On Returning Home
Also: In praise of sea shanties, investigating First Folios, weak stereotypes, George Scialabba’s prose, and more.
I am reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods at the moment. It is about his move, with his wife and children, to a small cottage in rural Ireland. “I had a plan,” he writes.
The plan was to settle, to have some land, to root myself and my family. To escape from the city, to escape from the traps. To grow our own food, educate our own kids, draw our own water, plant our own fuel. To be closer to nature and further from the Machine. To be freer, to be more in control. To escape and, at the same time, to belong. To learn things I didn’t know anything about but wanted to, because I felt they’d make me a better, rounded adult person: planting trees, keeping hens, managing woodland, carpentry, wiring, building, all the small skills required to run a few acres of land and to be part of it. On top of that, to bring up our young children at home. And on top of that, to write books: truer books than I had ever written before. To write something great, something real, something so intense that nobody could read it without dimming the lights first.
“My plan,” he continues, “went wrong almost immediately.” I won’t share more since I haven’t finished the book yet. Hopefully you’ll feel prodded to read the book yourself. It’s very much worth the modest 14 bucks.
I mention Kingsnorth because James Matthew Wilson has an essay in the latest issue of First Things about moving back home to Michigan. His situation is different from Kingsnorth’s. Both he and his wife were born and raised in Michigan, and after spending several years outside the state for work, they returned a few years ago to stay. Like Kingsnorth, not everything was easy about the move. Still, for “the first time in many years,” Wilson writes, “I did not feel within me a pining to be where I was not.”
One thing that struck me about Wilson’s essay was his remark that the desire to return home after a time away is both completely natural and irrational:
Giving reasons can be a wonderful exercise in praise, though when I try to offer some, they seem mostly like trivialities. For example, I simply prefer the way Michiganders speak, at once friendly and laconic, as if with a hint of embarrassment at disrupting the silence. The most characteristic Michigan expression is not even a word, but a muffled apology: “Ope.” I relish the way Michiganders explain where they are from and where they are going by using their right hands as maps. I appreciate the way Michigan kids earn money by collecting discarded pop cans after football games and returning them to the store for the deposit.
Other reasons seem very nearly irrational. Like most people, I wince when I see those sprawling state highways lined with gigantic box stores and squat, grotesque blocks of chain restaurants. And yet the sight of a Meijer causes my breast to swell with good feeling. It is the store where you can buy everything and ride a mechanical horse for a penny. (On the night of my senior prom, we made a stop at Meijer to lounge about the patio furniture in our formal wear.) It will perhaps explain nothing to say that what matters most is to be around people who know how to play euchre.
I love the flat open spaces, though I came to appreciate them only after spending a couple years amid the beauty of the Berkshire mountains. I love the woods and the wildness of the place, which increase as one drives north. West Michigan, which is in many ways different and separate from the rest of the state, has its own natural beauties, above all the dunes and shoreline of Lake Michigan. The shore of a Great Lake is something altogether more peaceful and pleasant than the hard elements of Pacific or Atlantic beaches. The woods of Michigan in winter are not sublime like the mountains of the American West; they have rather a vast yet intimate beauty through which one wanders. They are places of bears and cougars, where one ventures on cross-country skies with at least a little caution.
I was born and mostly raised in Washington State. We moved away when I was 15. I don’t have a strong desire to return. I love the South. If I were to move anywhere, it would be to Switzerland, where my wife is from, and where we spent six wonderful—if also busy—years. I know other Americans who have visited Switzerland but could never imagine living there. Why? Who knows. The attachments we have for places—both home and abroad—are truly a mystery.
In other news, Ted Gioia takes us on an enjoyable tour of sea shanties: “Few music trends delight me more than the sea shanty revival. In recent months, I’ve encountered them in surprising places, far away from sea and shore. I’m told that shanties even go viral on TikTok—which shivers my timbers big time.”
Investigating First Folios: “For two decades, Eric Rasmussen has traveled the globe to investigate and authenticate Shakespeare First Folios – the earliest printed compilations of the Bard’s plays – which celebrate their 400th anniversary this month. First Folios can command millions of dollars when one surfaces for sale. Along the way, he has encountered bumbling book thieves, eccentric owners, quirky historical footnotes, and even a copy with a bullet hole through the middle (the slug stopped at Titus Andronicus, proving that it’s ‘an impenetrable play,’ he says).”
I didn’t care for Evelyn McDonnell’s Joan Didion book. Nicholas Clairmont didn’t like it either: “Evelyn McDonnell is . . . a biographer of the great writer Joan Didion who is not very good at reading, and who is pathologically self-interested. What she has written is not even a hagiography, but a sort of vibesography, organised in 14 chapters like a Pinterest mood board . . . Around here, in an ordinary negative book review, one is supposed to find something positive to say to demonstrate intellectual honesty and to just not be off-puttingly nasty. Unfortunately, intellectual honesty demands what it demands: there is absolutely nothing good about The World According to Joan Didion.” Do read the whole thing.
