“All over the world we’ve been destroying the places where animals live in order to get materials to build our homes, our cities and to make our own lives more comfortable.” One year ago, Jane Goodall spoke on Covid-19. We should listen and end the nightmare.
Read More Protecting Wildlife: Jane Goodall“Daniel Mendelsohn had a particularly modern take on the value of reading Proust’s densely written, heavily detailed, slowly unfolding opus known as In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).: Recently I was traveling on a train next to a young man—a recent college graduate, I guessed—who was reading a hugely fat Victorian novel. […]
Read More Proust as Antidote for Smartphone-Induced Attention Deficit“…all these years later, with wars raging endlessly around the world and still achieving nothing except pain and destruction, Wedding Album’s message of peace and love — of peace being rooted in and nurtured by love — sounds wiser and more urgent than ever.” John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, Once an Oddity, Now an Icon
Read More John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, Once an Oddity, Now an Icon“I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me, that there is a place for me in the world that is vaster and greater and eternal.” – Brandon Taylor How Mary Oliver Helped Me to Breathe Again Poet Mary Oliver Dies […]
Read More How Mary Oliver Helped Me to Breathe Again – Brandon Taylor on the Gift that is “Wild Geese”“Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul.” Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid
Read More Reading in the Age of Constant DistractionSolitude? In this time of endless noise? Here’s an article on the importance of solitude. “If [Blaise] Pascal’s observation about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of the human condition in general, then the issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude due to the options available […]
Read More The Art of SolitudePessoa was to have an extraordinary afterlife, as he prophesied in his poem “If I Die Young”: “roots may be hidden in the ground / But their flowers flower in the open air for all to see. / It must be so. Nothing can prevent it.” Among his belongings when he died was a large […]
Read More Fernando Pessoa’s Afterlife“Bradbury, who never used a computer or drove a car (and believed automobiles more dangerous than war), could be described by a little-known word in English derived from Portuguese, nefelibata: one who walks in the clouds. For better or for worse, we don’t as yet live in the future he imagined, and his predictions and […]
Read More On the Dark, Wondrous Optimism of Ray BradburyA Kite is a Victim By Leonard Cohen From: The Spice-Box of Earth March 1965 A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, […]
Read More A Kite is a Victim – Leonard CohenLegendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen passed away on November 10, 2016. Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love The Crack In Everything Widens: […]
Read More “Yet another thread unraveling from the very fabric of society.”
Michael Twist 