Month: April 2012
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Attention: attendere (L.), tenderness; attend: to turn one’s ear to, listen to
I am writing half an hour before nightfall. Before I awoke on Sunday, a mosquito kept buzzing in my ear, reminding me of dear Emily’s buzzing Fly. I awoke with the dawn, the sun having made its case rather nonchalantly this morning. Around 7:20 a.m., the sun cast itself upon room and walls and trees…
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‘My sad smile corrects her’
Joan’s PET scan came back negative. The doctors don’t know what the spot on her lung is. Maybe just a scar. Joan turned 89 the week before last. Today she said, “Eight-year-olds are such a marvel. They see and say so much.” We drank champagne on her birthday and, with her two sons and also…
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Love as plenitude: A prelude
Theodicy (Leibniz’s coinage) is a justification of the ways of God to man. To “justify the ways of God to man” was Milton’s project in Paradise Lost. This justification can seem urgent, and especially fraught, when one cannot deny the existence of evil but at the same time believes wholeheartedly in the existence of a benevolent,…
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On Ajax’s becoming mad
Overcome by rage, Ajax would have his revenge. He would steal upon the Greek camp, would bleed Odysseus alongside the other men who had had a hand in the scheme. Achilles had died and his armor was rightfully his–for who greater than he, what warrior more mighty and more deserving, what man nobler? Odysseus was…
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The ground is for giving: A reverie
Two days of steady rain have left the city sodden. I am feeling the effects of slumped shoulders and the vertebrae in my lower back have been gabbing more than usual. I look to my right at the brooding Lake Geneva, compare it with the graying of the sky. On cue, someone, perchance looking down…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 