![]() What does one do when what was and arguably should be ‘ordinary’ has faded to a vague memory and feels strange to us? One might reasonably be concerned at this point whether we can go into our collective memory and rediscover what perhaps has never before been ‘lost’ to man. It has been well nigh a century since Lytle penned these words. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed… The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth, century for the first time. In 1930 Andrew Lytle called these “the ordinary functions of living.” He continued: Who would ‘they’ be? Yet this much is sure, somehow these things have functionally vanished. I use the passive voice here of necessity how does one say who has taken them away? We can’t really say that ‘they’ have taken away singing around the piano, story-telling, sitting on the porch, reading aloud, and the shared work of home. ![]() Many of the ordinary functions of human living have been taken away from us. If someone takes a ball away from a child, the child will in any case know what to look for-that is, unless it’s gone so long he begins to forget, or, those around him keep handing him other things to distract him. It might not be easy, but it should be rather obvious what to do. ![]() ![]() ![]() The path to restoring home-life will be in restoring the ordinary. ![]()
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