“The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.” Thus spake Leo Tolstoy, who made it to 82.
It is hard to disagree, especially if you find yourself, as I do, on the cusp of three score and ten, the so-called Biblical age. Of course, old age is not surprising in the sense that it is unexpected, but rather that it turns out to be so different from what you may have expected. [Read more →]
Recently, I posted on my blog as a “thought for the day” this quote from Jean de La Fontaine: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
My own life offers evidence in support of this. I was the editor of my college newspaper (co-editor, actually: I shared the duties with a colleague, because I was also the main editorial writer), but when I graduated I had no intention whatever of becoming a journalist, principally because the idea of facing deadlines on a daily basis did not appeal. [Read more →]
Somewhere in Sexus, the first installment of The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller writes that “imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything.” [Read more →]
Recently, I watched a DVD of Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest, in which Prospero is renamed Prospera and is played by Helen Mirren. I rather liked it. The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play, and I am always moved to tears by those great lines toward the end: [Read more →]
I think the best thing that has ever been said on the subject of prayer was said by the medieval mystic known as Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
This, of course, is precisely the most difficult prayer to utter when you are not feeling at all reverent …and yet it would seem the one most necessary at precisely such a time. [Read more →]
One of the great passages in modern poetry occurs in the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the section called “The Burial of the Dead”:
… There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I remember when I first read this in college. It struck me then — as it still does — as a most ingenious and effective representation of existential terror. I thought of it again early one morning last week. [Read more →]
I have been pondering Robert Benchley’s Law of Distinction: “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”
I don’t know how many people today remember Robert Benchley, but that he titled one of his essay collections 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield should tell you a good deal about how funny he could be. [Read more →]
“Work,” Noël Coward once said, “is so much more fun than fun.”
Thomas Aquinas would have agreed. “Agere sequitur esse,” he declared. Action follows from being. You are as you do.
I also agree, especially now that I have returned to work (last week, I started a part-time, presumably temporary gig at the Philadelphia Inquirer). [Read more →]
Last week I came upon this quote from the English novelist John Fowles: “There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.” [Read more →]
It is always nice to get up to date, even it takes some time. In my case, the process seems to be proceeding apace. I’m not up to date yet, but I have at least caught up with the 13th century.
Let me explain how I discovered this. In my last column I made the point that what is called creation is not something that took place several billion years ago, but something that is taking place now. [Read more →]
