Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.
I am committed to reading the best that has been thought and said. Escapism and the utilitarian have never been my guides to what I read. In our age of competing stimuli, we’ve imperiled our ability to reflect, to think hard about life’s meaning and live it well.
Stillness is prerequisite for reflection that enlargens our thinking, renders us more humane, the finding time for the right read that nurtures the goodness that lies within us.
I am dismayed about contemporary classrooms, vastly different from those of my New England childhood that lent emphasis to the reads that expand awareness and humane endeavor.
Classicist Michael S. Rose sums up for me what today’s classrooms have lost with their inability to distinguish the wheat from the tares:
“The great catastrophe of our time is not that children fail to learn, but that they have never been taught what is worth knowing. The tragedy that unfolds daily in classrooms across the land is the presence of amnesia, a colossal forgetting of our inheritance. The inheritance of human genius and beauty—from Athens and Jerusalem, through Rome and the Renaissance, to Shakespeare’s London and Lincoln’s prairie—is what now stands in peril. It has not been violently seized; that would require too much effort and too much awareness of what was being lost. Rather, it has been carelessly misplaced, forgotten among the dazzling distractions of modernity” (Substack, Oct. 9, 2025).
I think the greatest compliment one can pay a book is to want to read it again. I doubt I can ever shed Eliot’s Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—or, more contemporary, Pullman’s The Dark Materials.
You know me as loving anything by Virginia Woolf: a summer day of floating clouds in sea of blue, daisies blooming at my feet; a tranquil sojourn in the shade of a leafy maple, my back propped against its furrowed bark, To the Lighthouse in my hands.
A momentary escape from a troubled world of tribal factions…
How can I not enter into character Lily Briscoe’s insightful awareness of art’s ability to unify experience and grant it meaning?
“She could see it so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.”
And then the question that hovers over all our lives:
“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
The artist’s struggle to render visible her inner contemplations—it’s all there. Those rare moments when the gates of mystery yield, and we glimpse the whole.
As Lily exclaims in triumph and exhaustion:
“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
Great artistry helps us find our own vision, makes us more aware, and doing so, lends nurturance for living our lives better.
And so it is for me with To the Lighthouse: like a well-brewed tea, to be sipped slowly, savored, drunk down to the very lees.
There are three places I’ve been that I’ve loved the most, but not in the way most travelers recount their memories.
Each remains a palpable memory, not because they yielded an Eiffel Tower, Cancun beach, or haute cuisine New York restaurant; but on the contrary, a stunning silence, sweeping me out of myself and a landscape weighted with human duplicity.
In those moments I floated, unmoored from gravity, a wanderer among the stars —part of everything that has been or ever will be, glimpsing eternity beneath all mortal breath, my entrance into epiphany.
It happened first for me years ago at Arlington National Cemetery, the white rows glimmering in the rays of early morning sun.
The second at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers’ fragile dream first lifted from the earth. I stood alone, wombed in stillness, as if the air itself remembered that first exultant rise.
Most memorable of all, traveling eastward from Edinburgh, and suddenly they unfurled, the Highlands, spectacular in their rolling verdure. I stepped from the car into a silence so immense it seemed alive.
In its haunting stillness, I understood Emily Brontë’s fierce passion for the Yorkshire moors, resounding in her poetry and prose:
“you are not broken for needing stillness you are not flawed for shrinking from noise your mind is simply attuned to something different something more aligned with the quiet current that flows beneath all of existence.”
Like Emily, I exalt in that stillness, shaking hands with Eternity.
I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.
The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.
I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.
It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.
Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.
Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.
Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”
Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.
In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.
In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.
Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.
On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”
While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.
Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).
It’s with profound sadness I learned yesterday of primatologist Jane Goodall’s death at age 91.
Blessed with remarkable genes, she lived life with zest up to the very last, tirelessly traveling across international landscapes to raise funds for her Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania, founded in 1977.
I read her NY Times obituary, but it falls short in evaluating the plenitude of her achievement and its significance for all of us. I learned some time ago that the NYT composes many of its obituaries in advance, ready-to-go like a frozen pizza.
It doesn’t take into account her devotion to the Tanzanians among whom she worked for sixty years, as earnest for their welfare as she was for chimpanzees, humanity’s closest relatives, possessed like us with dual capacity for good and evil.
She gave early warning of climate change as an eyewitness of its exponential ravages in Africa, the front line of its advance.
You can learn much of what she accomplished through reading among her many books The Shadow of Man or A Reason for Hope of her work in Africa, breakthroughs in science, and personal beliefs, some of them controversial such as her advocacy of birth control availability to help African families limit their family size. Tanzania is second among Africa’s 54 nations in population growth. With a present population of 68 million, its projected 2100 population will swell to 283 million, imperiling its subsistence resources.
Goodall had faced an uphill climb in winning acceptance among male scientists, stubbornly suspicious of any woman’s achievement in investigative research. Initially, when setting out for Africa, she had been a waitress and secretary. A wealthy donor, however, recognizing her brilliance, provided the funding for a Ph.D. in ethology at Cambridge University, Goodall one of the rare individuals to directly achieve a Ph. D., not having been an undergraduate.
I confess to a personal attachment to Goodall who, like me, suffered from lifelong prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder inhibiting one’s ability to recognize faces.
