I think community is there for the taking, and while zoom is not as communal as in person, it's a big leap from commenting on Substack, which in turn is a big leap from the most pervasive social media sites.
I've zoomed with a few Substack writers in the UK who, absent the technology, I'd never have gotten to know. And we'll probably go to London this year, one of the drivers being the opportunity to meet whoever's around in real life. I realize that it's a privilege to pick up and make that trip, but it's an example of seeking out community.
Thanks, David -- and our friendship and collaboration is a good example of how virtual connections lead to genuine relationships, even in-person meetups, which I hope will come true for us one day. Let's make that Mets game early in the season, so there's still some hope left?
I'd disagree that "community is there for the taking," and I'm probably coming from somewhere you've overlooked.
What's missing is the social and cultural aspects of community. If the local community doesn't recognize you as a member, then there are limited resources to find community. Also, virtual communities cannot replace physical ones, even if they can be a long-term stand-in.
I think David might have been suggesting that virtual communities can lead to physical ones? But I suppose infrequent meetups aren't the same as living in a physical community... I really have been thinking about this in terms of my fresh start in Pennsylvania. I don't want to spend the next 14 years biding my time until I can leave for Montana. The more rewarding way forward is building those relationships that might make me want to stay a decade from now -- and that aren't based on mutual interest, like a virtual connection might be, but more on other commonalities, like shared investment in a municipality or region.
I confess, Josh, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues you raise here, both in the question about Hemingway that called me here and the one about community. One could write so much. Here, some partial, related responses.
First, I have to say I think Hemingway’s formulation, as gripping as it is, grips in the wrong place. We don’t get strong in the broken places. We get strong around them. The broken places heal but remain vulnerable.
I think another way of conceiving the adaptation to the world that is partly under discussion here is how we live with disappointment. The world, our lives, don’t deliver to us exactly what we hoped for, professionally, relationally, romantically, in community, in the prevailing culture and values – how do we live with that? How do we accommodate it? How do we create value in our lives – and we do have to create it ourselves – so that life feels worth living and a source of some fulfillment to us. Short of the tragic, that’s the hard work of living.
The creation part is essential. For every person who lamented the fragmented world of modernity and the loss of what they imagined a passing coherent spiritual and cultural world view, there was someone rushing headlong with enthusiasm into the revolutionary newness of that same modernity. I’m currently rereading Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending in working on an essay I’ll publish next week. He writes about how that sense derives from our need to see and arrange order out of the disorderly flux of the world. But even that perception of disorderly flux, no less than the organizing narrative and theoretical arrangements and explanations we think to extract from it – some will argue – is time bound and standpoint determined. I venture to say that your relation to the idea, and need, for community differs from mine in ways we might stereotypically anticipate based on the different places we were raised in. My relation to a community of place (to condense complex experience and feelings into a simple formula) are shaped as much by Winesburg, Ohio as Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.
Love that idea of getting strong *around* the broken places rather than *at* them. Exactly right. Christopher Hitchens wrestles with the Nietzschean canard, "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger," in his cancer memoir. Sometimes what doesn't kill us still weakens us permanently.
But I don't think James would be writing his second book -- or would have been interested in speaking to me -- if he didn't still feel vulnerable at those broken places.
Also fascinating ideas about how our needs for community differ based on our raising. Quite right!
Coming back to this for a second reading, I notice something I missed the first time, which I find encouraging: the guy on the bench in the Escher sketch does not have the face of the character behind bars. What I like about him is that he is not bothered by what's going on around. He has his own puzzle to ponder, and he doesn't look too stressed about it. I'm not even sure he's broken. Divergent? Yes! :-) And okay with that, maybe. I can't say that's my only thought, but it encourages me.
Fair point, Tara -- I like that reading. Another, darker, one might be that he's indifferent to the guy in the prison cell, but you're right that the befuddlement doesn't have to imply angst.
