ISSUE XX, VOL. XX

Spring 2020: Busyness & Boredom

WHEATON’S UNDERGRADUATE LITERARY JOURNAL VOL. XVIII, ISSUE I

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ellie Shackelford

STAFF OF THE PUB

Caleb IngegneriBennett KilloughMegan KimRaven CulloMattea GernentzPeter BilesKathleen ParkerAugust SmithMonica ColónHannah PughLoren LaddAnnalise ChelsenElliot YoungNia BukerJames DiddamsNoah SmithSamuel ReichEmily NeadCaitlin Curry

Art EditorAssistant Art EditorPoetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorNarrative EditorAssistant Narrative EditorEssays EditorAssistant Essays EditorManaging EditorAlumni and Archives ManagerPublicistWebsite ManagerFundraising ManagerBusiness ManagerLayout and Design EditorHead CopyeditorCopyeditorCopyeditor

The Pub

Spring 2020Busyness and Boredom

White Man Red Hand

Warhol, Words, and Busynesswith Images

God the Meteorologist

Psalm

Vandeventer-Chequamegon

The Sabbath: Cultivating Timefor Compassion, an interviewwith Lydia Griffith

For My Grandmother

Beyond Utility: Critical Race Theory and Love of Neighbor

I Can Only Go As Fast As MyHealing Goes

Busybody

Wandering Worlds: Heidegger and Robinson on Boredom andMeaningful Life

Lo Prometo

Remarks on Boredom

Threadbare

Astorga

Flight Risk

Abigail Chen

ESSAYS

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Ally Stapleton

Grace Kim

Grace PratteNat Lewis

Ellie Shackelford

Madison Casteel

Caleb Ingegneri

Is Perkins

Ruth Wu

Cameron Harro

Alexandra Rivera

Thomas Wilder

Grace Gebhard

Juan Elvir

Mary Fischer

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Letter from the Editor

Sincerely,

Ellie ShackelfordEditor-in-Chief

SØREN KIERKEGAARD, WORKS OF LOVE, (HARPER COLLINS, 2009), PP 105-106.SIMONE WEIL, “REFLECTIONS ON THE RIGHT USE OF SCHOOL STUDIES WITH A VIEW TO THE LOVE OF GOD,” WAITING FOR GOD (HARPER COLLINS, 2009), PP 57-65.

The more I consider the busy and the bored, the more I think they look alike. The busy are always distracted and bustling, and the bored complacent and unproductive––but both embody truths about attention. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard wrote that “to be busy means, divided and scattered, to occupy oneself with what makes a man divided and scattered.” The busy invest in that which cannot make them whole, which cannot sustain, nor support, nor save. Attention is split in an attempt to cover every base— the classroom, workplace, and dining table—even while the body can only inhabit these one at a time. The bored are not “boring people,” or those without imagination, or simply lazy, to use Thomas Wilder’s words from this issue. Boredom, in its deepest sense, means not seeing anything worth doing. Our usual image of this sense of uselessness, sitting on the front porch watching cars go by, no longer applies. Now, it seeks enter-tainment and finds it, and there is no pause between the initial moment of listlessness and the satisfaction of finding a distraction, during which you might question yourself more deeply. The fragmented attention consumes, it scrolls, it changes the channel from the impeachment trial to reality TV. The Pub has filled a gap on Wheaton’s campus for over a decade now by providing independent journalism created by students for students. It engages the intersection of the intellectual life and the Christian way, and this mission leads our staff to ask this spring of 2020: what do busyness and boredom have to do with our lives as students and as followers of Christ? When I approached former editor-in-chief, Ellen Misloski, with our issue’s theme, she directed me to an essay by Simone Weil on the purpose of school studies. In the essay, Weil claims that the main purpose of scholarship is not the content of the various subjects, but the goal of developing the quality of one’s attention: every geom-etry problem, if we dedicate ourselves fully to it, strengthens the attention we can give to God in prayer, or to a sufferer in need of care. I hope this issue of The Pub invites readers to evaluate their busyness and boredom and calls for a renewed investment of attention in the eternal.

Letter from the Editor

White Man Red Hand

Abigail Chen

it’s a game we playthe red going pure whitein ten-nine-eightwaiting for the red yellow greenwatching the focused fish swimin a city of faceless diversity.

walk sign is on go powerfully but not head onalso led by a white man walkingseven-six-fivefour across abbey roadeasier, simpler if we all went one way.

it’s no candyland yellow brickno middle earth, no middle roadchoose your side or your directionno winning by waitingonly legal across black and white linesthree-two-one freedoms gone.

POETRY

breathe in the sighing exhaustavoiding the dear tourist, deerin the angry cab headlightsignoring the humanity confined to the side of the roadwe’d rather walk around the beaten traveler.

blink blink white to red a hand, feeding refusal and rejectionlack of responsibility to souls, your only piece of humanity treading the street, the water they swimin a city of faceless diversity.

stop. look. listen. play the (complicit) law-abiding look left and look rightdon’t be left behind or only walk behind whenthe white man leads.

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Warhol, Words, and Busyness with Images

Ally Stapleton

Looking at Andy Warhol’s art makes me laugh. It’s hard not to at least crack a smile when you walk into a room wallpapered in large pink and yellow cow heads, as Regenstein Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago recently was in celebration of a major Warhol exhibition. The show, entitled “From A to B and Back Again,” featured work of Warhol’s from the 1950s through the 1980s, including some of the artist’s most iconic pieces: his 1962 “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” and “200 One-Dollar Bills”; the 1967 “Marilyn” series, composed of screen-printed images of Marilyn Monroe in ten different colors; “Mao” from 1972, a fifteen-foot depiction of the Chinese then-pres-ident with strokes of blue eyeshadow and pink blush; and several of the artist’s self-portraits in his customary white-silver wig and black clothing. More than three decades after his death, Andy Warhol is still an icon. Looking at his work in 2020, it’s not a mystery why: Warhol’s art radiates a bright, loud, and somewhat manic energy which is totally consistent with the fast-moving and tech-obsessed world in which we live today—the pink and yellow cows tell you that much with one glance. Warhol was a leading figure of the school now known as “Pop” art—art which drew heavily from popular culture, known for its colors, kitsch, and appeal to mass audiences. He redefined what art could be and aligned himself un-equivocally with American mass consumerism, making his entrance into the world of fine art by painting thirty-two Campbell’s soup cans and hanging them on a wall like a supermarket display. His other subjects included Brillo pad boxes, bananas, coke bot-tles, celebrity faces, and ordinary people photographed in Polaroids at his industrial New York studio. He had, in short, a fetish for the everyday, and his work betrays an unapologetic materialism: a love of stuff declared with impudence and cheek. It glints with irony and a sort of flashy, unabashed American-ness. Using a highly calculated creative method for reproduction and recontextualization, Warhol elevated the stuff of everyday life to the level of art, blurring distinctions between high and low and

ESSAY

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putting it all on display for viewers. Warhol’s work as an artist was that of object production and, as such, was linked inextricably to consumer culture. He created many of his most famous images through a screen-printing process taken straight from commercial advertising (the field in which he began his career). Warholian “silk-screening” involves the simple act of tracing and then chemically transferring a photographic image onto a canvas. Designed for efficient mechanical reproduction in the advertising world, the tech-nique was co-opted by Warhol as a method of creating art. In using screen-printing, Warhol called into question the definition of “art” and what it means to create it. . “I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s,” Warhol once said. What does it matter if it was Andy Warhol or Jane Doe who pressed the ink from a stencil to a canvas to produce a portrait if the image produced is the same either way? His art obliterates the aura of uniqueness surrounding the art-object, elevating to the status of “fine art” objects and images made ubiquitous in daily life by advertisements, commercial branding, pop culture, and news. Warhol remained throughout his life an astute observer of consumer culture and, seemingly, an admirer of it. His work exists in symbiotic relationship with consumerism and its worship of the snapshot, of the sound-byte, of the brand names and slogans and celebrities. While other artists praised Pop art with high-flown definitions, calling it a “U-turn back to a representa-tional visual communication” and a “re-enlistment in the world,”[1] Warhol defined it more simply: “It’s liking things.”[2] Warhol liked things, all things, and he saw that the America around him did too. His work immortalized the stuff that made up the background to daily life in the America of his time, multiplying images for viewer consumption by opening up new and ever-increasing ways to consume them. The world which gave rise to Warhol and the world we inhabit today share a pervasive reality: image excess. In his world, images were supplied in ever-increasing abundance by billboards, magazines, television, advertising, news shows, and the per-sonal camera. Even more so today, we are bombarded, everywhere and always, by the visual. Thanks to social media and the ability that pocket-sized technology gives us to both produce and receive pictures (both still and moving, without sound and with it) at a near-constant rate, we are almost fully immersed in a world of images; they are an inescapable feature of our everyday lives. Warhol’s work both celebrates and critiques

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this reality. Warhol preceded the smartphone and the internet by several decades, but he seems uncannily in tune with the desires which these new technologies tap into: the desire for more, for stuff, for entertainment and sensation and excitement. His production-oriented artistic method feeds this desire, producing images by the dozen by recycling the same images his viewers were already seeing everywhere in tabloids, newspapers, and television. Warhol seems to recognize better than anyone our modern addiction to images, and he knows the human (or perhaps acutely American) tendency to saturate rather than satiate ourselves in the things which give us pleasure. His art is excess, reproducing the everyday and giving consumers exactly what they

clamored for: stuff, sensation—and always more of it. By taking this addiction to its extreme, however, Warhol also recognizes a darker side of it: his art demonstrates how truth—a different thing than mere seen reality—can easily fall to the wayside and become buried in the dust kicked up by our careening pursuit of the visual. Somewhere between the colorful Marilyns and tow-ering, comical Mao, a needling question forces its way into Warhol’s work: of all the faces and colors and headlines, what is real and what isn’t? This dark note bleeds from beneath the all-embracing hullaballoo of Warhol’s art, forcing viewers to peer beneath the surfaces and ask what—or whether—substance lies behind them. It’s present in Warhol’s “Death and Disasters” series in the skulls and guns which began to appear all over his work in the 70s and 80s. It’s there in his progression of “Twelve Jackies,” featuring prints and re-prints of Jacqueline Kennedy’s face following the assassination of her husband. It’s there in his massive “129 Die in Jet!” painting of a news headline proclaiming the same words; it’s found in “Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times” and “Electric Chair.” Andy Warhol is not naïve. In these works, Warhol is pointing to the way that images can numb us to what is really real. Images present us with a reproduc-tion of reality, but when we see them all over the place and they become the very air that we breathe, do they lose their meaning? How do we get at what is really beneath their surface? Is such a feat even possible?

