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How like a winter hath my absence been
‘A great part of every day is not lived consciously,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done… When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.’ In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, she explains that the key to righting the ratio is in ‘the…
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Uhmm
Now that my summer leaves are falling, I suppose it’s not surprising that I have renewed my interest in the words that have remained faithful to my denuding branches -not just words, though: conversational words; words that used to drip like water from the leaky faucet of my mouth -on command, or not… Sometimes though,…
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Call me a fool; trust not my reading nor my observations
Lately -well, since I retired anyway- I’ve been noticing that I’m not retaining as much when I read; I find that I often have to re-read a paragraph to make sense of it: sometimes, the tense seems incorrect, sometimes a name I’ve just read escapes me; and occasionally I skip parts of sentences like words,…
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I have that within which passes show.
I suppose I have known all along that there were rules. Each time I engage in conversation with others there are hidden conventions at play: modes of conduct, standards for engagement, topics that are avoided, words that are inappropriate under certain circumstances, and yet welcomed in others. I have to decide which rules to follow,…
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In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god
Is Philosophy gendered? I don’t mean in terms of the number of men who, until very recently, considered themselves the only able arbiters of the discipline. And I’m not sure I could even comment on whether being married could make a difference in the field one way or another. And yet… I was an obstetrician…
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Doubt thou the stars are fire
What am I doing, thinking about love at my age? And don’t get all shmaltzy about that; don’t remind me that without love, there is no hope, no future, no point in going on… It’s not that I’ve never considered those arguments, but I’ve lived through them all, and am at peace with myself and…
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I go by…?
I realize that I am still swimming upstream on many issues -no doubt it’s a function of the number of years that I drag behind me like an anchor in mud; and yet I suspect we’re all at least partially tethered to our past. Take names as an example[i]: there was a time when a…
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Would that we might also pray in the fullness of our joy
Prayer! I think I should be careful here: I have no enduring patience for obsequiousness in the face of eternity; I would not beseech a god, or gods, to treat me well. And yet… And yet perhaps there is some benefit to discussing a problem with a higher power -a different power anyway: laying it…
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Are you telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…?
I’m confused about a lot of things I suppose, but lately I have been vexed by the removal of ‘offensive’ books from the shelves of libraries both here and in the USA: books disguising themselves as ‘nonfiction’ when their detractors are convinced they are actually fictional (and hence not to be believed). I used to…
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