Original Poetry from Dietrich Balsbaugh
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The Phenomenology of Phineas and Ferb
They prize summer above all else. Why? It is full of potential, and unfinished narratives, embodied experience, and sensory experience with others. “Summer” becomes a stand-in for a life well-lived in the particulars. It’s making-do with the odds and ends we’ve been given, bucking convention, and rising to the occasion.
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On Liberals and Liberal Education
Recent articles of note from the world wide web.
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“Request and Variations”
Original Poetry from J.D. Smith
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Get a Clue
We went on to discover that this “clew” was a northern English and Scottish fragment of Old English cliewen which meant "sphere, ball, skein, ball of thread or yarn.” Going back even further, it appears as if this word might even go back to a common root meaning a mass of clay which also produced our modern words “glue” and “gluten.” In other words, a big ol’ ball of something. Dough? Bread? Suddenly we’re in the dark forest of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, that ill-fated “clew.”
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Tolkien on Doing Our Part in Our Time
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
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Tolkien on the Oathkeeping
Now is the hour come, Riders of the Mark, sons of Eorl! Foes and fire are before you, and your homes far behind. Yet, though you fight upon an alien field, the glory that you reap there shall be your own for ever. Oaths ye have taken: now fulfil them all, to lord and land and league of friendship!
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Tolkien on the Decline of High Men
If the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarce claim any longer the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts. Such is the need of our days.
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Tolkien on Beginnings
There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark.
