Space Enough, and Time

New Zealand Dispatch: South Island Dispatch

Posted on June 24, 2014 by awtraughber

Readers often speak of Tolkien’s gift for creating a “fully-realized world” with Middle Earth: you feel like every little path could lead to somewhere fantastic. The same could be said for New Zealand, the South Island especially.

The last leg of my trip has included glacier walks and boating through fjords. The weather has been great, with one day starting with a serious frost. And even though it rained during my Milford Sound trip, it was okay: we got to see waterfalls turned back around by strong winds. So many good moments that photos can’t do justice. Here’s a multiple waterfall shot.

Now it’s back to the North Island before heading East for good.

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New Zealand Dispatch: North Island Edition

Posted on June 17, 2014 by awtraughber

I’m one island in on my two island journey through New Zealand. Yesterday morning I boarded the ferry in Wellington and made my way to Nelson via Picton.

New Zealand is beautiful. Every turn you make on the road yields some great surprise. The food is good: lamb kebabs and steak for me. The weather has been good: sunshine at all the good moments. The sites, of course, are amazing. I’ve posted some pictures to Flickr, so you should be able to see them to the right. Here’s one of my favorite camera-phone pics:

What is it? Why, it’s Hobbiton before sunset from the bottoms of the hill (which means Bag End is topside).

Time flies, and I’m really glad that I took this trip. It’s an interesting way to make yourself fully present, for sure.

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One Month and Then New Zealand

Posted on May 13, 2014 by awtraughber

A few months ago I found a cheap flight to New Zealand and booked it. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time (thanks, Lord of the Rings and the Amazing Race), and it’s something that has given my thinking some focus these last few weeks. I think about it in different terms each day: time in a beautiful place, a chance to see where some of my favorite movie moments were filmed, my first time leaving the country alone (sorry, Canada), a break from my ten-year summer routine. And while I will be traveling alone, I feel like I’ll be carrying many good things with me.

Here’s a brilliant time-lapse video of the country by photographer Shawn Reeder. If I see beauty half as good as he has captured on film, I will consider myself doubly-blessed.

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A Flood of Holiness

Posted on May 12, 2014 by awtraughber

Don’t let the title of N. D. Wilson’s latest essay fool you. “Lighten Up, Christians: God Loves a Good Time” sounds a little frivolous, but it has a real seed of truth inside it’s fun-loving shell. And while there’s nothing wrong with fun, there’s something really good about where the essay ends up. From the article’s beginning:

We Christians are the speakers of light. We are the proclaimers of joy. Wherever we go, we are the mascots of the gospel, the imagers of the infinitely creative Father, and the younger brothers and sisters of the humbled and triumphant Word. We speak in this world on behalf of the One who made up lightning and snowflakes and eggs.

Or so we say.

Wilson spends much of the article calling us on our stodginess, which is well and good and often appropriate. He contrasts our disposition with that of God, creative and whimsical. Then, in a brilliant turn that echoes Peterson and Lewis:

We should strive for holiness, but holiness is a flood, not an absence. Are you the kind of parent who can create joys for your children that they never imagined wanting? Does your sun shine, warming the faces of others? Does your rain green the world around you? Do you end your days with anything resembling a sunset? Do you begin with a dawn?

He ends by moving from question to command:

Speak your joy. Mean it. Sing it. Do it. Push it down into your bones. Let it overflow your banks and flood the lives of others.

A tall order, of course, striving to be like God. Holiness is probably both the best and the worst word for it. At it’s best, holiness is robust and mesmerizing. At it’s worst, it is twisted and deflated by human self-righteousness. The way Wilson puts it, though, makes we want to strive to be like the God with the flood of holiness.

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A World of Bad Poets

Posted on May 9, 2014 by awtraughber

Even at its best, technology is a strange master. It’s the kind of master that blinds you to your own submission, really. The level of submission is different for everyone, of course. Sometimes the people you think would buy in the most barely touch things like social media. And there are so many options, so there’s always at least one good venue for expression.

Nicholas Carr is one of the tech-thinkers I read in order to process technology issues. Over spring break I read one of his slightly older books, The Big Switch. And even though some of the tech-names used were dated, much of what he said was a real help in locating contemporary life on the media map. He often blogs at roughtype.com. A recent entry, titled “Identity Overload,” is a nice distillation of one of technology’s effects: the demands it often makes on our sense of self (or selves, as the case may be). Connecting T. S. Eliot and writer Rob Horning, Carr writes:

Social media turns us all into bad poets . . .

Personality wants to expand to fill all available space. Resisting the self’s inclination to artificially inflate what’s inside, and thereby overwhelm what’s inside, has always been hard, but it becomes much harder when the available space for the self is made both explicit and infinite, as happens with social media and other documentary systems of self-expression.

