Amplify The Oracle Always
I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard tell of the existence of a thing called a “Rock Card,” but it sounded lovely. Word was that it could get you a dollar off admission into the Pink Floyd laser-light show at the Cumberland Science Museum and 10% off your purchases at Cat’s Records and Tapes. I can’t honestly remember the context in which one was vouchsafed unto me, but it marked an entry into something that felt important, like the wider world wanted to be my friend, that there were people out there who were willing and ready to salute that within me which was—and is—about to rock.
I say all this to note that artfulness—thoughtfulness even—is a party to which everyone is invited and to which I myself have been invited by others in myriad ways throughout my life. This thesis is afoot in a remarkable piece by Casey Cep that’s appeared in The New Yorker. To my great delight, she places Nashville at the center of one such effort and lifts up Chapter 16 as an alive and signalling example of how the door to artfulness (literacy, critical thinking, a sense of the common good) can be kept open for millions of people. As it happens, my contribution to the piece was spoken over the phone in the thick of Green Hills, within blocks of every place Davis-Kidd Booksellers once existed in Nashville.
Please read the piece and share it and ask yourself how you can add to the stock inventory of available sanity by lending your own witness to the lifting of the witness of thoughtfulness you spy and draw on from here and there. Amplify the oracle. Be the Rock Card you want to see in the world.