Sadly, I haven’t read Dorothy Sayers. I need to rectify that. But I did find this quote, and if that’s being a feminist, sign me up.
“Every woman is a human being—one cannot repeat that too often.”
—Dorothy Sayers
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Well, I read that her book “Gaudy Night” was the first feminist mystery story 
Dorothy L. Sayers - Wikipedia. She was an intellectual. I have enjoyed her Wimsey stories, but was intrigued by her other side more recently. (not that I’ve read much, sadly).
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Dorothy Sayers Quotes:
There’s nothing you can’t prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.
A man once asked me … how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. “Well,” said the man, “I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.” I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
Books… are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development
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So far, everything that you, @MarkD and @jpm quote from Berry makes me want to read more Berry. I have actually accumulated a good deal of his work but just can’t read fast enough. And the stuff on my ereaders is far less obvious than the heaps of books on the chair behind me, my nightstand, the lid of the turntable, the filing cabinet next to my desk, etc. etc.
We need more prophets with such clear sight and voices.
@Randy, I have only read Sayers’s Harriet Vane mysteries, which include P. Wimsy. @Jay313 Her feminism in those is a beautiful type, but incredibly subversive for the time — a strong, ethical woman with a past that people focus on, rather than the woman who is trying to make a new life for herself. Love Sayers!
(Except that she uses too many extended quotes in French, and I read the books before the Internet and Google Translate were known to the general public.)
While I was waiting at the hospital last week, I was going to read some of a bio I have on Sayers, that I bought at the Wade Center last summer at Wheaton College. (The Wade Center is the largest repository in the world of C. S. Lewis’s work and papers, but it also includes Tolkien, Sayers, MacDonald, and two or three other authors I”m not thinking of. ) But I lacked the concentration. The bio on Sayers is called Subversive and is by Crystal Downing. Sayers, like Berry and so many others, is on my list. Thanks for the title. Would you keep us posted, as you find things worthy of sharing. I think she surely has a lot.
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Liam, I just ran across your post the other day, when I was looking for something else, and it goes really well with Kierkegaard’s “Lily in the Field, Bird of the Air.” Kierkegaard encourages his listener to learn from nature how to be before God and how to attend to Him.
Thanks for pointing to such neat books as you always do.
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Just splendid, Randy!
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I started rereading Jenny O’Dell How to do Nothing the other day and had a long stretch of mindless activity that I could fill with it, while I worked today. I’ll try to gather some of my favorite points from it as I go again.
Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.
….
In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age…it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.
This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway[1]. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.
From the introduction of How to do Nothing
O’dell provides an intelligent, thoughtful look at the the way human worth is eroded in a world where everything is commodified. Her work provides an excellent example of how a young, postmodern thinker has something valuable to say about the world, what’s wrong with it, and how to live in it, while fulfilling our duties to our communities.
O’dell describes herself as “ the quintessential California atheist” yet decribes thoughtful discussions with a friend who is RC. Independent of her disinterest in faith, she says much that is of value to Christians.
1 Chinese Nail House
More from the intro of Jenny O’Dell’s book How to do Nothing. Even though the book is not a Christian book at all, she points to values that Christians can, and I believe should, embrace. People and things are not valueable because they are useful and can have a price tag attached. Productivity is not the bottom line for humans and the rest of the natural world. The Protestant Work Ethic is not our friend.
These two lessons should give you a sense of where I’m headed in this book. The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).
In this book, I hold up bioregionalism as a model for how we might begin to think again about place. Bioregionalism, whose tenets were articulated by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s, and which is widely visible in indigenous land practices, has to do with an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans. Bioregionalist thought encompasses practices like habitat restoration and permaculture farming, but has a cultural element as well, since it asks us to identify as citizens of the bioregion as much as (if not more than) the state. Our “citizenship” in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together.
It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.
Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.
There’s an important detail at the beginning of the useless tree story. Multiple versions of it mention that the gnarled oak tree was so large and wide that it should shade “several thousand oxen” or even “thousands of teams of horses.” The shape of the useless tree does more than just protect it from the carpenter; it is also the shape of care, of branching out over the thousands of animals who seek shelter, thus providing the grounds for life itself. I want to imagine a whole forest of useless trees, branches densely interwoven, providing an impenetrable habitat for birds, snakes, lizards, squirrels, insects, fungi, and lichen. And eventually, through this generous, shaded, and useless environment might come a weary traveler from the land of usefulness, a carpenter who has laid down his tools. Maybe after a bit of dazed wandering, he might take a cue from the animals and have a seat beneath an oak tree. Maybe, for the first time ever, he’d take a nap.
Listening to this reminded me of our conversation about What We Mean When We Talk About Meaning, and exchanges I’ve had with @SkovandOfMitaze @Klax @MarkD @Jay313 @Randy @NickolaosPappas and @Mervin_Bitikofer
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Soren Kierkegaard:
Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time – as is implied in his saving work – he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower. This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness. It is absolutely impossible for anyone to sneak away from the Pattern with excuse and evasion on the basis that It, after all, possessed earthly and worldly advantages that he did not have. In that sense, to admire Christ is the false invention of a later age, aided by the presumption of “loftiness.” No, there is absolutely nothing to admire in Jesus, unless you want to admire poverty, misery, and contempt.
What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached. He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires.
If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, who can doubt that Judas was an admirer of Christ!
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May it be ever more so!
From my own continued reading in the Berry Book “The Need to be Whole” - which chimes in with the same convictions, so far as I’m seeing, as O’Dell’s.
From Chapter 2
Our economy, let us not forget, defines “equality” as the “right” of everybody to be as wasteful, violent, destructive, consumptive, lazy, and luxurious as everybody else.
And his further notes on the role of war (now perpetual war mentality) on our economy and thought:
War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.
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“And if we reject the natural explanation of hereditary descent from a common ancestry, we can only suppose that the Deity, in creating man, took the most scrupulous pains to make him in the image of the ape. This, I say, is a matter of undeniable fact—supposing the creation theory true—and as a matter of fact, therefore, it calls for explanation. Why should God have thus conditioned man as an elaborate copy of the ape, when we know from the rest of creation how endless are His resources in the invention of types?”
–George Romanes, “The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution”, 1882
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Not that he couldn’t have, is there another reason he shouldn’t have besides the reason given (which isn’t really a reason)? I think exaptation is cool. 
Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
Psalm 63:3
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A part of an epitaph by Kipling, written after his son died as a teen in war. Some think it may reflect his own grief and remorse.
War seems a horrible way to settle a disagreement.
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Whatever our thoughts on armed struggle, it makes one think.
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Reading some of the stories out of Ukraine, this is particularly touching.
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Speaking of war and poetry (just writing that much made my eyes damp 
), I’m reminded of Wilfred Owen’s poetry as it appears in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, posted above a ways ↑ after Russia invaded Ukraine.
I learned of it ca. 1966-67 in the middle of the Viet Nam war era, wept, and joined the Navy less than a year later.
(In God’s providence, the technical and engineering training that I received in those six years wound up being my career after I got out – not by my plan. Some of you know about other life-path altering co-instances that occurred while I was in, too.)
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Connectivity in contrast to Sensitivity
From “How to do Nothing” by Jenny O’Dell.
I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem both of listening and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between 1) listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and 2) listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a distinction that’s especially helpful here, between what he calls connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.
Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in. Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.
So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.
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