“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
For audio version click here Muhammad Ali, sweating, is crunched up on a long board and is doing another set of his 2500 daily sit-ups. He is preparing to fight George Foremen. He needs to have abdominal muscles made of tensile steel. Throughout this set he talks continuously to Bundini Brown and for a while riffs about all the food he will eat once the fight is over. Wilfred Sheed observes that Ali has a […]
read more
For audio version click here I stumbled upon someone recently who I had once thought of with disdain. The meeting was pleasant, even friendly. I do not think he ever knew how I felt about him, or maybe I imagined that, maybe I was just creating a fiction I’d prefer to accept instead of immediately confronting the jolt of shame that left me a little dazed. One of the advantages of growing older is that […]
read more
For audio version click here Away from home, we miss its intimacy and so we look for another version of it; perhaps we remake it into the place where we once were gladly fastened to the whirling planet. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, settled in the mountains surrounding Cavendish, Vermont in a house set among birch trees; they “reminded him of Russia.”* Cut off from his language and friends, from the all sustaining […]
read more
For audio version click here On Friday night I watched a high school play, Ann of Green Gables ; the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the lights on the players came up, and then 17 year olds tried slipping into new personas. They dropped into unfamiliar accents, into other ways to walk and to carry themselves. They clipped the rhythm of their sentences. They pretended to inhabit someone else for an audience. Think about being those high school actors (women […]
read more
