From Alan Jacobs:

Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Some 20th-century thinkers who have been vital for me over the years:

Explainers: Charles Taylor, Mary Midgely, Freeman Dyson
Illuminators: Mikhail Bakhtin, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott
Provokers: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Simone Weil

Jacobs later claims that one makes a vital error mistaking one roll for another. For example, he says of Rousseau the Provoker, "God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously." In thinking of this potential mix-up, one general, Rousseauian principle comes to mind.

Because he thought that everything was good the nearer it was to the "hand of the Maker", Rousseau generally left his children to be taught by nature itself. He once neglected, with one group of his children, to record their dates of birth or genders upon their birth. This led to all sorts of problems that he later detailed in a letter, saying that the oversight would kill him.

Alan Jacobs:

So maybe a “general account” is not what is needed so much as equipment for acting wisely and lovingly — in a Christlike way — this day. A Franciscan-Daoist ethic for a surveillance-capitalist hate-media world. What that might look like is something I plan to think about a lot in the coming year.

I often think of surveillance capitalism as the Eye of Sauron. Maybe the needed equipment would look something like a fellowship. Franciscan-Daoist sounds to me like a hobbit and wizard ethic, earthy and ethereal.

From Wendell Berry’s essay “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” (Via A. Jacob’s Article):

Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

AND

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, though, it comes down to seeing that many of us carry around a fantasy of “the uninterrupted life” that does nothing but make real life harder than it needs to be. In any case, the fantasy is usually an impossible one: my finitude means I definitely can’t spend as much time on my work and with my family as I’d like – due to maths – and this wouldn’t change were I magically to acquire the power to dictate how every hour of my day unfolded. C. S. Lewis, writing of course from a Christian perspective, summed things up lucidly:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Last week, about this time, I set off for my maiden voyage to Laity Lodge. There, I met some great people and heard some wise words on the Lord’s Prayer from Wesley Hill and Alan Jacobs. For Jacobs, wise words means poetry. He shared what he called two short sermons and three poems: George Herbert’s “Prayer,” Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us…,” and Andrew Hudgins “Praying Drunk.”

In the course of his talk, Alan Jacobs kept calling the poems prayers. I think the connection is more than just a slip of the tongue. The poem and prayer that’s stuck with me most is the last line of “Praying Drunk,” “Remember me.”

[Dadid Foster] Wallace missed what [C.S.] Lewis missed in observing his pupil Betjeman: Irony is not always and everywhere snark; sometimes it’s a painful awareness of our own absurdity, an awareness painful enough that it’s best to deflect it through humor.

—Alan Jacobs

I stumbled on an Andy Anderson skate video on Chris Hannah’s blog. Andy lives the “dirtbag” lifestyle of a skater and makes a wonderful observation on what it means to rest (emphasis mine):

…There’s a skill to relaxing, finding peace…It’s funny how relaxing is so tied into being lazy because it doesn’t neccesarily mean you’re being lazy. Part of my work is relaxing. Becasue relaxing is taking control of yourself¹ and accepting that you’re not controlling anything else.

Hearing Anderson talk about the the work of relaxing, I couldn’t help but think of what it means to stop…that is “sabbath.” Then, when he went on to talk about control and “accepting that you’re not controlling anything else,” something occured to me. “Control and surrender” is a sabbatic balance.

Brian Eno, Austin Kleon, and Alan Jacobs²—all speak of the creative process flourishing via the slow growth of control and surrender. Here’s Eno:

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part. I want to rethink surrender as an active verb…It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.

At another point, Eno pictures surrender as a dynamic ship flexible enough to move through rough waters without breaking. This dynamism of “surrender as an active verb” ripens what it means to stop and rest. Without control, surrender would acquiesce to abstraction stripped of it’s particularity. Without surrender, control would absolutize into tyranny.

Shabbat begets the weaving of shalom. Control and surrender is the sabbath balance. Let’s re-create and weave peace bringing love its due worth.