“Why can’t we eat normal food?” Frank moved the fried tempeh, steamed broccoli, and brown rice around on his plate with his dinner fork, much like the eight-year-old boy he was forty years ago.
His wife’s...
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And...
The transcendent ‘overcoming’ or reconciliation of the Fall of Man—that symbol of the cause of the disorder that we would wish re-ordered, of the return to the garden—is what great poetry graciously asks of us...
“An intermediate...
In Othello, William Shakespeare, the philosopher of everyday life, holds up a mirror to us and shows us what human beings are capable of. Beneath our most pleasantly cultivated exterior, there often lurks a serpent...
William Hazlitt is widely...
All those who find it hard to deal
With modern life and get perplexed
With innovation technological; who feel
Their memory receding with their hairline and will get quite vexed
If they can’t get a word, can’t find their specs;
With crinkled faces and with...
Podcast stories, like reading, have the advantage of engaging the audience’s imagination. And lest the technophobes among us decry the dominance of gadgets, rather than the gadgetry taking us into a brave new world, the technology is actually allowing us to participate in a much older form of literature:...
It is time to whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, it’s time to face the real facts about Oscar Wilde and his real views on homosexuality...
It was with a queer...
We were born a light within pain
Reckoned in spasms of a tender night
A knowledge Child from infinite origin
Born bearing what came before Us -
So birth found Us quiet, like peace;
And twenty alive, like blood.
To the bright sun I leapt a...
Storytelling shaped Washington Irving and his life as much as he shaped it. Irving describes how from boyhood he rambled about the countryside and “made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew...
The young man intended to purchase my death and, presumably and in some manner carry it away so that I never would meet with it. Immortality, wealth, my beloved Jessica all rotated in kaleidoscopic vision before my eyes...
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones...
Have you ever wondered what a mostly adult Huckleberry Finn might have been like? Or who might pass for a modern day Huck Finn? Or what Huck might have done had he been born into money—or made...
My title is a question: "Do you know what an odyssey is?" I am asking each of you to ask yourself: "Do I know what an odyssey is?"
In learning as in traveling and, of course,...
The whole scene expressed the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this world, when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow, and death...
There is a certain church in the city of New York which I have always...
