David Copperfield (1935) “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” writes narrator David Copperfield at the beginning of the great Charles Dickens novel. But why the uncertainty? Can’t we just decide to be the hero of […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Becoming the Hero of Our Own Life
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Beowulf, cancer, Catcher in the Rye, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, In Memoriam, J. D. Salinger, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot | Comments closed
A Spiritual Interpretation of Waterfalls
Spiritual Sunday I still haven’t gotten over the waterfalls at Yosemite—does one ever?—and so am sharing a spiritual interpretation of a waterfall by the 17th century mystical Anglican poet Henry Vaughan. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I have mixed feelings about Vaughan (especially by how he sees the natural world cordoned off from […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Waterfall", Henry Vaughan, Intimations of Immortality, Religion, William Wordsworth | Comments closed
Epic vs. Ironic Heroes
On Monday I described my friend Alan as an Odysseus figure for the way he has coming back, time after time, in his battle with his cancer. He appreciated the article but was taken aback by the comparison and asked why I hadn’t compared him instead with someone like Holden Caulfield. He said he didn’t […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Anatomy of Criticism, Catcher in the Rye, Heroism, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Northrup Frye, Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
A Battle with Cancer: The Epic Version
From time to time I have written about my friend Alan, who has been assaulted by a series of cancerous tumors that the doctors keep on removing, either through surgery or through radiation/cyberknifing. He has had tumors removed from his eyelid, his neck, both lungs (six in all from the lungs) and now, most recently, […]
Mending Walls Can Save Lives
Robert Frost’s poems (as indicated by “Mending Wall,” which I wrote on yesterday) have the wonderful ability to move from the very specific to the universal. One begins with a small incident (two neighbors fixing a stone wall) and, before one knows it, one is thinking deeply about the world–barriers between people, roads not taken, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mending Wall", Birches, Robert Frost, teaching | Comments closed
Preparing a Gateway for the Dead
Film Friday Two weeks ago our Friday night film group watched Yojiro Takita’s Departures, the Japanese film that won the 2008 Best Foreign Film Oscar. Given our society’s discomfort with death, it is a film that people must see. (Caution: In the following reflection I’ll be revealing the ending.) Departures is about a young Japanese […]
Befriending, Not Fighting, Grendel’s Mother
I am still vibrating from the powerful student essays I received last week. I talked about one yesterday and will share another today. This is one from a student whose mother is dying of brain cancer. Erica Rutkai (she is letting me use her name) decided to move from California to the east coast when […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Beowulf, cancer, Erica Rutkai, Grendel's mother, Hero | Comments closed
Children Commence, Parents Let Go
Flowers for Justin This past Saturday St. Mary’s College held its graduation and, as always, it was a time of good-byes. Good-byes are the theme of today’s post. One good-bye was to poet Lucille Clifton, a former member of the faculty whose poem “blessing the boats (at St. Mary’s)” has become a regular part of […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "blessing the boats", "lesson of the falling leaves", Education, Lucille Clifton | Comments closed
Dazzled by Dreams of the Body
Ten years ago my 21-year-old son died on the Sunday following Easter. The coupling of the tragedy with the celebration of Christ’s resurrection makes my questioning of the religious observance all the more acute. Do I really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Is there life after the death of our bodies? Or if […]
