Continue the Conversation
Everything is interconnected, which is why I cannot try to isolate the books I read. I need to keep a dozen or so in process. I need to stop worrying about not finishing one or another: no more self-imposed rules,…
Holding onto My Own Soul
I sometimes worry that I’ll copy down 99 percent of the words in this book, and if I do that, it will mean that I’m still trying to hide behind the words of others, still trying to avoid my own.…
How Many Will Make It Past the Prison Walls and Never Get Locked in Again?
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Thoughts, conversations, experiences, memories, things that I’m reading are all coming together and leading me on. For Tolstoy, the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and…
Words and Light
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be blind? If so, whatever you’ve imagined is probably wrong. According to Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight in an accident when he was eight years old, the world doesn’t…
What Meets the Eye
Thanks to Camille Paglia, I have mixed (and rather confused) feelings about the Romantic poets. In short, I don’t know what to make of them. If I am to believe Paglia, they were all perverts with strange sexual proclivities that…
On the Hunt
Quiet weekend afternoons in my adolescent years were sometimes spent reorganizing dresser drawers and closet shelves. My mother was pleased to get things straightened up and pared down, but I was in it for the treasures to be found, the…
Reading, Writing, Rules, and Reason
Was it a year ago already that a friend told me about an unlikely book she was reading and finding fascinating? I describe the book as unlikely because if anyone were taking bets on either of us reading it, he…
Hope is Enough
Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory Greene makes his statement about a starving dog with a broken back or broken legs that drags herself to the door of…
Which Way?
If Diamond had had to find out the riddle in order to see Mr. Raymond again, I doubt if he would ever have seen him. “Oh then,” I think I hear some little reader say, “he could not have been…
The Touch of the Unknown
I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon…
Where Does One Begin?
Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully…
White, Grey, Black
“I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?” “No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly…
