From Word To Word

My family and I have just returned from Manitoulin Island, where both my parents were raised and where both sets of my grandparents still live.  We stayed at my Mother’s place in Providence Bay, an old family house that she purchased a few years ago as a kind of cottage and will now be using as a full time residence and a place to run art workshops and summer programs.  She calls the place Providence House, and she was gracious enough to let us use it for a week and to bring along our friends the Humphreys.

Manitoulin is a deeply significant place for me.  I spent almost every summer there as I child, either at the farm of my Grandparents Hill, which is just outside of Mindemoya, or at the hunting camp of my Grandparents Gordon at Carter Bay, which is on the south shore of the Island east of Providence Bay.  I am by no means a farm boy, but it was during my summers on the island that I learned to ride the workhorses by leaping onto their bare backs from the apple trees, to drive a tractor poorly, to help birth a breach position calf, and to mow more hay than I care to remember.  I am no more a naturalist than I am a farmer, but the island was also the place where I learned to identify some animal sign, to distinguish one tree from another, to cut trails, and to fish.  My most vivid memories are of picking raspberries from along the dirt roads, of fishing in the little Mindemoya river, of wandering among the dunes at Carter Bay, and of reading in the old stuffed arm chair at the camp, the night already black, the moon hidden by the trees, the only light coming from the coals of the open wood stove.  It is into these memories that I always return when I come to Manitoulin.

It has been meaningful to bring others, first my friends, then my wife, then my children, and now my friends’ children, as I have returned to these memories over the years.  The island that I can introduce to them is not the same as the one of my childhood, of course, but it connects to that childhood in strange ways, and it connects to the person I am now as well.  It is no longer possible to get fresh fish from the dock at Providence Bay, for example, because there are no boats that still fish from there.  It is no longer possible to get icecream at the dairy in Mindemoya, because the dairy has now been demolished.  It is still possible, however, to find fresh fish, even if it is now sold from a truck in the grocery store parking lot, and it is still possible to get icecream made by the local dairy, even if it is no longer quite as local.  These things are still important to me now, though perhaps for other reasons, and it was a real pleasure to share them with the Humphreys.

It was also a pleasure to begin building some entirely new memories with my family.  I returned to Carter Bay to take some photos with my eldest son after the Humphreys had left.  While we were photographing, we met a woman on the beach who was able to confirm my uncertain identification of the sandcherries.  We collected several handfuls of them, my son biting into them, making faces, spitting them out, then biting them again, while I filled my shirt pockets.  We also caught crayfish.  We threw rocks from the tall stones into the water.  We found a stick that looked like a sword.  We saw a bear on the road.  Most importantly, when we returned home, we turned the sandcherries into a startlingly red syrup that went beautifully on icecream before bed and only slightly less beautifully on pancakes in the morning.

It is these kinds of memories that have made Manitoulin so important to me.  I feel it most strongly now, just after I have left it.

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the garden with my eldest son. We were staking tomatos mostly. I was holding the twine for him; he was cutting. I was tying up the tomatos; he was clipping random plants. I was weeding; he was adding specimens to the snail house that he has constructed out of an old planter.

As we were working, a neighbour of ours, who used to play the piano at the church where I attended as I child, and who taught music lessons to my wife for several years, wandered by on his way to the library. He stopped to talk, and I noticed that he was holding several critical commentaries on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is often issued separately from the text that it is supposed to preface, and which is one of the very few works of criticism that I can say I actually enjoyed reading. We talked very briefly about the commentaries, most of which he disparaged, and about Milton’s poem itself, which he praised very highly.

When he had resumed his walk and I had resumed my gardening, I was left thinking about how strange a thing it was to find someone who was actually reading Paradise Lost, not to teach a class, not to complete an assignment, not to pass an exam, but just to read it. The same observation could be made of just about any canonical literary work more than a few decades old, of course. It would have been just as strange if my neighbour had been reading Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene or Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. What was disconcerting about this observation, however, was that it revealed how much I had myself begun to regard these texts as confined to the realm of the classroom. It was not only my cultural expectations that had been surprised by his reading practise but my personal expectations as well. I suddenly recalled how powerfully I had experienced Paradise Lost myself, and I was alarmed to see the extent to which I had allowed myself to confine it to an artificial role in an artificial curriculum. I had forgotten why I had read Paradise Lost in the first place, forgotten why I still believe that others should read it, but I have remembered now, so let the next few paragraphs stand as the beginning of a self-correction.

