momentously Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing […]
Category Archives: Essays on Literature
How to Get Me to Keep Reading a Book.
27-Nov-12Tuguegarao City Put this on the second page: When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie on the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the […]
Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that […]
Mark Twain’s Grave on All Souls Day.
14-Nov-12I wrote on this blog about a trip of mine to Hannibal, Missouri, the adorable little river-town where Mark Twain spent his boyhood. In our imaginations the writer is so associated with the Mississippi River that I believe it it something of a crime that he is not buried along its course. It is of […]
Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture is online and well worth the few minutes it takes to read. Berry almost always feels distinct from other writers; his thinking has integrity (Latin integritas, “wholeness”). He begins somewhere near the beginning, and so his thoughts feel rooted. He is aware that a human life is transmuted food – an astonishing […]
On Writers Not Finishing Things.
27-Dec-11“But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from […]
A fine short essay, an introduction to an abridgement, on the astonishing Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles Doughty. By Barnaby Rogerson, who appears to have some talent.
Christopher Hitchens, Flagellum Dei.
19-Dec-11I see no particular reason to call Christopher Hitchens a good person – anyone, as I have said, who leaves his wife when she is pregnant with their second child is safely distancing himself from all the more benign forms of respectability – but I must confess that despite the obvious – despite Greenwald’s pointing […]
Rereading Dante.
15-Dec-11I’ve been reading the Divine Comedy recently. It continues to astonish me. I remember reading it in college, as a freshman, and feeling quite certain that Purgatorio was better than the Inferno, and Paradiso was best of all. As time has gone on I have become only more aware that this is most emphatically a […]
Greatest Hits of 2011 at the University Bookman.
27-Dec-11The editor of the University Bookman sent out a list of the most-read pieces on the site in 2011, and the interview I gave there was one of them. The top five pieces are all excellent and I recommend them all: “Tyranny of the Herd.” By Paul Beston. http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/tyranny-of-the-herd/ “Live Where We Are.” By John […]