His art is excess, reproducing the everyday and giving consumers exactly what they clamored for: stuff, sensation—and always more of it.

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In 1985, French social philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote a book identifying this same phenomenon in its title: The Humiliation of the Word. Ellul defines the “humiliation of the word” as the regression of verbal, word-based modes of thinking and, in their place, the steady forward march of imagistic thought. The modern world has been plunged into this predicament by the tidal wave of images which have come to define our daily lives. “A universe of images surrounds us: photos, films, television, advertising, billboards, road signs, illustrations, etc.,” Ellul says (114). “We habitually visualize everything.” His words feel chillingly relevant to our own cultural moment more than thirty years later. For Ellul, images are not inherently bad; in times now distant from us, imag-es could both enhance understanding and focus attention (Ellul notes this phenome-non in religious icons and in pieces of original artwork prior to the age of mechanical reproduction). But as the sheer number of images with which an individual comes into contact on a daily basis has exploded in recent centuries, their effect has mutated. Excessive reliance upon the image, Ellul argues, molds the way that human beings experience the world in potentially damaging ways, by flattening the distinction between seen reality and deep truth. Ellul argues that the “reality” presented by an image is a mere reproduction or representation of surface-level phenomena that are in need of language to translate them into actual, meaningful truth. Images represent; words do something deeper. To move from the imagistic world “of representation, spectacle, and information” (114), we need the word. Ellul fears that, submerged constantly in images, humans are losing the ability to move from superficial reality to deep truth. Take the common, inescapable inclination of modern humans to take photographs: “When a person is concerned with taking pictures. . .he worries about the choice of scene to be preserved. . .thus we become locked entirely into the visual problem alone. We abandon any effort at overall impression: what might have been an authentic experience is reduced to mere spectacle” (122). We trade the full experience for a snapshot, for a photo which flattens out sound and feeling and thought into a single dimension. Real life has many more dimensions than the visual alone, but pictures, and all images as a mode of com-munication, cause us to forget this: [Pictures] deal with the “picturesque,” which will always be the most superfi-cial. . .I can just hear the angry shouts: “You know perfectly well that you forget! Pic

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tures serve to remind you. . .without pictures, you will forget that you went to. . ., that you saw the mural of La Parisienne at. . .” What an enormous error! What deserves to be remembered—whatever has been lived deeply—is engraved in my being and in my memory. It changed me and made me a new person (123). The picture is essentially a memory depleted of its dimension and signif-icance, yet it surreptitiously becomes “the substitute for something living, just as images always do.” Ellul’s 1985 illustration is startlingly applicable to 2020, as it forces us to reckon with the idea that the image—always available on our phones from our friends, from news sites, from the social media accounts of people both known and unknown—“prevents us from living but gives us the strong impression that we are living” (123). We are in danger of becoming trapped within a reality which is foreign to what we are truly experiencing in the moment, but which gives us the illusion of being something “real.” We rely on images to preserve, to inform, and to entertain us. In doing so, have we lost touch with dimensions of experience which they cannot convey? At first glance, Andy Warhol appears to play into all of Ellul’s worst fears about the humiliation of the word beneath the all-powerful image. The “world of representation, spectacle, and information” is exactly where Andy Warhol pitched his camp, as currently seen in the pink-and-yellow clamor of Regenstein Hall. But to view Warhol as the fulfillment of Ellul’s cautionary oracle is ungenerous, and, I would argue, mistaken. For lying beneath all of Warhol’s work is the insistence that viewers look beneath the surface. The insistence is sneaky, lurking under the temptation to leap from one sensational, colorful surface to another which taunts any viewer in the labyrinth of “From A to B and Back Again.” But by supplying us image upon image, Warhol reminds us of our constant tendency to substitute the image for the thing itself. He calls our bluff; he exposes us for who we really are. There is an emptiness which lingers as one finishes making their way through “From A to B and Back Again,” a vacancy left unfilled by the endless parade of images. Warhol’s seeming cel-ebration of the image is proved insufficient in the end, and Warhol knows this better than anyone. It bears repeating: Andy Warhol is not naïve. As he gives us surface upon surface to skate across with our easily distracted, image-drunk eyes, Warhol challenges the discerning viewer to look deeper. The surface, he hints, is not the thing itself. The question of what is real and what is not is the ultimate question for

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both Ellul and Warhol. As Christians, and even simply as human beings, we must constantly wrestle with the same question. Humans are, by nature, animals of symbol. We communicate indirectly: when we read, we translate marks on a page into sounds; the sounds form words, which serve as meaning-laden representatives of things in the actual world. When we drive, we use colors and shapes—white lines vs. yellow, solid vs. dashed, a red hexagon vs. a red triangle—to determine how we move two-ton chunks of metal around the road. Christians operate at the level of the symbol to an even greater degree than non-believing persons, for we profess belief in a reality— and a deity—utterly unseen. This deity is communicated to us through words in an an-cient text, through liturgies, through sacraments, through Sunday’s morning meetings and sprinklings of water and bread and grape juice. We traffic in the material as a way of accessing that which transcends the material, but we still never come face to face with “the thing itself ”—with the God whom we declare to be the maker of all things visible and invisible. The question of how one operates between the material and the symbolic—the surface and what’s beneath it—is therefore all the more pressing for people of faith. Ellul is concerned that we are settling for surfaces, never penetrating through them to that which is real, true, determined, and determinative. We are so

We are in danger of becoming trapped within a reality which is foreign to what we are truly experiencing in the moment, but which gives us the illusion of being something “real.”

fascinated by the image, by the superficial reproduction of a thing, that we can lose interest in the thing itself; eventually, in our minds, we replace the thing with the representation. And we continue, settled and soothed and satisfied by this. I argue that Warhol, an undeniably unconventional Catholic who attended weekly Mass until his death, offers us hope for this predicament. What Warhol notices better than anyone is this: we are born idol-makers. The mate-rial magnetizes us; we crave the image, and given free reign, we will, nine times out of ten, abuse its power. We are still, in sum, people of the golden calf. We are beings of sight, convinced by what we can see with our own eyes. We fixate on it and build it up

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to be something more than it is, changing it through repetition, recontextualization, and glorification. The image becomes our object of worship, though we go to church and perfunctorily sing praise songs to another God multiple times per week. We become lost in the surfaces we see right in front of us—and lose track of truth. Andy Warhol’s art is a shrine to this addiction, to the idol-making human heart. But highlighting the human need for the material does not preclude the search for that which transcends it, and I believe that Andy Warhol knew that. His work matters because it can spur on that pursuit while disabusing us of the rosy-glassed illusions we may like to believe about ourselves. A Warholian lens on the pursuit of the true allows a robust acknowledgement of human corruption by showing us what fascinates us and bringing forth the ephemerality of our fascination. He uncovers our cardinal sin: that we are easily distracted by that which we ought not to love. In short, Andy Warhol gets it right, as far as humans go. And I think there’s something about the world at large he gets right, too. Meaning, for us material beings, exists enfolded. We do not have access to it all at once (though we may deceive ourselves into thinking

We are still, in sum, people of the golden calf.

that we do), and what’s true, whether we like it or not, must be prodded for through the packaging of signs, indications, approximations, and representations both legit-imate and misleading, effective and vapid. Warhol seems to luxuriate in these layers, neither denying the image its natural place in our lives nor ignoring its insufficiency for fully satisfying us. He puts our idols on pedestals and makes even more compel-ling those things which capture our attention, and yet, by wrenching them from their context and allowing us to see them afresh, he puts us face to face with the bizarre misordering of our own souls. He invites us to laugh at ourselves, at our gods, at what, as Ellul might say, we have chosen to trade “the word” for. Andy Warhol shows us our-selves with a candor seldom matched in the flow of our daily lives, and through this he can drive us to be better viewers of the world. He gives us images with the hope that, perhaps, we might learn not to stop consuming them, but to consume them better.

[1] Jim Dine, another Pop artist.[2] Interview with Gene Swenson, 1963.

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VISUAL ART

God the Meteorologist

Grace Kim

Sometimes we are faced with our gods.

And sometimes we flush them down the toilet.

Toilet paper neatly stacked, floor tiles nicely polished. It doesn’t matter.

When I hear that you are no longer with him, it is no different: shredded paper or photograph.

That book never made me a zen master or a motorcycle mechanic.

Voice is recognized and recognition is through memory.

Memory takes time and our days are consisted of hours.

Haha!

