“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here Decades ago, before teaching, after a long middle shift packing trucks, I drove slowly home, out of the city, over empty streets. Windows rolled all the way down, I was content to ride in the quiet clearing out from every darkened house. My parents and younger sister were already asleep. I ate something quickly and slipped up the stairs. We had no air conditioning. Every window opened to the night air. I sat […]
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You Can Listen Here The aging of the mind and of temperaments creates traps more hurtful than any acid time adds to a back or to joints or to a body that suddenly lists when it should be anchored. For some, aging reaches out to make the world into a simpler place, one explained by a dozen or so platitudes, one comforted by glazy nostalgia. Even standing at the entrance to old age, I can feel the temptation of […]
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You Can Listen Here Helen Macdonald plays games with her goshawk. She snaps a book closed. Her hawk, Mabel, “makes a curious, bewitching movement.” Macdonald, intrigued, tears off a strip of paper, “scrunches it into a ball, and offers it to the hawk with [her] fingers. She grabs it with her beak. It crunches. She likes the sound. She crunches it again and then lets it drop, turning her head upside down as it […]
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You Can Listen Here In her final confrontation with Stanley, Blanche Dubois challenges him with the essential idea about how we must not treat others: “Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.” Has this conviction ever been stated more directly or clearly? Children understand these two sentences. Conversely, try explaining that we should love one another — it is complicated, difficult to both define and diagram, a notion filled with qualifiers, hesitations, […]
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