Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people.

Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the… read article

Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying appeared first on The American Scholar.

Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude.  I know I favored singable poems (Stevenson), field guides to butterflies and wildflowers, and collections of brief biographies of the famous and heroic. I remember juvenile monographs devoted to Marie Curie and Davy Crockett. On the cover of the latter, Crockett is on the wall of the Alamo, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat at the Mexican army.  The first “grown-up” book I remember reading was The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber, a fellow Ohioan. If those are the first, what about the last? Robert Richman (1957-2021), former poetry editor of The New Criterion, poses that question in “The Last Book,” published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Paris Review:   “What will be the last book I read? Woolf’s finest work, the only one I shunned? The Turgenev novel everyone disdains? End Game in Poetry, a just-uncovered work by Grandmaster Borges, or Dinesen’s stories, seeking for a fourth time the mercy of my eyes? What will be in my hands the morning they find me? A dog-eared Borzoi, or sassy new Penguin? A pockmarked Pantheon, or pristine Random House? And will the failed-poet coroner claim foul play and confiscate the thing? Will the book then appear in a dealer’s locked case, scarred by marginalia claimed to be authentic, where I propose a brief tying-up-of-ends-type poem? Or will the last book be the one that I wrote and never could abide, but could read that night with kinder eyes, and whom I turned slowly to greet like a long-lost daughter?”   Richman died at age sixty-three – too young but old enough to begin thinking of last things – the last kiss, the last laugh, the last book read.

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