POETRY

Psalm

Grace Pratte

Hear my voice when I call. Be merciful -or answer me. Feel the soft fleshof the cool cheek. What liliesare you clothing far from my side?

I imagine you leaving his bones,watch the wind scatter the dust. My skinwalks down the road without mewhile the preacher pre-ordains the dead.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodnessof the living in the land of the dead. Goddoes not watch his children die. Answerme. Here, stones do not move

to cushion the feet. They burn and vomitblood on the linoleum. The priest fills his cup and declares it stagnant. Be merciful. Give us todayour children back alive. They are more

than your glory. Answer me.

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NARRATIVE

Vandeventer-Chequamegon

Nat Lewis

Not long ago, I was stopped on my morning run, a little after sunrise. The sun was just half a peach, low slung in the air, redding the bay, which has two com-plicated names. The first is Chequamegon. I was running along the water, like I have always done before breakfast. The second name I know for the water is Vandeventer. As I ran, someone yelled out. I turned around and saw a man sprinting at me full force across the grass from one of the houses on Harbor View Drive. I was a little shaken to see him coming at me like that. Those waterfront houses on Harbor View Drive are big. No one we know lives there. They are rented out to rich commuters and young

It is not the kind of thing you come to know if you are only passing through. It is the kind of thing you pick up over time.

lawyers from Minneapolis who stay when they need a break. “You all right?” said the man, catching his breath. “You need any help?” The man said he had seen me running while he was having his coffee. He said I looked like I was in trouble. I told him I did not need any help. He said he was sorry, that I looked like I was running from some-thing, like a fire. Or a burglary. I told him I was fine. I told him I have always run along Vande-venter-Chequamegon in the mornings. Did his running to me mark the moment of my crossing an invisible line? I knew he would not have run to me if I had looked young. He squinted at me. He said he had never heard of either of those names before. It made sense to me. How could I explain it to someone like him? It is not the kind of thing you come to know if you are only passing through. It is the kind of thing you pick up over time. Myself, I have never known if there is a right time to use one name for the bay over another. Or why both names are so difficult. I have always lived here.

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I should really know the names for the water and when to use them. “I am fine,” I said to the man. But now when I run, I look over my shoulder every so often for people who think I am running from something, to keep myself from being startled again, the way that man startled me. If words were paperweights, they would keep the lived things down, would prevent them from flying up like the corners of a tablecloth. But they will not stay down. They will rise through it, just as if those words had no power at all. When it comes to the problem of choosing a name for the water, I get around it by simply saying “the bay.” Anyone can see what bay I mean. It does not make me angry to be old.

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The Sabbath: Cultivating Time for Compassion, an interview with Lydia Griffith

Ellie Shackelford

When the theme Busyness and Boredom was selected for this issue of The Pub, I immediately turned to someone with whom I’ve had many conversations about busyness in the life of a Christ-follower. Lydia Griffith is a Wheaton student (‘20) who has initiat-ed conversation within her spheres of influence about Sabbath-keeping through conver-sation and invitation. Here she shares her convictions about the compassion produced by pursuing a day of rest.

“But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire com-passion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.” Matthew 12:3-7 NASB

Ellie:What does the Sabbath mean to you?

Lydia:In my family growing up, we took a really legalistic approach to the Sabbath. We weren’t allowed to watch football on Sundays because the football players were work-ing, and we weren’t allowed to shop at Wal-Mart on Sundays because those people were working. When I left home, I started going to the grocery store or going to restaurants on Sundays and basically with that rejected the whole notion of Sabbath. When I was a freshman, I would regularly do homework on Sundays and got rid of the idea of Sabbath-keeping altogether. When I became interested in the topic again, it was funny because people that I talked to, especially administrators here, would say things like, “Well, the Sabbath doesn’t apply in the same way that it did in the Old Testament because Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath,” and––

INTERVIEW

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Ellie:What does that mean?

Lydia:I have never known. [laughs] I have never known. But they say, yes, it’s no problem to break the Sabbath because Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath.Where the Sabbath itself originates is in the Old Testament, specifically in the creation narrative when God says, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, and on the seventh day, you should rest.” So the question is always like, well, what if I am medical personnel or something and I am forced to work on Sunday? In that case, I think that there be a day of rest is the important thing. But certainly it’s valuable to have a consensus on a day of rest, and I think if that falls on the day that you attend church that’s even better.

Ellie:How would you describe the meaning of the Sabbath?

Lydia:Well, most poignantly in my life, it’s an act of faith, saying that God will provide if I do all my work in the six days. I try to keep my work focused and directed, that I may rest on Sundays, but rarely do I go to bed on Saturday night thinking I’ve done everything I need to do to prepare me for next week. In the most concise way, I would say that Sabbath-keeping is just putting away the to-do list.

Ellie:So what does your Sabbath typically look like? What activities do you abstain from and how do you use your time?

Lydia:I’ve often said that I won’t rake my own leaves but I would rake my neighbor’s leaves, as long as I’m not paid for it. I’m happy to participate in the activities of my neighbor, but not in my own productivity. So I’m not going to build a resumé on a Sunday, or do my homework, even if it’s homework for my theology class. The ways that I typically spend my Sundays are reading books that are non-academic, time with families, and long walks. I try to keep my days unscheduled because so much of my week is scheduled. I go to church and I don’t bring my phone with me. That’s a way to lose track of time, and I won’t do scheduling or responding to emails or messages on Sundays that are logistical or business-related.

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Ellie:To call back to your family’s practices when you were growing up, do you shop or go out to restaurants on Sundays?

Lydia:I do go out to restaurants on Sundays. I have gone back and forth on that. Maybe that’s a point of inconsistency in my own life. The way that I typically rationalize it is that they would be working anyway. But maybe that’s not a fair rationalization. There are other places that I grumble about being open, specifically Sam’s on Sunday morn-ings, which is staffed by students on Sunday mornings during what is traditionally a church time.

Ellie:Let’s turn to the campus conversation a little bit more. Wheaton has a policy which closes all academic buildings on Sunday and disallows sports teams to participate in sporting events. And it’s led to some controversy on campus. A Student Government member campaigned on promises to end this rule and discussions on the forum wall have been sparked about what’s lost because teams can’t compete in Sunday events. What do you make of this rule?

Lydia:In general, I think that an institutional stance regarding the Sabbath seems to make a lot of sense at a Christian institution, and it would actually be a little bit baffling to me if it were otherwise. I think to undo some of the rules regarding the Sabbath seems to be a little bit short-sighted, as it is forgetful of the need for janitors and staff members that are forced to work if buildings are open. If students were perfectly responsible and always threw away the trash when they left, and vacuumed, and didn’t leave pizza boxes––if students were perfectly consistent and perfectly clean, maybe we could have a different kind of conversation and talk about the edifying use of academ-ic buildings. I could see Adams Hall being used well on a Sunday for art in a construc-tive, nonproductive way. I hear those concerns, but I don’t take them very seriously because I’m much more concerned about forcing other people to work on a Sunday.

Ellie:How has taking a Sabbath affected you? And what do you think it could do for oth-ers?

Lydia:Well, I think it’s helped me to be better acquainted with myself and it has certainly helped me to better participate in what’s going on in the neighborhood of Wheaton. The Sabbath has been an instrumental piece in my ability, and freedom, to be a neigh-

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bor and not just a tourist in Wheaton. I’m not here just to study; I’m a resident. I have spent Sundays chatting with strangers in coffee shops, or writing stories, or getting to know those who actually live here in a long-term sense. And all of those have been ex-ercises in learning to have a more compassionate imagination, as Marilynne Robinson writes about it. I have been disheartened by campus responses to sins that have been committed by students against other students. There are a few different examples that come to mind in our recent campus memory. But I’ve been disheartened by some of the responses, like, “Wow, if I had known what this person would do, I never would’ve talked to them,” or, “if I had known who this person really was, I would have been distant––”

Ellie:––Which is the opposite of what Christ does for us.

Lydia:Right, the opposite of the Gospel. And when people lack compassion toward our fellow students, even when they have done wrong, it feels personal to me. There is no difference in my wrongs and the wrongs of others.

Ellie:Yeah. So you think there’s a severe lack of compassion in regards to other people, despite the fallenness of all?

Lydia:Yes, and I think busyness prevents us from getting to know ourselves and getting to know those around us in a real sense. The only reason I can have compassion for these people who have been found guilty is because I’ve been able to take the time to get to know people and to get to know my own failings.

So maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but losing track of time and getting to know another person is really important. This week I was sitting next to a fireplace late one night with a local person that I’m sure you’ve seen before. We’ve had many conversations

“Busyness prevents us from getting to know ourselves and getting to know those around us in a real sense.”

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and I asked him at one point if he’d ever felt known. And he kind of shook his head no. I mean, he lives in Wheaton where there are a lot of professional counselors, pro-fessional listeners, basically, professional friends, all around you. He finally said to me, “I think I need to go to Mayo Clinic for counseling.” And, I said, “Maybe that would be helpful.” And he paused and said, “Because at least there, I know that I would have two hours to talk. I can’t talk as fast as everybody else. And if I went to a counseling session, I could pay for two hours and I would have time to talk.” And what I realized is that the curse of this man in Wheaton, Illinois, is that he is surrounded by a ton of people who don’t have two hours to sit here and listen. That’s a really simple gift that you can give to anybody—if you’ll give it.

Ellie:And if you have 24 hours of the Sabbath, maybe you have two hours to give.

