“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
In my junior and senior years of high school, I was knocked down and then altered by the murders of King and Kennedy, by a sinister and fear-mongering Nixon, by the televised violence of the Chicago convention, and by Vietnam, by its daily, useless devastation. I read Ramparts, Fanon and Cleaver , Hunter S. Thompson , Marcuse , histories of the War . I marched in demonstrations and engaged in long arguments. Somehow, in circumstances I no longer remember, […]
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In eighth grade I wrote a book. During some recesses I sat on the side of the yard and watched the boys run, one bold son occasionally breaking free to scamper up to a knot of girls and shout and cause them to giggle. I watched the girls jump rope and huddle in groups and look at the boys. I watched the nuns in their shawls looking at us, tall […]
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I have not been sleeping well. Big deal. Since 2016, the number of partial insomniacs world wide must be in the hundreds of millions. Wendell Berry understood: “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be ….”* Two or three nights a week at 2:17 or 3:03 or some […]
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This begins with innocence. I was throwing rocks in a stream for the pleasure of the splash, for the pleasure of throwing rocks into a stream or to see how far I could make them go. I was 12 or 13, old enough to know. There were ducks fifty feet or so upstream. I aimed for the pleasure of aiming so wrapped up in the mere physics of moving. No […]
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