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The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by… read article
We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are. A… read article
"The day steeps everything in golden liquid... A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love."
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer… read article
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(This might be a distressing read, so let me just say at the start that it ends ok and we are fine now.)
At age ten I attended the grand opening of the new public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, within easy walking distance of our house. Next door was Yorktown Lanes, the bowling alley dedicated two years earlier. Across the road was the municipal swimming pool where my mother had been giving swimming lessons since 1957, and next to it was the miniature golf course (“putt-putt”) that I would manage for three summers beginning in 1970. Nearby were the municipal tennis courts. This concentration of recreation today strikes me as remarkable. No wonder my generation was spoiled rotten. Now the city is demolishing the old library and building a new one nearby, where the ice rink and indoor soccer field once stood. Some good-natured dissenters have protested the razing but top-down progress is tough to reverse. The old library’s design is notably ugly. We knew that even in 1963, but it was the “Space Age” and the building was said to resemble a flying saucer. Inside, none of the rooms were quadrilaterals. All were shaped roughly like slices of pie. At the center were the circulation desk and shelves of periodicals. That’s where I first read Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Within the next few years I would, without guidance or much of a critical sense, discover literature in that library. I borrowed Kafka’s The Castle, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Steve Allen’s The Funny Men, T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950, Kipling’s Kim and Fletcher Pratt’s The Civil War. I permit myself to get nostalgic about those self-guided literary explorations. They started a way of life that remains in place today. I still wander among library shelves, trusting in intuition. The old building was tacky and is probably better off knocked down and hauled away. Of course, most contemporary architecture is a scandal and I have little trust in the aesthetic qualities of the new library. The unfairly forgotten George Crabbe writes in The Library (1781): “But what strange art, what magic can dispose The troubled mind to change its native woes? Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see Others more wretched, more undone than we? This, Books can do; — nor this alone; they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise, Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise: Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone: Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings.” The tone is elevated and the iambic pentameter a little plodding but Crabbe is on to something: “Their aid they yield to all . . .”
