"But look at this matter in other lights; weight it in all sorts of scales...But this is not the half; look again" (Moby-Dick)
"A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that" (Moby-Dick)
Last 9 days: (niece and I on Nantucket, Sturgill show in New York, Platonic day of fall weather in Philly)
"It is not down in any map; true places never are" (Moby-Dick)
"Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon." (-Moby-Dick)
"Awareness of the multiplicity of human ways is also the necessary precondition for the active search for the better or best way...God's multiplication of languages and his dispersal of the nations [institutes] otherness and opposition." Leon Kass on the Tower of Babel
Celebrated the official last day of the summer (the last day of the John's Water Ice season)
"O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven." Collect for the 26th Sunday in ordinary time
"Against our ever-present natural temptation to care only for ourselves and for our own and to deprecate or ignore the value of the stranger...the Noahide law teaches that, at least with respect to life itself, every human being has a claim and a standing equal to our own"
"The story of the Flood seeks to wash away the heroic temptation in the reader. It seeks permanently to drown the natural human aspiration to apotheosis through heroic deed and to replace it with an acquired human commitment to righteousness and the perpetuation of life on earth"
"There is more than half a century...during which all nine generations of human beings, from Adam to Lamech, are alive at the same time...[the genealogy] prepare[s] the wisdom-seeking reader to learn, in the sequel, how human beings react to the discovery of their unavoidable finitude"
"The Biblical rejection of polytheism, in part, means the Biblical rejection of apotheosis" -Robert Sacks, quoted in Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom
"Herding probably preceded farming...the farmer is the innovator, the man who takes the ambiguous step forward (or is it backward?). But our text invites us to consider the shepherd as the innovator by making him second born, one who did not follow in his brother's vocational footsteps."
"If the needle is the first tool, clothing is the first product, and hiding is the first goal of art" -Leon Kass, The Beginning Wisdom: Reading Genesis
Some brief eulogistic reflections on Wendell Berry, who celebrated virtues and loves that are for everyone, regardless of their form of life: peterblair.substack.com/p/wendell-be...
Wendell Berry, That Thoughtful Man
Rest in Peace
peterblair.substack.com
I came upon Berry's work in college out of what felt like some niche political philosophy interests and it was a pleasure in recent years to see his name turn up in (for me) new places: Guy Davenport quoting him in The Hunter Gracchus, his friendship with J. Kenyon and D. Hall
Man
Evan Walker@ecologicalev.bsky.social · 2mo agoRest easy to the great Wendell Berry. He challenged us to think differently about living a fast, technologically complex life. He probably wouldn’t have loved me posting this on social media. Time for me to touch grass. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/u...
I liked "Tony" as a mediation on the value of being someone rather than anyone—acquiring a context, discarding one's idea of oneself to become a specific person letterboxd.com/peterblair/f...
A ★★★★ review of Tony (2026)
(PFS—Bourse) I enjoyed this because it didn't seem as freighted with the weight of the "biopic as a genre" as other ones I've seen recently (A Complete Unknown and Deliver me From Nowhere). It just fe...
letterboxd.com
Happy Wild Pink release day to all who celebrate open.spotify.com/album/6wN3op...
Still Coming Down - Album by Wild Pink | Spotify
Wild Pink · album · 2026 · 9 songs
open.spotify.com
He wished it were already fall, season of wisdom and work. —John Crowley, The Solitudes
“Scripture wishes to emphasize that the sanctity of the Sabbath is older than Israel, and rests upon all mankind” -Umberto Cassuto, quoted in Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom
I've only dipped into the new Phoebe Bridgers album so far, but digging "Haunted"
“Because he is the free being, he is also the incomplete or indeterminate being: what he becomes depends always (in part) on what he freely will choose to be…precisely in the sense that man is in the image of God, man is not good—not determinate, finished, complete, or perfect”
“[In Genesis] the fundamental principle through which the world is created is separation” (Leon Kass); “Yahweh gave [Abraham] just four commands…each time something had to be separated from something else” (Roberto Calasso)
“The open form of [Genesis] and its recalcitrance to final and indubitable interpretation are absolutely perfect instruments for cultivating the openness, thoughtfulness, and modesty about one’s own understanding that is the hallmark of the pursuit of wisdom” -Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom