A “nekyia” scene (i.e., an ancient Greek rite in which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future) from the Tomb of Orcus II, depicting the ghosts of Agamemnon and Tiresias.

My wife and I are finally watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds for the first time. (I say “watching” because we’re at the stage of life where we split a viewing over two nights; I might’ve been embarrassed by that earlier in life, but I’ve come to a place of self-acceptance.) It is not what I expected, and I mean that in a rather positive sense. I’m certainly curious to see how things wrap up.

If at all feasible in your situation, don’t use Amazon. That is all.

Harry did not really listen. A warmth was spreading through him that had nothing to do with the sunlight; a tight obstruction in his chest seemed to be dissolving. He knew that Ron and Hermione were more shocked than they were letting on, but the mere fact that they were still there on either side of him, speaking bracing words of comfort, not shrinking from him as though he were contaminated or dangerous, was worth more than he could ever tell them.

First fire of the season

James K. A. Smith, with sage advice on how to visit a museum:

When visiting a museum or gallery, I think studiousness can be a vice. Too much diligence—earnestly following the sequence laid out by the curators, studying each label, expecting every work to be significant—can protect us from actual aesthetic exposure. Sometimes playing the connoisseur, with its haughty dismissal of sentimentalism, insulates us from being moved, changed, perhaps even called by a work of art. And so, perhaps heretically, I’m an advocate of roaming, of unburdened wandering the gallery, as a practice of attentive availability. My pilgrimage through a museum is a contemplative glide. Alert but promiscuous in my looking, I refuse to be held down until I encounter a work that holds my gaze. I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly. […]

The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.