The fourth week of April, 2023

Hedges, progressive summarization, South Korea, the Age of Concentration, seasonal wardrobe changes, and Eva Ibbotson

The Life of Hedges

If you’re like me, when you think “hedges” you picture the short, boxy plants that decorate the picturesque English countryside (see below). Apparently, a hedge row can be any number of a variety of closely planted trees and shrubs that mark a boundary. The tree lines between fields here in eastern Kansas / western Missouri are hedges!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I learned this while reading this article from Civil Eats: “The Edges Matter: Hedgerows are Bringing Life Back to Farms”. This piece is one long paean to the blessed hedgerow, bringer of all good things to farms and plants. The benefits of hedges include improved carbon capture, increased water retention, shade for farm laborers, pathogen filtration, reduced pests (and pesticides), more effective pollination, and less erosion.

To me, the modern disregard for hedgerows is yet another example of well-intentioned “upgrades” that discard traditional wisdom and practices at humanity’s peril.

If you’re interested in the interplay of nature and agriculture, you can’t miss “The Biggest Little Farm”. I cried more than once.

Capacities and Progressive Summarization

A few weeks ago, I fell back down the rabbit hole of personal knowledge management (PKM), something that happens a couple times a year. This time the deep dive was spurred on by the discovery of a new PKM app, Capacities. It’s early on in its development, but at first blush it looks like the love child of Notion and Obsidian. (Is it the PKM of my dreams??)

I spent some time reading through this series by Tiago Forte on “progressive summarization”. Progressive summarization is Forte’s process of note-taking that facilitates future discoverability and usefulness. A core part of this process is that as you revisit you notes, you continue to add to your summarizing of it. You start by bolding what stands out to you. The next time, you highlight some, but not all, of what was bolded before. Following this, you compose a mini-summary, and finally you remix your takeaways with your own thoughts.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The key element to this strategy is that you DO NOT do all of these steps at once, coeval with the origin of the notes. Instead, you implement “opportunistic organization”, adding one element as a time IF and WHEN you ever come back those notes. If you never come back, they will stay completely un-summarized. If you come back frequently, they’ll eventually get remixed. This idea is absurd to my perfectionist nature, but I am thrilled by the intuition of it. There is no need for lengthy, disciplined processing at the outset; the notes progress through the levels as you revisit them, a little at a time. Additionally, the summarization state of the notes can itself tell you how important they are to your thinking! Also importantly, no time is wasted on notes you will never actually use.

4B in South Korea

In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly interested in the culture of South Korea. Its history is closely tied to the culture of the United States, and its own influence on U.S. culture has been on the rise.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I read this fascinating and heartbreaking article on a movement in South Korea called 4B. “4B” is essentially an abbreviation for four ideological stances its adherents adopt: no heterosexual marriage, no childbearing, no dating, and no heterosexual sexual relationships.

Movements like 4B and the interviews in the article indicate that Korea is wrestling with significant issues in male-female dynamics. The article mentions that because Korea is racially and ethnically homogenous, the biggest societal divide is between men and women. I think the United States is wrestling with similar animosity between the sexes, but its visibility is eclipsed by larger cultural issues like racial equity and two-party politics.

Age of Concentration

This article by Eugene Vodolazkin blew me away. I am enchanted with his conception that we are entering the Age of Concentration, a new Middle Ages. Vodolazkin writes on the context of modern history, Russia’s relationship to the United States, the nature of leaders and revolutions, utopias, and finally his suppositions that characterize the Age of Concentration.

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

If you’re captivated by Vodolazkin’s thinking as I was, he discusses the similarities between our current postmodernism and the Middle Ages in more detail here. He does this primarily through the lens of literature, which in this case is a very specific and helpful way of exploring ideological correlations. For example, both the literature of the Middle Ages and contemporary literature of the 21st century blend the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

One of the interesting things I discovered in the first Vodolazkin article is that the original Greek meaning of the word “utopia” was “no place”. It was coined in sixteenth century by St. Thomas More in his work Utopia, which questions whether a perfect world can actually be realized. We’ve now lost this sense of the original idea of the word, a clear indication that we believe in the reality of the ideal society.

*Creating

This month I switched over my wardrobe from cold-weather clothes to warm-weather clothes. I usually do this shortly after Easter, as I like to continue to wear my darker hues from winter through the end of Lent. The timing worked out pretty perfectly this year, weather-wise.

This process involves clearing all the winter clothes out of my closet, getting out my under-bed storage of summer clothes, hanging those up, and then refilling the storage with winter clothes. This bi-annual process is the perfect time to weed out those things I haven’t worn all season, don’t like anymore, or that don’t fit anymore, etc.

My favorite thing about this is that the engine for this process drives itself. In the case of the spring wardrobe change-over, the increasing temperature serves as my motivation: I’m eager to cool down with the lighter clothes I’ve stored away. The purging element is also self-motivated because the more I decide to donate, the less I have to fold and store. The limited capacity of the storage under my bed provides a physical boundary limiting what I can keep. It’s worked well for the last few years, and I hope it continues to do so.

*Current Obsession

I reread A Countess Below Stairs, and there is just not another author like Eva Ibbotson for me. I enjoy the first word to the last word and every word in between. Despite this, I constantly reconsider her status was my favorite author, for one thing because I hate answering the question “Who’s your favorite author” with someone no one’s heard of before. For another thing, she’s not part of the canon of Western literature and as such seems like an anti-climactic choice.

Photo by Chandra Oh on Unsplash

Ibbotson’s heroines certainly do not fit the modern vogue for “anti-heroes”, and cannot really be described as “realistic” or “relatable”. They are unashamedly good and truly virtuous: humble, patient, kind, and hardworking. I often wonder if they fit into the category of “Mary Sue”, a female character who is unrealistically perfect and boring for her lack of flaws. The difficulties in the lives of Ibbotson heroines are the result of historical conditions, not brought about by their own faults. They seem to always make the heroic choice, especially when it doesn’t benefit them at all. And their virtue does not seem to be result of intentional effort, cultivated habit, or sterling example; in fact, Ibbotson usually describes them as being this way since childhood.

Despite what admittedly seems like a huge flaw in Ibbotson’s writing, these heroines are still delightful to read and magnetic to everyone who knows them. I think they possess a central quality which illuminates them from within: they are head-over-heels in love with the world. They wonder equally at dandelions and operas. They care deeply for other people, their oddities and their foibles and their irreplaceability. They see through banality of menial labor and earning a living to the privilege of existing. They have a deep sense of the mystery of life itself, with its infinite scope and entail, and I can’t help but love them for it.

*Commonplace

But I would not turn back. I would go on, because the load I was carrying on my back was heavier than the weight of death.

- The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Earnest J. Gaines