It’s been cold this week. We even had a bit of wintery precipitation, which we call snow around here, but you probably have real snow in your area and would laugh at us for using the same word to refer to whatever that was in the air a minute ago. It’s winter here. With current events as they are, it feels like winter everywhere.

Contemporary Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan wrote in his poem, “A bridge used to be there, someone recalled,” these lines about muddling through.

He recalled the city he’d escaped from,
the scorched terrain he searched by hand.
He recalled a weeping man
saved by the squad.

Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
He should have returned a while ago.
What could happen to him, exactly?
What could happen?

The patrol will let him through,
and god will forgive.
God’s got other things to do.

Winter can feel like that. Quiet enough to allow you to push back both real and imagined terrors, worries that the world is leaning into the curse, that God has other things to do. But such feelings belie the hope we have in Christ. As Christina Rossetti wrote in “A Better Resurrection“:

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

What else to we have today?

Bookstores: Focusing on a new store in Concord, N.C., called Goldberry Books, World magazine reports on the return of small booksellers. “In the last decade, the American Booksellers Association (ABA), a trade organization for independent bookstores, has actually seen steady growth. In 2022, its members operated more than 2,500 locations—up more than 50 ­percent since 2009.”

Libraries: The Vermont State Colleges System intends to divest itself of printed books and offer only digital access by July 1, 2023. Joel Miller talks through how bad that could be. The faculty of three colleges in the state system have pushed back, calling the board of trustees’ decision “reckless.”

Fathers: Ted Kluck talks about his friends’ fathers, who are coming to the end of their lives. “They taught us how to goof off and bust chops and work hard and be generous and stay married. . . . Do they make dads like these anymore?”

Remembering: Joseph Conrad wrote, “The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.” Patrick Kurp reflects on this as well as Thelonious Monk’s love of the hymn “Abide with Me.”