“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 Coming up the path from the beach, he begins to emit a subdued mewling, and he is limping. He stops and allows me to run my hands over his body and pads. One was knotted in his fur and pressing into his belly, and the other had clenched itself just below a nail where it dug deeper with every step. I slowly pried loose two ‘hitchhiker’ seed pods, these belonging […]
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You Can Listen Here I drive this shortcut road 10 or more times a week to the gym and grocery store and whenever I have to cross the Schuylkill River to the north, but it took me too long to pull my car to the side and walk to the marker. Twenty-six years before the beginning of the Civil War, black men and women, many free of bondage*, built a Church on a rise […]
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You Can Listen Here Ahab leans upon the rail, looks out upon the calm Pacific and then speaks to Starbuck, describing the “mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day-very much such a sweetness as this” he first began whaling and his exile from “the sympathy [that arises] from the green country … by the green land” of his home in Nantucket.* His portrayal is a memory and especially a […]
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You Can Listen Here When power is at stake, purity and fear are natural allies. Bear with me please in my recitation of quotations. I want to build a case. Anne Applebaum’s history of the Soviet Union’s prison system, Gulag , contains a chapter on “the years 1937 and 1938 – remembered as the years of the Great Terror (92)” … when “the Revolution devoured its children… (96).” Lenin and a young Stalin “The lowest […]
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