Every Good Morning

The Prince is a treatise on political power – how to claim it, how to keep it, how to defeat one’s enemies. It is also a book written to please a prince. Its tone is one of servility, for it was written to an actual Prince to curry favor and to secure some scrap of power and a living for Machiavelli. It is a book about how a sovereign can […]

I became aware of Dr. King in the late summer of 1963 as a ten-year-old in perpetual motion moving past our black and white TV and seeing pictures of a black man speaking in drawn out syllables and a crowd that seemed to fill up Washington D.C. I remember his voice then. No one I knew spoke like that. The priests mumbled, the nuns’ sentences came in the form of […]

Rochester is the wild man of Jane Eyre, the man of wild nature, a man of wealth who knows how to conduct himself with upper class figures like the odious Ingrams. He is the man of the moors, of storms, wind, full moons, enormous horses and dogs; a dark man full of passion, a trickster, the inhabitant of a lonely mansion where he keeps a woman imprisoned; a weird man […]

Jane Eyre begins life as a ward of the wealthy Reed family, “a dependent … who ought to beg,” an orphan, one to whom no one owes affection. Mrs. Reed is her aunt but that means nothing. Mrs. Reed is one of several brutes who blight her childhood. We come upon Jane at 10 years of age, under siege from a malevolent cousin, John Reed, 14, a budding sociopath who […]