On Writing
Writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done – so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well. Ernest Hemingway
A Mischief of Grief of Our Own Making
The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA Roberto SavianoMarch 7, 2019 Issue Hondurans living at the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus shelter in Tijuana while waiting for their US asylum applications to be processed, December 2018 The link in the title above will take you to an article in the new issue of the New York…
Here’s to a new year, and all of its grand possibilities.
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what…
“The greatest liar hath his believers . . .”
This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): “The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no…
Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes
“A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” BACK
Beauty and insight in a fragment of a forgotten sentence.
I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.” “. .…
APHORISM
aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm] NOUN a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples: “The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth) “Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.…
Straying afield from ourselves . . . what could we learn if we would?
Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun…
“You have no privacy . . . get over it.”
These words spoken by Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, way back in 1999, open an article by Sue Halpern in the new issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she reviews four new books on privacy. The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America by Sarah…