Althouse: "[S]he had come to respect the wisdom of the Benedictine vow of stability—which is, as Thomas Merton put it, a renunciation of the vain hope of finding the perfect monastery..."

November 12, 2017

"[S]he had come to respect the wisdom of the Benedictine vow of stability—which is, as Thomas Merton put it, a renunciation of the vain hope of finding the perfect monastery..."

"... and an embracing of the ordinariness of what you already have.... [She] convinced them that moving to a new place was not the way to build a new self, because you brought your problems with you. If you didn’t distract yourself with moving around, but stayed where you were and put down roots, you gave yourself a chance to grow."

From "Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On/As America’s rural communities stagnate, what can we learn from one that hasn’t?" by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.

29 comments:

Oso Negro said...: The New Yorker is the authoritative source for life in small-town America.; 11/12/17, 9:56 AM
traditionalguy said...: Amen. Roots are our traditions filled with wisdom remembered.; 11/12/17, 10:01 AM
Sebastian said...: Rural communities are "stagnating" most anywhere.; 11/12/17, 10:06 AM
Big Mike said...: I am so fucking tired of people from LA or New York or or some other large, coastal deep blue city trying to plat Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall with small town rural American.; 11/12/17, 10:10 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "Rural communities are "stagnating" most anywhere."

The article is about a small town that is not stagnating, that's vital and very positive in many ways.; 11/12/17, 10:14 AM
MayBee said...: Thinking of moving, Althouse?; 11/12/17, 10:15 AM
Jupiter said...: The article is a protracted ode to immigration.; 11/12/17, 10:40 AM
Bill said...: I enjoyed the article, which I feared might be condescending, but wasn't. My favorite passage from it:

She believed that because God was a trinity, to be created in the image of God was to be created for relationships; so to make relationships the purpose of your life was to fulfill your human mission.; 11/12/17, 10:47 AM
Big Mike said...: The article is about a small town that is not stagnating, that's vital and very positive in many ways.

Even so, I got a distinct whiff of “Gorillas in the Mist” from the article. And the little remark about dividing the classes alphabetically by A through U versus V through Z is simply wrong. I went to school with a number of kids of Dutch descent, and there were numerous “de Young (the young),” “Deyoung,” “de Jong (the young, but original spelling), “den Beste” (the best one), “Olthoff” (old house, like Althouse except Dutch), in addition to all the “Vander” last names.; 11/12/17, 11:45 AM
JackWayne said...: The New Yorker - where boring thumbsuckers* go to die.

* A serious piece of journalism which concentrates on the background and interpretation of events rather than on the news or action.; 11/12/17, 11:50 AM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: If we found someone in this small town that's in favor of illegal immigration, then surely most people in all small towns are in favor of illegal immigration!
It's not an exaggeration. Leftists truly do reason this way.; 11/12/17, 12:08 PM
buwaya said...: They would despise actual old-school Benedictines.
I can imagine what old Sister Gracia would say about them too.; 11/12/17, 12:20 PM
LYNNDH said...: "because you brought your problems with you" - that is what has happened here in CO. Too many CA people bring their political/fiscal crap with them. They are foisting their problems on me and mine.; 11/12/17, 12:24 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: There are some things about the small town I grew up in that I miss. I didn't leave the area, but it's not small anymore. On the whole, however, I think I like the variety of people and greater amenities that a larger population often brings. Hm. Good things in either case.; 11/12/17, 12:26 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: In a small town, if there's a parade, a town festival, a fair, or some other town event, pretty much everyone goes and people recognize the faces they see. As the town gets bigger, events get more corporate, impersonal, crowded, and full of strangers.; 11/12/17, 12:30 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: There's a conundrum for a person who likes all kinds of people and city amenities but hates crowds (mobs.); 11/12/17, 12:31 PM
Simon Kenton said...: LYNNDH:
""because you brought your problems with you" - that is what has happened here in CO. Too many CA people bring their political/fiscal crap with them. They are foisting their problems on me and mine. "

Boulder's Daily Camera this morning breathlessly announced that New Era ferried enough CU students to the polls at the last moment to keep the municipalize-the-utility fiasco going. This cancelled the votes of neighborhoods of old people who were against the municipal utility effort, which has blown more than 10 million for no progress - except moral! Boulder is still a moral leader and advance examplar for the rest of you inferiors - over the course of about 6 years. Most of the students interviewed carried vacuity to a point where you'd be lucky to find a molecule of brain in a cubic foot of inter-stellar emptiness, but I could imagine the more cynical students (and their New Era enablers) chortling, "Great. We'll sock the old fuckers with $200 million in debt when the final vote comes, then graduate with the consciousness that we've forced the coots to pay to save Gaia, while we duck out." Would it hurt to restore property-ownership qualifications for votes on fiscal issues? The idea attracts us senescents.; 11/12/17, 1:19 PM
Michael K said...: I am not inclined to read anything the New Yorker writes. I do read "City Journal" but the political focus is 180 degrees from the other.