As usual, Josh, you are looking directly at something that I'm only glimpsing from the corner of my eye. From the interview with James "Is it true that you really got your shit together, or did you just have to construct a new persona that you could live with in this new capitalistic system." This is so much what I'm struggling with right now, so thank you and James for articulating it.
IMO, it’s important not to ‘hold your nose’ to enter the business world. Some artists have taken the plunge and looked for deep meaning in the everyday truck of commerce. For example, the poet David Whyte has consulted with businesses and made engaging with that life a hallmark of his poetry.
I would affirm that something like "reciprocal bonds of obligation" are an element of community, but that phrasing sounds like something a person outside of a community would say.
Let me give an example.
For a decade, most of my family helped a local farmer every hay season. I learned to drive by steering the truck behind the hay bailer. I also threw thousands of pounds of hay. We were offered no pay nor asked for it, because we knew we all were poor. Without being prompted--because doing so is terribly uncouth--they would frequently offer food and soda.
Sometimes, in the deep winter, a whole side of lamb would show up on our doorstep. Literally. It was 20 degrees or less outside, so the interior doorstep is a good freezer. We knew where it came from, but we didn't ask.
This is the kind of "reciprocal bond" that one can find in rural America. If nothing else, poverty was so pervasive that being ostracized from the community caused extreme hardship. But the problem is that urban America typically doesn't have such a strong goad to communal life (even if it is much more friendly to multicultural communities). And this ignores the fact of radical individualism, which leads people to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the self and identity. In urban America--though only part of it--wealth makes it easier to ignore the call of community. It becomes a choice. One can shop around--connotation very much intended--which has numerous socioeconomic effects.
Agree -- James does, too, I think. He addresses the problems of no one really "needing" anyone else in urban society. All you need there (presumably) is cash.
My mother wrote to me after listening to this interview about the other kinds of reciprocity that aren't obligatory in rural communities, and this might be where you're pushing back? Her example was how my father will talk with someone for over an hour, sometimes more, even when the task that brought them together has long been completed. I remember hearing Wynton Marsalis, the great jazz musician, describe something similar as his definition of "soul." It's the feeling you get from someone's house that you don't want to leave, because being there is soul-replenishing.
When I go back to Troy, Montana, and the first girlfriend I ever had -- back in 9th grade -- says "Oh, hi Josh," from behind the counter at the hardware store, it's not because there's a transaction. It's just genuine interest. And -- as I think you're suggesting -- the obligation part of it really isn't the point. There are no obligations. There's just reciprocity without any strings attached. Closer to the mark?
Also, as we well know, that failure to meet reciprocity does slowly alter one's social standing.
For instance, and going back to my example, those same farmers gave my brother and I several thousand dollars. That's a crazy amount of money for people living on subsistence ... but they were quite elderly and had no close relatives.
I think Marcel Mauss' The Gift Economy is an excellent way to think about this.
When one gifts service, especially when little else can be offered, then the receiver acknowledges a debt. But, as a gift, it's not reciprocal. This only works in a culture that acknowledges this kind of relationship.
So, in my personal experiences of American culture, especially in the midwest where I've been the last 20 years, I haven't seen this at all. Relationships tend to starkly divide into the transactional, into the clannish collective, or into the Christian-like agapic giver.
I originally cited Cather thinking that she was an example of someone who didn't break but wasn't killed in the way that Hemingway claimed. But I actually see her as a model of adaptability. Just as you didn't make peace with your competing needs without first owning your grief, Cather endured a period of real mourning for the world that modernity replaced. She became a modernist on her own terms -- and more joyfully than her character, St. Peter. So one doesn't have to be the man with the cube forever, even if that bafflement is a necessary stage.
I think community is there for the taking, and while zoom is not as communal as in person, it's a big leap from commenting on Substack, which in turn is a big leap from the most pervasive social media sites.
