“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 There are four of us. There should be six. Two brothers, the fourth and the sixth child in order, died as infants. We know so little about them that they do not even register as ghosts. Thomas, number four, survives in a photo, in his hospital wrist bracelet, in an album lined with 24 cards decorated in birds and babies, in strips of fragile newsprint, and in 59 white and […]
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You Can Listen Here I never cared a whit for all that frolicky crap about spring – the bad poems, gorged with adjectives, written for dim children. I like movement. I like raking the last of the leaves, washing the cars, carrying the old red chairs out of the cellar, lifting them above my head, curving around the house and setting them in the yard. I like opening up, one window at a time […]
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You Can Listen Here Donald Kagan, a Yale professor, began his Introduction to Greek History class by summoning students from their amphitheater seating to the front of the room. He told them to bring their pens and notebooks. He divided them into two groups facing each other across the expanse of the ‘killing ground’. He directed them “into an improvised phalanx of Greek warriors, with notebooks for shields and pens for spears (xvii).” * Then they ‘fought’, […]
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You Can Listen Here Books matter to me. No, that’s too weak. Books are transcendent objects. No, that’s too abstract and bloodless. I believe that books and reading can rescue us when nothing or no one else gives a tinker’s damn. Charles Dutton , the actor, changed his life in soiltary confinement — he read Day of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward on his belly next to his cell door. The light escaping from the hall under the door was the […]
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