I used to think of “public life” (the life we share with neighbors and strangers, in public space) as the basic concept in the study of politics. I now think a better concept is “common life.”

Politics does not equal publicity: it depends also on what we encounter in silence and in solitude.

Wendell Berry writes, in the second of his 1979 Sabbath poems:

Resurrection
Is in the way each maple leaf
Commemorates its kind, by connection

Outreaching understanding. What rises
Rises into comprehension
And beyond.

This seems to me like the place to begin thinking about our common life: that our most important connections are mysteries, matters to be approached with reverence and without undue claims to comprehension.

Asking about the nature of our connections—pushing past what’s historically situated or culturally specific, moving toward what’s simply true—does not lead us to secure, transparent knowledge. But it leads somewhere. I want to learn how to speak and write about that “somewhere.”

Here’s Berry again, from another Sabbath poem (with some elisions):

I would not have been 
an essayist except that I 
have been bewildered and afraid