“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 Ahab is the soul of Moby Dick, but the physical and symbolic reality of the whale gives us the core ideas of the book. No other novel in American literature presents us with a more complex, poetic, and convincing portrait of a species or of an individual creature. The White Whale is the object of desire, the ferocious grail of Ahab’s quest. He takes arms and legs, drags boatloads of men into […]
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For audio version click here Walk 25 yards north from the house and you enter a pasture open to this Autumn’s wide blue sky. Pause now, back to the house, and close your eyes. Conjure your powers of banishment. Imagine yourself an exile from 2012. Banish the lawnmowers and leaf-blowers shuddering close-by. Banish the streaming traffic from Holmes Road. Make it a dirt road. Now you can hear the wind. Now you can hear yourself think. In […]
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For audio version click here My older sister raised two strong, smart children, worked with autistic kids for over 20 years, sheltered my mother and father in their old age and has met something as dead as a post in her home, and as physically near to her as if he were a person standing in a check-out line at the supermarket. She is funny and sober, a hard-working grandmother with reams of common sense, but […]
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For audio version click here Our home rests on a corner of two ‘country’ roads, and on most days I like living close to everything that travels up and down them. Except on a few early mornings when green garbage trucks barrel along like battleships, these roads are agreeable to walkers who stop by with dogs and greetings; we are fortunate to see other travelers too — screech owls, foxes, birds of every color. Pull-in drivers share […]
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