Only the empty nests are left behind / And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
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Backward Miracle
Every once in a while, we need prose, not poetry, says the poet. We need just the vessel with the wine and nothing more. We need a single loaf and the single fish and that is all.
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Not Many Wise, Not Many Noble
Inside the ‘museum’ was a pile of artifacts — four-hundred-year-old Bibles, sacred heart pictures, a reproduction of the shroud of Turin, old motorcycles, more dinosaurs, and a neon sign that read: “Jesus Saves.”
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2020 New York Encounter: Crossing the Divide
Are you hungry for an extended engagement with reality, for something that will awaken you more fully to the human condition? Consider joining us at the New York Encounter, February 15th through the 17th.
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Public Domain 2020
Gutsy piano students everywhere can now legally photocopy Chopin’s Préludes as they sweat over its tangled passages.
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What’s In A Translation?
Every year when I read the Iliad with my students, I pick up a new translation. I laugh out loud with delight when I read fresh characterizations of old characters. Odysseus described as a complicated man or Agamemnon as a drunkard. I love it when ancient heroes or villains shout contemporary phrases. "You’re both whining," says Nestor to Agamemnon and Achilles. Did ancient Greeks whine? Of course they did. Then of course I love comparing translations and seeing how translators grasp the tragedy of the poem.
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Tolkien’s Other Stories (Book Recommendation)
If you have enjoyed The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or maybe even the Silmarillion, it might be time to explore some of these or other of Tolkien’s lesser-known stories.
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Quantum Mechanics, Contingency, and Freedom in Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”
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.
