how to build a library
read a book, watch a cat, call a kicker?
The habits and habitat of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can't even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.
A person would be crazy if she weren't anxious.
— Catherine Raven, Fox and I
I am currently watching the small predator I live with stalk birds in the front yard.
I’m glad she is no longer killing butterflies, at least. Her body count is four: the yellow wings spewed in shreds over the back deck. She has killed nearly every cicada that has emerged from its underground slumber. She was chasing one through the daylilies this morning. I feel bad for them, sleeping underground for 17 years, only to face destruction in the paws of a small feline hours after bursting into life.
Yesterday, she caught a small mouse hiding under the ferns in the front garden bed and brought it up to the front porch in her jaws. Since she was full of 9 Lives chicken-in-gravy, she did not kill or eat the poor mouse, but was going to play with it until it died a slow, bone-breaking death. I am not immune to the desperate squeaks of a mammal in distress, so after praising Rainy the cat loudly for her hunting excellence, I scooped the mouse up in the bowl my breakfast sandwich had been in and set her off into the grass far away on the edge of the woods.
But, right now, Rainy the cat is stalking her favorite cardinal.
James is right, the cardinals in North Carolina are brighter than the ones in Chicago. When I see a little saturated scarlet body flicker through the trees that have exploded green, I never fail to do a double take. It doesn’t seem possible that something that red is found in nature. It’s a flagrant, unabashed color: it seems so intentional, so painterly. Like a pigment that began as an idea.
This cardinal has been coming out to the driveway in the mornings and playing a game of cat-and-mouse (cat-and-cardinal?) with Rainy the cat. He seems to be teasing her, getting dangerously close, letting her stalk, take a few tense, silent steps, every muscle in her body sprung to spring, and then—just as she is about to pounce—he flies up and away.
One morning, she followed him up into the tree as he was hopping up, branch by branch, out of her reach. She sat in the meeting point of two branches for a few frozen minutes, whimpering, until she figured out how to get down. Yesterday, when I was on the phone with a friend, pacing up and down the driveway, I looked around for my little grey shadow, and she was up in a tree. She’s a clever girl.
So far, all the birds have managed to elude the cat. After birds, her favorite prey to hunt are lizards. The lizards sun themselves on the roof and then drop into the dead leaves on the deck. The cat hears the thunk of salamander body hitting dead leaves, and darts over like a little grey-tuxedo-ed lightning. The lizards, most of which have limped away with their hearts still beating, are her favorites. She has brought four of them into the house, and I got all of them except one outside of the house. I choose to believe the missing lizard is in the basement, far away from my bed.
She followed a small brown snake through the dead leaves by the edge of the driveway, sniffing it until it hissed at her, when she beat a hasty retreat.
I recently observed how different it is to write and work in a house in the woods than in Chicago. My friend pointed out that there is more to observe in a city, more opportunity for inspiration. This is true, and, in New York, I often thought of myself of Annie Dillard of the concrete. But the woods is also ripe with interactions, this small city of flora and fauna. I live in the metropolis of the animal kingdom.
A bold squirrel has scrambled directly above Rainy the cat on the crest of the roof. She is watching him longingly.
Our lives in Chicago were pretty extreme in being fully inundated in hospitality and community 24-7, which is life-giving and soul-restoring, but can also deplete one’s mental and emotional reserves, which are needed to think and read and write.
So six months living alone in a house in the woods with a cat has taught me that I work very differently when I enter into a life that is contemplative in its structure. When one is left alone, a different sort of time appears, and you can think, write, and produce very differently. But I would find that isolation crushing without a community. Community has been essential for me to find contemplation, even if community has not always been physically present with me.
Over the past six months, I have visited ten Catholic Worker (and adjacent) communities. Visiting these communities has reminded me that I have also been living in a house of hospitality at the Rancho. My grandmother and grandfather made a house for their children and grandchildren, this house has been a continued gift of hospitality to one little writer, some cardinals, a cat, and the fig tree. To visit others in the Mystical Body of Christ is to remind ourselves that we are also a part of it, living our lives in the same mystery. We live in the gifts we have received.
