Milton for Contemporaries

Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on Paradise Lost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.

Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.

 Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:

“…the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”

The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.

In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.

Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.

Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.

Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.

Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”

In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.

I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.

Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.

Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.

America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.

We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.

As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

—rj

Britain’s New Prime Minister Is An English Major

I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.

I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.

Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.

But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?

This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”

Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.

What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?

…we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Or from “Going, Going”:

Their kids are screaming for more
More houses, more parking allowed
More caravan sites, more pay.

Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.

Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.

–RJ

Water Over Smooth Stones: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams

I hadn’t heard of Denis Johnson (1949–2017) until I read an Esquire article enthusiastically recommending Netflix’s 2025 film Train Dreams, an adaptation of Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same title.

I liked what I read—the story of a shy man, Robert Grainier, who finds words difficult. He arrives as an orphaned child in Idaho’s rugged panhandle at the advent of the twentieth century. A day laborer, he joins crews cutting giant timber and building massive railroad trestles; later, he founds his own venture, hauling freight across the Idaho wilderness by horse-drawn wagon. He falls in love. They have a child and build a cabin in the woods. Joy and grief follow.

The story transcends Grainier, who lives into old age as a witness to a vanished America we will not see again—a sweep of history moving from horses to railroads, cars, electricity, telephones, television, aviation and rockets into space.

I watched the film and read the novella, whose 117 pages go quickly. Directed by Clint Bentley and co-written with Greg Kwedar, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Grainier and richly deserves its critical acclaim, with several reviewers calling it one of the most moving cinematic works of the new century.

Nominated for four Oscars, the film fleshes out the book’s narrative. Page and screen offer apples and oranges, distinct yet equally absorbent and moving tellings, each capturing the life of a simple, everyday man carrying his grief with quiet dignity, portraying life’s randomness and impermanence through rhythmic sequences and soft-lit photography.

The book itself leaves no word wasted, flashing with lyrical intensity. Wolves howl. Sentry spruces keep watch, piercing solemn, low-wandering cumulus flotsam. Short sentences mirror time’s passage, moving like water slipping over smooth stones. The book ends, leaving behind a haunting lingering. Not surprisingly, critics have dubbed it an epic masterpiece rendered in brevity.

Johnson began as a poet and went on to write short stories, nine novels, a novella, and two plays. Train Dreams won an O. Henry Award, one of the top honors for American and Canadian short fiction, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Earlier, his Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award.

I now think of him as one of our contemporary best, agreeing with the critics ranking him alongside Cormac McCarthy in chronicling the American experiment, though doing it more gently, measuring what was gained against so much irretrievably lost.

rj

A Mary Oliver Poem I Hadn’t Resd Before

Mary Oliver was perhaps the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, whose nature-centered poems continue to reverberate.

Oliver’s gifts were different from Frost’s. She rarely pursued the subtle symbolism beneath his seemingly familiar surfaces or the double meanings hidden within his plain diction. Yet we continue to read her for a similar invitation: to find rest, not among our busy fellows, absorbed in the pursuit of the volatile, but in nature’s quietude—the bubbling stream, the scurrying chipmunk, the scent of pine, the intricate tapestry of a snowflake.

As always when I read her, a quiet solace takes hold. I grow tranquil, reminded that contentment is found not in possessions but in nature’s moods, even its thunder—in the sense that I, too, belong to something larger than myself, a continuity that neither time nor circumstance can annul.

My childhood returns: memories of a pine-scented grove, a whispering wind, a fox moving silently through the brush.

A few moments ago, I read an Oliver poem I had somehow missed, despite having read much of her work. It’s “What Can I Say,” one of her final poems, included in “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.”

Once again, she beckons us to immerse ourselves in nature’s quiet wonders, to gather its gifts, and to discover grace by accepting its rhythms.

Her poems never insist; they invite. They ask us to linger long enough for the ordinary to become luminous.

Nature still speaks, if we’ll but listen. As Oliver reminds us, “the leaf is singing still.”:

“What Can I Say”

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

—rj

Censorship by Omission

I’ve just finished reading the proposed Texas State Board of Education reading list.

In fairness, it contains a number of worthwhile works that introduce students to foundational texts in American history and culture. Yet it is also unmistakably the product of a Republican-controlled State Board of Education, reflecting a distinctly conservative vision of what students should read.

Biblical passages appear at nearly every grade level, Nothing comparable is drawn from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religious traditions, despite the growing religious diversity of Texas classrooms.

