Sooner or later each of us confronts the question of what it means to be me. Who am I as an individual existing in this time and place, as part of this family and this people? This most basic question is thrown at each of us, and there is no predetermined script.
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Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and Flannery O’Connor
Quentin Tarentino’s film “Pulp Fiction” and Flannery O’Connor’s stories smell of nihilism. But at the end of the film, and at the end of O’Connor’s stories, the light of Providence glimmers tantalizingly. So there was a meaning after all! But it was not the meaning I was expecting.
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On the Importance of Forgetting
Most attention in our culture is given to the importance of remembering. But it turns out that forgetting can be just as important. The inability to forget can be as destructive as the inability to remember.
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“Thoughts that Wound from Behind:” Literary Allusions as Pedagogical Opportunities
Dante places the ancient hero Ulysses into the eighth circle of hell. A fraudulent counselor of war, deception, and exploration beyond the bounds of God’s law, Ulysses suffers eternal encasement in flame. But Tennyson’s poem, great in its own right, calls Dante’s judgment into question. The tension between these two poems – one epic, one lyrical – gets at the very question of the meaning of life.
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Poetry and the Mystery of Time
Poetry allows us to meditate on our everyday experiences in ways that unearth profound mysteries we so frequently overlook. But to be more awake, more conscious, requires not only breaking from routine but also cultivating a different sense of time.
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The Moviegoer: Suburbia, the Search, and Binx Bolling’s Existential Homelessness
The movies tend to conceive of despair, as they do of love, in terms of external obstacles that are overcome, end-of-story. So they gloss over our existential amnesia, and they confuse our actual despair (our wrong relation to God, self, and world) with felt despair. As Binx Bolling sees it, this apparent comedy is really the tragedy of man accustomed to despair. The man may have regained the world, but it turned out he never had a soul if his predicament is reducible to [re]obtaining the American Dream.
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Politics, Publishing, and Snowy Woods
Unless you were paying close attention, you may have missed a momentous occasion in politics and publishing earlier this year.
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The Iliad: A Poem of Force and Pity
This is, as far as I can tell, what we get from the first great war epic: the demystification of the glories of war and the tragic delusion of Force.
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Epitaphs for the Journey (Book Recommendation)
For me, when I’m really in a poem, it’s the same as being in the middle of a prayer. It really is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all the poems are going to be religious poems, except maybe in some very, very deep sense.
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“I’ll tell you about despair, mine.” A Tribute to Mary Oliver
I was sitting at home, coffee in hand, when one of those breaking news articles popped up at the top of my iPhone screen. “Mary Oliver, poet, dies at the age of 83.” My heart sank. I let out a sigh and tears welled up in my eyes.
