For many of us, Daylight Saving Time begins tomorrow at 2:00 am. That’s “spring forward,” people! I’m going to go out on a limb and embrace the controversy that I know is to come: I like time changes. I like changing to standard time in the late fall, with nightfall earlier each day as we inch toward the winter solstice. I like that. I like falling back (and the extra hour of sleep once a year) and also, for entirely different reasons,... Read more
I was angry with my father for a lot of reasons over the years, some justified and some not. But I don’t recall any time when I was more pissed at him than when I heard him say on one of his cassette-taped “fireside chats” aimed at his followers and groupies that “a person’s real family is almost never his blood family.” Thanks a lot, Dad—signed, “One of your blood family.” I heard this a few short months after my mother... Read more
To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it many appear, might be a way of saving human lives. Simone Weil The above passage comes from Simone Weil’s essay “The Power of Words,” written in the late 1930s as Nazi forces, ideology, and propaganda swept across Europe. Weil’s concern in the essay is to push back against the insidious ways in which language can be... Read more
My youngest son, Justin, has a remarkable memory–for, as he puts it, “totally useless facts.” By the time he was ten or eleven, I had learned never to challenge his memory of a basketball game we attended, of a conversation from months or years earlier, or a movie. Thanks to me and my forcing Justin and his brother Caleb to watch my favorite movies from the time they were very young, Justin knows every line of dialogue from “Dead Poets... Read more
I’ve lived almost two-thirds of a century now, so I have passed many of the birthdays that supposedly mark a passage and/or cause the birthday person distress. 18, 21, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 . . . you know what I’m talking about. It has never been a big deal for me—as Jeanne always says, “It’s just a number.” But I’m 65 today . . . and that particular number has caught my attention. “65!!” I’ve been thinking over the... Read more
I read a fascinating article in The Atlantic not long ago that explores the various ways in which virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri have begun to occupy more and more important spaces in our lives. Alexa has lived in our house for the last eighteen months or so. I was worried at first, because home is the one place where my conversation tends to be unfiltered. I talk to our dachshund Winnie as if she is a person (actually,... Read more
In one of my seminars a week or so ago, my students and I considered the following passage from a text assigned for the day. [He] had seen nothing of the world and had acquired neither knowledge nor understanding of it . . . [He] preferred to have people of the same origins as himself in his immediate entourage; no doubt he felt most at ease among them . . . His illusions and wish-dreams were a direct outgrowth of... Read more
One of my teaching colleagues and mentors used to love to tell the story of what happened one day after he and a colleague teamed up for a particularly impassioned lecture in the interdisciplinary course they were team-teaching. I no longer remember what he said the text or topic of the class was, but after class a usually silent back-row-sitting student came up from and said “Wow! You guys really take this stuff seriously!” Which raises the question: What would... Read more
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself. Michel de Montaigne I freely confess that Lent is my least favorite liturgical season. I have struggled not so much with the season, but rather with what Lent seems to represent for many people. It often is little more than a forty-day exercise in playing at getting serious about one’s faith. One can easily pray more, study more, try to be a better person, and generally try... Read more
One of the pleasant surprises of the new semester, now four weeks old, is that the discussions in all of my classes have arguably been the best in recent memory. Students not only are ready to discuss on all sorts of topics, they also are showing a willingness to be honest and “go deep” about themselves in ways I have seldom experienced. On some days, my classes are essentially teaching themselves with little direction from me. All I can say... Read more
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