Wayfaring Quotes

“The blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you're looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you're -not- looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need -books.-

(Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“Gardening marks, as clearly as any activity, the joining of nature and culture. The gardener makes nothing, but rather gathers what God has made and shapes it into new and pleasing forms. The well-designed garden shows nature more clearly and beautifully than nature can show itself.”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“(I am particularly fond of the latter model [i.e., the tree-filled residential squares of London]. which you can see followed in a lovely way in Chicago's Washington Square Park, the city's oldest. The Newberry Library sits on the north side of the square, and one of the great delights of using that excellent library involves sitting at a table and gazing through tall windows at the park's trees. Of course, this means that you don't get much work done and feel guilty later, but life consists mainly of such tradeoffs.)

(The Life of Trees)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“What do we choose it imagine, when we choose? The answer is always revelatory, which is one of the reasons Chesterton was right to say that 'the simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious people play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.' The Harry Potter books remind us of this, and they can be, if we read them rightly, both a delight in themselves and a school for our own imaginings. They have many flaws, but I have not dwelt on them here because I forgive J.K. Rowling for every one. Her seven books are, and thank God for it, always on the side of life.

(The Youngest Brother's Tale)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“...invention is not a virtue that scholars hold in high regard because it is not a virtue that they tend to possess.

(The Brightest Heaven of Invention)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique 'existential' relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done.

(W.H. Auden)
(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“The uniqueness of human beings, in the created order, is that we live simultaneously in nature (the realm of involuntary and repetitive acts) and history (the realm in which we make choices, and experience and reflect upon the consequences of those choices). Other living things -- plants and other animals -- live in nature only; angels, perhaps, only in history. To have this double inheritance is our challenge, our pain, but also our glory.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant