After receiving an email from a reader interested in the mythology surrounding bears, I remembered my own obsession with the boar. This was written some time ago, and one day will hopefully be expanded for a small illustrated book. Forgive the in-line citations, which may be an eyesore, but it would take too long to…
Here’s Seamus Heaney, first talking about his poems on the bog bodies of Iron Age Europe, in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, and then the bog poems themselves, spanning three of his collections: Wintering Out, North, and District and Circle. Also, since I hope to do a post on the bog bodies at some point, interested readers would do well to check out the book that inspired Heaney’s interest in the subject, P. V. Glob’s The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved.
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From the moment I wrote it, I felt promise in “Bogland.” Without having any clear notion of where it would lead or even whether I would go back to the subject, I realized that new co-ordinates had been established. Door jambs with an open sky behind them rather than the dark. I felt it in my muscles, nearly, when I was writing…
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Many thanks to Richard Smyth, editor of Albatross, for including two of my poems from Old Europe in Albatross #27. You can download a .pdf of the entire issue here.
I’ve always been about five seconds away from being an atheist, or of just being indifferent to the idea of God. I once knew the son of a minister. In the middle of facing the hypocrisy of the religion he was raised with and how ill-equipped it had made him to deal with the world,…
i
How odd that the days lengthen; the hours
braced against a brittle sun that sears
the lip of ice at the base of the black oak.
The ice and the sun
are opaque and impenetrable,
a sealed world. This world. The days don’t dwindle
into twilight but linger so silently
we hardly notice the future
in these perplexed angles of
light. Later, at the feet
of the boxwood, night rustles anxiously, or is it
merely the wind. No, there are certain tensions.
The night wants what it is owed.
ii
Mornings, I walk the circular pond and the pond stares back.
I won’t go near enough to see
the distorted reflection staring up at me
The sky is there;
clouds shunt past, rapid as recognition, the sky a blank
eye as is the sun. I stand at the edge, I am
a poor…
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I pass a sign outside of a business every now and then, and staring out at me beneath a bad logo is a caricature of Albert Einstein complete with mustache and wild hair. And I wondered if anyone who knew him, either as a lowly patent clerk or as the head of the Institute for…
I’ve always liked it that the actor Richard Burton could admit in his diaries: “I am fascinated by the idea of something but its execution bores me.” And this from the guy who played Hamlet (and whoever else) a million times. But there’s something to it for those of us who’ll never play Hamlet, or…
It’s been said of Picasso: “At the age of sixteen, he produced two paintings which were of academic perfection.... So what do you do with your life if you’re producing academically perfect works at the age of sixteen? Every step afterwards is an innovation.” Indeed, whether you like where Picasso went or not, it’s undeniable…
The image is a familiar one: an aging man or woman who becomes more and more bewildered and angered at the usual political corruption, or the pace of technological or social change. To protect themselves they become more and more strident and inflexible, and retreat behind whatever cultural or religious certainties they can. In the…
I’ve been trying for ages to write about a friend from many years and cities and jobs ago, and the questions that have always trailed out from his story are, What do we owe our friends and family? What do we owe to the people we love? What kind of difference can we make in…
It’s always refreshing to hear a religious person, who is trying to convince you of the truth of their faith, suddenly realize the actually wonderful mystery of faith: they can’t actually prove it. And so instead they end up saying something like, “I can’t prove it, but it clearly works.” This is what they say…
Over the past few years it’s been easy enough for me to notice how eager and energetic infants and toddlers are to know just about everything. What they don’t seek out themselves by clumsy curiosity, they are given and eventually take up in their own way, with guidance. At the same time, it’s been all…
While I’m the only member of my family who isn’t a teacher, what it means to teach others has always been on my mind. And so, comments from recent posts make me ask questions like these: If we believe that something like rock music is clearly lesser than classical music; or that the likes of…
Picking up some pizza at a favorite place the other week, it was hard not to notice that right by the counter a new TV had been installed. Hanging just where anyone entering or leaving the restaurant would see it, the screen toggled between stock photos of Italy and Italian food, and ads for local…
