The year of ...

‘Honeysuckle’ (1883) by William Morris or his daughter, May

Alan Jacobs... The Year of Focal Practices.  What I'm most interested in is the "declaring" the year of ____.  Rather than days stacked on end in pursuit of the latest, Jacobs identifies and follows up on a yearly "focus" -- repair the world, patient endurance, or (for the current year) practices that bring us together.

This also reminds me of this Thoreau "prayer": I wish to begin this summer well; to do something in it worthy of it and of me… I pray that the life of this spring and summer may lie fair in my memory. May I dare as I have never done! […] I am eager to report the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it…. It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning

I declared 2021 the Year of Hypomone and 2022 the Year of Repair. I have not ceased to need hypomone — the New Testament word for “patient endurance” — nor are the good things of my world in any less broken. And it seems to me that there’s a close relationship between the two themes, because those who would engage in tikkun olam, the repair of the world, will more than most others require hypomone. But how to get it? How and where to find the resources that enable the patient endurance that in turn enable us to pursue the work of repair? I declare this the Year of Focal Practices. 

What do I mean by that? It’s a concept from Albert Borgmann’s seminal 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. As Borgmann’s career moved on he became a clearer and more straightforward writer, but in 1984 … not so much. He was still, then, too Heideggerian to be lucid. So rather than quote I am going to try to summarize, drawing chiefly on chapters 9 and 23.

Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household. Various members of the family were responsible for some element of hearth-maintaining — one would chop or gather the firewood, another bring that wood into the house, another make the fire, another add logs when the fire got low or stir it to enliven it, still another to cook the family’s food over the flame — and each member benefitted from its warmth. The heath was a place for preparing food and for keeping warm; it was therefore also the place where the family gathered, where its unity and wholeness were made manifest. The household gods — the lares and penates — were above all the guardians of the hearth. They preserved and in various ways represented the family’s focus. 

Controlled fire is of course the paradigmatic technology: Prometheus’s gift of fire to humans is the definitive extension of our natural abilities, an augmentation of power, a prosthesis. But, Borgmann shows, fire-as-focus is much more than that: it generates a set of focal practices that strengthen the bonds among members of the family. Contrast the hearth at the center of a home to a central heating unit, which instead of binding us to one another invites us to go our separate ways. The central heating unit is not a focus that links us to one another; it is rather a device that facilitates our separation.