Lydia:Yeah. And if you forget your phone and your watch and there’s nothing planned. I try not to plan things even with friends, because I want to be able to look at the person sitting across from me and say, “I have two hours right now. Let me listen to you right now.” On a different occasion, I asked someone a question that was probably a little too personal. And he looked at me and asked, “How much time do you have?” And I said––I lied to him, I didn’t have time, I was going somewhere else––and I actually just said, “Time.” And he stood up and came across the table and hugged me when I said that word. And he proceeded to tell me things that I had never known. And so I just canceled what I was supposed to go to, a little thing that could totally wait. But the gift of time is huge. It’s nice of you to give twenty dollars or whatever but really what people want is for someone to say, “I’m gonna sit for two and a half hours. We’ll talk until you’re done.”

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For My Grandmother

Madison Casteel

Tell me a story I’ve already heard twice.Retrace the dandelion sidewalk. I’ll pour over the newspaper.

Give me a melody and words worthy of it.

Turn a symphony from flour, sugar, worn linen.

I swear I’m listening.

I swear I saw you tear the hem from your dress to embroider mine.

POETRY

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Beyond Utility: Critical Race Theory and Love of Neighbor

Caleb Ingegneri

“Where there is discourse or where there are notes missing in law’s written score, our conversations must be a provisional search for notes that are harmonious with the way we experience the world” —Charles Lawrence III (337) We paddled under the bridge through the lily pond. After ten days of canoe-ing in the Boundary Waters, existence shone rich and warm as a Rembrandt, the night sky a cauldron of blue. I told Dr. Buttman about my jaded months of searching in the desert suburbs of Phoenix. He promised to listen until I asked for feedback, but as I told my story, he interrupted —“Caleb, can I say something? This might be shocking.” I complied. “You know God. You just have too short of a memory; you forget who you belong to.” His correction flushed me with guilt, guilt that motivated a journey: the journey to become Christian. If I was to know God, I had to learn to listen, to remember, to pay attention.

*** One month after the conversation in the lily pond, I rode my yellow bike with whitewall tires and sky-blue handlebars to a cultural festival at President Park. The scent of hydrangeas mingled with the mild air and babble of the crowd. I sat at a pink granite table, opened Works of Love by Kierkegaard, and began to read aloud, my words cadenced to the Afrobeat band playing on the stage in front of me. Tears welled up in my eyes. How clear it is—you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Kierkegaard’s insight into Christ’s words: by loving your neighbor, you learn how to love yourself, who you are becoming—Christian.

Imagine this: you sit in your apartment; you are writing; you are busy. It’s midnight. The deep purple darkness outside pales in the fluorescent, surgically precise lights.

ESSAY

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I’ve noticed in myself and people around me a longing to do more. It stems from an ambition or passion natural to life; we long to engage in rewarding, authentic action, yet instead, we often busy ourselves with more to do. This is the crucial dif-ference between action and busyness. Surely, we can act from our busyness, but such action falls short of rested, contemplative love of neighbor.

Meister Eckhart, a 12th century German mystic and Dominican priest, says that “the contemplative person should indeed avoid even the thought of deeds to be done during the period of his contemplation but afterwards he should get busy, for no one can or should engage in contemplation all the time, for active life is to be a respite from contemplation” (3). I read this while swinging in a hammock, sleep-deprived, struggling to balance my desire of boundless time for thinking, reading, and writing with the reality of my job—my duty to campers. I carried hundreds of kayaks between the green-roofed, oak-framed boathouse and the lake before I understood: contem-plation exists to help us act.

When Eckhart referred to contemplation, he also likely meant pure silence—the silence of the dimly coruscating stars. His sermons were written things, objects born of action. His message was vital as I tried to write this essay in the middle of a busy semester. Eckhart wouldn’t have done this; he wouldn’t have had the lamp or the computer to do so, yet somehow he was admirably productive and insightful, and he cared for people and loved them well. It is pressingly clear that living a good life does not involve heedless busyness. The most productive eras in my life come when I know to stop—eras when I know when to rest in bed or sit enfolded in candlelight with friends.

***The same Christ who says “come to me all you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” also says “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Forrest Gander says: “I hear the busyness in their voices, they hear the busyness in my voice.

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To be oblivious, in some manifold danger. And so one lives” (55).

We are in manifold danger. We often act and live from positions of heedless busyness. As Christians, we are compelled to act, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Eckhart says that “no person in this life may reach the point at which he can be excused from outward service. Even if he is given to a life of contemplation, still he cannot refrain from going out and taking an active part in life” (3). To love our neigh-bors, we must know them. Put yourself in my experience: it is fall, you are on the lawn between Buswell Library and Edman Chapel. You’re reading “Looking to the Bottom”, a Critical Race Theory article by Mari Matsuda. The late summer songs of black-capped chickadees and warblers whistle over the rumble of distant lawnmowers. Ants meander up your

We can act from our busyness, but such action falls short of rested, contemplative love of neighbor.

legs. You are sweating in the sunlight. You start to hear Matsuda’s arguments that the racialized pathways in the United States and academia have silenced minority voices. The lawnmowers fill the air with the scent of grass clippings and slowly silence the birdsong. You walk into the halls of Buswell looking for a quiet place to read.

Matsuda contends that “neutral application of legal principles is false” and that those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen. Looking to the bottom—adopting the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise—can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice” (63). Epistemological questions suddenly drift into murky, relativistic shallows when separated from looking to the bottom. Matsuda contends that “when notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, are examined not from an abstract position but

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from the position of groups who have suffered throughout history, moral relativism recedes and identifiable normative priorities emerge” (63). By paying attention to individual and collective histories of oppression, Christians will find how and where they must act. The new normative priorities are found at the new epistemological source, the “actual experience, history, culture and intellectual tradition of people of color in America” (63). If we want to love our neighbor, we must listen to racialized minorities and regard their pressing needs with utmost seriousness.

*** In The Word and the River: Pedagogy as Scholarship as Struggle Charles Lawrence III argues that CRT is a movement of legal scholarship that harmonizes with the experiences of oppressed people. Lawrence challenges us to consider how the history of racism and oppression has created physical conditions and needs in our present society. CRT, as a legal discourse, is driven by this quest, the need to articulate

Instead of isolating racism to discrete acts and thereby making scapegoating possible, we must shift our per-spective to those at the bottom, racialized minorities experiencing oppressive conditions.

these oft-ignored narratives of experiences of oppression. CRT contends for remedies that fulfill the practical needs of oppressed groups and challenges us to deny what Critical Race Theorist, Richard Delgado, calls “studied indifference.” (51) In order to subvert studied indifference, we must avoid heedless busyness. We must pay attention to the most pressing needs elucidated by Critical Race Theorists and prioritize those needs over other, more trivial concerns.

Lawrence calls racism a disease. He contends that racism is a pervasive part of reality which has formed the present conditions of inequality for racialized minori-ties. Discrete acts of racism are the symptoms of a larger disease. Instead of isolating racism to discrete acts and thereby making scapegoating possible, we must shift our perspective to those at the bottom, racialized minorities experiencing oppressive conditions.

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*** I began reading CRT two falls ago. I first read Faces at The Bottom of the Well, by Derrick Bell, CRT’s foundational figure. Bell argues strongly against ‘col-orblind’ and ‘race-neutral’ perspectives. In “Serving Two Masters” Bell discusses the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Brown is a prominent example of the historic legalization of inequality through colorblind policy. In short, Brown “or-dered the end of state-mandated racial segregation of public schools” (Bell, 20). It also became practically obsolete in record time; implementation of desegregation proved virtually impossible. The principal reason was the Brown opinion’s inherently flawed, colorblind, perspective. There is no legal neutrality on matters of race. Decisions are motivated by histories full of intended values and meanings. The concern which called for Brown was never for blacks to have the right to associate with whites—the concern was that racial segregation was harmful to blacks. Instead of pretending that society is devoid of pervasive injustice conditioned by racism, we must recognize how histories of racism establish and perpetuate housing and education patterns which segregate schools by race and class. Bell contends that “equality for blacks will require the surrender of racism-granted privileges for whites” (22). Bell contends for repara-tive actions in education in education to combat educational inequality. If we are to help in these reparations, we must listen to CRT.

*** In “The Imperial Scholar” Delgado argues that minority legal scholarship on race goes unregarded by the elite inner circle of race scholars that are in majority racialized white. As a consequence of this disregard of racialized minority scholarship, even legal changes made with good intentions are misguided. Without ‘looking to the bottom,’ legal scholars provide incomplete solutions which fail to disrupt the condi-tions which enable racism. On the surface, things may appear more just, particularly through the adoption of color-blind rhetoric, but the bottom remains the same. The symptoms of racist acts are less apparent, but, the disease-like conditions of racism remain.

Delgado contends that inequality in education is more than an unfortunate, abstractly “created problem requiring remedy.” Inequality is the tangible condition of “simple injustice requiring immediate correction.” If “racial issues” are perceived

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as benign, “leisurely treatment is not surprising” (50). Critical Race Theorists direct our attention to the experiences of educational inequality in the United States. They reveal that pervasive racism causes pressing needs among racialized minorities. As Christians, we are called to love our neighbors sacrificially. We must disregard our own ends and take their needs more seriously than our own. To do this at Wheaton College, we must disregard our busy pursuit of trivial scholarship. Instead, we must turn our ears towards scholarship such as CRT — scholarship which realigns our priorities with Christ’s priorities.

