Monday roundup

 Amanda Knox offers some rather hard-won insights in a piece at The Free Press entitled "The Life I Refused To Surrender." Knox, you may recall, was the American living in Italy circa 2009 who was wrongly convicted of murdering her British roommate. After she was incarcerated, forensic evidence showed that her roommate had been raped as well, and that one person committed both crimes. Knox was exonerated and released in 2011, returned to the United States, and is now a writer, wife and mother. 

Here's the life lesson she took from her prison experience:

The next day, back in the prison—the word colpevole, guilty, echoing in my head—I silently swept a corridor during my work shift. I overheard one guard say to another: Poor thing. She doesn’t understand what just happened.They thought, since I wasn’t hysterically sobbing, that I hadn’t absorbed the fact that I was going to spend the next 26 years trapped in this place. 

I was quiet precisely because I was sitting with my epiphany. And it was this: I was not, as I had assumed for the past two years, waiting to get my life back. I was not a lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home. 

I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me. 

The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It just was. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of clarity: my life was sad. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. I would be locked away for the best years of my life. I would never fall in love, have children, pursue a career. My world would be so small, trapped within concrete walls and surrounded by traumatized people, many of whom were a danger to themselves and others. This life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would alienate me from everyone I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in different directions. 

But—and this was the critical thing, the thing I hadn’t been able to see until that moment—no matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now. 

Every Friday, one of my Ordinary Times colleagues, Ben Sears posts an installment of his "POETS Day!" series. It's - well, I'll let Ben frame it:

This is one of those weekends where POETS Day gets lost in the wash. The first week of March Madness is a triumph of unproductivity. It’s not that the NCAA Tournament is so compelling that even non-basketball fans get into the excitement. It’s that basketball fans get so excited by it that they think it perfectly natural that people who don’t otherwise like the game would suddenly get swept up by the spectacle and those who don’t care realize that by pretending to care as much as basketball fans think they should they get to half ass it at work, take long lunches, use the copy machine to print endless personal documents, call their friends whenever they feel the urge, watch T.V. (television) on their phones at their desk, openly gamble, and leave early to catch the late afternoon game just like everyone else. Their bracket, chosen solely on the basis of which mascot is cuter, is just as likely as the fans’ to win a couple of hundred bucks too. So go do whatever. I don’t even think you have to ask to leave early. Go take a nap, hike a bit, marvel at how uncrowded places without walls of televisions are. Just be ready to talk about a blown call or an amazing comeback in one of the games you were supposedly watching. People will put the important-for-conversation clips on Twitter. As always, don’t let the weekend go by without a little verse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… even if everybody pissed off before Thursday’s tip off. If the basketball thing doesn’t spring you, there’s always St. Patrick’s Day to fall back on. Erin Roll Tide!

His featured poet last week was Delmore Schwartz, one of the earliest figures among what we call the New York Intellectuals. He was a classic case of an artistic powerhouse who couldn't tame his demons:

When Delmore Schwartz was twenty-five years old, he made a huge splash in New York intellectual circles with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The book, a collection of short stories and poems, was well spoken of by two of the time’s giants in Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He was fresh and talented and people predicted a great deal from him, which he delivered for a while. When he died, it was three days before anyone identified the body. Friends said they hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Alcohol, drug addiction, and insanity wore him down.

Among the themes he returns to in his work is lack of permanence and the passing of time, especially that things pass because they belong to time. His early life was not a happy one. His parents’, both Romanian Jewish immigrants, marriage was miserable. They split up when he was nine. His father died at age forty-nine when Schwartz was sixteen or seventeen. His most famous short story, the titular story from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, is a fantasy where the protagonist watches his parents’ early life on screen at a movie theater and yells at them to change course. It’s a past that can’t be changed, and the watcher is dragged screaming from the theater. So much of his work focuses on coming to terms with what is done; that a moment is formed and gone and can never be relived.

In his poem “Father and Son” in a dialogue the father tells his son that time is death as it “dribbles from you, drop by drop.” while the son is skeptical. “But I thought time was full of promises.” The father warns the son that he will, as many do, try on guises to hide from his past and its wear on him, but it won’t work. In one of my favorite images he takes the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth and immortality, and recasts it as a prison that burns away your ability to affect your past and leaves you impotent and guilt ridden at each inescapable return:

Always the same self from the ashes of sleep
Returns with its memories, always, always,
The phoenix with eight hundred memories!

 

Bridget Ryder of The European Conservative says that EU do-gooder collectivism aimed at the continent's ag sector is running into resistance. Isn't this the kind of pie-in-the-sky heavy-handedness that resulted in so much tumult in Sri Lanka recently?

While the EU has moved forward with its plan to abolish the combustion engine, another flagship aspect of the Green Deal—agriculture and food policy—is proving almost impossible to implement. 

The Commission released the Farm to Fork strategy in 2020, proposing some 30 measures to transform both agricultural practices and consumer food habits. It looks to tighten animal welfare standards, triple organic agriculture, reduce pesticide use and fertiliser runoff by 50%, and create standardised consumer food labelling to nudge Europeans’ eating habits away from fats, salt, and sugar, towards more ‘sustainable’ nutrition.

But it is meeting resistance from both member states and industry. Even EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who has always been sceptical of the plan, recently downplayed its importance.

“The Green Deal is not a law,” Wojciechowski told the Polish Parliament in December 2022. “It is a political program in which all sorts of objectives are included, and which, as is the case with political programs, will be implemented to a greater or lesser extent.”

Indeed, the Commission initially emphasised that the strategy largely consists of aspirational targets. But the EU Parliament’s resolution supporting the strategy called for giving them a “binding nature,” in other words, moving from aspirations to law. In June 2022, the commission proposed a revamp of the bloc’s pesticide rules that includes binding targets to reduce pesticide use in member states. 

Gotta love that binding nature. 

Patterico argues that much in life is situational, that positions such as "tribalism is always bad," or "experts generally can't be trusted" don't hold up as absolutes:

I’ll summarize my conclusion briefly: life involves judgment calls. It’s tempting to place all your faith in principles like opposing tribalism, or sticking with the group no matter what, or seeking commentary that challenges you, or seeking commentary that reinforces your beliefs. But there is a time and place for all of our decisions, and they can’t always follow such simple rules. The only correct principle is to develop a world view about how you know when you are doing the right thing, and then try to do it. There is no easy shorthand for that.

At Discourse, Robert Tracinski makes the case that in the early 20th century, a critical mass of cultural influencers embodied outspokenness and decidedly nonconformist, somewhat brazen persona combined with a ringing defense of the free market, a combination one doesn't see much anymore. 

Aaron Renn offers an even-handed take on the state of the complimentarian-egalitarian divide in institutional Christianity. 

I've been prolific over at Precipice.

My February 16 piece, "Art and Dissolution," looks at what a healthy way to reconcile towering creative figures' indispensable works with their lives of largely self-imposed chaos might look like. 

"Humankind Didn't Spring Forth Two Weeks Ago" takes on a common assumption upon which all too many post-Americans operate. 

"The Philippians 4:8 Standard" asserts that Paul's exhortation ought to be our gauge on what deserves our attention.

"Notes on the Definition of 'Woke'" is my contribution to the latest round of discussion about that term.