I've zoomed with a few Substack writers in the UK who, absent the technology, I'd never have gotten to know. And we'll probably go to London this year, one of the drivers being the opportunity to meet whoever's around in real life. I realize that it's a privilege to pick up and make that trip, but it's an example of seeking out community.
Thanks, David -- and our friendship and collaboration is a good example of how virtual connections lead to genuine relationships, even in-person meetups, which I hope will come true for us one day. Let's make that Mets game early in the season, so there's still some hope left?
As Yogi Berra said "it got late early." That sadly could be the Mets motto,
😂 But also 😪
I'd disagree that "community is there for the taking," and I'm probably coming from somewhere you've overlooked.
What's missing is the social and cultural aspects of community. If the local community doesn't recognize you as a member, then there are limited resources to find community. Also, virtual communities cannot replace physical ones, even if they can be a long-term stand-in.
I think David might have been suggesting that virtual communities can lead to physical ones? But I suppose infrequent meetups aren't the same as living in a physical community... I really have been thinking about this in terms of my fresh start in Pennsylvania. I don't want to spend the next 14 years biding my time until I can leave for Montana. The more rewarding way forward is building those relationships that might make me want to stay a decade from now -- and that aren't based on mutual interest, like a virtual connection might be, but more on other commonalities, like shared investment in a municipality or region.
I confess, Josh, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues you raise here, both in the question about Hemingway that called me here and the one about community. One could write so much. Here, some partial, related responses.
First, I have to say I think Hemingway’s formulation, as gripping as it is, grips in the wrong place. We don’t get strong in the broken places. We get strong around them. The broken places heal but remain vulnerable.
I think another way of conceiving the adaptation to the world that is partly under discussion here is how we live with disappointment. The world, our lives, don’t deliver to us exactly what we hoped for, professionally, relationally, romantically, in community, in the prevailing culture and values – how do we live with that? How do we accommodate it? How do we create value in our lives – and we do have to create it ourselves – so that life feels worth living and a source of some fulfillment to us. Short of the tragic, that’s the hard work of living.
The creation part is essential. For every person who lamented the fragmented world of modernity and the loss of what they imagined a passing coherent spiritual and cultural world view, there was someone rushing headlong with enthusiasm into the revolutionary newness of that same modernity. I’m currently rereading Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending in working on an essay I’ll publish next week. He writes about how that sense derives from our need to see and arrange order out of the disorderly flux of the world. But even that perception of disorderly flux, no less than the organizing narrative and theoretical arrangements and explanations we think to extract from it – some will argue – is time bound and standpoint determined. I venture to say that your relation to the idea, and need, for community differs from mine in ways we might stereotypically anticipate based on the different places we were raised in. My relation to a community of place (to condense complex experience and feelings into a simple formula) are shaped as much by Winesburg, Ohio as Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.
Love that idea of getting strong *around* the broken places rather than *at* them. Exactly right. Christopher Hitchens wrestles with the Nietzschean canard, "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger," in his cancer memoir. Sometimes what doesn't kill us still weakens us permanently.
But I don't think James would be writing his second book -- or would have been interested in speaking to me -- if he didn't still feel vulnerable at those broken places.
Also fascinating ideas about how our needs for community differ based on our raising. Quite right!
Coming back to this for a second reading, I notice something I missed the first time, which I find encouraging: the guy on the bench in the Escher sketch does not have the face of the character behind bars. What I like about him is that he is not bothered by what's going on around. He has his own puzzle to ponder, and he doesn't look too stressed about it. I'm not even sure he's broken. Divergent? Yes! :-) And okay with that, maybe. I can't say that's my only thought, but it encourages me.
Fair point, Tara -- I like that reading. Another, darker, one might be that he's indifferent to the guy in the prison cell, but you're right that the befuddlement doesn't have to imply angst.
As usual, Josh, you are looking directly at something that I'm only glimpsing from the corner of my eye. From the interview with James "Is it true that you really got your shit together, or did you just have to construct a new persona that you could live with in this new capitalistic system." This is so much what I'm struggling with right now, so thank you and James for articulating it.