To read Paradise Lost is to experience words as force and as power. I am awed by its pompous, thunderous, resonant, grandiloquent voice with the same kind of awe that I have for Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Blake’s illustrated mythopoetic creations. It is not necessary to like these works only to experience them. They hold something audacious and fearful. They do not hesitate to speak on behalf of gods and devils, to claim the place of the prophet and the seer. They place themselves apart, in the space between heaven and hell, earth and sky, good and evil. They speak a language that others fear to speak, a language of angels and demons and spirits and heros and immortals.

To write and speak and create and compose like this is presumptive in the last degree. It is to assume the role that all creators secretly desire and yet fear to hold. It is to be as like to God as God will allow. It is to invite adulation and ridicule. It is to be called a prophet and a heretic. It is to be consigned to the space between spaces that is opened up by their creations, to inhabit this space that is nowhere, to be considered a little lower than angels and a little higher than fiends.

When I read Paradise Lost, whatever its literary successes and failures, it is because it allows me to stand in this place too, even if only for a moment. It is because it can make me recall this place, years later, in the heat of the sun, standing among the tomato stakes of my garden. It is because Milton’s garden of poetry and myth makes my own garden somehow wilder and stranger, somehow truer and richer. It makes this garden of mine, for an instant, strain beyond itself toward the space that separates it from the divine.

I encountered a friend yesterday afternoon, a woman who would certainly prefer to remain anonymous here and probably everywhere else as well. She is a passionate gardener but has very little space to garden at her apartment, so she has for many years gardened small plots of dirt alongside city roadways and parks, wherever she feels that a few flowers would do most good. She is a practitioner of what I call guerrilla gardening.

During our conversation yesterday, I happened to mention that I had finished ripping out plant matter from my new garden and that I was looking forward to doing some planting, beginning with some trees and shrubs this fall. She asked me why I was not now planting any of the edibles that I would eventually like to grow in the garden. I responded to the effect that I would like to do things in order, to have the large plants and landscaping done before I begin introducing the perrenials and finally the annuals. She brushed off this explanation, informed me firmly that it is possible to do both things at once, and insisted that I take from her a selection of vegetable seedlings, arriving at my door a few hours later with seedlings for several varieties of tomatoes, brussel sprouts, chives, and some ornamentals.

The gift was not inconsiderable. This woman has little enough in the world to give, and she gave out of the plants that she had so patiently gathered and seeded for her own gardening. She gave out of the things that she loves most. I was moved, and the plants that she has given me seem a little different than those that I would purchase myself. To plant and tend these gifts becomes a response to them as gifts. They become more than plants because they represent something given and received between friends. The gift of friendship has transformed them, as it transforms everything.

I want to begin replying to TC’s comments on Social Holocaust by expressing how significant these kinds of responses are to me, whether they are received through this present medium, or through conversation, or through my classes. In each case I feel myself honoured beyond what I deserve, indebted in ways that I do not know how to repay. The responses of others continually recall me to humility, and I am always grateful for them.

TC suggests that eliminating the encounter with the other is also an elimination of the self, and that the decision to refuse the encounter with the other is perhaps the result of a decision, even if only a subconscious one, to refuse the self. Now, I think that TC is speaking psychologically here, and I am not at all qualified to respond in those terms, but I would agree that in ethical and philosophical terms this is precisely the case. The refusal of the other is always a refusal of the other in me. The more radically I refuse to encounter the other, the more completely I refuse to encounter myself. The refusal to encounter the other, therefore, is often an expression of my unwillingness to encounter myself.

