On the Common 149

Wheelbarrows at 5 AM.

Feb 27, 2025

Good morning!

I write to you from my couch on a sunny, 77-degree day, just one week after we had an inch of snow. Charlotte weather is giving us all whiplash, but I’m not complaining. Soon there will be baseball and flowers.

The Part Where There’s an Essay: Two Kinds of Snobbery

Maybe you’ve read of the idea of “chronological snobbery.” In case you haven’t, here’s a short, oversimplified primer: we all tend to think that new things are better. Put another way, we look down our noses at those in the past, because they simply didn’t know as much as we do. Mankind hadn’t yet developed the knowledge base that we have, so we are more enlightened now than they were then.

CS Lewis called this perspective on time “provincialism,” because it is the same idea in time as it is in space. If a person never leaves her home—never has a thought that anyone outside her home even exists or thinks differently—she lacks the perspective that might come from a bit of visiting elsewhere.

In the same way, if we never think about or visit temporal “destinations”—we never read about history, we never think about the past or future generations, then we are, chronologically speaking, “provincials.”

I sometimes see this operating in two ways.

The more typical way we might expect is that of preferring our modern way over those of the past. This is what I described above. We smart people in 2025 assume that we know better than those behind us in time. We chuckle at their ridiculous solutions to problems, knowing that we would have gotten it right. We sigh for those poor saps back in the past, thinking how blunt and dull their way of life must have been. Aren’t we smart? Aren’t things better now1?

But this works in the opposite direction, also.

A few years ago I heard a children’s author bemoan our chronological snobbery in the inverse fashion: we parents—and we homeschoolers were the worst at this—refuse anything new. We disdain new children’s literature and make the unfair assumption that it cannot be as good as its older counterpart. “If you teach your children that the only good books are the old books,” she said, “why would your kids try to write anything at all?”

Well. This was convicting to me, Book Snob Extraordinaire.

There are certainly shelves—yea, libraries—full of fantastic older books for kids. Many of these fall out of print and are never remembered again, and this is tragic. But we are guilty in the opposite direction, also. Today, and even tomorrow, there will be authors, painters, poets, film directors, and animators making good, true, and beautiful things for kids. And we will overlook them because they’re new.

Why don’t we visit some other neighborhoods?

For the Anglophiles

This might be a rerun, but well worth re-running: the Tolkiens’ party.

Reads & Listens of the Week

The Story of the Jesse Owens Oaks: at least one oak tree remains which was planted by Jesse Owens after his victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Read about it here. For bonus points, read this letter from the German man who stood with him on the podium. “Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we not separated by war. I am saying—tell him how things can be between men on this earth.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣”

I did not think it was possible to write this much astute commentary about the song “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid, but Andrew Osenga did just that: The Little Mermaid Made Me a Musical Hypocrite.

I very much enjoyed this conversation on Plain English: Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God? The title does it a disservice; the topic is much more far-reaching than that!

A belated Valentine’s entry: I am certain I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth another mention. This American Life reaired one of my all-time favorite stories a couple weeks back: Break-Up (Act I). Starlee Kine writes a breakup song—more specifically a “torch” song—while enlisting the help of the king of the 80s brokenhearted song, Phil Collins. Bonus link to the saddest song Phil ever wrote.