Hi friends,
If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you subscribed to my newsletter sometime in the past few years. I’ve transferred my newsletter list over to Substack, which lets you mix blogging and newsletter posts. I haven’t been writing here much, but am going to start posting more soon to keep followers updated on my civic essays and projects.
Thought I’d kick off that process today by letting you know that I am in Current Affairs this week with a tribute to the beloved songwriter John Prine, who died last week at the age of 73. An excerpt is below, with my goofy schema of splitting public figures into “prophets,” “mystics,” or “sages” (Prine was a prototypical sage):
I think you can split great public figures into three groups: the prophets, the mystics, and the sages.
The prophets have visions of the future. They’re the Martin Luther Kings and Michelle Alexanders and Wendell Berrys of the world—they condemn the present order and lead us toward somewhere new.
The mystics have a connection to the otherworldly—to the realm of the mysterious. They’re the William Blakes and John Coltranes and Stevie Nickses of the world, who try to bring you with them to—or, at the very least, bring you messages from—some spiritual plane.
The sages are different. They have no special access to the future, like the prophets do — or to another realm, like the mystics do. They aren’t trying to take you anywhere — neither to the promised land nor the other world.
Rather, sages are just really, really good at living here and now. They’re who we turn to for practical wisdom. And their wisdom is hard earned — it comes not from a prophetic insight nor a mystical trance, but rather from the sustained, ordinary work of putting in the years living and learning, listening and paying attention. Like cast iron skillets, sages only get better with age. And like the plant they share a name with, they have healing powers.
Some might say that the sage’s craft is the cultivation of wisdom, but I think that’s only a part of what sages have perfected. I think it’s more right to say that the sage’s craft is friendship. And friends, as the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott put best, “are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve.”
If you’re looking for a movement leader, you want to find yourself a prophet. If you’re looking to shake up your old ways, you want to find yourself a mystic. But if you’re looking for a good friend — that’s when you want to find yourself a sage.
You can read the fully essay — The Very Least We Could Do is Name the Maywood, IL Post Office After John Prine — here.
If you didn’t catch my last essay in Current Affairs, it was a retrospective on politics in the 2010s: Decade of Disappointment, Decade of Hope. My take: the 2010s was the decade of the saviors disappointing us... but also the decade of the people taking matters into their own hands. Put another way, Obama was right when he said back in 2008: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for — we are the change that we seek." You can read the essay here.
Hope everyone is doing as well as can be during this hard time.
Best wishes,
Pete