I am aware that I have introduced some terminological confusion here, and in previous posts also, when I refer to encountering the self as other, and I think an explanation of my terminology in this respect might be useful to clarifying exactly why I think TC’s observation is both accurate and significant. In making reference to the self as other, I am following Emmanuel Levinas in his idea of “the third”, though I am using different terminology. Levinas argues that a pure ethics is never possible because, among other reasons, it requires my self and the other to be the only ones concerned. The introduction of a third person makes ethics impossible, because there are now two others, and my responsibility to each of them is infinite. Any fulfillment of my responsibility to the one will necessarily come at the expense of my responsibility to the other. The third, therefore, is a recognition of the practical limits of an ideal ethics.

Levinas goes on to argue that it is never possible to find a pure ethics by escaping the third, because if I were alone with the other I would not have escaped myself. The self who appears to me as myself always plays the role of the third for me, always introduces impossibility into the ethical responsibility that a bear to the other.  In this sense, I bear for myself an ethical responsibility also, just as much as I bear responsibility for the other, and even as a condition for the responsibility I bear for the other. I can love the other only as I love myself. I can bear responsibility for the other only as I bear responsibility for myself. This is to say that I necessarily love and bear responsibility for the other and for myself as an impossibility, because I must love and bear responsibility infinitely and must do so more than once.

Returning to TC’s comments, the implication for me here is that the rejection of the other cannot be separated from a rejection from the self, even on the most fundamental philosophical level. The desire or the need to refuse the self, whether or not it is subconscious, will always be also a desire and a need to refuse the other. Because I fear to encounter myself, I refuse to encounter the other. The logic of holocaust, then, proceeds from myself, from a fear of myself as other, and from a fear of encountering my self as other. I eliminate the other because I must eliminate my self as other.

Jean-Luc Marion, in an essay entitled “Evil in Person” (see Prolegomena to Charity), traces a similar logic in his description of evil. He argues that the logical end of all evil is suicide. Though suicide is not necessarily the worst of all evils, it is the end where all evil logically terminates, and for some of the reasons that I have been discussing. All evil, he argues, is evil because it separates us from the other, because it places the logic of revenge between us. This logic appears to affirm the self, insofar as it eliminates what is not the self, but in fact it is also a negation of the self, since it also eliminates the other in the self, to the point where self is nothing. The evil that I perpetrate on others, even and especially when this evil is revenge for the evil done to me, is thus always also an evil that I perpetrate on myself, and its result is always separation and isolation. The final end of this logic, of course, is suicide, the ultimate act of separation and isolation, the act in which is shown most essentially that the separation of the self from others is always accompanied and perhaps motivated by a desire to separate the self from the self.

It is for this reason, Marion argues, that “Hell is the moment when the soul finds itself alone.” Discovering itself apart from everything, even its self, the soul discovers itself absolutely alone, definitively imprisoned in its isolation, solely responsible for its isolation. The movement that I have been describing, therefore, and that TC has refined for me, the movement of holocaust, always ends up including the self in its destruction and perhaps even secretly originates in the desire for this self destruction. Social holocaust, in this sense, becomes the outworking of social suicide, the ultimate and essential act of separation.

I have had several conversations in the past few weeks about my understanding of encountering the other, an idea that I have written about several times, most recently in a post on the idea of Social Holocaust. There are two sorts of objections that people are making to this idea: first, that it privileges a sort of extroversion and gregariousness and fails to value solitude; and second, that it sets up an ideal of the encounter that real encounter always fails to achieve, an argument that resembles very closely the concern of TC’s comments on Being at Home. Both of these objections are valid to a degree, and I would like to nuance my argument in order to account for them.

To the first objection, that my privilege of encounter fails to recognize the value of solitude, I would suggest a distinction between the word ’solitude’ and the word ‘isolation’, arguing that encounter requires the first but is absolutely opposed to the second. In order that I encounter the other truly and properly, in order that I be able to respond to this encounter truly and properly, I must be prepared to listen and watch for the other, must be prepared to open myself to encounter with the other, and this preparedness requires of me not less solitude but more. Solitude, in this sense, is a deliberate and practised aloneness in which I encounter myself as other so that I may be prepared to encounter the other as other also. This solitude is a practice of aloneness that consists precisely in turning me outward toward openness.