Glad it resonates, Liz! And thanks for reminding me that I'm not making all this up :)
That was a great question.
IMO, it’s important not to ‘hold your nose’ to enter the business world. Some artists have taken the plunge and looked for deep meaning in the everyday truck of commerce. For example, the poet David Whyte has consulted with businesses and made engaging with that life a hallmark of his poetry.
Thanks, Conor! I'm unfamiliar with David Whyte -- appreciate the suggestion.
Sure, check out e.g. The Heart Aroused https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/871728
I would affirm that something like "reciprocal bonds of obligation" are an element of community, but that phrasing sounds like something a person outside of a community would say.
Let me give an example.
For a decade, most of my family helped a local farmer every hay season. I learned to drive by steering the truck behind the hay bailer. I also threw thousands of pounds of hay. We were offered no pay nor asked for it, because we knew we all were poor. Without being prompted--because doing so is terribly uncouth--they would frequently offer food and soda.
Sometimes, in the deep winter, a whole side of lamb would show up on our doorstep. Literally. It was 20 degrees or less outside, so the interior doorstep is a good freezer. We knew where it came from, but we didn't ask.
This is the kind of "reciprocal bond" that one can find in rural America. If nothing else, poverty was so pervasive that being ostracized from the community caused extreme hardship. But the problem is that urban America typically doesn't have such a strong goad to communal life (even if it is much more friendly to multicultural communities). And this ignores the fact of radical individualism, which leads people to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the self and identity. In urban America--though only part of it--wealth makes it easier to ignore the call of community. It becomes a choice. One can shop around--connotation very much intended--which has numerous socioeconomic effects.
You get the idea.
Agree -- James does, too, I think. He addresses the problems of no one really "needing" anyone else in urban society. All you need there (presumably) is cash.
My mother wrote to me after listening to this interview about the other kinds of reciprocity that aren't obligatory in rural communities, and this might be where you're pushing back? Her example was how my father will talk with someone for over an hour, sometimes more, even when the task that brought them together has long been completed. I remember hearing Wynton Marsalis, the great jazz musician, describe something similar as his definition of "soul." It's the feeling you get from someone's house that you don't want to leave, because being there is soul-replenishing.
When I go back to Troy, Montana, and the first girlfriend I ever had -- back in 9th grade -- says "Oh, hi Josh," from behind the counter at the hardware store, it's not because there's a transaction. It's just genuine interest. And -- as I think you're suggesting -- the obligation part of it really isn't the point. There are no obligations. There's just reciprocity without any strings attached. Closer to the mark?
Yes, Josh.
Also, as we well know, that failure to meet reciprocity does slowly alter one's social standing.
For instance, and going back to my example, those same farmers gave my brother and I several thousand dollars. That's a crazy amount of money for people living on subsistence ... but they were quite elderly and had no close relatives.
I think Marcel Mauss' The Gift Economy is an excellent way to think about this.
When one gifts service, especially when little else can be offered, then the receiver acknowledges a debt. But, as a gift, it's not reciprocal. This only works in a culture that acknowledges this kind of relationship.
So, in my personal experiences of American culture, especially in the midwest where I've been the last 20 years, I haven't seen this at all. Relationships tend to starkly divide into the transactional, into the clannish collective, or into the Christian-like agapic giver.
Great opening there, Josh.
I am honored to be compared to a Necker Cube…modernity requires impossible contortions…
I originally cited Cather thinking that she was an example of someone who didn't break but wasn't killed in the way that Hemingway claimed. But I actually see her as a model of adaptability. Just as you didn't make peace with your competing needs without first owning your grief, Cather endured a period of real mourning for the world that modernity replaced. She became a modernist on her own terms -- and more joyfully than her character, St. Peter. So one doesn't have to be the man with the cube forever, even if that bafflement is a necessary stage.