Description: I’m Matt Miller, an essayist, teacher, and permaculture gardener from the Midwest.
CV About Sources for Nursery Plants Posts Jul 5, 2022 Odysseus and the attempt to impose order Odysseus thinks of [his return home] as a cleansing, a return to goodness, but the poem knows that the desire for sweetness has ended only in horror and mayhem. He thinks that order can be imposed by will; the poem knows that the vision of perfection brings war into a house and leaves it broken and bloodied.
It is a sobering drama, an anti-Arcadia, with a deep lesson: singular visions do not work; only by consensus and accommodation can the good world be made; returning wanderers do not have all the answers; and anything which is to be done in your own Ithaca can only be done by understanding other people’s needs and their unfamiliar desires. Complexity, multiplicity, is all and clarified solutions come at a brutal price.
The proper response to ideals we fail to attain—or indeed do not have the capacity to attain—is neither to lower the ideal nor to throw up our hands in bitter despair because we fail to reach the ideal. Rather, it is to allow our failure to become a kind of “severe mercy.” This phrase is from a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote to Sheldon Vanauken regarding the death of Vanauken’s beloved wife Davy. Perhaps, Lewis gently suggests, the loss of Davy might become “a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that w