Most recently, I visited John Paul II Catholic Worker Farm in Kansas City, where I helped herd a few ruminants, weeded onion beds, and moved bookshelves around, which, after sitting at a computer screen and writing for weeks on end, is pretty therapeutic.
The fact is, however, this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money and money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstance and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride…His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons…He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should've found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties of course he consults certified experts who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties. It is rarely considered that this average citizen is anxious because he ought to be.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
I was visiting the JPII farm on my way back from my brother’s commencement at Benedictine College in Atchinson, Kansas. My little brother would be the first to tell you Atchinson is not a news-making town. At least, not since the Atchinson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. So I was unaware when I sat down with my sister in the overflow seating room that we had back-row seats to the week’s news cycle!
My sister (an NFL aficionado) was, at first, excited that Harrison Butker was speaking. Her excitement quickly turned into live updates in the sisters’ group text for the benefit of our absent siblings.
I don’t know what anyone expects to happen when we invite someone who lives by his foot up to speak at a university, which is (purportedly) an institution dedicated to making a living by the life of the mind, but the speech sounded much like what you would expect when you invite someone to talk who lives by his foot. He definitely put his foot in his mouth. But his illiterate (I mean that literally, the only source material quoted was a common aphorism that makes an appearance in the chorus of a Taylor Swift song and an online review of the movie Silence, the context of which did not leave much assurance that he had seen the film or read the novel by Shusaku Endo upon which it was based, and an unidentified Josemaría Escrivá quote) rant achieved what I can only assume its purpose was: to generate lots of outraged headlines in the mainstream media. Because we all know that outraged headlines in liberal rags translate into fat checks from culture-war-minded right-wing Catholic donors. All wars (including culture wars) are pretty lucrative ventures for the cash-grab-inclined.
(My brother-in-law noted that his commencement speaker had given them an opportunity to write a letter of gratitude to someone who made their college education possible. How sweet and innocent is that? Simpler times, before contemplation and gratitude were sacrificed on the altar of a media moment for donors.)
As the football player gave his speech that did not seem grounded in any serious thought, literature, or tradition, Christian, Catholic or otherwise, but whose only lineage appeared to be the red-pilled corners of Twitter-now-X, I was reminded of a constant refrain of professors guiding my Program of Liberal Studies seminars at Notre Dame: where is that in the text??? Ground it in the text.
It seemed pretty insulting to the young people who just learned to go through the trouble of reading books, writing essays, citing sources, making arguments, to treat them to a commencement speech devoid of critical thought, designed to be turned into outrage-generating clickbait. It also seemed a bit short-sighted, cutting the university’s own raison d’être out from underneath it. What’s the point of a university if I can make $20 million by kicking a ball and then running my mouth?
I believe every human person is made in the Image and Likeness of God, and so therefore has the capacity and capability for intelligence, and I believe Mr. Butker does as well, but he—much to my and his and everyone in that room’s detriment—did not display that! I am not calling anyone stupid, but I am calling Mr. Butker’s speech stupid. I know that it’s stupid, first and foremost, through my own experience. I can feel when I am losing brain cells (a feeling I first identified when scrolling Twitter during the Trump presidency), and that’s how I felt listening to his speech.
We all have ideas, insights, and the valuable wisdom of our own lived experience, which we turn into wisdom through reading and thinking. That’s called formation and we call that formation an education. Rather than contextualizing any of his lived experience in the wisdom of literature, the tradition of thought our ancestors have taken the trouble to pass down to us through 5,000 years of oral history and the written word, this speaker simply reached for the dog whistles of those who are distressed with change, don’t know why, and so want to resurrect the past for reasons they do not fully understand. We have to pity those poor conservatives, wrote Peter Maurin, in April 1936, who don’t know what to conserve.
I hate to engage with any of the actual statements in the speech, because, again, I think they matter about as much as a tweet, and I deleted my twitter two years ago, because it was wasting my time and vaporizing my brain cells. We have better things to do with our one wild and precious life, ladies and gents!
