Category: meditation

• March 16, 2012

  If life is brought into question

  If life is brought into question, then life has been carried forth into a space in which it is now open to inquiry. This is a marvel. It is also a glory. Life, before being brought into question, had been stuffed with periods, the tedium of periods, the slumber of dogma. But now life, itself…
• March 15, 2012

  Restless mens (L.): Three E verses

  I.   Clever men bleed well: they’re feted, fed senselessly, sent every rendered wench, end effeted, well-spent, seceded.     II.   Agreed! Sempre, the terms severed, they were sentenced hence: ever rent yet never freed.    (Dern! Derned, derned severe!)     III.   The tree bends, The reed-wren flees, The wereful sheep descend. Pebbles…
• March 13, 2012

  On kith and kin

  As it happens, [Flaubert’s] “Un Coeur Simple” is a magisterial example of…how it is possible to enter into, and convey to others, a mental world that is not one’s own…. –Anthony Daniels, “Flaubert’s Simple Heart,” New Criterion (June 1, 2010) *   *   * My grandpa liked to take my hand in his large,…
• March 12, 2012

  ‘There is more beauty than our eyes can bear…’

  I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first…
• March 10, 2012

  On the value of paying attention: An excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

  The following is an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (New York: FSG, 2004), pp. 28-9. The narrator, Reverend John Ames, is 76-years-old and dying. As his final word, he has decided to write a letter to his 7-year-old son. The year is 1956. In the excerpt below, he refers to Feuerbach, a prominent atheist living during…