cleithart

New Writing

I wrote an opinion piece for 1819 News as part of their Center for Cultural Renewal project—something to keep an eye on.

Here’s my article: “Do you want a revolution? Sing.”

What I Read in 2024

No commentary this year, though I did send a newsletter with a few highlights.

*Asterisks mark books I read on Kindle.

For School (6)

The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
Gilgamesh the Hero, Geraldine McCaughrean
The God Beneath the Sea, Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen
The Oresteia, Aeschylus (trans. Ted Hughes)

Children’s (11)

Penrod, Booth Tarkington
*Children of the New Forest, Francis Marryat
*The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, Charlotte M. Yonge
*Moonfleet, John Meade Falkner
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
*Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, Julie Andrews Edwards
The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
Teddy’s Button, Amy Le Feuvre
*The Midnight Folk, John Masefield

Fiction (8)

The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
*The High Window, Raymond Chandler
*Penny Plain, O. Douglas
*The Mystery, Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
*We Did Not Reason Why, H. W. Taylor
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Non-fiction (14)

*Hills and the Sea, Hilaire Belloc
Poetics, Aristotle (trans. Kenneth A. Telford)
Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubnar
A Nature Diary, Richard Adams
The Theopolitan Vision, Peter J. Leithart
Good to Great, Jim Collins
The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt
The One Thing, Gary Keller
*Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Joe Rigney
Schaeffer on the Christian Life, William Edgar
Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger
*Men and Marriage, George Gilder
Hospitality, Mark Brians and Drew Knowles
The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton

Read-Alouds (2)

Brave Ollie Possum, Ethan Nicolle
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Total: 41

Books and Seasons

Robin Sloan is reading The Green Knight on New Years Day. I plan to read it over the Twelve Days of Christmas. That puts me in mind of other books I try to read at specific times of the year.

Advent: Auden’s For the Time Being
Christmas: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever; The Green Knight; A Christmas Carol
Lent: Piers Plowman; Hamlet

I wonder what other book/season pairings there are in my life. Maybe I’ll add Dandelion Wine to read over the summer.

Support the Finishing

Sometime I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. […] Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING.
Robin Sloan

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was surely the impetus behind Good Work, a reaction against the endless “now” of social media. A print magazine must be finished before it be mailed to subscribers. When it’s finished, it’s done. It exits. The work has ended for now. You can rest.

In the new year, I plan to start a crowdfunding campaign for a limited run of Good Work. I think that’s the way forward: plan the issues, raise money, write, print, send. I’m sure I’ll cite Robin’s newsletter here in support of the project.

An Ambassador from the Transcendent World

Teacher: The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. [This book] is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.

Student: Why?

Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.

Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.

Teacher: That’s because it’s a bit alarming to hear it stated in such terms, even though it’s the most accurate way of describing it.

Student: What is it? What is this other world? Does it have a name?

Teacher: Yes. Your world, the modern world, is the immanent world. The other world is the transcendent world.

Student: And what’s your relationship to the transcendent world?

Teacher: As a classical teacher, I’m an ambassador of the transcendent world. My job is to present the transcendent world to you in such a way that you’ll want to take up residence there, be naturalized, and become a subject.

~Gibbs

Obviously a conscious choice to use “subject” instead of “citizen” in the final sentence.

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Michael Oakeshott

Better Drowned than Duffers

I’m only a few chapters into Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, but already I’m convinced that the children have some of the best parents in literature.

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