For with us pity for others is the price we are anxious to pay for the privilege of our self-pity. Robert Penn Warren. World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel. Random House, New York. 1950. Pg 7. One thought on this: pity is not compassion, but it seems similar.

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of […]

Teaching, and Now, Retirement*

On May 31, I resigned my faculty position teaching English at a small high school. The school solely served at-risk students who had been removed from the home for various reasons; most of them had gotten in trouble with the law, but all of them came from extremely dysfunctional families. As, probably, do a great […]

Family History

When I was 16, my father and I were walking in from checking crops. Our home place was a half-section – a rectangle ½ mile wide by 1 mile long – so a walk to the middle could be accomplished inside the space of a conversation. On our way back to the house, my father […]

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection By Gerard Manley Hopkins Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle […]

Descending Theology: The Crucifixion

by Mary Karr To be crucified is first to lie down on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes      fix you into place. Once the cross pops up and the pole stob sinks vertically in an earth hole perhaps at an awkward list, […]

Email From My Dad

I sat down to write you the morning email and found myself 15 minutes later perusing through news stories that, though interesting, really didn’t affect me at all. The obvious entertainment???????? stories of the celebrities mansions, loves, wayward lives and children, etc, or the IRS failure to answer taxpayers questions, (40% of calls go unanswered)……….it […]

Dust Storms

THEY DO NOT HAPPEN NOW, the sandstorms of my childhood, when the western distance ochred, and the square emptied, and long before the big wind hit, you could taste the dust on your tongue, could feel the earth under you–and even something in you–seem to loosen slightly. Soon tumbleweeds began to skip and nimble by, […]

An Embarrassment by Wendell Berry

“Do you want to ask the blessing?” “No. If you do, go ahead.” He went ahead: his prayer dressed up in Sunday clothes rose a few feet and dropped with a soft thump. If a lonely soul did ever cry out in company its true outcry to God, it would be as though at a […]

“The Years That Walk Between”

etr-gu: Ash Wednesday, and I am reading Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” again. Isn’t this what rituals do, what rituals are for? Yes and yes. When it comes to re-reading, they let us see a familiar work with a fresh eye, or let us see ourselves with a fresh eye through reference to a work that hasn’t […]