I remember the excitement the day the crates arrived and were carefully opened, and what emerged was overwhelming. What was beginning to happen was a unique partnership combining all the art forms: poetry, painting, music, and theater into one evening’s performance. She was British-chilly until I brought out the gin: one ice cube and a [...]
However we choose to look at it, October thrills and titillates each of our senses and reaches into the very depths of our suspect souls, whether we actually encounter the dead or merely imagine their various states of being. Oh, the blessings of October, my favorite month. As far back as I can remember, in [...]
In “The Awakening of Miss Prim,” the title character’s awakening and education in the most natural ways of friendship illuminate for her the great wisdom and tradition of marriage, which modern education and ideology in their blatant ignorance have relegated to the past as a useless, unnecessary institution. In Natalie Fenollera Sanmartin’s bestseller The Awakening of [...]
Flannery O’Connor clearly has a soft spot for her Southern religious freaks. She sees in their insanity the germ of genuine belief, and recognizes in them an antidote to the bland, uniform indoctrination into a culture where materialistic atheism is the assumed worldview. In her short stories, and culminating in The Violent Bear It Away—her [...]
Social visits are done for their own sake, for disinterested reasons, for the pleasure of others, and as a gracious act of thoughtfulness that dignifies both the visitor and the visited. In the novels of Louisa May Alcott, a time prior to the invention of the telephone, and even into the middle of the twentieth [...]
The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself. “A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the [...]
The reader crosses a threshold from the book as an object into a transporting engagement with the surface of the writer’s language, and then through the language into living thought and imagination, into spaces and times and ascendancies of thought. The book that has drawn you into it has disappeared altogether as an object. It’s [...]
In Flannery O’Connor’s "Wise Blood," the Church of preacher Hazel Motes is a Church of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. It is a Church Without Christ because no redeemer is needed. Is this not what the majority of twenty-first century Christianity has become? In re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I’m struck by the prophetic precision with which [...]
With his students, the ideal teacher of literature seeks the center of knowledge, which he understands in metaphysical or theological terms. His vehicle is poetry, by which he means the imaginative creation of action and character in either prose or verse. When they seek the center in communion with the greatest of poets, teacher and student [...]
If the twenty-first century is to produce more great men and more great books, it will have to restore a true education; and a true education is an education as if truth mattered. The title of this essay, “Education as if Truth Mattered,” is taken from the subtitle of Christopher Derrick’s book, Escape from Scepticism: [...]
Many parents, ministers, camp councillors, and even school teachers are trying to teach virtue to the young, simply by means of lists and definitions. And surely definitions are useful... eventually. But the primary means by which kids grow in virtue are their models and heroes, seen as whole characters. In my mid-twenties, I had an [...]
H.G. Wells sought to free humanity from the “bondage” of tradition, but T.S. Eliot saw history not as an evolutionary movement, but a return to the past. While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of [...]
If literature is not in any sense a mode of description, then what does it really communicate but feeling? In 1961 the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch published an essay in Encounter entitled, “Against Dryness.” In it, she laments the way in which our “scientific, anti-metaphysical age” has left us with “far too shallow and [...]
From police procedurals to fantasy extravaganzas, genre fiction often struggles to balance the appeal of its subject matter with the demands of storytelling. Smaller, self-contained novels that artfully suggest a world beyond their pages are usually more successful than broad, sweeping epics that try to cram in every single thing. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Rings [...]
