“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 I think it’s been there since my Aunt Elsie read to me from the Book of the Martyrs. I have had an interest in the history, actions and personal psychology of tyrants and in the nature of evil, and early Catholicism may have been the stimulus. Raised Catholic, we received theological training beginning in first grade. At that age the instructional emphasis often fell on the reality of sin. It is […]
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You Can Listen Here Do we never grow tired of imagining ourselves living other lives on distant ground? Driving north, off the Thruway, we chatted back and forth about this vista, that house, the sweep of a meadow, the comfort of a stream near a home; the subtext to all this being what would a day feel like in this or that new space, one bounded by rows of mountains and long fields of […]
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You Can Listen Here In 1918 at the end of WW I, T.E. Lawrence, 5’3” tall, weighed 80 pounds, down from his normal 112 (436). That lost 32 pounds begins to tell us something of what happened to him in the desert. For almost two years Lawrence waged guerilla warfare against the Ottoman Empire, over tens of thousands of square miles of desert, primarily with Bedouin fighters, an infidel in a land where that […]
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You Can Listen Here The Met was packed, we couldn’t get seats together, and so for my first opera experience sometime in the late 80’s I ended up sitting between gowned sisters who unfolded massive librettos* on their laps and whose blue fox furs both had their heads turned toward me, their beady glass eyes letting me know that I had better behave. To please my wife I had agreed to see The Marriage of Figaro ; I thought I had […]
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