When we return to Tucson (Not a "small town" but the right size) we both heave a sigh or relief. Los Angeles or Chicago are our two usual destinations and both are awful.

My wife laughs at how stressful Los Angeles is and how relieved she is to get home.

We went to the opera last night and the orchestra played the national anthem before the overture and everybody stood. Opera goers tend to lean left, especially in a university town. Not here.; 11/12/17, 1:26 PM
Michael K said...: "Would it hurt to restore property-ownership qualifications for votes on fiscal issues? The idea attracts us senescents."

Tucson turned down all bond issues last week.; 11/12/17, 1:27 PM
Earnest Prole said...: moving to a new place was not the way to build a new self, because you brought your problems with you

Shorter version: Wherever you go, there you are.; 11/12/17, 2:15 PM
FullMoon said...: LYNNDH said...

"because you brought your problems with you" - that is what has happened here in CO. Too many CA people bring their political/fiscal crap with them. They are foisting their problems on me and mine.
11/12/17, 12:24 PM

Is that right? Every Californian I know who left the state did so because they were unhappy with politics here. If I leave I will not bring any political/fiscal crap with me.
Why would a liberal Californian ever want to leave? Aside from the politics, California is the best state in the nation.; 11/12/17, 2:29 PM
Richard Dillman said...: I think the following thoughts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self Reliance" is pertinent to this discussion:

EMERSON ON TRAVEL

“It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. ” – Emerson, Self-Reliance; 11/12/17, 2:38 PM
Michael K said...: "Every Californian I know who left the state did so because they were unhappy with politics here"

Agreed and I know a number of them. We left. My son and his wife are thinking about where they will go when they (he mostly) retire. She can run her business from anywhere with an airport, He is a fireman.

Their best friends just left last spring forAtlanta.

The lefties all sing "I Love LA" in harmony.

Unless they don't own a house.; 11/12/17, 2:56 PM
Ann Althouse said...: @Richard Dillman: Thanks for quoting Emerson. It was very weird for me to encounter that because before I got there, I had been moved — by Freeman's "As the town gets bigger, events get more corporate, impersonal, crowded, and full of strangers" — to go searching for the word "stranger" in my ebook collection of Emerson and Thoreau. There was some quote I vaguely remembered.; 11/12/17, 2:59 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also."

(The next paragraph in Emerson); 11/12/17, 3:01 PM
Richard Dillman said...: Here is a passage from Thoreau that is also pertinent to this discussion. It is from his impassioned essay "Slavery in Massachusetts" that addresses events related to enforcement of the fugitive slave law. Context is important here.

25] It is evident that there are, in this Commonwealth, at least, two parties, becoming more and more distinct --the party of the city, and the party of the country. I know that the country is mean enough, but I am glad to believe that there is a slight difference in her favor. But as yet, she has few, if any organs, through which to express herself. The editorials which she reads, like the news, come from the sea-board. Let us, the inhabitants of the country, cultivate self-respect. Let us not send to the city for aught more essential than our broadcloths and groceries, or, if we read the opinions of the city, let us entertain opinions of our own.

[26] Among measures to be adopted, I would suggest to make as earnest and vigorous an assault on the Press as has already been made, and with effect, on the Church. The Church has much improved within a few years; but the Press is almost, without exception, corrupt. I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the Church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper. At any meeting of politicians,--like that at Concord the other evening, for instance,--how impertinent it would be to quote from the Bible! how pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution! The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Bible which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispensing. It is, in short, the only book which America has printed, and which America reads. So wide is its influence. The editor is a preacher whom you voluntarily support. Your tax is commonly one cent daily, and it costs nothing for pew hire. But how many of these preachers preach the truth? I repeat the testimony of many an intelligent foreigner as well as my own convictions, when I say, that probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.; 11/12/17, 5:28 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: Even Lefties tire of crime, taxes, and exorbitant rents. We've had a number of Brothers move to our smallish town recently where, previously, the only ones were a few doctors. But, as has been noted so often, the Lefties also bring their pathologies with them. So, even more crime and taxes.; 11/12/17, 6:09 PM
Richard Dillman said...: @annalthouse: Thanks for the acknowledgement.; 11/12/17, 8:21 PM
Bob said...: It's ironic that Merton is mentioned. Merton wrote longingly about the Carthusians and Camaldolese hermits in his book The Silent Life, and submitted a formal request to his abbot to be allowed to leave Gethsemane and become a Carthusian, which the abbot refused. Merton was later allowed to create his own hermitage at Gethsemane, which was apparently something of a compromise on the Abbot's part.; 11/13/17, 1:52 AM