Delgado agrees with Bell’s analysis in “Price of Racial Remedies” that when “racial inequality is mainly the fault of the isolated redneck, outmoded ritual violence, or even long-abrogated governmental actions, then remedies that would encroach on simple ‘conditions’ of life—middle-class housing patterns, for example, or the autono-my of local school boards—are unnecessary” (25). To change the conditions of racial inequality, we must seek to disrupt the status-quo. Alan David Freeman defines two legal perspectives on race: the “perpetra-tor” perspective and the “victim” perspective. The perpetrator perspective tends “to focus on intentional and determinable acts of discrimination inflicted on the victim by some perpetrator and to ignore the more pervasive and invidious forms of discrim-inatory conditions inherent in our society” (50) It is obvious: racism is more than a discrete, discernable act. Racism is a condition set upon the world after colonization, slavery, “lynch mobs, segregated bathrooms, Bracero programs, migrant farm labor camps, race-based immigration laws, or professional schools that, until recently were lily-white” (50).

How middle- and upper-class white Americans see race has everything to do with how they can better love their neighbors. Wheaton College and the city of Wheaton is a racialized white space. Recognizing and rejecting the sinfulness of the perpetrator perspective is necessary, especially for Christian scholars. Their work has a consequential influence on the larger white evangelical world, so implementing the victim perspective in opposition to the perpetrator will likely be met with resistance. As Delgado says: “self-interest, mixed with inexperience, may make it difficult for the privileged white male writer to adopt this perspective [the victim perspective]

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or face up to its implications” (50). Racial reparations which lead to change in the status-quo have an inherent cost to whites. Delgado warns whites against pursuing racial reparation “on the grounds of utility or distributive justice” (50), as they often do. Racialized minorities bear the burden of racism, not the burden of proof. Making reparations and listening to racialized minorities is tied to the intrinsic individual duty of each white Christian to love their neighbor. The goal of reparations is not mere neutrality or equal opportunity, but to counteract the history of white suprem-acy which has brought about the current conditions of inequality in our society, the conditions of our neighbors’ pressing needs. Reparations should be thought of as essential remedial efforts to cease the spread of racism’s blight. Christians, we must go beyond the utility of loving your neighbor for yourself to loving your neighbor as yourself. We must redefine our concerns to assume the concerns of those with pressing needs; we must look to the bottom. This means

Racialized minorities bear the burden of racism, not the burden of proof.

first and foremost that we must attend to Critical Race Theory as a valuable source in forming normative priorities for our actions. In listening to CRT we will discover pressing needs which we have a duty to meet. Through this process of listening, we must reject the perpetrator perspective and embrace an earnest pursuit of remedies.

There is a weight to our words, scholarship, and daily lives. Wheaton Col-lege, as a Christian school which is majority white, has a large influence on the wider evangelical world. It is also in manifold danger. It has a racist history which contin-ues into the present. If we, as the Wheaton community, earnestly hope for Christ’s kingdom, a kingdom where we love our neighbors as ourselves, we must be willing to disrupt the status-quo. Loving people requires learning to listen, to contemplate, and to act. To learn this, Christians will find no better help than Critical Race Theorists. For Christ’s sake, we must listen to Critical Race Theory, and then we must act.

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Works Cited:

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. Crit ical Race Theory: the Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York, NY: New Press, 2010.

Eckhart, Meister and David O’Neal. Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Noth-ing: Sermons, Writings, and Sayings. Boston: Shambhala, 1996.

Gander, Forrest, and Michael Flomen. Be With. New York: New Directions Publish-ing Corporation, 2018.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Dis-courses. Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper, 1964.

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I Can Only Go As Fast As My Healing Goes

Is Perkins

VISUAL ART

Each of these collages focus on moving towards healing through a contem-plative art based approach. This practice allows my body to assemble the different scraps, fragments, assignments, interactions, and memories without ascribing mean-ing to the product, apart from recognizing that the meaning is within the process of the “putting together”. These works invite me into a movement towards wholeness through trusting a material that is less than whole. The themes center around only being able to go as fast as my healing allows. In the midst of busy-ness, we often neglect the healing needed to fully move forward, instead we split ourselves further trying to move beyond the next threshold of healing. We can think that we can force recovery by skipping ahead, but how can we forget the pace it takes for new skin to form? Working with the tiny discards of paper in a rhythmic arrangement permits me to stitch together the memories and the moving forward in a way that challenges the pressure to be someone or something I am not.

Continued on next page

Busybody

Ruth Wu

Where Are You

Boredom is the most terrifying place to be.Your mind is free to ponderand wander to spaces unseen.More petrifying than horror,more frightening than fear —in thrillers your adrenaline is pumpingin boredom there is simply nothing therebetween you and the wide expanse of everything that could be and impossibility of everything that would be if given a chanceof everything that should be but is brushed off upon first glance.In boredom you freeze with too many directions to go:the narrow and wide roaddiverged in yellow wood,the footsteps of a wayward fellow,the beliefs everyone else follows...Trapped by the multitude of ideas,you stick with having noneand sit stuck in invisible mudwaiting for someone else to make it fun.

POETRY

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Busyness is the most dangerous place to be.As you sit down to drink coffee, researching about clean water and environmental sustainability,you reach for your cup and realize that it’s long been empty and not reusable.It was a momentary slip of memory,but you mentally berate yourself.After a couple of hours of cramming for exams,the whole experience repeats(not speaking from experience or anything).Then, after working through the night,from the moon’s first breath until daylight,you are barely awake when you realizehow thirsty you are,because although you got a new cupyou have yet to drink a drop.

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Wandering Worlds: Heidegger and Robinson on Boredom and Meaningful Life

Cameron Harro

ESSAY

“Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments of those who had died in pursuit of the objective and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget that they have forgotten.”

—Wendell Berry

We tend to think of the end of the world involving climate disaster or killer robots or nuclear annihilation, but that might be an inadequate taxonomy. What if we’re already living in a world that is dead or dying, and we’ve just not picked up on it? Here’s a hot take: your world doesn’t just exist by itself. Don’t worry, this is not a headfirst dive into solipsism; I won’t deny that things like the chair that you’re sitting on exist. This is supposed to be an observation about human experience. In his lecture “What is Metaphysics,” Martin Heidegger sketches out an account of how human beings exist in a world. Humans are fundamentally practical creatures, he says, and primarily interact with their surroundings by referring to the everyday projects that they find themselves engaged in. We encounter our world first and foremost in the terms of meaning and the purpose that we use when we participate in it. This empha-sis on meaning and purpose may be particularly relevant to us today; news reports seem to indicate that our society suffers from a peculiarly contemporary affliction of meaninglessness and boredom, leading potentially to depression and even to suicide. If Heidegger’s account of human existence is remotely plausible, then maybe some-thing has gone wrong with our world, and investigating this subject more might give us some clues as to how we got here, and maybe even how we might escape.First, an abbreviated version of Heidegger’s account of a world. To all people, he says, objects, locations, and even other people are characterized as ends, means, or both. All of these are linked together, becoming nodes in the network of practical meaning

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in which we all live. This network—rather than just the set of independently-existing objects—is what Heidegger calls a world. Even if we may at times strive to view the world apart from our own participation, for instance in the practice of natural science, this network of meaning and purpose is the first and final realm of our experience. You experience your chair right now as something to sit on, and even if you get up and stand back to consider it as a piece of woodworking, a form of organic material, or a collection of atoms, you will eventually restore to it the meaning that it gains when you use it for the purpose of sitting. You may have gained some valuable informa-tion in the interlude, but it is information that is abstracted from what is essential to human life. Further, in his “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger discusses how worlds get their start by saying that a work of art “sets up a world.” He gives an (ideal-ized) account of a Greek temple and its function in its context. By virtue of housing both the statue of the god and its worship, the temple becomes the center of the com-munal world, the focal point of worship, attention, and life. It “fits together and at the

Such a person could easily be described as “worldless,” as being adrift in a field of meaningless objects without any way to navigate.

same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.” That “unity of paths and relations” is the sense of “world” that I’ve been talking about. By housing the central activity of communal life—worship—the temple becomes the focal point of the communal world, which, in turn, depends on it for its continued existence. With these preliminaries established, we can turn to boredom and what it might reveal about our world. Focusing particularly on boredom will be useful in this context because of the way that our projects, actions, and intentions are so closely tied to our existence for Heidegger. Yet it seems that there are at least two kinds of boredom, so let’s clarify what we’re talking about here. There’s the kind of boredom that you get in a lecture sometimes, when your eyes glaze over, you can’t stop thinking about the homework you need to do, and somehow every time you look at the clock, fewer than seven minutes have passed. I won’t be talking about that sort of boredom.