The other day I happened across one of those huge So and So’s Guide to Classical Music, and for the hell of it I paged around to the only modern composers I really know (Philip Glass, Henryk Gorecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener), and they were all pretty much panned as fads. Ages ago when…
Last year a good friend of mine, a great artist of immense intelligence and humanity, nevertheless wrote to me about the birth of his child: “I’d been in search of meaning my whole life, and there it was.” Surely this was the usual thing we hear after a child is born, but for him it…
For all of my talk about people being seduced by culture and violence, it’s worth saying that I’ve fallen under the spell many times. From late gradeschool on, when I first discovered writing, oftentimes I tried to sum up my sense of loneliness, and later actual depression, by writing fictional accounts of school shooters. One…
What use does criticism serve, if any? I’m thinking here of the reviews of books, movies, or music, whether the smallest notices in newspapers on up to book-length studies. Do some of us genuinely enjoy a good suggestion? Have we found a handful of voices that we trust, that feel like a friend, and so…
There is a remarkable moment in an interview with the writer George Steiner. That familiar question about the Nazis comes up, of how someone who listened to Bach and Beethoven by day could put people in gas chambers by night: Steiner: “[there are those who are] certain that the cultivation of the sensibility of beauty,…
Last week I spoke about the tendency of many, including myself, who discover a sense of belonging far from where they’re actually from. Such an experience of home is intense but also fleeting, a two-week trip or a series of later returns; or it lives on just as an immensely powerful memory. But I was…
Does anyone else feel a kind of intangible attachment, even nostalgia, for the road? One day and long into the evening I remember driving from El Reno, Oklahoma, to Holbrook, Arizona; just hoping to cross out of New Mexico, there were fewer hotels than I expected, so during that last hour of trying to find…
Not sure who the equivalent is for you, but Albert Camus was one of the first authors I found outside of Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The high school teacher who introduced me to him also laid an egg it took years to get over: the apparently insurmountable gulf between “popular” and “serious” literature; and…
There are many stories from the late 1930s of European and American intellectuals being taken on stage-managed tours of the Soviet Union, nearly all of them returning to their home countries with glowing reviews of what they had seen. An exception was the novelist Andre Gide’s account, Back from the USSR, where he claimed that…
I’ve long noticed a general suspicion shown towards movies purporting to tell a “true story.” Even though it’s no surprise that they take license with real events, after they’re released there are always dozens of webpages treating even the smallest of these instances negatively. What are we so afraid of? On the one hand, surrounded…
I woke the other day to find this sentence in my email: The internet is not real. Because after we go beyond all the news that has been filtered to reflect our opinions, all the ads that reflect our preferences and all the entertainment that we choose to fall into for hours on YouTube or…
I usually repost this every year around Black Friday, but it seems a good companion to yesterday’s essay. It’s not just the media that’s to blame for our situation: When asked if the news of the day surprised him anymore, the poet Joseph Brodsky—who grew up in Soviet Russia and came to America in his…
One could spend a thousand lifetimes on religious questions which have no answers. Such questions are worth bringing up but not even attempting to exhaust, and so I want to briefly write about two of them: morality, and intertwined problem of free will and predestination. Morality In all of these pages I never saw…
What follows [this will serve as an introduction to Humility is Endless] is an expression of my love both for religion and for the world, and how the experience of each can make us rigid and intolerant and certain, but also selfless and filled with empathy and understanding for others. Both our experience of religion…
There is a sense of make-believe about much of life, as if it were a play. I buy books I won’t read for year, or keep up the appearance of my house, or do so much for a “future” I am not even guaranteed. But so much more of what we do, or become attached…
If you were to find these words, and no others, written on a piece of paper, “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world,” and didn’t know who said it or when, you could agree or disagree with the words themselves. However, if I were to…
I once heard an hour of talk radio on the subject of two composers. Between the host and the guest scholars and all of the callers who had very specific and wonderful memories of this music, it was a great hour. And while each scholar favored one composer over the other, and while some callers…
