Are You Optimistic or Hopeful? Which One Is Better?

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If you follow me on my personal Facebook page (which doesn’t have much of anything personal about me, confusingly enough, since I started it in order to post political articles back during the election), you’ll know that I’m a YUGE fan of a conservative columnist over at National Review named Jonah Goldberg. (Music fans may know that one of Bach’s most famous compositions is a set of pieces called the “Goldberg Variations.” An early ancestor of the estimable Jonah? Maybe so.)

Anyway, this Goldberg has, like everyone else in the known universe and beyond who has anything to do with any kind of media, started a podcast, called The Remnant. The second episode, once you get past some rather sophomoric attempts at humor, has an interview with Yuval Levin, a name I’m sort of familiar with because Levin is a contributor to NR, whose website I check many imes a day. (If you’re a friend of mine through my aforementioned personal FB page you’ll know

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The Triumph of Hope Over Experience

3 sets of seed packets fanned outThe title of this post is from either Samuel Johnson or Oscar Wilde, talking about second marriages.  But–in my life this quotation applies much more clearly to the pursuit of gardening, in particular vegetable gardening.  Today I got my seed order from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, and here are all the hopeful little packets spread out on the kitchen table.  I had said that I wasn’t going to order any seeds from catalogs this year as I tend to over-order.  I was just going to buy seeds at the garden center.  In order to keep this resolution I had to immediately throw all seed catalogs in the trash, without allowing myself so much as a peek.

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