Tag Archives: "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

How to Overlook 200,000 Deaths

Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” captures why America might be overlooking 200,000 deaths at the moment.

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By Donne Logic, Chess Refined, Not Dull

While the 2018 chess championship is proving disappointing to some, Donne helps us see it as the experts do.

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Celebrating 45 Years of Marriage

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of my marriage to Julia, I turn to Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

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Donne Can Help with a Separation

Today is my 43rd wedding anniversary and, although Julia and I plan to be together for many more years, we will live apart next year. John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” may help us out.

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Donne’s Warning about Climate Change

Looking back over the past year, I repost an essay on John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and climate change denial. Given that 2015 has been the warmest year on record and that “the weather outside is frightful,” Donne’s comments about “moving of th’ earth” are only too relevant.

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Donne’s Lovers, Spooky at a Distance

Tuesday Adam Gopnik makes some nice literary allusions in a recent New Yorker essay-review of George Musser’s Spooky at a Distance, which is about the history of quantum entanglement theory. Entanglement, also known as non-locality and described by Einstein as “spooky at a distance,” claims that two particles of a single wave function can influence each other, even […]

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Donne and Climate Change Denial

Somewhat unexpectedly, John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” gives insight into climate change denial.

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Can Donne Help Us Cope with Death?

Meditations on Margaret Edson’s “W;t”–with further reflections on whether Donne’s poetry can help us handle death.

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Magnificent Women in the Sick Room

Tolstoy shows us deathbed vigils can spur us to a deeper engagement with life.

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