7 Quick Takes

March 11, 2021 by Amy Welborn

— 1 —

Well, well, well – this is interesting. WordPress has added a “Stories” feature to the site. I just did a super-brief test, and it was easy and posted with no problems. (I deleted it – not worth looking at – just a test) – so look for some of that here.

Of course, Instagram remains, and while I am not a super heavy user of the platform, I will continue to post Stories and occasional posts. But I like this feature being added here. Adds value, as they say.

We’re going on a bit of a jaunt tomorrow, so look for some content at Instagram and then, eventually here – although internet will probably be spotty where we’re going and I imagine I will be most interested in simply surviving the day. But still. You never know.

— 2 —

I actually did some work this week. I finished the Living Faith devotionals that are due after Easter already, and got a good start on a project I was asked to do last week and is also due the week after Easter. My goal is to get it finished early next week. Kid #5 is going off with friends to the beach for spring break, which means: I. Will. Be. Alone. I would like to use that time to really get my head straight on serious, long-form and long-term writing. Pray that I do and don’t waste the time just rage-scrolling.

— 3 —

This week, I read, among other things, the long short story “Old Mrs. Harris” by, of course, Willa Cather. It’s a wonderful, complex, moving depiction of the lives of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, its original title was “Three Women.” But perhaps that wouldn’t accurately express the sense of the story because while there are, indeed three women of one family at the center, other women play important roles, including the family’s servant girl and the neighbor, Mrs. Rosen, through whose eyes we first meet the family and witness much of the action.

From another blogger:

It is based on the lives of Cather, her mother, and her Grandmother Boak, who followed her daughter and her family from leafy, beautiful Virginia to the raw prairie town of Red Cloud.
We first see old Mrs. Harris from the point of view of a neighbor, Mrs. Rosen, a well-educated Jewish-German immigrant. Mrs. Rosen likes quiet old Mrs. Harris, the grandmother of the Templeton brood, but believes Victoria Templeton, her pretty daughter, unfairly leaves the cooking and housework to Mrs. Harris while she gads about.
Throughout the story, Mrs. Rosen underestimates Victoria and her teenage daughter Vickie, who is studying for a scholarship exam for the University of Michigan. Mrs. Rosen thinks Victoria is inconsiderate and that Vickie is flighty and will never study enough. But we readers begin to understand the pressures faced by Mrs. Harris and the Templetons. In Tennessee, it was taken for granted that a mother should help her grown-up daughter with her household, but in Tennessee Mrs. Harris had an elegant house and hired help (or slaves). In Colorado she has only one girl, Mandy, to help. And Mandy is so good that she rubs Mrs. Harris’s feet at the end of a day. She seems closer to Mrs. Harris than Victoria is.

And yet another:

The Templeton family is observed by their neighbor, Mrs. Rosen, who is a cultured German-Jewish immigrant. Mrs. Rosen is the woman next door who keeps a tidy house, waters her lawn, and lowers the blinds so the sun doesn’t fade the furniture and carpets. Mrs. Rosen is fascinated by the transplanted Southern family next door, particularly Mrs. Harris. She comes across as a bit judgmental at times but it is less a personal issue than a revelation for the reader of her own cultural background and the expectations it engenders.
One of the major themes of this story is the contrast between the old world and the new, with Vickie acting as a bridge between the two. It seems that her character will soak up the good that the old world has to offer — art and literature and some food — while also taking the best of her family’s old Southern traditions and combining them with what the new world of the American West has to offer….
….
This is such a refreshing change from the all or nothing dichotomy often found in stories of life in small Midwestern towns. It shows Vickie as a bridge between the two traditions and ways of life. Vickie will also be the first of her family to go to college at a time when higher education was becoming accessible to women.
Mrs. Harris is a woman who had been taken out of the culture she loved — one where the hills were filled with solitary old women who’d gladly help out in a busy household where the young women and mothers could enjoy socializing in the front of the house while the old women kept house in the back.

