Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?” It’s a touchy philosophical question that has...
“Every time I ask what time it is, I get a different answer” Henny Youngman I don’t know about you, but I find some movies useful and even entertaining...
It is no different now. The yearning still gnaws. The night dark, utterly silent, Sky stretched endlessly back Into an infinity beyond reach. And the fears, the tears Are...
“Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy;...
In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by...
“The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori (It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”) Wilfred Owen Yes, it seems fitting that...
“Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the captain lied” Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows” When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5th, I was sound asleep, like a baby...
“I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” Samuel Becket, Endgame Before he went to Rockaway Beach...
It’s been a long time but worth remembering, if you can, that when the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001,...
It is not uncommon to be doing something seemingly innocuous when one is flooded with wild thoughts, musings that seem randomly meaningless, leading nowhere. Thoughts that think us. To...
“He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.” William Blake, Eternity “But...
Rolling out of my crib before dawn today (I was in it long before the charlatans Harris and Trump began their theatrical “debate”), it being another September 11th, I...
I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy....
“With a click, with a shock Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon…” “Something’s Coming,” lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by...
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie...
A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee,...
I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about...
With lilacs in the dooryard blooming a week ago, I was struck by a sense of synchronicity so strong that I stood stone still and sniffed the air for...