“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 Outside of Chartres we drove past miles of bright yellow fields of mustard in a flat, green landscape devoid of strip malls. Only walled farms and their outbuildings broke up the roll of the countryside. Throughout our 800 mile loop this was to be the pattern: city or town, village, countryside — we saw no suburban sprawl. Wherever else the French may be struggling, they seem to have done this […]
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For audio version click here The ragged edges, the desolate back waters – I’ve been to a few of them. There’s north-central Maine where roaring trucks haul huge trees on dust roads past the loneliest homes I’ve ever seen — dark, ruined ranchers set in holes that look punched into dull evergreens. Or Hardin, Montana, an arid scattering of slum-lord housing bisected by hundred car trains carrying heaps of coal. Or Port Norris, New Jersey, a […]
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For audio version click here We stood in line for an hour outside of Giverny’s walls. We talked with strangers, eavesdropped, took in the rare sunshine with pleasure. Within five minutes of stepping through the doors and entering the garden, I remember distinctly saying aloud, I want to live here. I felt besieged by color. Row upon row of flowers stretched out over a space filled with sun — great clusters of tulips, daffodils, flowering […]
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For audio version click here All that we are is the result of what we have thought. Buddha The shoes resting on the cellar steps – that image stays with me — two by two, each on a succeeding step. Every Sunday night while his children attended grammar or high school, he would sit by his workbench in the cellar, open his wooden, green shoe-shine box, arrange the polishes and cloths and brushes and shine […]
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