We find joy when we lose the self in activity, in those good things that are outside ourselves: making art, doing science, playing sports, educating the young, or caring for the old and disabled. Joy is nature’s way of telling us that we are fulfilling our nature… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords [...]
The hedonism of reading good books makes its mark on the meaning of a life, infusing it with a richness that can be had at no dearer a price than that of a library card—which is to say, it can be had for free by anyone who is not so foolish as to fail to [...]
Time will never be truly ordinary, and everydayness will never dominate as long as we have recourse to silence and prayer… There is a kind of harmony between the aftermath of Pentecost and the weeks after graduation. The great feasts are over, and the intensity of activity has abated. The world enters what the Church [...]
Is Time itself best understood by those things in life which are Time-less? Such is the main question posed in my play, “The Habsburg Manifesto.” It is not a political play but a philosophical one, whose main theme is the inner nobility of the individual as that which withstands and transcends all politics, all ideology, [...]
We find joy when we lose the self in activity, in those good things that are outside ourselves: making art, doing science, playing sports, educating the young, or caring for the old and disabled. Joy is nature’s way of telling us that we are fulfilling our nature. Even a cursory glance at the interior life [...]
Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain, And fetters, sure and fast, Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign. Far in thy realm withdrawn Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom, And glorious ages gone Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb. […]
Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on the most famous question-and-answer about time ever posed. It comes from the eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions, published about 400 C.E.: This is his question: “What, then, is time?” And this is his preliminary answer: “If nobody asks me, I know; if I [...]
This note is written in memory of David Lachterman, who was an alumnus—using the term in its fullest significance—of St. John's College, Class of 1965, when I was a young tutor. He was in my classes only in his junior year: in a preceptorial entitled "The Fragments of Parmenides and Heraclitus," and in the mathematics [...]
Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the world. I formulated it for publication in 1999 and had it formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred years ago by Augustine in 399 A.D. and some three quarters of a millennium before that [...]
Maybe it is the Amish in me, but I have never been good at wasting time. First thing in the morning it seems my mind is alert, and I’m thinking of the next problem to be solved, the next essay to be written, then the next meeting to attend, and the day’s work to be [...]
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John’s College. What makes the truth worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the [...]
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” —Virginia Woolf […]
I want to steal four minutes of my talking time to speak of the role that the Santa Fe campus has played in my life. I remember vividly the atmosphere around its founding in the years before 1964, but only confusedly the arguments pro and con—though among the latter one worry was predominant: Were we [...]
When T.S. Eliot was lodging with his friend John Haward, the charwoman [the cleaning lady] was once asked about the famous man she worked for. Not knowing who Mr. Eliot was, she finally figured out who they were talking about and said, “Oh! you mean the holy man!” Mr. Eliot’s eleven years with Mr. Haward [...]