And is there a good escape from a world of bad poets? I’m not sure. But you can read more of Carr’s thoughts here.

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Media and McLuhan

Posted on May 8, 2014 by awtraughber

A friend laughed at me a few years ago when I told her that I had “discovered” Marshall McLuhan. I didn’t quite see what was funny; reading McLuhan set me on a path to better understanding media and culture (even if it’s on my own plebian level). I blame Douglas Coupland, whose short biography of the thinker got me to check out McLuhan’s Understanding Media over Christmas vacation. True, a lot of what he said is beyond me, but the things he “saw in advance” were quite amazing . . . and sobering. This clip, short and unfortunately incomplete, is a nice snippet of his thinking.

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It’s What You Do with the Dots That Matters

Posted on May 7, 2014 by awtraughber

From Seth Godin’s blog:

Without a doubt, the ability to connect the dots is rare, prized and valuable. Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn’t been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than ever before.

Why then, do we spend so much time collecting dots instead? More facts, more tests, more need for data, even when we have no clue (and no practice) in doing anything with it.

I think we all have a predisposition to collecting something. Maybe it’s part of our commercial culture. Maybe it’s something deeper. For some students (current or life-long), it manifests itself as jumping through hoops for good prizes that supposedly exist in discrete spaces. This ought not be, but it’s a difficult trend to push against.

There are dots everywhere. Collect them if you want. But point me to the people who can connect them.

You can read more of Godin’s thoughts everyday here.

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Augustine and Getting Love Right

Posted on May 5, 2014 by awtraughber

I’m currently reading my way through James K. A. Smith’s new book on relativism, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds.¹ A third of the way through the book, Smith brings up Augustine and his book on education and doctrine, Teaching Christianity, in the context of understanding the relationship between things. Great quote about the different between “use” and “enjoyment.”

There are some things which are meant to be enjoyed, others which are meant to be used, yet others which do both the enjoying and the using. Things that are to be enjoyed make us happy; things which are to be used help us on our way to happiness.

“Things that we enjoy,” Smith adds, “are ends in themselves, ultimate goods. In fact Augustine says that the things we enjoy are the things we love.” Returning to Augustine:

Enjoyment, after all, consists in clinging to something lovingly for its own sake, while use consists in referring what has come your way to what your love aims at obtaining, provided, that is, it deserves to be loved.

Smith again: “What you love is what you enjoy; and what you enjoy is what you love– what you treat as ultimate, what you treat as an end in itself. . . . Some things are meant to be used, while other things deserve to be loved. . . . This order of evaluation and obligation is what Augustine calls the ordo amoris, the right order of love.”

I really like this. For Augustine, of course, God was the Ultimate Good. People, I think, should be in line somewhere behind Him. As much as I enjoy good movies or good books, I’d like to think that I love people more, that I enjoy being around them (and that they can be enjoyed for their own sakes). I fail at this miserably, I think, but it is definitely something worthwhile to keep in heart and mind.

Oh, to love rightly.

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¹ The book is Who’s Afraid of Relativism? and it’s a great deal over my head. But it contains one of the best discussions of one of my favorite movies, Lars and the Real Girl. Smith is on something of a roll right now. His book on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is brilliant. [the picture, by the way, is from wikipedia.org]

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Absurd and Almost Home

Posted on April 30, 2014 by awtraughber

The funniest thing about Mr. Peabody and Sherman was probably the short that played in front of it, Almost Home. Turns out that the short, with lead acting voice by Steve Martin, is a precursor to a feature film: Home. I showed it to my students yesterday, but they didn’t laugh as much as I did. Absurb. Existential. But also funny in it’s own way.

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Making the Journey to Area X

Posted on April 23, 2014 by awtraughber

One of the odd consequences of loving things like The Lord of the Rings or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so much is how it prevents me from reading other science fiction and fantasy novels. Sure, a younger me dabbled in Piers Anthony and Harry Harrington, but names like Frodo and Zaphod Beeblebrox are about as much as I can take. But Robin Sloan (of Mr. Penumbra fame) said that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihiliation was a great sci-fi read, of a kind different from most other sci-fi novels. And he was right. The story of four explorers in the mysterious “Area X” is wonderfully vague and psychological. It twists and turns on itself like some ancient but newly-discovered staircase. And it’s the first of three books to be released over the next few months. You can read the entire first chapter of the book for free here. You can check out a nice little “map” of “Area X” here. And you can check out a random “recruitment” video for the Southern Reach (the group behind the organization) below.

Authority, the second of three Southern Reach books, drops in early May.

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