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On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.” White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on… read article
"What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds."
If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition… read article
When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a patchwork of plots and kingdoms but as a vast living organism veined with valleys and furred with forests. They had to leave the Earth to see it whole, torchbearers of that rude paradox of the human condition: often, we have to lose our footing to find perspective; often, it is only from a distance that we come to feel the pull of the precious most intimately and most… read article
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A blog turns out to be an education undertaken in public. Its proprietor is more student than teacher, and one is fortunate to encounter numerous tutors along the way, between the covers of books and out there in the bigger world. I seldom sit down at the keyboard with the goal of instructing you, like a pompous schoolmarm. More often I want to share something – a book you might enjoy and a sense of the pleasure it has already given me, or some new nugget of knowledge. I would continue reading and writing without you, but you make the experience more rewarding. Here is a 1958 entry in Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014): “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” With the proviso that “experience” and "every possible situation" include “book learning,” I agree. It’s an old paradox, one the Greeks left us, but the older we get and the more we learn, the more we come to recognize our ignorance. In other words, “adult education” is redundant. Dr. Johnson might be describing the care and feeding of a blog when he writes in The Rambler on July 9, 1751: “The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.” Anecdotal Evidence today celebrates its nineteenth anniversary. Each day since February 5, 2006, I have posted something except during the hiatus following spinal surgery in 2019. Now, with a renewed backbone, it’s time to get to work.
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Frog Prince” by Stevie Smith appeared first on The American Scholar.
On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.” White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on… read article
