Good morning. I spent the last few days cycling on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s a beautiful road—one of the most beautiful in America—and the weather was fantastic, if a bit warm. One day I’d like to cycle the entire 450-mile-long thing.

On a lunch break at Cumberland Knob one day I happened to talk to an older gentleman (and his wife) who had done it in the 80s with a group of friends. It was tough, he said. A sag is essential, but I could tell by the way he talked it was a great memory. Probably even more so because he hasn’t biked in two years. I didn’t ask why and regret it, but I didn’t want to pry. Could be he will never cycle again.

Why do I mention this? No reason, really. But, it is one small example of real life. People do stuff, stop doing stuff, drive up from Mount Airy, where they own a bike shop, for a picnic on the Parkway and strike up a conversation with a random cyclist. All of the sudden, they are thrown back into the past, recalling an event that seems small and unimportant—an event that is not recorded somewhere with photos and hashtags and that will one day be completely forgotten. But it is an event that is still very much part of the life of the person recalling and speaking.

I didn’t read the news much when I was away, but I did talk to my wife about it one evening, and one thing that strikes me about the statements, the events, the outrage is how performative much of it seems. Please note: I am not saying that all responses to George Floyd’s death are performative. Heaven forbid. Nor am I saying that his death was not the result of a great evil. Or that it is not part of “real life.” I’m writing about something else that is happening at the same time.

Perhaps it’s the effect of social media, but how much of what people say and do about race these days on Twitter or Instagram—posting a black square, not posting a black square, calling out white people for posting a black square—will they even remember a year from now? How do these actions bring out something real in them? I could say the same thing about people outraged at having to wear masks. I’m not saying that all statements or social media posts are performative, but often what I see in them is the show and how quickly people take up the parts they are expected to play—a part like this, for example, which is so idiotic, it’s depressing:

Marie Cisco was fed up. America was in turmoil, rocked to its core by the brutal killing of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis. Protests against systemic racism and injustice had been raging for five days, and the nation’s theaters were excruciatingly silent in expressing support.

Cisco, a producer who has worked with the New York-based National Black Theatre, the Public Theater, Lee Daniels Entertainment and the Apollo Theater, was not surprised by the crickets coming from these institutions — self-professed bastions of liberalism and equality — but she felt hurt and angry all the same.

So Cisco created a public Google spreadsheet and titled it ‘Theaters Not Speaking Out.’ It was open for anyone to edit, and it had a simple directive: ‘Add names to this document who have not made a statement against injustices toward black people.’

Ah, another Google spreadsheet. Don’t tell me this isn’t a performance on the part of Marie Cisco. I’m sure she doesn’t feel it to be so, but that’s what it is: Calling out insufficiently “virtuous” theatre companies to get them to make a meaningless statement against “systemic racism” that won’t change anything and will be forgotten within two weeks. Surely Cisco knows this. So, why do it? The show must go on, I suppose—and it’s a show, no doubt, in which Cisco imagines herself to be playing a starring role.

Speaking of the show, you don’t come here for politics, so let’s get on with it. Gracy Olmstead reviews a new book about the women of Appalachia: “Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, like Smarsh’s Heartland, considers the dignity and resiliency of poor working-class families in this region of America. It is a book that seeks to offer a more nuanced look at people who have struggled and worked together in rural Appalachia for generations, focusing specifically on the Appalachian women who bind their families together, protect their kith and kin, and spur each other on to success.”

Michael White reviews a history of The Spectator: “Back in the good old days before the new puritanism, I was nursing a lunchtime pint and the political weeklies alone in Annie’s Bar in the Palace of Westminster when the Labour MP Eric Heffer burst in, as he did everywhere. ‘What are you reading?’ demanded the burly Bennite. ‘The Spectator,’ I replied. ‘I prefer it to the Staggers.’ A proud autodidact, Eric looked around the bar to be sure there would be no other witnesses to his heresy. ‘So do I,’ he whispered. It was a widely shared view. New Statesman readers were being bored comatose at that time by the dour editorship of Bruce Page, whereas The Spectator’s thirty-year decline was being reversed by Alexander Chancellor (editor from 1975 to 1984). An Old Etonian charmer, whose anarchic scepticism and curiosity came with a lifelong aversion to voting Tory, Chancellor remains my idea of what the magazine should be about: he was a ‘thoughtful Whig’, as Spectator contributor J S Mill might have put it.”

Michael Horton writes in praise of hunting: “In his book On Hunting, the late philosopher and writer Roger Scruton says that with his discovery of hunting, his life began anew. It is in the land, community, and soul-affirming joys of the hunt that Scruton finds renewal. In his eloquent defense of the hunt, he argues, ‘in the age of the machine the rhythms of life are beaten down by hammer blows and driven into the unconscious, where they dwindle and die. Unless you reawaken them.’ For Scruton and for many others, it is the close contact, indeed intimate contact, with the natural environment that reawakens these rhythms of life and death.”

Italians are apparently really enjoying all the tourist-free museums that have recently reopened: “On a clear-skied, mid-week morning, Italian art lover Maria Grazia stood with her two teenaged sons outside the Vatican Museums, waiting for its tall, arched doors to open to the public after three months of being firmly shut. Pre-lockdown, she and her family would have stood in a lineup that often wound hundreds of metres along the walls of Vatican City. Today, the line is only a few metres long. ‘I was here once 30 years ago, and my sons have never come,’ said the lifelong resident of Rome, who declined to give her last name. ‘It’s just always seemed too complicated to get in before.’”

“Renaissance astrology,” James Hankins writes in First Things, “was a premodern form of scientism, if we take scientism in its broadest sense of unwarranted reliance on science, or a predisposition to believe opinions that present themselves illicitly as scientific facts. It differed from our contemporary forms of scientism largely relative to its intellectual prestige. In the modern world scientism is parasitic on an enormous body of valid ­scientific achievements as well as on the dominance of materialism and utilitarianism in public philosophy. In the Renaissance, by contrast, the scientistic practice of astrology had to share the intellectual ecosystem with powerful traditions of practical reasoning that challenged its premises in fundamental ways: the moral theology of the Catholic Church and the moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans, taught everywhere in schools and universities. In the ­quattrocento, the backbone of the curriculum in moral philosophy was Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s On Duties, and classical philosophers took a dim view of astrology. Even Galen, whose philosophical writings were informed by his towering authority in ancient medicine, drew the line at judicial astrology, the pseudoscience of predicting the future. He decried the ignorance of ‘horoscope-casters.’”

Joseph Epstein on eating out: “I  cannot recall the first restaurant I was taken to as a child, but my best guess is that it was what was then known as a ‘steak house.’”

Photo: Dudenrode

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