“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
The Greeks knew, and Shakespeare too, that tragedy is inevitable, and that it springs from our mortality, from our flawed characters and from our intersection with an inhuman, unforgiving natural world. Too often we follow our desires blindly and take actions whose full range of consequences we could never have foreseen. Too often, an accident will take its toll. Through a series of thoughtless and innocent choices, we end up […]
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Nations do not care if you believe in them or reject them. We live within their domains of alliances and enemies and must choose accordingly – either in rejecting their supremacy and finding a way to live with that choice or to make a choice to accept our nation’s (every nation’s) often egregious actions and act within that world. What is possible? What is merely an implausible dream? For […]
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“The mysteries of artistic creation are such that even the artist may have only the foggiest notion of what the work is aiming to be. A poem ends up on the page. But it’s not an utterance like a message or a telegram. In this respect, every poem is susceptible to Prufrock’s refrain, “That is not what I meant at all.” What The Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made […]
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For a very long time, for decades really, but especially since 2016, I’ve been trying to figure out how ordinary people united by a cause or by a point-of-view, can arrive at a point where they can believe absurdities and do terrible things. So let me begin with a story about a conspiracy and about the power of belief in changing a mind. Sometime in the summer of 1969, my […]
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