As a kid I delighted to discover an abandoned house in the woods. In my imagination I pondered about the lives of those who had lived there. Sometimes signs left behind, were clues to what they cared about. Moreover the condition of what remained served as a rough indication of how long the place…
There are songs, — one song alone for which I’d pay the full price of a concert ticket, to hear performed live. Never mind the rest of the set list, a single melody and lyric would make the ticket outlay, as well as the effort to reach the venue, the expense of time, —…
There is a last time for everything. The first day of Fall was yesterday, September 22nd. I picked up my camera, earlier in the week with the intention of capturing a final collection of Summer flower photos from Almond Marsh. Summer ends and Fall begins. That’s a logical deduction, a necessity of thought is…
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!” —…
When modes of expression are worn out art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to…
Tomorrow officially Fall begins. It has been a hot dry summer, with a big deficit in moisture. When the maples shed leaves on account of heat stress I take note. I am ready for Fall. Should we not celebrate seasonal change by gathering a few friends together for quiet conversation, for sharing a found…
A friend sent me an article by David Brooks, published in the September issue of The Atlantic, How the Bobos Broke America Brooks uses his incisive analytical skills, a deft facility with language to outline the rise of the Creative Class to the apex of the pecking order of American influence, and a rising simmer…
I discovered another writer. Or did the work of Emil Cioran discovered me? There is the old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.” E. M. Cioran was born Romanian. He left for Paris in the late 1930s. I purchased his second book published in French, entitled, All Gall Is Divided. …
THE DRY SALVAGES (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder…
I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday. In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip. I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently. Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,…
