It opens up whole new vistas for experience

Sara Hendren's year-end list is a series of 12 short (monthly) paragraphs.

The newsletter list is titled: scenes from 2025.... life unquantifiable

She said:  I wrote about patterns, gift economies, losing and finding a child, and the spaces and interactions that give us what’s free.

They read like an outline for a novel, filled with friends, strangers, family members, books, students.  For example:

In January, I ride through horizontal snow squalls alongside Lake Michigan with A, a perfect stranger, and make a rare easy drop into the deep end of conversation. We have a nonstop exchange for the four hours up to a midwestern ski resort and the four hours back. At the resort, I speak at length with a group of students about the gift economy laid out in Lewis Hyde’s classic book. You think Hyde’s telling you to give your gifts, like “giving back,” I say. But it’s weirder than that. Gifts precede you, mark your life. They invite you to imitate the pattern. This truth is hard for all of us to hear.

In March, in balmy Florida, I visit with another group of students at my friend M’s study center, talking gifts and virtues. The nearby university has been a political football in higher education, but the community I visit has zero interest in the culture wars. It’s all earnest seeking, genuine mentorship. Over a patio lunch together, M, a longtime student of Ivan Illich, says casually: Illich thought that grace is usually marked by a quality of surprise.

In July, I swim in the river near K’s house in the woods. We find the stone benches and footholds under the dark edge of the water and talk lightly, candidly about our friendship: Is it sturdy enough? Should we see each other more? In midlife these things aren’t obvious. K keeps Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language on a coffee table for the slow DIY house remodeling underway, and I start to thumb through it.

In August, my friend M and I start a spontaneous micro book club conducted entirely on shared voice notes. We send seven- or eight-minute missives on the ideas we’re reading together: saints and martyrs, postwar humanism. My smart phone, mostly a diabolical source of idling distraction, affords weeks of asynchronous exchange by making audio communication seamless and intuitive. Now I do voice notes with my niece who’s a new mother and with a young friend sharing the ups and downs of her dating life.

It’s not a coincidence that my friend J taught me to love the voice note form. She is a concert violinist, philosophy lover, decades my junior, and blind. We trade notes fast and furious about our many shared interests. When it’s good, accessible design always bridges a barrier. In many cases, it opens up whole new vistas for experience. My son G has been teaching me this for two decades: new vistas are available. In case of my untimely death, maybe just put that on my headstone? NEW VISTAS AVAILABLE, EVEN NOW.

In late September, I remind my architecture students that our seminar classroom conversations must be different from the ones happening in their apartment kitchens and in coffeeshops. It’s a spatial argument: In the casual rooms of our domestic lives, I say, we can shoot the bull. In the classroom, we’re aiming for something more rigorous. You can’t dismiss the reading on the vibes. We’re looking for sound reasoning, good evidence. I make a case for what results from this disciplined, collective thinking practice: liberal education, which is to say liberating education, becoming free. Or freer than before.

A week later we’re discussing Wendell Berry’s “Why I’m Not Going To Buy A Computer,” first published in Harper’s magazine, and we read several withering letters to the editor about the piece published in a subsequent issue. Taking in Berry’s placid, penetrating rebuttals—the way he amiably eviscerates, stands by his convictions—my student T says: this man has the quality of being free. I think: A bright-light intellect is in this room. T’s comment becomes a hinge for the whole term. We get liftoff as a group.

In early December, many of my architecture students opt for an oral exam final. I’ve given them all a gift copy of A Pattern Language, and they each express surprise at its insight and pragmatism. A couple of them start to grasp the more radical vision of Alexander’s anarchic and humanist project: a bottom-up description of the built environment, elevated to near-universals. We sit and talk, one-to-one, for an hour. The chatbots have been kept at bay. It’s my favorite cohort yet. I finish the term weirdly optimistic.