But I will respond to his comments about the Traditional Latin Mass, which he said was “essential.” And that is stupid. First of all, what Latin Mass is he referring to? One codified in the sixteenth century at the Council of Trent? Mass forms in Latin that pre-dated that? The current liturgy of 1969, but said in Latin? Define your terms, sir! Why is saying Mass in Latin in a particular manner codified 1,500 years after the death of Christ made such an idol of? What on earth do people think the Christians did for the first thousand years of Christian Eucharist? Did Christian liturgy not begin until 1545 AD? My lord. You can love the Latin Mass, no shame to you, but you might want to interrogate your certainty that you cannot worship God correctly in any other way. That seems awfully like closing yourself up in a “dogmatic box,” as Pope Francis would say. Chill. Breathe. Relax. You are loved. Read John Henry Newman.
If he recognized his love of the Latin Mass as what it is, an amoral preference based on his personality, politics, and particular taste, then he could have said, “There is nothing more important to me than the Latin Mass,” which would at least invite some conversation based on his reasons for thinking and feeling that way, rather than trying to convince other people of some gnostic “true Catholicism” he has found within the larger world. He found “order” through it, he said. Say more, sir! Order for what? Ordered toward what? What kind of order? Ordered by whom? How? Now that’s an interesting line of thinking. We could finally get into the realm of reasoning, something that was not on display last Saturday. Reasoning makes us ask questions about our past, our present, and what our telos—our common goal or destiny—for the future is. What in our centuries-long traditions is important to hold on to, to reinterpret in a new way? What in the past is a dead letter, and what lives? The only way to discern this is to think and read. As Catholics, we believe in doing our thinking and reading together, an idea that gave rise to the universities of Europe which are clearly, in their current form, reaching their expiration date.
If Benedictine College was looking for an agitator, they should have selected Peter Maurin. (The fact that Maurin died in 1949 would seem to pose an immediate problem, but what with AI holograms or Google Gemini or some such, I feel confident even a freshman in their dorm room could cobble something together.) Peter Maurin’s easy essays are pithy (a more antiquated and genteel version of clickbait) and they are agitating! They call Christians to a better world. But they call Christians to that with a technique that is not based on a blind, reactionary conservatism, sexism, or invoking the coercive, dead power of patriarchy, but by reading, studying, and by basing the reconstruction of the social order on the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is not just the Beatitudes—“Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are the meek,”—but it contains a pretty thorough program for Christian living: most famously, the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12), and, perhaps less famous, the sad news we cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24).
Finally, if there’s one thing we can agree with the football player on, it’s that being a homemaker, a father and a mother, is much more important than being a football player. So one might wonder: what does the football player think about living in an economy that values his work with $20 million over five years and his wife’s “essential,” “more important” work with nothing? Does he think it unjust? If homemakers are so essential (and I think they are) why are they not invited to give commencement speeches so that we might learn from them? If the labor of homemaking is so essential, more grounded in reality, and more rewarding than the financial analyst, then why is it lauded and yet given no power? We praise women and yet give them no authority: doesn’t that praise then ring hollow in your ears?
Perhaps we might want to think about how our economy could reflect the vital importance of nurturing, growing, and caring for other humans, in order to make it feasible for men and women to choose this ultimate good of caring for others rather than resorting to kicking balls around on televised fake grass or stealing bread from the mouths of the poor to make a living.
You know, I’m not some sort of elite that thinks that education can only happen in a $80,000-a-year institution, which may still technically be an institution of higher learning whose heritage is the monastic universities of Europe, but, these days resembles a hedge fund more than a university. These days, universities seem more concerned about their triple-A Moodys rating, capital campaigns, and issuing bonds for construction projects than they are with forming educated persons. But this speech seemed less like intelligent speech and more like just another piece in the puzzle of the financialized project that is the contemporary university in this age of the death of thought. Ideas have become very handy tools to rally donors rather than elucidate the truth.
As I walked around the (beautiful) campus in the evening with my parents, visiting the Lourdes grotto and the monastery on the bluff overlooking the river, I noticed a large construction site for the new library, named “Independence Hall,” which will “honor America.” Well, I thought, at least Harrison Butker’s speech has funded a building filled with books that others can read, even if he never will.
That’s unfair of me. I hope he does read them. He might learn a thing or two.