Its political leanings are equally unmistakable. High school students encounter Margaret Thatcher’s “Eulogy for President Reagan,” Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” (from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), and Thomas Sowell’s “Flattering Unction” (from The Vision of the Anointed).

Missing are serious countervailing perspectives that might encourage students to weigh competing ideas rather than inherit a single ideological framework.

Although students read excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” major literary voices are conspicuously absent. Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros. Prominent Asian-American writers are nowhere to be found.

Mark Twain is absent as well, conveniently avoiding the controversies surrounding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has likewise disappeared.

The proposed list, scheduled to take effect in 2030 if approved, has already been reduced from roughly 300 works to 200. Among those removed were The Great Gatsby, The Alchemist, The Hate U Give, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Even more striking is the absence of books published during the past half century. Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a riveting dystopian novel introducing middle-school readers to questions of memory, conformity, and moral choice—is missing.

So is Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a coming-of-age novel confronting trauma, mental illness, and adolescence.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the defining memoirs of twentieth-century America, is absent as well.

What remains is a reading list whose omissions reveal its priorities as clearly as its selections. This is less an exercise in literary judgment than an attempt to shape civic identity through selective reading.

The response has been swift. PEN America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Federation of Teachers have all criticized the proposal.

While many states publish recommended reading lists, Texas’s carries unusual weight in defining what students are expected to encounter and, just as importantly, what they are not.

In the end, this is censorship by omission.

At a moment when reading proficiency is declining and many young people struggle to finish even a single book, schools should be placing in students’ hands works that ignite curiosity rather than merely satisfy ideological objectives.

Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down, for example, can be read in a single evening. A fifteen-year-old boy enters an elevator intent on avenging his brother’s murder; at every floor another ghost steps inside. The novel is impossible to put down, yet its real power lies in the moral questions that linger long after the final page.

The same can be said of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the extraordinary true story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, whose survival of a plane crash, weeks adrift at sea, and years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, becomes ultimately a story not simply of endurance, but of forgiveness.

A good book invites a conversation with its author. It excites. It unsettles. It enlarges the imagination.

Reading lists are, by necessity, adult constructions. But Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (2011), reminds us that the deepest reading often begins elsewhere, not with official lists, but with curiosity.

The books that stay with us are frequently those discovered by chance, books that cultivate sustained attention amid the constant distractions of modern life.

—RJ

Keeping Up With The Greeks

When Christopher Nolan decided to film The Odyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.

Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated The Iliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.

That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.

Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.

My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.

A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.

Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.

It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.

Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.

I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.

Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.

Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of The Iliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”

Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhaps allowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.

I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.

Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.

Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:

“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

—rj

A Dickinson Poem

I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.

She remains my favorite poet:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we dont believe
Does not exhilirate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.

The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).

Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.

–RJ

Why Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey Is A Must See

I haven’t been to a movie theater in five years. With inflation, it’s become an extravagance, unnecessary when you can simply wait a few months and rent the film for home viewing.

Having said that, and still believing it, I fully intend to break the habit for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, opening in theaters July 17.

Perhaps I’ve fallen prey to the hype, but I have an almost irresistible urge to see this one on the big screen. I taught Homer’s epic for thirty years, and every time I returned to it I discovered something I had somehow missed before.

If pressed, I would call The Odyssey the greatest saga ever told. Born of an oral tradition nearly three thousand years ago, it remains astonishingly contemporary, its influence reaching through Western literature: Virgil’s The Aeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and countless other works that consciously echo Homer’s enduring voyage.

Joyce called it the most universal of stories, and I think he was right.

Within its pages are some of literature’s most enduring archetypes, recalling Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth: the hero’s journey of separation, ordeal, and return; the enchantress and the temptress; the faithful spouse; judgment, homecoming, and restoration.

Then there are the symbols: the sea, the descent into the underworld, Penelope’s shroud, the bow that proves identity, the purifying fire.

Three great themes, however, lend the poem its lasting power.

First, assertion versus passivity. Thoroughly existential long before existentialism, The Odyssey insists that we become ourselves through engagement rather than retreat, through action rather than surrender. The Lotus-Eaters, Calypso, and the luxurious ease of Phaeacia all tempt Odysseus to abandon his purpose.

Second, boundaries. Again and again Homer reminds us that there are limits human beings ignore at their peril: reverence for the sacred, loyalty to family, fidelity to one’s companions, respect for hospitality. Even Scylla and Charybdis embody the necessity of steering between destructive extremes.

Finally, there is cosmic evil. Whether arising from nature’s indifference or human cruelty, evil is real, unmoved by moral persuasion, and must be recognized before it can be confronted. Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops remains one of literature’s unforgettable dramatizations of that truth.