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There’s another form which is characterized less by the distraction of the first instance and more by a general listlessness, where no potential action seems at all appealing. Although this apathy sounds similar to depression, it might not get all the way there, still lacking some measure of despair or sadness. In the former type of boredom, it seems as if the connections between oneself, one’s projects, and the surrounding people, places, and objects are preserved, even if progress is obstructed; in the latter, it almost seems like the purposeful connections between oneself and one’s surroundings have vanished or dissolved. If this happens, such a person could easily be described as “worldless,” as being adrift in a field of meaningless objects without any way to navi-gate. How might it come about that one could go from living a purposeful life to living one that seems hopelessly boring and meaningless? Put another way, is it possible for a world to die? For an apt case study, we might turn to Marilynne Rob-inson’s novel Gilead. The eponymous town of the novel was founded before the Civil War by ardent abolitionists intent on using their tiny patch of Iowan prairie as an outpost for the cause of freedom during the time of “Bleeding Kansas.” The narrator, a Congregationalist minister named John Ames, finds himself in 1950’s Midwestern America, a man out of time. At 70, he is one of the last people in Gilead who remem-bers anything about how the old, shabby town used to be. In the years following the catastrophe of the Civil War, the town underwent a transformation: to escape the trauma, the people forgot. They avoided talking about bygone times and neglected to pass down their old convictions. In Ames’ family this practice was explicit, and he only learned about the past from his father (in rare, unguarded moments) and his grandfather, who had never lost faith in the cause. In doing so, the town chose not to pass down its way of life, and thereby its world. In the time before and during the war, the cause of abolition animated the life and the world of the town. After the war, as the people abandoned the thing which had been at the center of their communal world, their world itself began to decay. In Ames’ writing, the town of the present day is frequently referred to as “shabby,” “old,” “dusty,” or “gone to weeds,” rather than the “brave” and “energetic” town of the past. Old families either died or moved away, new families and churches moved in, and slowly the old world vanished. John Ames, his father, and his grandfather—all, inconveniently, pastors by the name of John Ames—each has have a different reaction to the change that

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their world underwent around them. Their differing responses to the political/social change seem explainable largely in terms of their life experience and history, and yet it also seems that each attitude is intimately related to the man’s beliefs and expectations about the divine—about God and miracles. Ames’ grandfather was converted to abolitionism by a vision he had as a young man of Christ standing before him in chains. He immediately knew he had to go to Kansas and make himself useful to the cause, leading him to pastor a congrega-tion, to aid John Brown and his militant friends before the war, to serve as a chaplain for its duration, and to return to Gilead and his flock after it ended. As he aged, he found that all of his hopes had been dashed, both by the war itself and by what fol-lowed; he says, “no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment. I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it.” He was disappointed, not least with a town that had forgotten him and its original purpose. At a Fourth of July Celebration, he rebukes the town, saying, “The President, General Grant, once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism. But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes.” Ames comments, “Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention. Those who did came very near taking offense. . .I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same

To him, it seemed God had departed, and the only way to find Him again would be to seek Him out in the place where it started, to chase again after the old visions.

words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.” Unable to change the town back into what it was or to adapt himself to its current reality, his grandfather finally flees his boredom, disappointment, and sense of uselessness and returns to Kansas, where he eventually dies. To him, it seemed God had departed, and the only way to find Him again would be to seek Him out in the place where it started, to chase again after the old visions.Ames’ father, though, reacts in a strikingly different way. Disgusted by the violence and the war, he tells his own father:“I remember when you walked to the pulpit

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in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and as clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing. And I was, and I am, as certain of that as anyone could ever be of any so-called vision. I defer to no one in this.” His response, rather than to say that the holiness in the town had departed, was to claim that it was never there in the first place. He took his father’s pastorate and tried to find the presence of God in the peace that followed, yet he restricted his potential experience of the divine in such a way that he never quite found it. In the end, he abandons his faith, dismissing the life that he had lived—and his son still lived—in the world of Gilead as a parochial aberration that would be swept away by a broader experience of fresh, modern life. John Ames’ comments about his father’s and grandfather’s conceptions of visions and the divine are revealing not only in what they highlight in his forebears but also in what they declare about his own stance and belief by way of contrast. Of his grandfather, he says: “I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.” His father, by contrast, denied any special reality to an instance of natural beauty that John, both as a young child and as an old man, took to be miraculous. In his reductive account of the world, “he never encouraged any talk about visions or miracles, except the ones in the Bible.” They share, however, the conclusion that, in Gilead, God is gone, the world has died, and the only way to regain a meaningful, useful life is to try to find a different world—whether old or new—somewhere else. Now, none of us are confronting the death of a world in rural Iowa, yet Gilead is useful as an example of how a world might die at the local level. There are several other relevant accounts of how worlds might be threatened at national levels (e.g. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America) or even at a broad, historical and cultural level (e.g. Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue). Understanding the overlap and impact of these factors in a particular individual or communal life—let alone figuring out how to address them—might easily constitute the main task of that life. How-ever, because most of our lives are lived in a fairly local context, Gilead is able to go beyond diagnosing a problem and point to a solution. After all, John is somehow able to remain, to live in Gilead as a world which is suffused with the presence of God. He explicitly says that he could never get bored of his life there: “I have lived my life on

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the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me. I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes in the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.” Throughout the novel, he lauds the miracle of existence and the honor of witnessing and blessing so many human lives. What is it about John’s approach that allows him to make the transition, to know and acknowledge the holiness found in the past while also finding the present, shabby prairie town miraculous? Ames’ success seems to come in part from a special emphasis on the doctrine of Creation. He approvingly quotes George Herbert, who says, “For Preservation is

They share, however, the conclusion that, in Gilead, God is gone, the world has died, and the only way to regain a meaningful, useful life is to try to find a dif-ferent world—whether old or new—somewhere else.

a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment,” and then remarks, “There’s a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man. . .I have thought sometimes that the Lord must hold the whole of our lives in memory, so to speak. . . .[T]he finger I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention, taking Herbert’s view.” The identity of the work of Creation is the same over time, certainly, but it is also new at every moment, such that a line of oak trees, water, light, silence, and (especially) other people still have the capacity to amaze Ames even after a lifetime of familiarity. More can always be revealed, and it is miraculous. It is in this world, where God is at work in preserving and creating all things, that Ames can avoid fixating only on the most forceful visions, as his grandfa-ther did. It is here, too, where he can avoid the skeptical, reductionist view of miracles that his father had, which emptied his faith. Furthermore, Ames’ life has a deep connection to the Word and the sac-raments. It’s notable that, often in the novel, when Scripture is used it is not used so much as a premise in an argument but as a lens through which Ames sees his own life

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and experience. Similarly, Ames interprets many of his experiences—even those which do not take place in a church—in terms of the sacraments of baptism and commu-nion. Both of these sorts of experiences are places where the activity of God overlaps with Ames’ own particular life. As he says,

I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstanc-es, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. . . .It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift.

Because of his attention to God’s activity throughout the ordinariness of his life, John Ames lives in a meaningful world, even in Gilead, Iowa, which lacks both the meaningful animation of abolition and the purposeful hubbub of cities. He is always engaged, always ready to be surprised by the Lord, and is certainly never bored. Gilead is a unique work of art. It does indeed, as Heidegger insists any work will, set up its own world. It invites us to live there, to spend some time with John Ames. However, it also points beyond itself and enjoins upon us to find and enter the transcendent and particular world which God is already at work creating. It’s a com-pelling offer. Obviously, anyone who hopes to accomplish this in their own setting will face challenges specific to this age, this community, this world which one already finds oneself in. We’ve seen this life in fictional 1950’s Iowa; what it would mean for you or for me to pursue such a life in 2020’s Wheaton is yet to be determined. At the very least, though, it seems that such a life—such a world—could hardly end up being boring.

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NARRATIVE

Lo Prometo

Alexandra Rivera

Most of it is blurry, but Javier remembers the old, scratchy couch in the caseworker’s office, which smelled like Cheeto dust and cigarette smoke. Mami and Papi had died in an accident the week before, and they’d stayed with neighbors until that last day. The caseworker tried to find relatives both in the city and back in Puerto Rico, but there was no one. He remembers Illiana’s sobs, muffled in Osvaldo’s shirt sleeve; the sting in his lungs as he gasped for breath; the sticky, silent tears cool on his overwarm cheeks. Lucia had been too little to really understand, but she knew enough. She held onto Javier so tightly. He could feel her trembling. He remembers that, clear as anything. They took her first. As soon as the door closed behind her, they heard her begin to wail. Javier began to sob, then. Osvaldo hushed him. They took Illiana next. Then Os-valdo put his arm around Javier’s shoulder and squeezed. He rested his head against Javier’s curls and whispered, “Está bien, Javi, it’s okay. Estaremos juntos de nuevo. Lo prometo, lo prometo.” And then he was alone.

Until Naomi’s phone call, he’d never really stopped being terrified for them. It’s been almost fourteen years. Javier told himself before he left that whatever happened, it would be worth it to see his brother and sisters again. Lucia had sounded so excited on the phone, and when they were kids he’d always hated to disappoint her. So that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. It’s probably the only thing. Since the agency that had separated them also screwed up their records, and Javier had been placed in seven homes before Naomi put him in the group home he lived in until he graduated high school, Osvaldo had been going in circles until he’d

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been directed to the judge that had ruled on Javier’s court case. Naomi had been his social worker from age thirteen until he’d aged out and had stayed in contact with him, and Osvaldo got Noami’s number from the paralegal who answered his call. The thing is, Javier had missed them. He’d thought about them all the time. How many times had he lain in bed, sick to his stomach, thinking, If it’s this bad for me, what’s happening to Lucia and Illiana? Even when his foster mother assaulted him every day for weeks, when telling his first social worker, Dean, did nothing, still he’d thought about his sisters, his brother, so afraid for them. Naomi said Osvaldo had been trying to find Javier for years. The call came during class, and he spent the rest of the hour until he could call her back worrying that there was a problem with his records or, even worse, his court case. The last thing he expected was that his brother had called out of the blue to ask her for his contact information. That was almost two weeks ago. Ever since that afternoon, he’d been alter-nately buzzing with nervous energy and freezing up with dread. The fact that Lucia had chosen an Olive Garden of all places should have been a sign. But no, Javier had been so goddamn nervous he hadn’t had a single rational thought from the moment he’d stepped out of his door until he found himself here. His eyes start having trouble focusing, and he feels his mind begin to slide away into fuzzy, white-cold blankness. He squeezes his own knee under the table to ground himself. Illiana asks him about college, and she and Osvaldo disguise their dismay almost perfectly when he tells them he started out at community college before his scholarship. And again when he mentions scrambling to find a roommate when he aged out. When he tells them he’s pre-law, their eyes go round with such pointed understanding it’s suffocating. Maybe it’s the garlic bread, but he’s beginning to feel nauseated. As Lucia tells a story about her college roommate, the haze in Javier’s brain solidifies and drops into his stomach. When she asks him about his own roommate, his answer is louder and more brusque than he means it to be. “I’m used to roommates. I was in a group home, before,” he says, and watch-es their faces. Only Lucia winces. He tries something else. “It was okay. No way a fami-ly would have wanted me after the case. The court said that was probably for the best.

