I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases. In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam. For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s. Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]
Thinking about my dead son in this Christmas season brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the lengthy poem that he wrote over the course of 17 years lamenting the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.Hallam was a young man when he died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Tennyson describes his […]
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Christopher Marlowe, death of a child, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, John Milton, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Rachel Kranz, Suffering, Umberto Eco | Colleagues of my friend Alan Paskow held another one of our salons Monday night. Alan is a former professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s College, now retired, who currently has cancer in his lungs. We have been meeting once a month or so to show our support and to generally reaffirm how important community is. Monday […]
In yesterday’s post I began giving an account of a car conversation I had with my two sons regarding stories that explore father-son relationships, as well as my desire for a story in which fathers and sons collaborate to handle the world’s challenges. Darien, my older son, felt that the archetypal conflict as it […]
“But maybe stories and poetry can help open our minds to possibilities that are very real but extremely hard to see; and in that sense, they can be very practical.” – Rachel Kranz in a response to yesterday’s post I love the two responses to yesterday’s post (from the two major women in my life) […]