Solitude is therefore absolutely distinct from isolation, which turns not to openness but to closedness, both to the self and the other. Whereas solitude is practised in a disciplined aloneness, isolation can be and often is practised in the crowd, where the sheer amount of superficial contact with everyone functions to shield me from really encountering anyone, where the crowd permits me to be so shallowly acquainted as to be virtually anonymous. This kind of isolation prevents both real encounter and real solitude. It is the practise of distraction from encounter and from solitude, through mere social stimulus, through the use of technological apparatus, through the acceptance of certain social institutions and infrastructures, and through acquiescence to certain cultural pressures. It is the kind of isolation that occurs when spouses read in bed to avoid speaking to one another, when friends spend their time together talking to others on their cellphones to avoid having to look each other in the eye, when people refuse to allow others into their homes for fear that their real lives will be exposed. It is a practise that says, “We will talk later when others are around, so that we will have an excuse not to mention what we are really feeling and thinking,” that says, “We can talk later on the phone when I am with someone else, so that I will not have to look into your eyes or anyone else’s,” and that says, “We will have you over later, when the house is clean, and when we are having a party, so you will see us at our best and we will not really have to share with one another.” It is what Derrida describes as “lethal isolation.”

It is just as difficult, therefore, for the extrovert as for the introvert to be open to the other, for the extrovert’s socialization can isolate as easily as the introvert’s separation. Encountering the other is not a matter of having more acquaintances, or going to more clubs, or holding more dinner parties, it is a matter of holding oneself open to the possibility that, at any moment and in any manner, I may be encountered by the other. I will not know who this other is. No activity of mine will discover this other to me. I can only make myself open, before I know who this other will be, and wait to be encountered. The practise of this discipline is not simple, either for the introvert or the extrovert.

All of this brings me to the second objection, that this ideal of encounter with the other will not always or ever be discovered in a real encounter with the other. TC expresses something like this in the observation that not everyone’s home matches the ideal home for which I am constantly advocating. In both cases, however, in the encounter and the home, which are inextricably linked for me, I would argue that this inadequacy is the essential and constitutive risk. There is no openness to encounter and no hospitality of the home that is not an openness and a hospitality to the possibility of hostility, violence, and death. To a certain degree, every openness will always be an openness to this violence, because there can never be pure encounter, can never be encounter with the other that is not immediately reduced to a relationship with another. In other words, all encounter, all hospitality, is inadequate to what it desires to be, which introduces an unavoidable violence into the act of encounter. As Emmanuel Levinas says, playing on a double meaning in the French, the host is always also the hostage to the one who is invited. The host always invites the one who will make him a hostage. There is no avoiding this violence.

In this sense TC is absolutely right. Every home fails to be a home in some respects, and some fail in almost every respect. Yet, the failure of the home, even at its worst, should by no means render the ideal of the home less desirable. What it should do, what it does do, is ask of us at least two things. First, it asks that we never confuse what is of the home and of the encounter and what is not, that we always distinguish clearly between what belongs to these ideals. Second, it asks that we always strive to approach the ideal of the home and the encounter, even and especially because we recognize that this ideal is not some concrete object that can ever be realised.

Those who are concerned with the home need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were beaten or neglected or abused, but that was not of the home; that was a violence done to you in the place where a home should have been. Come, let me invite you into my home. It also falls short of the ideal. It also admits that it does not wholly know what this ideal might be. Even so, it strives to be a home as best it can. Come strive with us, and when you go from us, to wherever it is that you will go, strive to make it a home also, as best you can, because there are many who looked for a home and found none, because there are many who need your home to be their home as well.”

In the same way, those who are concerned with encounter need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were hurt, and abandoned, and rejected, but that was not of the encounter; that was a violence done to you in the place where the encounter should have been. Come, now that we have encountered one another, let us strive to bear the responsibility of one another as best we can, though we admit that we will never be adequate to our ideal, and though we admit that we do not wholly know what this ideal might be. Though we must always be parting, let us go from one another, striving to be open to the other also, because there are many who have been hurt and many who have been abandoned, and they need those who will bear with them as well.”