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It probably was.” There it is. Osvaldo is looking at the table now. Illiana takes a steadying breath, trying to be subtle about it. She’s not. Lucia is chewing her lip. Osvaldo says something to Illiana, quietly, in Spanish. She shakes her head. Javier’s chest burns. But he won’t cry. “It’s fine,” he says loudly. “Enough about me. What about you guys? You’ve been meeting up for a couple years, yeah? Catch me up. Osvaldo is married. Don’t you have two kids now? And Illiana just got her master’s degree. Congrats and all that. You both went to Ivy League schools too. Crazy. And Lucia’s other brother just had his third kid. Really crazy.”

Javier’s chest burns. But he won’t cry.

When Osvaldo speaks, his voice is still quiet. “Calm down, Javi. Estamos aquí para conocerte de nuevo. Lo entendemos, okay?” “I don’t speak Spanish anymore,” Javier says shortly. “But I guess that didn’t occur to any of you.” Osvaldo blinks at him. Illiana starts to reach across the table but stops half-way. She leaves her hand there. He’s not going to cry. “It’s okay, Javi,” she says. She smiles at him just a little, like it hurts. “We’re here to get to know each other again. We know we missed it all. We wish we could have been there for you.” Javier can’t be here. “Sure. It’s fine.” He stands up. “I need some air.” Javier is halfway to the bus stop before the cold brings him back to himself. Damnit. He’d left his coat on the back of his chair. He scrubs at his face, pretends he doesn’t notice the cold tears he finds there. With a shiver, he stuffs his hands in his pockets. His phone buzzes. He ignores it. He ignores it for four more blocks, all the way to the bus stop. He ducks un-der the awning and sits on the cold metal bench, relieved to find it empty. It must be close to 9 PM now. It’s starting to snow. There’s probably at least half an hour before the next bus. With a laugh, he realizes he’s angry. He’s so furious he’s shaking. At who?

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he asks himself bitterly. At Osvaldo for finding him? At Illiana for reaching across the table? For stopping halfway? At himself for forgetting his language? For meeting with them at all? For saying things he knew would hurt them? For not saying more? For being the one who cried? For running away? Stop, he thinks. It’s useless, it’s over. It’s over. Javier takes a shaky breath, hunches his shoulders against the cold, and clos-es his eyes. Leaning back, he rests his head on the plastic wall behind him. He takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out slow, watches the steam curl in the streetlamp’s light, watches it disappear. He inhales again, long and deep, counting it out on his fingers pressed against his leg. He hears the voice of the group home operator, Mark, in his head. Calm down, Javi. You’re safe. Breathe with me. You’re okay, kiddo. He knows what this is, he knows, but he can’t stop. He feels coiled inside, like a spring, his lungs twisted around his spine, his ribs. His heart is still going at it, as if he’d sprinted all the way from the restaurant. In his pocket, his phone finally stills. He chokes on a laugh. His eyes stay closed until the bus arrives.

His heart is still going at it, as if he’d sprinted all the way from the restaurant.

By the time Javier gets back to his building it’s closer to eleven than ten and he’s more tired than angry. He leans against the wall as he waits for the elevator and pulls out his phone. Five missed calls, twelve unread messages. He glances through them, and the guilt starts trickling in. They’re mostly from Illiana. There’s two from Lucia, each several paragraphs long. Osvaldo sent only one. When he opens his dorm room door, the first thing he notices is that Benji’s side of the room is, if possible, even messier than he left it. The roommate himself is sitting on his bed with two open textbooks and a hurricane of papers covered in notes spread out around him, all of which he is ignoring in favor of scrolling through his phone, and there are two pencils sticking out of his messy curls. He looks up when the door opens and gives Javier a slightly wrung-out grin. “Hey,” Benji says, lowering his phone.

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Javier nods at him and crosses to his own neatly made bed, sitting on it heav-ily, sighing. He scrubs at his face. He tries to remember if there was any homework he was planning to do tonight. He can’t pin down a thought. “You okay?” He looks up. Benji is peering at him with a look somewhere between caution and concern. Javier hadn’t told him where he was going tonight. Part of him wishes he had, but most of him is glad he didn’t. Benji is already too nosy. “‘M fine. Studying going well, I see.” “Spectacularly, thanks,” Benji says, and without a hint of irony. “Uh-huh. Aren’t those your sociology books?” “Yeah, and?” “I thought it was a bio exam you had tomorrow.” “Oh, I’m dropping bio. Pre-med is out.” Javier manages a wry smile. “You decided that in the three hours I was gone. Just like that.” “Yep. It wasn’t meant to be. I’m thinking linguistics, maybe anthro. Linguis-tic anthropology? Who’s to say.” Javier shakes his head and, reaching down, starts to unlace his boots. “You do you, man.” “Thanks, I will. What happened?” Javier pauses and looks up. “What?”Benji tosses his phone on the bed and squints at him. “You got no coat, dude. And your face, my man. It’s awful.” “Thanks.”Benji frowns. “But really. Are you okay?” “I’m fine.” “Look, I know you got that whole—” he does air quotes— “‘machismo’ thing you gotta maintain, but if you ever wanna talk—” “Benji, shut up. I just want to go to sleep, okay?” “Oh. Okay.” He droops a bit, his hands dropping into his lap. Then he seems to realize. “Oh! Sorry, sorry.” He starts sweeping his mess of papers into a sloppy pile, the pencils in his hair bobbing absurdly. Javier sits up. “You don’t have to—”

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“No, no, it’s okay, I’ll go sit in the lounge.” Before Javier can say anything else, Benji is stuffing his feet into his ridic-ulous house slippers and shuffling out the door, books and papers piled high in his arms. Silence fills the space Benji’s formidable personality leaves behind. Javier sighs. He hadn’t meant to run Benji out of the room, but he really is so tired. Movements slowed by fatigue, Javier changes, brushes his teeth, and finally climbs into bed. As he turns out the light, he hears Illiana’s voice again. It’s okay, Javi. We wish we could have been there. He pulls the covers up to his chin and closes his eyes. In the early years, he would sometimes hear Osvaldo’s voice in his head at night, most often when he’d been sent to bed after one of his tantrums. Estaremos juntos de nuevo, Javi. Lo prometo. By the time he was twelve, Javier’s social worker, Dean, was sick of him. At some point, he’d stopped looking at him when he asked him how he was. His visits became rare. He just called. When Javier told him what his new foster mom was doing to him, Dean scolded him for lying. And hung up. He knows—he knows it wasn’t his fault. His new social worker Naomi, the one who believed him, said so. The prosecutor said so. The judge said so, too. And all five therapists. He turns onto his side. He forces himself to notice the bass he can just barely

In the early years, he would sometimes hear Osvaldo’s voice in his head at night, most often when he’d been sent to bed after one of his tantrums. Estaremos juntos de nuevo, Javi. Lo prometo.

hear from two floors up. The slippery feeling of his still-cold sheets. The artificial, flowery scent of his freshly laundered pillowcase. He’s here now. He’s here. Deep breath in; slow breath out.

The next morning, Javier goes to the library to meet up with his criminal

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justice project group. He likes to get there early; the tables by the windows always fill up quickly. He works on an essay for another class while he waits. “Yo, Ocasio.” Javier looks up. A young woman is standing by his table, looking at him expectantly. He nods and smiles in greeting. “Hey, Miriam.” Miriam grins as she slides into a seat adjacent to him, dropping her backpack on the ground next to her. “You do remember me, then. I thought you probably did, since we had two classes together last semester, but you’ve never said hello in this one.” Javier huffs as he gets his laptop out.“Of course I remember. You were the one who called me ‘Peanut Butter Boy’ on Snapchat. People were still calling me that in January.” “You ate chunky peanut butter straight from the jar. In the library. At ten in the morning. And you asked if anyone had a peanut allergy first. It was adorable.” “Yeah, okay,” he says, and opens his laptop pointedly. “Where are the oth-ers?” “If you ever checked the group chat, you would know.” Javier doesn’t dignify that with an answer. Miriam sighs theatrically. “They’re on their way. Eden and Hailey said they’re bringing coffee.” Javier nods, pulling up the rubric for their project on his screen. “Hey, Javier, are you okay?” He looks up, startled. “Yeah? What do you mean?” Miriam tips her head, studying him with a faint frown. “I don’t know. You seem a bit peaky—more tired than usual.” He frowns and looks back at his laptop. “How would you know what I usually look like? I’m fine.” “Seriously, I don’t mean to pry, but you look pretty rough. You been sleep-ing?” Javier takes a breath and looks back at her. “I appreciate your concern, but that’s none of your business.” Miriam blinks. Then she sits back in her chair, her face smooth. “Okay. It’s your life.” She turns and unzips her backpack, pulling out her laptop and the text-book.

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They don’t say another word until Eden and Hailey arrive. It doesn’t matter. It’s not as though they’re actually friends. He ignores the ache in his chest. He’s always been good at that.

