At the end of the final season of The Newsroom, Jedidiah Purdy and For Common Things get name-dropped.  Being a fan of show-runner Aaron Sorkin, I decided to give the book a try.  I ordered it from Amazon, only to have it get lost or misdirected for a week or so.  When it finally arrived, I jumped right in and was pleasantly surprised and appropriately challenged.  I thought I’d take a few posts over the next couple of weeks and talk through some of my favorite quotes from the book.

The first thing I liked about Purdy’s first book wasn’t even about Purdy’s writing.  It was a quote by Czeslaw Milosz: What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence.  It lays the foundation for much of what Purdy tries to articulate (or in this case, pronounce) throughout the book. It is both seeing and saying.  It is a twist on something I heard a few years ago: things that “go without saying” are often the things that most need to be said.  From the preface:

. . . this book is a plea for the value of declaring hopes that we know to be fragile.  It is an argument that those hopes are no less necessary for their fragility, and that permitting ourselves to neglect them is both reckless and impoverishing.  My purpose in writing is to take our inhibition seriously and to ask what would be required to overcome it, to speak earnestly of uncertain hopes.

The book serves as a great call to attention of the basic things too easily taken for granted in our modern society.  And attention is important.  From later in the book:

Attentiveness helps us to see what can and what cannot support our hope, and so it may be our best stay against despair.

Hope and despair are big words for me, words with personal, communal, and spiritual weight.  And while much of what Purdy argues in the book doesn’t make much of spiritual reality, it definitely takes up the cause in connection to the personal and communal.

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So we should ask: what things “go without saying” but need to be said?  What foundational things do we rely on and potentially take for granted?  What basic, day-to-day things demand our attention, not so much to fix them but to keep them from needing repair in the first place?

(image from tv.com)