One thing we all have in common is the certainty that we are all different. You like the certainty of being different, yet despise those who themselves are different—but we all do. You like the choices you’ve made, you like all the things that distinguish you, yet hate and feel frightened of what others have…
The Book of Job is one of the most lucid presentations of the problems I’ve been writing about, and it is a story which is easy to tell: Job is an upright and just man, rich, and with many children; Satan (not the personification of evil from later tradition, but merely one of the many…
If you say your certainty is a matter of faith—is no one else allowed faith? If you say your certainty is a matter not of a choice you’ve made, but of what God has shown to you—has God really spoken to no one else, has God really only spoken to you, or to those who’ve…
I once heard an interview with an aging scholar. He was about eighty years old, and still extremely enthusiastic about the subject he’d dedicated his life to. One of the questions asked was why anyone should care about his area of expertise: “What does it have to do with my life?” His answer is amazing:…
There is no reason to think of another religion any different than your own. The phrase might as well be, Do not do to other religions what you would not have them do to yours. None of this is about showing how all religions are the same, or demanding everyone know about other religions. It…
Nothing is essential, necessary or fundamental to living decently, happily, or with empathy for others. I mean this mostly in religious terms. There is no one God, one figure, one religion, one denomination, one scripture, one translation: there is no one of these that is essential, necessary, or fundamental to everyone’s life. One is as…
I once heard someone say that the illness and death of a child, or a child born with a severe handicap, made him doubt the existence, or at least the benevolence, of God. I understood what he meant, but anymore I have a hard time agreeing. Such an idea seems to come from the belief…
When something happens to us or to others and we say it is God’s will, so often we aren’t just saying God meant for that to happen, but that it happened for a reason we know and can discern. As a result, an illusory structure—along with many unsupportable assumptions—is thrown over our life, and the…
Growing up Catholic, the greatest hint into the changing nature of religion and law always occurred whenever I heard someone disagree with their local priest or bishop, or even the Pope. This was surprising since the followers of religious or political leaders, or merely the upholders of certain laws or traditions, all eventually try to…
The impulse toward rebellion and conformity is an immature one, part of an early and unavoidable stage of thinking. It is a youthful reaction, and an important one of drowning in mere exposure to so many new things you think you should take sides on, but really don’t have to. And, being a reaction couched…
A few years ago I was in the bathroom with my headphones on, holding my cellphone up and balancing that hand against the mirror. I was watching some video while trying to shave. I suddenly felt ridiculous. I couldn’t even shave without watching or listening to something. *** In the summer of 2001, while getting…
I write about bittersweetness a lot. It seems worth noticing that the essence of life is not doing away with every bad or unfortunate thing, or pretending we can completely avoid them, but rather in living with them decently when they occur. Living like this, we have no choice but to do away with so…
The greatest gift we can offer the future is the example of our daily lives, how we are living in the present moment. All the specifics of cultural, political, religious or national identity amount to trivia if they only make us merely distracted, merely angry, merely arrogant, merely unable to care about anyone but ourselves,…
Riding public transit last week, a few passengers started talking about Pope Francis’s visit to the United States. Almost immediately, though, the conversation veered away from the celebrity and even piety of the event into mocking the Pope’s statements about the poor, and migrants. “I mean really,” one woman said, “if we all took in…
A hundred years ago, in June of 1917, the small Egoist Press in Bloomsbury, London, issued a book of poems by the American expatriate, T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations. Much like trying to read the Bible after a religious upbringing, it is almost impossible now to read especially the first four poems—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”—without reference to the veneer, reputation, and sometimes repudiation, that have attached themselves to Eliot in the century since. (And many of the remaining poems make you wonder why that reputation took hold at all.) But here are all twelve of them. What an odd bird the book was then, and how strange so much of it still seems now.
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al…
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