From the first queasy hints of pregnancy to the wrenching parental rite of college graduation, raising a bourgeois kid has become a total thing. There’s so much information available, so many parenting tools, so much insight and advice from kid science and brain science, from BabyCenter and Moms.com. Of course, when it’s your kid, the ability to do things that might be conducive to their future success translates into the felt obligation to do these things. In other words, the presence of all this advice, the swelling of our parental agency thanks to all this helpful knowledge, makes us parents guiltier and more anxious. To learn of possible pathways to success for your children is also to imagine new routes—should you be lazy or remiss in applying this knowledge—to failure. The crude parental logic of this is: do more. Do as much as you can, because among the many things you’re now empowered by knowing is that there are a lot of parents out there who are doing as much as they can.
Currently reading: Little Platoons by Matt Feeney 📚
Finished reading: The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari 📚
I expected a more direct treatment of tradition, whereas Ahmari’s book is really a collection of vignettes from significant figures (e.g., C. S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Howard Thurman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) that are used to answer the title question of each chapter. (And which, I suppose, when taken together offer a cumulative case for “the wisdom of tradition.") Even so, it was a page-turner. Ahmari’s storytelling ability is impressive.
I’m calling for a moratorium on book subtitles of this ilk: “[Discovering/pursuing/seeking/etc.] ________ in an age of ______.”
Writers and publishers have fallen into a rut with this one. It’s so easy, but don’t reach for it. Resist the urge. Say it a different way. You can do it. I believe in you.
View of Dresden by Moonlight (1839) by J. C. Dahl:
Frederiksborg Castle (1814) by J. C. Dahl:
Currently reading: Reading the Gospels Wisely by Jonathan T. Pennington 📚
The Met is running an exhibition entitled Africa & Byzantium, highlighting the often-overlooked artistic and cultural contributions of Africa to the (for most of us, more familiar) Byzantine world.
The National’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, was my wood-cutting soundtrack this afternoon. (My books are slowly migrating home from the office and will require appropriate lodgings.) “Tropic Morning News” had exactly the right energy for that project.
Birthday gift for mom
(Quick aside: Is there another human who could make the face Springsteen is making here and look like a badass rather than an idiot? My assumption is no.)
