In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it. There is a real difference here though people turn to the imagination without knowing it in life and to reality without knowing it in arts and letters. —…
Here I am, another day in the town where I grew up. I am here for the funeral of my sister, the last of our family to live in Durham, North Carolina. I will miss my sister. I feel grief over what we both missed while growing up. Things were as they were. The…
Words make, and have made a world, that transcends the world and a life livable in that transcendence. It is a transcendence achieved by the minor effects of figurations and the major effects of the poet’s sense of the world and of the motive music of his/her poems and it is the imaginative dynamism…
What to say and how to say it? Unable to write anything yesterday, waking in the predawn gray I handed the luggage over to the limo driver. The day began with the familiar ground-tone of anxiety, — I didn’t want to miss our flight. My mind flashed back to when I was a boy. …
THE SOLUTIONS OF DREADFUL NIGHT (excerpt) by James Thomson We do not ask a longer term of strife, Weakness and weariness and nameless woes: We do not claim renewed and endless life When this which is our torment here shall close, An everlasting conscious inanation! We yearn for speedy death in full…
Another day’s grind. That sounds like a unwarranted complaint. As a matter of fact I’m an old white guy, benefiting from ruling class privilege. There are many blue-collar tradesmen not as secure as I happen to be, to say nothing of persons of color working their way up, competing with Caucasian peers…… I have…
Three days have passed since my sister died. A time was before any of us existed, and a time will come when we no longer will be present. That everything passes is occasion for sadness, and maybe gladness. Everything has it’s “prime time.” It is unseemingly to stay too long, to be ungraciously present,…
We moved from Mundelein. Our reason, to consolidate the family in one area, so that the grand kids, cousins, can play together as they grow up. We adults can compare notes about “life.” Life is nothing but a deck of jokers, as least that is how I’ve felt lately. Your quest: find meaning in…
My sister passed yesterday around 9PM. She lingered but for a short while, perhaps two hours after the nurse called to say that she was passing. I cannot say what death is as I cannot say what life is. It is concrete, a singular experience for each of us. No one can define what…
I knew it was coming. The last several phone conversations that I had with my sister were labored, troubling. With our last conversation she was unable to finish a sentence. I could not help her, as her mind no longer responded to verbal encouragement. An excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein was sent to me…