In praise of little trucks: “Vanishingly few vehicles like this are marketed in or made for the U.S. market—the majority that are in the U.S. have been imported by individuals or small firms. Some states, and some federal regulations, make this very tricky.”
Matthew Lee Anderson reviews Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis: “A focus on the evangelical imagination and the stories, images, and even architecture that shape it captures evangelicalism’s ethos in ways that historians and sociologists sometimes fail to. Her discussion of the conversionism that has long been noted as central to evangelicalism goes beyond such standard treatments by looking at the way conversions were valorized and critiqued in Victorian literature. As Thomas Hardy understood, superficial conversions into evangelicalism could quickly lead to cynical departures from it—a lesson that is, perhaps, pertinent not only to evangelicalism but also to other traditions . . . While Prior’s analysis of the Victorian roots of evangelicalism’s ethos is both provocative and instructive, her assessment of the flowering of those roots in contemporary evangelicalism is often unconvincing.”
Why does the Erechtheion look the way it does? “While the Parthenon embodies the ideals of perfection the Greeks sought from architecture during the Classical period, the Erechtheion is more unusual. Split across two elevations, the Erechtheion is essentially two temples squished into one. Its eastern portico, sitting on higher ground, marks the entrance to the portion of the temple dedicated to Athena Polias. A revered olive-wood statue of the goddess was housed in its cella (the inner room of the temple). The northern portico is about ten feet lower than the eastern one and serves as the entrance to the western section of the temple. There one finds shrines to Poseidon-Erechtheus, Hephaistos, and Boutes. This unexpected layout challenges the Greek canon of the perfectly arranged, symmetrical temple.”
Nearly 2,000 poets boycott Poetry because it used a little common sense: “Over 2000 poets and writers . . . have pledged to boycott the Poetry Foundation (as well as it’s poetry journal, Poetry), citing ‘a recent instance of prejudiced silencing’ in which Joshua Gutterman Tranen’s review of Sam Sax’s collection PIG, which engages with anti-Zionist politics, was shelved indefinitely because the magazine didn’t want to be seen as ‘picking a side’ in the ongoing genocide unfolding in Gaza.” Most of the signatories are poets in name only.
Former Gannett Media president and USA Today publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth is the new president of the Knight Foundation: “In her new role, Wadsworth, 50, will oversee a $2.6 billion foundation that gives millions of dollars in grants each year to arts, journalism and community organizations. The Knight Foundation has invested more than $632 million in journalism since 2005 and recently made headlines for its $150 million contribution to the Press Forward initiative, which aims to inject half a billion dollars into local news over the next five years.”
A new study shows that stereotypes have very little influence on how we judge the actions of actual people: “The new findings are based on a single series of lab studies and of course they don’t mean that people don’t ever use stereotypes when making judgments about others – stereotypes are still powerful influences in many contexts. Still, ‘it might be that they’re not used as we expected in instances where the behaviours that we observed from other people are quite unambiguous.’”
In praise of George Scialabba: “Scialabba toiled for thirty-five years at a desk job in the windowless basement of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, writing book reviews in his spare time; he has much to say about the economic conditions that enable or disable the life of the mind. (A sufferer from chronic depression, Scialabba credits his union for enabling him to take several paid medical leaves. ‘This is one of many ways in which strong unions are a matter of life and death,’ he writes in How To Be Depressed.) And yet, for Scialabba, the essence of intellectual and creative exchange remains a gift economy: ‘When we’re young, our souls are stirred, our spirits kindled, by a book or some other experience,’ he once said, ‘and in time, when we’ve matured, we look to pay the debt, to pass the gift along.’ Gratitude, deeply felt, enables generosity. And never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such undiminishing patience for his reader, such evident and unpretentious pleasure in the pedagogical function of good prose.”
Key line in James Matthew Wilson's piece: "My family was among those given the chance to move wherever we wished because I could, on a permanent basis, work from home."
If I'm not mistaken, the St Thomas MFA program that he co-heads -- which is one of the greatest things to happen to this country in years -- is almost entirely online, with only brief periods of in-person residency each year. Hence, he can live wherever he wants to. There is definitely food for thought here. Traditionally-minded Catholics (including Wilson) are obviously the last people to celebrate the "permanently online" way of life, and there are certainly abundant reasons to rue the ubiquity of the internet. However, is this not an example of the oft-wished-for, seldom-seen case where high technology enables something genuinely good? Maybe "permanent work-from-home" really can do something to get people out of overpriced, dysfunctional major metro areas, and help revitalize small towns.
Lastly, arguing for the merits of one's hometown or homeland is like arguing for the merits of one's mother or father. No matter how good or bad they are, they're still yours and that's the important thing.