We who are concerned with home and with encounter need to be willing to say and to do these things, even though they are a terrible risk, because we ask others and ourselves to be open to being neglected and abused again, hurt and abandoned again, because we can never guarantee that we will be adequate to the ideals of the home and of the responsibility of the encounter, because we will certainly and in every case fall short of these ideals. What we say and do always bears this risk, and those we ask to join us will always bear this risk as well. There is nothing more terrible than this, which is why it is always easier for me to isolate myself, even if I know that it will be lethal. It is always easier to allow myself to be distracted from the other, to guard the thresholds of the home. I cannot mitigate this risk and this terror, and I would not do so if I could.

I appreciate TC’s comments on Walking Suburbia and On Being at Home. I hope to address some of these comments more generally in later posts, but I thought that I would at least do TC the immediate courtesy of responding to the question of what exactly I mean by a social holocaust.

The phrase does not only serve my penchant for rhetorical excess, though it certainly does this too. It names accurately, at least in my opinion, what is happening to social relations in the cultures I inhabit; that is, it describes the systematic and systemic elimination of relational encounter in favour of technical connectivity. The symptoms of this displacement are everywhere. They can be seen in the replacement of cooking and eating together with the consumption of fastfood and preprocessed dinners, often in isolation; the replacement of walkable neighbourhoods with suburbs that can only be driven, usually in isolation; the replacement of mixed housing with mass produced developments that reinforce class distinction, sometimes gated for protection, and for isolation. This list could be made almost endless, and it would include everything from how we are employed, educated, entertained, medicated, and buried.

The impetus for this annihilation of encounter with the other is a fear of the other as such, a fear of anything that I cannot reduce to my self, a suspicion of anything that is not in my own image. It is not the logic of a genocide, which would eliminate only others of a particular race or culture. It is not the logic of a crusade, which would eliminate only others of a particular religion. It is not the logic of a political pogrom, which would eliminate only others of a particular politics. It is the logic of a holocaust, which eliminates anyone who is other to my idealized self, on whatever basis whatsoever.

The Nazi atrocities were a holocaust for precisely this reason. The final solution was not just a genocide directed at the Jews. It was several genocides, directed at Jews, and Slavs, and Gypsies. It was also a moral pogrom, directed at the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unacceptable. It was also a religious crusade, directed at Judaism and Islam. It was, in short, the means by which Nazi Germany defined and eliminated what was other to its ideal self: a final solution: a holocaust. This is precisely the logic of our culture’s elimination of relational encounter, only we have taken it much nearer to its limits, where anyone who is other, for any reason, is to be feared, where the other as such is to be feared, and where encounter with the other is always to be avoided.

Our holocaust is social rather than physical, obviously. We understand ourselves to be too civilized for the physical extinction of others. We are, in fact, quite proud of the tolerance that we show to others in the ideal, regardless of their race or gender or sexuality or whatever. What we fail to realize, however, is that our increasing tolerance for others in the abstract is being accompanied by a decreasing openness to encounter with the particular persons around us. We refuse to discriminate on the basis of age or religion, but we also refuse to actually know anyone, whatever their age and religion. The fabric of social relation, and therefore of ethics also, which is based upon encounter with the other, is annihilated. We kill no one, but treat everyone as if they are dead. This is our holocaust. This is our final solution.

Now, it could be objected that I go too far here, that we do still encounter others, sharing our homes with family, our cubicles with coworkers, our pubs with friends. This is undoubtedly true. It is never possible entirely to eliminate encounter with others, not on this side of death and sanity. Even so, long work hours, full schedules, job turnover, cubicle farms, technical gadgetry, frequent moves, all produce estrangement among families, coworkers, and friends, all permit us to be among each other without really encountering each other. This is partly why, in an era where connectivity is easier than ever before, counsellors and psychologists are treating ever growing numbers of patients who describe themselves as lonely, depressed, and disconnected. They have become isolated by a fear of encountering the other, by a refusal to be open to the possibility of encountering the other, by a rejection of the intimacy that is only possible through encounter with the other. This is our social holocaust.

