When you enter the room where it’s hanging, even before you fully register what the painting represents, the pleasure is already there, just as you turn the corner and see it on the wall.
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Carrying Grief
Even if it is helpful to know that deep grief is quieting, it is consoling that some are closer to our particular pain. Most people immediately become awkward when I mention the miscarriage. It makes sense to me, as I act similarly around people who have more extensive familiarity with death than I do. I have never experienced the death of a child I have given birth to, have never yet experienced the death of a parent or a spouse. I am not old; I still cannot, as my professor told me in college, really understand Lear. But at twenty-five, watching Lear carry the body of Cordelia and cry, “Why…
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Miami Miami
You are sitting on the couch watching football some Saturday afternoon. Maybe it’s halftime of your home state's annual Civil War game. Maybe two top ten teams are warming up for kickoff. Or you are just flipping channels looking for a close contest. But as score updates scroll along the bottom of the screen, one stands out: Miami University. "Wait, Miami University of … Ohio? Why is there a Miami University in the State of Ohio? Isn’t Miami in Florida?"
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“East in Autumn”
⎺Original Poetry from Thomas Roe
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Interstate Rest Stops for Those in the Slow Lane
Even if you don’t have kids in tow, dropping out of the interstate fast lane for a few minutes certainly can’t hurt. Reduce the blurring effect of modern transportation. Ignite your curiosity. And experience what Ray Bradbury called the “pores of life” instead — its finer features, texture, and details.
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Wonder, Love, and Mushrooms
That is a surprising progression — from mushrooms to meaning, but it is possible because all things are united by their ultimate cause. The thoughts we draw from reality are like the fruiting bodies of a vast interconnected “network of being.” Beyond this, the Christian encounters reality not merely as “being” but also as a created order — an order that is, as Gerard Manely Hopkins puts it, “charged with the grandeur of God.” The inky cap mushrooms along my favorite walking path owe their existence to a creator. This gives my interactions with them a truly personal dimension. God is the giver. They are gifts. And I am the…
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Augustine on the Way to the Homeland of Peace
It is one thing from a wooded summit to catch a glimpse of the homeland of peace and not to find the way to it, but vainly to attempt the journey along an impracticable route surrounded by ambushes and assaults of fugitive deserters with their chief, "the lion and the dragon." It is another thing to hold on to the way that leads there.
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Chesterton on Ultimate Questions
The deepest of all desires for knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for. Those who believe they can answer that question must at least be allowed to answer it as the first question and not as the last. A man who cannot answer it has a right to refuse to answer it; though perhaps he is rather too prone to comfort himself with the very dogmatic dogma that nobody else can answer it if he can’t. But no man has a right to answer it, or even to arrange for it being answered, as if it were a sort of peculiar…
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Cormac McCarthy on Needs and Wants
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
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Cormac McCarthy on The Interior and Exterior Man
In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen.
