Thursday Thread #39
Intro
This is Time's Corner, a weekly newsletter by Christian Leithart. I’m co-founder of Little Word, editor of Good Work magazine, and creator of Psalm Tap, a yearly colloquium for church musicians. By day, I teach make the most of summer break, and by night, I edit this newsletter.
Here at Time’s Corner, Thursdays are devoted to your replies. On Monday, I asked:
What’s a risk one of your ancestors made that you’ve directly benefited from?
Before I get to your replies, I should mention that my wife recently wrote a short guide to genealogical studies for homeschoolers. It’s called Roots & Stomping Grounds and you can download it for free here.
From You
A quick note: You can reply to any of these newsletters just as you would reply to an email. Click the button and type away.
A lot of readers had stories about ancestors who traveled to another country.
My wife Tara says:
My grandpa left Cuba in 1960 with $150, the maximum amount of money the government allowed a person to leave the country with. He found work and made arrangements for my grandma and their two children to join him. Twenty days after they arrived in the United States, diplomatic relations were severed and all flights were suspended.
Matt says:
My maternal grandmother took quite a risk by marrying a missionary to India in the 1950s, after her friends set them up at the church camp where she worked. They were both in their 30s. They had four kids, the youngest of which was my mom, and raised them in India, where he took over the Children's Home (for the children of lepers) from his parents and ran it for decades, changing hundreds — if not thousands — of lives, my own included.
Tim says:
My grandmother was born in Russia in 1913 (Czar Nicholas II was still the Emperor!), but her family had the foresight to come to America right before the revolution.
Not everyone’s ancestors emigrated, though. Shaina says:
My grandparent’s risk was their decision for my grandpa to leave the university where he was a professor of chemistry to learn to farm. They expanded the original fifty acres greatly and now four generations have lived and worked on the farm.
Dispatch from Broken Bow
This morning I finished Agnes Reppelier’s Essays in Idleness. These are real essays— meandering, full of anecdotes and half-developed thoughts—not articles with arguments and a conclusion. The last essay in the collection is about the open and vulnerable style of writing particular to letters. We write letters, she says, because we need each other.
Letter-writing… is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another. The craving for sympathy; the natural and healthy egotism which prompts us to open our minds to absent friends; the desire we all feel to make known to others that which is happening to ourselves; the certainty we all feel that others will be profoundly interested in this revelation; the inextinguishable impulse to “pass on” experiences either of soul or body, to share with some one else that which we are hearing, or seeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying,—these are the motives which make letter-writing essential and inevitable, crowd it into the busiest lives, assimilate it with the dullest understandings, and fit it into some crevice of every one’s daily experience. Thus it happens that there is a strong family resemblance between letters of every age and every country; they really change less than we are pleased to think.
I like to think of these Dispatches as letters, but of course there’s a world of difference between writing to a single person I know well and writing to a hundred people who may not even know my middle name. The latter situation can’t help but change how a person writes, as we have all seen in the writing styles particular to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. When you know you’re speaking to a crowd, it’s hard to be personal. How would Jane Austen’s letters be different if she knew they would be studied two hundred years after her death?
(As an aside, this is why I enjoy reading blogs so much, especially blogs written by obscure experts or, better yet, avid fans. They just write about what interests them, taking enough care to be understood, not enough to sound fussy, which makes the writing feel personal even when it’s not particularly good.)
All this to say, I feel confident that those who bother to read the Dispatch section of Time’s Corner won’t be bored by the minute details of the Leithart life, so… The weather has been stormy; there are fallen branches everywhere. I spend a lot of time these days at my desk, facing a window that overlooks the backyard, so I get to watch chipmunks walking through the slats of the fence and woodpeckers hopping up the trunks of trees. A few days ago, our roof vent fan started to rattle, so I adjusted its switch to turn on when the attic reaches 120 degrees, something I pray never happens. The kids spend lots of time outside, splashing in the water table or digging with their hands in the garden.
The trouble with minute details is that they keep happening, while letters must end sometime.
Links
One of my goals for the year is to post 200 times on my blog. Lately I’ve been going slowly through Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
A friend of mine has started a Biblical and theological training program called the Warfield Institute.
Drive & Listen is a site that pairs high-definition vlog-style footage (dashboard cams, helmet cams, vlog footage) from around the world with radio stations from the same area. Be careful—it’s easy to get sucked in and spend a half-hour watching someone walk around Rome.
Upcoming
This isn’t an event so much as an invitation. My church, Trinity Presbyterian, is planting another church in north/central Birmingham. We hope to start weekly services in the fall, and to that end, a small group of families has started meeting twice a month to eat, sing, and pray together. If you want more information, let me know.
The Theopolis Ministry Conference is July 17-18. Register here.
On July 19, the fourth annual Psalm Tap will convene at Third Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. You don’t have to register, but if you do, we’ll give you lunch.
Up To
Reading: Picture This, by Molly Bang. Excellent. Thanks, Remy, for the recommendation.
Watching: Lots of movie clips in preparation for a filmmaking class I’m teaching next week. This analysis of an AMC commercial starring Nicole Kidman is funny, but also educational.
Listening: My dad recommended this album by Leo Rojas.
Eating: Burgers at Whiskey Foxtrot.
About
I’m Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not active on social media, but you can read my blog here. Use the button below to share this issue of Time’s Corner, if you so desire. Thanks much for reading.