Javier goes to the gym as usual that evening. He starts with some simple cross-jab combos, keeping it light. His punches gain power as he goes and soon enough he has a good rhythm. Illiana has called twice and left messages both times. Mark used to say that wanting to punch the shit out of something was actu-ally the healthy response to some things. In those five years at the home, Mark sat with him through countless panic attacks and spent hours at the kitchen table helping him raise his D’s to A’s, making him feel like less of a freak. Naomi had believed him. She immediately took him out of that house, took him in herself while she found a place he could stay before the trial. When the police took their time getting the arrest warrant put together, she got in their faces about it. Tila Baxter, the prosecutor, was the one who told him about Project Safe Childhood, the reason he’s studying law today, the reason he worked so hard to get here. Of all the people who went out of their way to keep the fucked up kid he’d been alive long enough to graduate high school, Naomi is the only one who still talks to him. They’re not his family. He never thought they were. The image of Illiana’s hand, left halfway across the table, flashes in his mind. We wish we could have been there. One, two. Cross, jab. A memory of Naomi’s voice answers. You’re strong, Javi. You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. But you don’t have to do everything by yourself. He’d locked himself in the bathroom that day, refusing to go to another new therapist. Mark tried reasoning with him, but he’d had to call in Naomi. No one should live life alone, Javi. Cross, cross, jab. One, one, two. Later on the bus home, he finds a text from Illiana waiting. Please call me.

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He locks and pockets it. Takes a deep breath, lets it out carefully.

He’s walking to class the next day when Illiana calls him again. He stops on the sidewalk and stares at her name on the screen. On the fourth ring he thinks, Fuck it. He answers. “I have your coat,” is the first thing she says. She says it so carefully, Javier winces. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have left like that.” “It’s okay, Javi. I know we were a lot—” “No, it’s not okay, and you don’t know, but thanks.” Javier stops himself. He sighs harshly, dragging his hand over his short hair. Illiana is quiet, so he hurries on. “I don’t mean it like that, I just—it was a lot, but not—not in the way I think you mean. I knew it would be awkward and you all would try to talk about what happened to me while not talking about it, but I didn’t realize how—that it would make me—” “Lonely,” she says, gently. Javier squeezes his eyes shut. “You don’t know me, Illy. None of you do. And your lives, they were so—they’re so different from mine.” He laughs, and he knows he sounds bitter, but he can’t help it. “I don’t fit anymore. I don’t fit.” “None of us do, Javi,” and she sounds so sad saying it. For a moment, he sees her hand reaching across the table again. “But we’re still family. We still love each other, no?” “I mean, sure, but—” Javier sighs. “The thing is, I don’t know how not to disappoint you. Don’t say I won’t. I’m fucked up. And I, like, busted my ass in therapy all through high school, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been on and off meds a lot, I’ve done the visualization and the breathing and all that shit, and some of it helps sometimes, sure. But whoever I was going to be before, I’m not that guy and I won’t ever be him.” He takes a breath and braces himself. He hadn’t meant to say all that. He is not going to cry in public in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.Illiana is silent for a moment. When she speaks, she sounds much more calm than he expected. “I think I understand what you’re saying. My parents—they were the third family I was placed with. Their other kids were grown when they adopted me, and they made me the center of their world.”

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My parents. Javier drifts toward the outside wall of the building and leans against it, feeling a bit winded. “It was wonderful in some ways, and way, way, just, too much in others. Their love felt like a burden sometimes. Like everything they gave me turned into something I had to carry around with me. I could never forget that they wanted me to be my best, and when I couldn’t be that, I felt like I’d hurt them. You know?” Javier closes his eyes. “Yeah.” “It’s okay, Javi. If you don’t want to meet up again, it’s fine. I can FedEx your coat to you. If you never want to speak to us again, that’s your choice, and we’ll respect it. But I hope you won’t choose that.” He has to laugh at that, even if it comes out wet and reedy. “What, like Osvaldo would back off that easily?” Illiana clicks her tongue dismissively. “Tch. You leave him to me. What you say goes, hermano.” He looks down at his shoes and finds he doesn’t know what to say. “Would it be too much,” Illiana says, and hesitates. “Would it be too much if you gave me a call every now and then? Just to let me know how you’re doing?” Javier takes a breath, long and slow. “No,” he decides. “That would be nice.” “Okay,” she says, and sounds relieved. He clears his throat. “I have to go to class in a couple minutes.” “Oh yeah? What class?” He smiles through the pang in his chest. “Spanish 102.” “Really?” She sounds surprised. “Javi!” “Illy, don’t make it a thing,” he says, with a short laugh. “Please.” “Okay, okay, it’s not a thing then,” she says, clearly indulging him. He rolls his eyes, but he can’t stop smiling. “But I’m glad that you’re doing this thing that isn’t a thing.” “I’m hanging up now.” “Alright. Talk to you later?” He can hear the smile in her voice, and it loos-ens a knot in his chest. He takes a breath; easy in, easy out. “Yeah. I’ll call you.”

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18 Remarks on Boredom

Thomas Wilder

1. Bored…2. A word used so much, but has come to mean so little.3. There are many myths that are perpetuated about boredom: only boring people are bored; boredom only falls on those who are weak in imagination; boredom is a condition for the lazy. These myths not only characterize boredom as a state that afflicts those with some kind of character deficiency, but they also limit the capacity for boredom to have a positive impact on one’s life. 4. One kind of boredom occurs when someone, due to their circumstances, can’t do what they want. This is situative or circumstantial boredom. 5. But what about when one loses all sense of desire whatsoever? When the reasons to do anything over and against something else are entirely absent? 6. We can call this existential boredom. And it is to this genre of boredom that I direct my attention.7. One might believe that staying busy could prevent a feeling of existential boredom. This belief, however, presupposes that this boredom stems from a lack of activity. 8. The existential boredom that I’m referring to does not come from having nothing to do but rather the perception of having nothing that is worth doing. 9. In this sense, existential boredom does not relate to activity or work but to mean-ing. 10. To experience this kind of boredom is to experience a lack of meaning. 11. It is the flattening of experience, the reduction of contrast—or difference—be-tween all things. 12. When one previously scanned across a room and saw a book worth reading, a pencil worth using, and a coffee worth drinking, one now merely sees an array of qualities: light, color, value, and texture. Objects, which once held a stable position within a hierarchy of value, now recede into an undesignated conglomerate of matter.

ESSAY

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13. The experience of this degree of existential boredom can force itself on someone, but, in many ways, it requires a level of surrender on the part of the individual in order to move into this state. 14. If it requires an act of the will to embrace this condition, you might ask yourself, why would you want to voluntarily welcome it?15. Although I will not attempt to provide an answer as to why existential boredom creeps up on one person and not another, I will offer an idea about how embracing it can be a fruitful endeavor.16. Existential boredom cannot exist alongside the belief and emotional involve-ment in a hierarchy of value. If I feel and believe that the coffee is worth drinking, I will attempt to drink it. But if one of those aspects is missing, my action will lack conviction. This is what occurs in the state of boredom: based off of a lack of feeling, belief, or experience of an object, the hierarchy of value in which it stands comes into question. 17. Here’s the idea: if a feeling, belief, or experience I once had toward an object is now missing, maybe I should question about why I had those feelings and beliefs. Maybe, the position of that object within a hierarchy needs to be rethought. 18. If one does not shy away from the feeling of unease, emptiness, lack, and neutral-ity of existential boredom but rather adopts them, one is given an opportunity to renegotiate one’s values, beliefs, and hierarchies, which, in a fundamental sense, might be flawed.

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Threadbare

Grace Gebhard

VISUAL ART

“I think this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.” - Margaret Atwood

In this piece I deal with overlapping planes creating arbitrary space, as well as the intensity of juxtaposition between same-value hues. Overlapping planes lead one to question what is “surface” and what is “inside,” opening an otherworldly nature that suggests the divine.

Astorga

Juan Elvir

VISUAL ART

I spent the summer traveling abroad, mostly in Spain. One of my person-al goals during my travels was to become more than just a tourist passing through different towns and appreciating them in only a superficial way. I wanted to become as much a resident as I could be of every place I visited regardless of how long I was there for. This picture was taken in Astorga, Spain, and I think in taking pictures like these I was able to attain my goal. I was walking through a bunch of narrow alleys when I came across a small courtyard furnished with just a few benches. I think this picture captures the simplicity of life but also how immensely complex it can be. Superficially, many of the towns I visited seemed small and simple, as if nothing ever happened before I arrived and nothing would ever change once I left. Once I got to know the stories of locals and other travelers I realized how vibrant and rich and complex such a little place can be. I think as Christians it is important to realize that God created everything to be immensely beautiful, even remote little towns in Northern Spain.

Flight Risk

Mary Fischer

So many saints in Milwaukee. It was March, slush made dark veins in the streets,the chests of stone creatures rose and fell

in city squares. The river swelled with rain.In doorways, only us, escaping brieflythe dissolution of the outside world.

We left our kingdom behind.Whenever we leapt against the wind, the Holy Ghost lifted and carried us.

Public Market, Pabst Theatre--on this day all the locks flew open with a terrible triumph.

Every dark window shone like a mirror.Past the limit of what we could see, rafts of ice drifted towards the lake’s edge.

We were happiest. Far off, another city by the water, alight with birdsong,opened its eyes.

POETRY

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The Pub creates a forum for academic and artistic discussion at Whea-ton by producing diverse and thoughtful content which engages the intersection of intellectual life and Christian faith. The Pub serves as an opportunity for Wheaton students to participate in an editorial and production process that seeks to provide a window to the broader world of academia and challenge students to put their voice into the mix. The Pub is a place where discussions of academia and art can hap-pen student-to-student, and the joy which comes with learning can be shared side by side.

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