You can find the story here.

It’s deeply observed (because it was lived), compassionate and complex.

I think it’s important to keep pieces of writing like this in our lives – even at the forefront of our lives – since most of what we encounter in terms of the news and commentary that we read is simplistic, binary and judgmental.

I keep telling you – read history, read literature, talk to people face-to-face, and make things. It just might help you stay sane.

— 4 —

The United States Senate hasn’t decided or made known when it will conduct hearings on the Equality Act, but there’s lots of action in Europe right now, specifically the UK.

This week, Graham Linehan gave a speech to the House of Lords on related matters. It’s well worth reading to get a sense of the situation:

If you believe that JK Rowling is transphobic, a woman who has devoted her work and much of her fortune to the vulnerable, the bullied, he forgotten and the abused, then you are under a spell. If you believe that men can fairly compete against women in their sports–including contact sports– then you are under a spell. If you believe that men will not go to the most extreme lengths to gain access to women and children, then you are under a spell. If you believe that children as young as three years old can agree to a procedure that puts them on a medical pathway for life, that arrests their natural puberty, and that has almost no scientific proof as to its efficacy as a treatment for dysphoria, then you are under a spell.
Social media has created a through the looking glass world which is robbing everyone of their ability to think. My final statement on Twitter, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was simply “Men are not women.” A world where statements like “Men are not women” is hate speech is a world on the brink of chaos. Feminists are just the canary in the coalmine in this upside down world where public discourse depends on the whims of a small group of men in Silicon Valley. Gender identity ideology began in American Universities, is uncritically disseminated by the popular media, but social media companies and their users are the enforcers.

— 5 —

In Scotland today (Thursday), a Hate Crime law was passed (at some level, don’t know if it’s final) in which the most strenuously debated amendment was one to include biological sex as a category. The amendment didn’t pass, the bill – controversial also because of perceived threats to free expression – did pass with “cross-dressers,” but not “women” specified as a protected class.

However, Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Liam Kerr said there was “inherent ambiguity” in the language of the legislation.
He claimed it did not strike the right “balance” between free expression and protection from hate.
Another amendment from MSP Johann Lamont that would have included women as a protected group under the legislation was defeated.
The government has instead set a working group to look at whether misogynistic abuse should be a separate crime.
This group, led by QC Baroness Helena Kennedy, is due to report within a year.

— 6 —

As I’ve mentioned, one of the newsletters I read is The Convivial Society. From the most recent issue:

Rosa’s “guiding thesis” on this score is that “for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression,” an apt phrase that seemed, sadly, immediately useful as a way of characterizing what it feels like to be alive right now. The world becomes a series of points of aggression when, as Rosa puts it, “everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.” If our response to this is a measure of befuddlement—how else would we go about living if not by seeking to know, to master, to conquer, to make useful?—then it would seem that Rosa is probably right to say that this is a bedrock assumption shaping our thinking rather than being a product of it.
And, as he goes on to say, because we encounter the world in this way, then “the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.” We’ll return momentarily to the idea of resonance, a critical concept to which Rosa devoted an earlier book, but for now we should simply note that, in Rosa’s view, a failure to experience resonance “leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”
…

In one of his Sabbath poems, Wendell Berry reminded us that “we live the given life, not the planned.” I can’t think of a more pithy way of putting the matter. By the “given life,” of course, Berry does not mean what is implied by the phrase “that’s a given,” something, that is, which is taken for granted. Rather, Berry means the gifted life, the life that is given to us. We are presented with a choice, then: we can receive the world as a gift, which does not preclude our acting upon it and creatively transforming it, or we can think of it merely as raw material subject to our managing, planning, predicting, and controlling. Rosa helps us to see, quite precisely, why the latter path will be marked by frustration, anxiety, and alienation. So I will give him the last, more hopeful word:

“If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible.”

In brief: INFPs had it right all along…