Category: education

• January 25, 2012

  ‘Or some contrivance awkwardly suitable for the unpleasantly awkward occasion’

  Sometimes it goes: once lips to cheek. Sometimes it goes: twice, back and forth, slowly or swiftly. Occasionally, it goes three times. The pressure is also important. So is the touch. Firm or light. Moist or dry. Cheek or air or half-both. As intimacy grows, the lips may get closer or the kisses, on cheeks,…
• January 23, 2012

  At home with Joan

  If it’s before 9 a.m. and the doorbell rings, I hurry down the stairs to get it. If it’s after 9, then I assume Joan is up and around, sitting in the kitchen, reading the New York Times as the light comes in through the front window. Upstairs in my treetop home, I loiter with my…
• January 21, 2012

  Against the fantasy of something for nothing

  (Beyond my bedroom window: the snow comes down, the pigeons sit askant, at odd angles, one here, another there as if playing with me.) — (The birds, unseen, are singing amid the gently falling snow. Pure sprightly delight.) — We have inherited a misguided public philosophy concerning the desirability of “free things.” The fantasy that,…
• January 19, 2012

  Stone Soup, mutual dependency, and a new economic order

  In “The Story of Stone Soup,” as Antonio Dias tells it, a wandering beggar comes upon a village. Hungry and tired, he goes to each door and is met with the same answer again and again. There is, he is told, not enough to go around, and the door, half-opened, is soon closed upon him.…
• January 18, 2012

  Being arrogant got me halfway…

  “To live an examined life is to make a self-portrait.” –Robert Nozick, The Examined Life Being arrogant got me halfway to where I am today. Becoming humble got me the rest of the way. Being humble put me onto a different way. But arrogance, strange to say, was a saving grace for a young boy…