Some critics have faulted Nolan’s film for historical inaccuracy. Matt Damon, they say, doesn’t look Greek. The armor is not archaeologically faithful. Telemachus reportedly calls his father “Daddy.” Most controversially, Nolan casts the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o in a double role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.

None of those objections strikes me as especially important.

Few moviegoers will care whether the armor is perfectly Mycenaean. As for the contemporary dialogue, Nolan appears to have drawn heavily from Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, whose accessible modern English has introduced Homer to an entirely new generation of readers.

That seems to me a virtue, and not a flaw. The Odyssey deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among younger readers, upon whom its future ultimately depends.

As for Nyong’o’s casting, Elon Musk condemns it as “groveling” to “woke” expectations. The resultant backlash, unfortunately evident in some 600,000 dislikes of YouTube’s final trailer, says far more about our present moment than it does about Homer.

I find Nyong’o a magnetic presence, and admire Nolan’s willingness to ignore predictable objections. We inhabit a global culture now. Homer belongs to all of us.

Advance sales suggest that plenty of people agree. The film’s 70mm IMAX screenings have been selling out months in advance.

My wife and I already know where we’ll be.
In our seats. And with buttered popcorn, too.

–RJ

Needed: The Courage to Tell the Truth

Marlin Stuzman, R-IN

Despite assurances from several Republicans that they’ve spoken at length with Senator Mitch McConnell, hospitalized five weeks ago, we have yet to hear a single public word from the eighty-four-year-old Kentuckian himself. Governor Andy Beshear did the proper thing this week by sending the senator a letter requesting a candid accounting of his health.

Kentuckians, and indeed the nation, are entitled to such transparency from those they elect to high office. This is not a partisan demand but a democratic one.

I find myself in rare agreement with Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, whose unusually candid remarks distinguish him from the practiced evasions of so much contemporary politics:

“You know, just the things that I’ve heard and seen from some friends is that he’s obviously not doing well, but don’t know if he’s alive or has passed away. His constituents deserve answers where he is at,” Stutzman said.

“I think that the governor of Kentucky has every right to ask after three weeks that no one has said anything. As a Republican, I think we need to hold our own party accountable. And so, the fact that we haven’t heard anything really from Senator McConnell is very discouraging and concerning,” Stuzman added.

Politics, by its partisan nature, so often assumes the countenance of Machiavelli, cloaking its embarrassments in the respectable garments of euphemism and doublespeak until concealment itself becomes a civic virtue.

Stutzman’s plainspoken willingness to question his own party is refreshing not because it is extraordinary in principle, but because it has become extraordinary in practice.

Democrats are hardly immune to the same temptation. For months they brushed aside mounting evidence that Maine’s Graham Platner was unfit for public office, choosing loyalty over candor until the testimony of a liberal woman made further denial impossible. One is left to wonder how differently events might have unfolded had the whistleblower been a conservative.

Such questions are uncomfortable precisely because they expose a habit shared by both parties: the instinct to protect power first and truth afterward.

—RJ

Habits, History, and Rebirth Through Reading

Thus far, my plan to read 50–60 books a year, based on a new approach to how and what I read, has become one of the most fufilling disciplines of my life. I’ve just completed Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, an award-winning biography based on newly discovered manuscripts that shatter long-held fallacies regarding Gauguin. It’s my twenty-third book this year, with six months still to go.

It’s not numbers per se that interest me, but the cultivation of reading as a daily habit, as natural as brushing one’s teeth. I was inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which demonstrates how small, repeated behaviors, faithfully practiced, become almost automatic.

I’m reminded of B.F. Skinner. I was immersed in behaviorism in an intensive graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a paper on teaching oneself a new language. Years later, I learned Spanish by applying those very principles.

My new read is Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a scholarly masterpiece, riveting in its exploration of “unconformity”—the violent rupture where geological strata meet across immense reaches of time: earth’s history, from life’s primitive transition from water to land some 400 million years ago, prodigious in unconformity, cyclic cooling and warming, and sudden, often violent morphings into alien landscapes redolent of ever more evolved flora and fauna; reverberations of random catastrophe, the dominion of the temporal yielding at last the first vertebrates.

So too the human record bears its own unconformities: the clash of values, old and new, secular and religious, progressive and conservative; the collisions of mores, civilizations, and cultures.

I am fascinated, learning so many new things. That is why I relish reading, for with each challenging book I am reborn.