The reasons for this fear of the other in our culture are complex, and I do not have the space here to discuss them adequately. I would suggest, however, that they have to do with a certain political expediency and with a certain economic efficiency, not to mention the various individualisms, religious, political, philosophical, economic, and otherwise, that have characterized modernism and those of us who are its heirs. There is much that could be said in this direction, but it must wait for another occasion.

We arrived in Durham, North Carolina early yesterday morning, after fourteen odd hours of driving through the night, and spent the rest of the day napping or otherwise recuperating. At some point in the afternoon, we took the kids and went for a short walk to the local shopping centre, a matter of five or ten minutes each way. The neighbourhood looked like an average suburban neighbourhood, very like some of the neighbourhoods in my own town, immaculately manicured and perhaps more than normally treed. Despite the familiar landscape, however, I felt oddly uneasy, as if there was something unnatural about the whole scene.

We reached the shopping centre, picking up the few things that we needed, and the feeling of strangeness passed, but it returned the moment that we began to walk back to the place where we were staying. I found myself watching a group of four maintanence workers trimming and edging the lawns, blowing the cuttings from the sidewalks and the roads, when I suddenly realized the source of my unease: except for those workers, we were the only people actually occupying the landscape. We had seen not a single pedestrian during the ten minutes to the store and only paid workers during the ten minutes back.

I actually shivered. The very things that I had been talking about in more abstract terms a few days earlier had suddenly become enacted for me, and the effect was unnerving. There was literally no neighbourhood, no welcome, no hospitality, no encounter. It was not that the people were unfriendly or unwelcoming. In fact, my experience of North Carolina is quite the opposite, that the people are most often very hospitable. It was just that there was no opportunity for hospitality, because there was no opportunity for encounter.
We were literally alone in the landscape, removed from the hundreds of people around us by the walls of houses and cars and social roles.

The rest of the day proceeded in much the same way. I spent several hours reading a book on the front step, from which I could see forty or fifty townhomes, and saw only three other people, all leaving their houses just long enough to enter their cars. I spent part of the evening talking with my family in the backyard, which is open to all the other backyards in the same row, and saw not another soul. I felt, for the first time in reality, the same feeling of emptiness that I have often felt in artistic expressions of emptiness as diverse as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Stephen King’s The Stand.

Perhaps it seems extreme to compare the emptiness of a suburban neighbourhood to an emptiness that is the result of a holocaust or an apocalypse, whether real or imagined, but to me the comparison is not entirely unjustified. There was a sense in that depopulated suburban landscape, at least to me, that something catastrophic and unnatural had occurred, that an unprecedented disaster had overtaken the relations that should form a community. What was must disturbing, however, was the realization that this disaster is not localized, that it has overtaken communal relations on so general a scale that it now appears as the normal social mode to many people. In my mind this is in fact a communal apocalypse. It is a social holocaust.

I am going on vacation very shortly, a matter of hours actually, and I was reflecting on the fact that this will probably not be much of a vacation for anyone. It will involve me driving with two small children and two other adults in a minivan from Guelph, Ontario to Savannah, Georgia, stopping to celebrate a family reunion with people I mostly do not know, then driving back to Guelph. I figure to spend roughly the same amount of time in the car as out of it, to eat vast amounts of bad restaurant food, and to sleep only as much as my children will sleep in unfamiliar surroundings. Suffice it to say that this may be my last post for a few days.

This got me thinking about what the word ‘vacation’ means. Because it involves the vacating of one space in order to occupy another, hopefully nicer place, it necessarily implies travel and distance, even if this distance is only small, and it implies that the space being left is somehow worse than the one being approached. The assumption is that the home and its worries need to be escaped in favour of some ideal place of relaxation and rejuvenation.

For me, however, the idea of vacation, even a more ideal vacation, is not attractive, both because it involves travel, which I generally do not like, and also because it involves vacating the space that I have painstakingly constructed to make me feel at home. I have to leave behind my library, my kitchen, my garden, and my neighbourhood, not to mention the friends who occupy those spaces with me. To vacate my home, therefore, is to remove myself from precisely the things I most enjoy, and all for the purpose of travelling uncomfortably, eating terribly, sleeping poorly, and conversing frivolously with people I hardly know.

