“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
Alma Vogels had superb eyes. She could id birds by subtle marks in plumage when we could not see the bird. She painted too and produced hundreds of works. Patti, my wife and her daughter, thought she spent 10 or 15 minutes on each of these pictures. That’s all. They were an exercise for her. In Tuscany, Alma sat and looked out and up and her brushstrokes delivered all of […]
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Half a pace ahead, one shoulder hunched, she seems to be wheezing, but she is leading him out the heavy door, his arm looped with hers, a big blind man in sunglasses, gray-bearded, scruffy in a Viking t. In the parking lot, he stops. An SUV is inching towards them. They have come out from the shade into bright sunlight. He tilts his head toward where he feels the sun […]
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Twenty-one murdered in Uvalde, ten in Buffalo, and depending on definitions, there may have been as many as 200 mass shootings in the US so far in 2022. Nothing is going to change because a political majority of the American population have factored in all those deaths as acceptable in terms of this equation: If I get to keep my guns and buy more of just about any type whenever and wherever I want, I’ll […]
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In August 1914 , Solzhenitsyn writes a scene where a character confronts Tolstoy on “his insistence that love is the only proper response to evil”: “You say … that evil does not come from an evil nature, but out of ignorance. But evil refuses to know the truth. Evil people know better than anybody else just what they are doing. And go on doing it.” Evil also needs willing accomplices – media personalities, […]
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