Some say teachers should, like soldiers, should put their lives on the line. This A.E. Housman poem brings up the question of whether even soldiers should do so when there sacrifice will be meaningless.
Tag Archives: Alfred Lord Tennyson
Wanted: Teachers, Not Martyrs
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Charge of the Light Brigade", "Here Dead We Lie", "I Have a Rendezvous with Death", "Soldier", "Strange Meeting", A. E. Housman, Alan Seeger, Bertolt Brecht, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Galileo, Rupert Brooke, school reopening, teachers, Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, Wilfred Owen Comments closed
Mentor: Rare for Sons to Be Like Fathers
Homer explores the difficulty of a young man living up to his famous father. It’s a problem that continues with fathers and sons.
Is Old Age Becoming Overrated?
A “New Yorker” article on aging turns to literature to debunk the notion that aging is a good thing.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Vanity of Human Wishes", "Sailing to Byzantium", "Tithonous", Aging, Aristotle, As You Like It, Ecclesiastes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, King Lear, Merchant's Tale, old age, Plato, Rasselas, Samuel Johnson, Ulysses, William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare Comments closed
The Anxiety of Harold Bloom
The late Harold Bloom longed to be a Samuel Johnson but never got there.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom, Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot Comments closed
Let Us Sail into the Promise of the Day
E. A. Robinson’s “Children of the Night” finds spiritual hope in a dark world.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Children of the Night", Doubt, E. A. Robinson, Faith, In Memoriam Comments closed
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Crannied Wall
Monday On the way back from a family function in Iowa, Julia, my mother and I stopped off in Springfield, Il. Yesterday we visited the spectacular house that Frank Lloyd Wright built for Dana Thomas in 1902-04. Upon entering the structure, we were greeted by a statue bearing the label of a Tennyson poem. Looking […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Flower in a Crannied Wall", architecture and nature, Dana Thomas House, Frank Lloyd Wright Comments closed
Fathers & Sons: He Goes His Way, I Mine
Wednesday The talk with my son that I described in Monday’s post reminded me of talks with my own father where I was sure he was wrong. I’ve since concluded that I was not as right as I thought I was and that our disagreements came down to our different life arcs. Our arguments came […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Blaise Pascal, Jean Paul Sartre, Rasselas, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Johnson, Ulysses, Westword Ho! Comments closed
Will Odysseus Shape 2020 Election?
Monday I won’t take credit for this but Washington Post’s Molly Roberts recently penned a very Better-Living-with Beowulf type column where she contrasted two Democratic presidential candidates by examining which version of the Odysseus/Ulysses story they prefer. Her piece gives me an excuse to apply other versions of the story to various 2020 contenders. Roberts […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 2020 election, Aeneid, Beto O'Rourke, Donald Trump, Finnegans Wake, Homer, James Joyce, Joe Biden, Joseph Campbell, Odyssey, Pete Buttigieg, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Virgil Comments closed