I do not want vacations. I want holidays. I want holy-days, days that are set apart from the kinds of activities that consume my time and my energy, days that are devoted to the family, to the home, to reflection, to relaxation. I want, not to leave my home, but to inhabit my home more fully, to be more fully at home. Where a vacation tries to escape the things that trouble the personal and familial spheres, the holy-day consecrates these spheres anew, sets them apart once again, by purifying them for a time of the things that trouble them. I need fewer vacations and more holidays.

My regular Wednesday conversation with Don Moore was actually a Friday conversation this past week, the kind of enforced flexibility that is an occupational hazard of being a parent. Our discussion went in several directions, many of which deserved a post or more in their own right, but one of which resulted in one of those things that are so precious to any serious reader: a recommendation, in this case, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkely: University of California Press, 2002).

I have not yet read the book, of course, though I ordered it yesterday, so I want to emphasize that what I am valuing in this recommendation is not the book in itself, nor even the knowledge of the book as such. What I am valuing in this recommendation is the relational gesture that it performs between Don and I. The recommendation is valuable in this sense because of the risk that is implied when he says, “Read this; I think you will like it,” and the recognition of that gift when I say, “Yes, of course; I respect your judgement.” It is valuable because the gesture itself says, in its giving and its receiving, “Let this book be something that we have between us as a common ground and a common experience.” It is valuable because it says, “Let us try to know one another better by knowing that I have offered this, and you have received it, and we both have read it.”

The one who recommends, in this sense, gives a part of the self, opens a part of the self, to the one who receives it, and the one who receives the recommendation is one who receives the other through it, the one who is hospitable to the intimacy that the other offers. For this reason, it is possible for me to name a book to another without really recommending it, without it being a gift of my self to the other. The recommendation as such depends on the willingness of one to offer it or of one to receive it precisely as a recommendation, and it achieves what it is in potential only when both the giver and the receiver will it in this way.

The lending of a book, therefore, from one to another, has the potential to be an incarnational and a sacramental act, in that it both is and is not the embodiment of the relational gesture of recommendation. Though it can never be the recommendation as such, it is the body and the flesh of a recommendation. It bears, or it can bear, if it is willed to bear, the intimacy of the offering and receiving, the sharing and the remembering, that is implied in the recommendation. By physically offering what is mine, or by physically receiving what is yours, I enact with you the gestures of giving and receiving, the gestures of recommendation, that form the relation between us.

This third Sunday of every month is “With the Grain day”, which means that I take the Senior High class to a local coffee shop called With the Grain during what is normally Sunday School time. This gives me the chance to teach important lessons about good coffee and fresh baking, leading by example, of course.

This past Sunday, we were discussing some of the things that I raised in a recent post on Energy, Equity, and Encounter, issues related to walking and the opportunity to encounter those who live around us. I added to this some of the ideas that Jacques Derrida formulates in Echographies of Television, about being at-home, raising the possibility that one of the reasons we do not walk through our neighbourhoods is precisely because we are afraid to encounter our neighbours. Perhaps, I suggested, it is more comfortable for us to have images of our international, national, and communal neighbours broadcast to us through the television and the internet than it is for us to meet them on the street. Perhaps we prefer to stay in our own, home, in our own cars, in our own workplaces, precisely because we fear what an encounter with the other might mean.

One of my students then interjected something that I had never considered in this context before, but that nevertheless bears profoundly on the problem. He pointed out that, even when we are pedestrians in our neighbourhoods, as highschool students often are, we still find ways to prevent us from having to encounter those we meet: the cell phone, the ipod, the blackberry, or whatever, and I agree with this absolutely. I have always been critical of the ways in which these technical devices remove us from others, but I had never interpreted their use as a defence mechanism against the possibility of encountering others as such.

I am not arguing, of course, that all these technical devices necessarily prevent us from encountering others, and I even affirm the ways that they allow us to remain connected to others, though I intentionally contrast the idea of encounter with connection here. I am arguing, however, that the increase of mobile technology allows us to export beyond the walls of the home and the office the ability to isolate ourselves from possible encounter with the other. It extends our ability to replace encounter with connectivity. The ethical implications of this concern me greatly.