Updated: Feb 24, 2023
I’m not the Captain of my slip
Nor Marshall of my crew
The Admiral of the fleet of ships
Directs ours as he chose.
Ours is a small and wondering bark,
A coracle towards the Dawn.
Our Admiral turns the prow and marks
The path that we are on.
A poem for a new year -
Written when asked for a statement on the affirmation of God's control and purpose in my life and word.
Updated: Jan 12, 2023
There is a thing readers do, like mavens of fashion. We walk into our libraries of a fall evening and sigh - all these books and nothing to read.
Or so I did the other night, and not for the first time either. This has picked up speed in the last few months while dazzling Scribd titles glimmer at me. At the same time I have encouraged my children to dig into their own shelves.
A reader collects books like a magpie gathers shiny trinkets from unlikely places.
I pulled a dictionary in disrepair and a pristine copy of Good Night Moon from the depths of the book bin at the recycling center the other day.
I borrow from three or four libraries, enjoy Audible and Kindle, and achieved Literati status on ThriftBooks eons ago. Readers read. It’s what we do, but I’ve overlooked my treasure trove for quite awhile. It is time to look to my own shelves.
A wise man once said that having more books than one could possibly puts a reader in the proper stance before the realm of ideas. I agree. But I also want to try conquering my shelves. Maybe if I succeed, my husband will let my buy more books to address my hubris.
A Short History of My Shelves
I have my first board books from when I was a little girl. I intend to get rid of each falling apart copy of Good Night Moon when I pick up replacements, but instead we have four or five or six copies. (At three children, I recommend getting the lap edition. ) This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout our library.
I also have my first readers, and second readers, my mother’s classroom copies, and my grandmother’s copies.
I brought a couple thousand books into my marriage. One of the first things he ever asked me was, “Do you read?”
Then trouble struck. I read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up while pregnant and purging. I got rid of my Dickens. It was a dark time
To this day I’ll be looking for a book only to realize it didn’t make it through my feelings-driven library reduction of 2015.
I’ve repented. My library recovered.
My husband began a reading focused liberal arts degree. Our bookshelves groan.
What is there?
I have everything from Agatha Christie’s Train Mystery Collection to Augustine Through the Ages (a reference guide bigger than at least one of my children). There are shelves of poetry and form, writing mechanics and essays. I have a complete set of Adler’s Great Books published through Britanica as well as How to Read A Book. There is a small library of King Arthur variations from the Mabinogion to the Sword in the Stone.
We will read dictionaries and philologies.
We will read detective novels and house keeping guides.
Not to mention a four foot rainbow of cookbooks.
In case things seem too intense, I have Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and TinTin.
I should have invested in Woodehouse’s
What will I read outside of my personal library?
I have two book clubs and the Canon App.
I’m including my Audible and Kindle libraries on this adventure, so there are a lot of audiobook options already, but the Canon app is edifying in unexpected ways, so it stays.
And on Sunday I can read whatever I want. It is a day of rest from all work always. So, if I get stuck in my 4 volume cyclopedia of botany or in the history of German infantry units during WW2, I can snag a library copy of Code of the Woosters.
Rereading
Yes, I’ve read books from my library. I’m a pretty steady rereader, so I’m hoping that by starting at book 1, the reread factor will help the whole project along
Further Up;
Further In
"The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.
I will show you the things that are now being done,
And some of the things that were long ago done,
That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen. "
T.S. ELLIOT "Chorus from the Rock"
Virtue is declining as steeply as the worldwide workforce. If you know about one, then think about the other.
The moral tether of society labored for by men like William Wilberforce is snapped and the dogs are gnawing at the knees of little old ladies. There is hardly a better man to reference in our current age, one that fought ferociously for the freedom of all men. He spent his life on it - spent in the way they tell you not to spend, pouring all his eggs in one basket. But his solution was not merely legal or state driven. He looked to work in the hearts of men where true freedom was needed. He reformed manners.
If this were a women’s lit novel, this is where the chapter break time change would be because here we sit. Pandemic and social reform have withered our workforce as some retire early, others leave for home work, and the young lose sight of their place in society, refusing to enter entirely. And all of us - young and old a like - are not having kids to the loss of two billion fewer people in the next generation.
Conservatives are debating the merits of Boniface and Benedict asking whether we should chop down the proverbial oak trees or retire to establish our civilizations anew like the book people of Fahrenheit 451. Where do we put our work?
The Benedict model of cathedrals and monasteries is attractive and, to add to it, is needed to grow children and preserve . However, we are not limited like our forefathers were, preserving a handful of precious works, meticulously copying texts. We have our own limits, but at its core every household can do that kind of conservation.
The takeaway:
Things are going to die because of neglect.
We get to chose what those are.
The home preindustrially was the nexus of life and work, community and culture. It had heft and force in the shape and shift of the world.
We must look again towards the household as a place of work, a place that can contain worlds. In bringing work home, we centralize ourselves around the family, and the family will be critical going forward. We need kids and the kids will need both range and versatility.
Beyond my half cocked ideas of home hospitals*, I do think we should take a hard look at our homes and how we can create antifragile units that serve our community.
If we bring work home, we cull the labor needed to preserve and care for external spaces. This will mean work itself changes to fit the home's rhythms, but as the Lockdown Year showed - people adapt. Schools should move home or be interconnected with a church, intertwining children with the real world instead of maintaining a careful buffer closeted with peers. These children need skills, the kind you grow up with that give a respect for the last generation of craftsman and an understanding of a solid day's work. They need to function in society and not fear it.
Whatever the particular interests, hobbies, and adventures of the family involved, as women we need to get our heads around the immense task of managing it. Looking at a trajectory with wisdom isn't the same as saying panic because this is definitely going to fall out this way, but thinking about how we can be more effective in our work is useful.
So, where do we put our work? As women, where it always should have been - in our home. And in influencing our home, we influence the world.
Bibliography:
The Benedict Option
The Rule of Saint Benedict
The Household and the War for the Cosmos by CR Wiley
Range by David Epstein
Grit by Angela
Anti-fragile by Nasim Taleeb
Demographic Drought by EMSI
Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas
Chorus from the Rock by TS Elliot
*This was the original thought of surgeons before the discovery of antiseptic, so it is not too crazy. For details read the Butchering Art