Sharing an Apple
Poet Jane Hirshfield is new to me. Robert Bly is the one who introduced us, in his book, Looking for Dragon Smoke, and although I knew Bly’s name, I had paid it no attention (perhaps because none of my college…
Competition? Cooperation?
The artist who acts as if he could have conceived his art by himself, sealed off from other artists, is stupid—he merely tries to conform to the idiotic romantic image of the artists as primeval energy, as a demiurge. The continual…
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…
Go Ahead, Be Fresh
“I am not a cruise director” is one of the statements I used to make to my children more often than I would have liked, but certainly not on a regular basis. It was my almost reflexive response when one…
New Narratives
It has arrived: the first day of 2022. Why have I looked forward to it with such longing? Is it simply the notion of starting fresh, cleaning out the old and tired and worn? Is it that 2021 was a…
Let the Night Be Too Dark
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!Now let the night be dark for all of me.Let the night be too dark for me to seeInto the future. Let what will be, be.” —Robert Frost Living in day-tight compartments is…
Glum
Yesterday, after Andi died, I changed the background image on my computer to the one seen here. I love that shot of her, with those beautiful, soulful eyes, but I wasn’t quite ready when I woke my computer this morning,…
One Traveler
Perhaps these words from Bishop Kenneth Untener (as shared by Maureen Sullivan, OP) in her book, The Road to Vatican II, are good openers for some thoughts. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise…
The Old and the Novel
The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well.…
An Inevitable Implication
My family and I spent the first day of the new year visiting Dennis’s parents in New Hampshire. I guess it’s nice to get away from home once in a while, but no more than that. I’ve become too much…
Roughly Recognized
According to Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain Sight, “In the early reviews of War and Peace, objections were raised most frequently against the plot. ‘This disordered heap of accumulated material,’ as one reviewer called it, was perceived as…
A Philosopher of the Present
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is back in my reading rotation. Along with it, I’m rereading Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace,’ by Gary Saul Morson. My pace with both books might best be…