Currently the fate of her African investment, employing thousands of Tanzanians, remains under unrelenting threat with population growth, agricultural expansion, deforestation, fragmented forest, habitat loss, logging, and lack of consistent government enforcement of land use laws; not least, the volatility of donor contributions on which the work depends, collectively posing a Sword of Damocles hovering over its future.
There remain just 2300 chimpanzees throughout Tanzania, with an estimated 90 to 100 in Gombe National Park, the site of her research. Those numbers are down from the original 150 as elsewhere in Tanzania, bush meat remains a frequent staple despite its health risks. AIDS had its origin in Africa, consequent with eating chimpanzees harboring the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). Goodall was a committed vegan, ardently opposed to factory farming.
Also contributing to their demise is ever expanding human encroachment.
A friend of animals, champion of Mother Earth, always with passion and never without hope, Dr. Goodall is in my pantheon of heroes, her many awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (USA), the Steven Hawking Medal of Science for Communication, and designation as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).
Acknowledging her advanced age, she approached death as her “next great adventure. When you die, there’s either nothing, it’s the end, or there’s something. And things have happened to me in my life that I feel there is something. And if there is, I can’t think of a greater adventure than dying.”
I wish I lived in a world which lowered its flags in tribute to Dr. Goodall:
”Somehow we might keep hope alive—a hope we can find a way to alleviate poverty, assuage anger, and live in harmony with the environment, with animals, and with each other,” she wrote.
A candle has gone out and I feel lonely and in a dark place.
“Look at all the lonely people,” the Beatles sang in their haunting “Eleanor Rigby.”
You’ll find them not only in bars but, much more these days, glued to their TV screens and 24/7 social media, hungry to connect.
It’s the true addiction that plagues us.
Cultural critic Ted Goia—12 books—writes perceptibly of our mania to whittle our way out of our daily ennui via screen subservience, unwitting of the corporate entities feeding our habit:
“No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies. It’s not even close.
“… screen media providers will never tell you the truth about the screens themselves. These interfaces appear—falsely!—as innocent and without agenda. But just follow the money trail, and it’s not hard to figure out what’s really going on.
“The richest people on the planet are the ones who control our screens. That doesn’t happen by coincidence.
“If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us—at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection” (“David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us,” Substack, Sept. 26, 2025).
Goia quotes the late literary genius, David Foster Wallace, who didn’t own a TV, knowing his susceptibility to its mind-numbing allure:
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.…At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money(Interview with David Lipsky, Rolling Stone, 1993).
By the way, I’m planning to read everything Wallace wrote—the short stories, the essays, his magnus opus, Infinite Jest and unfinished The Pale King.
Prescient and mesmerizing, he deserves nothing less.
Trump’s address to the U.N. General Assembly last week, too long and consistent only in its rambling, narcissism, and cantankerous bombast, surely rates as one of America’s most embarrassing spectacles on display before world leaders. Clearly, we are witnessing a leader’s mental decline, posing grave danger, not only for our nation, but the world at large.
It began when he stepped on an escalator that stopped moving midway. Trump thought it not accidental.
Addressing the UN, Trump showed the world how to win friends and influence people:
“I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”
Trump’s your consummate ego-maniac. It’s always about him:
“No president or prime minister. And for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that restoring stability and I did it in just seven months. It’s never happened before. There’s never been anything like that. Very honored to have done it.”
In his megalomania, Trump presented himself as the world’s greatest peacemaker, no thanks to the UN:
“I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape…. Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements….”
On climate change, ignoring decades of peer-reviewed science, Trump excoriated renewable energy efforts as a “green scam.”
So much of what Donald says isn’t easy reading. Take this example from his UN speech:
“Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”
I ask myself, How did this guy get into Penn’s prestigious Wharton School of Business? I remember a former Wharton prof allegedly saying he was “the dumbest student” he ever had (William T. Kelley, Wharton Professor of Marketing). Wharton was selective in those days, taking in transfers by the bushel, including Trump, a Fordham student. And then there were the family connections. For the record, Trump didn’t graduate with honors.
Trump displays all the earmarks of lacking impulse control. I used to give him a pass—ok, he’s impulsive—my mistake, only to realize this is a psychological disorder that can lead to harmful consequences, if not professionally addressed.
Think about it, an impulsive man in thought and action able to trigger a nuclear response. He called war hero John McLain “a loser.” Biden is “sleepy Joe.” Zelensky is “ungrateful.”
We have on our hands a president who skips his morning intelligence briefings, runs government by the seat of his pants. Acts on whim.
For 57 minutes before the UN, he rambled on—angry, vengeful, inflammatory. His speeches grow darker in their menacing.
Essentially, he was telling UN delegates they could go to hell.
We’ve had presidents who’ve been physically impaired (Wilson, FDR), but never one mentally incapacitated.
Some propose impeachment. That’s been tried twice, but with no result, Republican lackeys to the rescue.
There does exist the 25th Amendment allowing for removal of a president unable to govern.
Either way, impeachment or invoking the 25th, we await the midterms, expectant of a substantial majority who will act this time to assure the safety of its citizenry and restore dignity to our nation and garner respect from world leaders.
Waist up portrait of young African American doctor consulting female patient using digital tablet in clinic setting
Yesterday, in a 6-3 vote, liberal members of the court dissenting, the US Supreme Court granted an emergency stay of a lower court decision mandating that the Trump administration disburse the $4 billion dollars in foreign aid approved by Congress.
While the Court’s decision isn’t a final one, the funds must be spent before the end of the fiscal year, endangering their being ever dispensed.
The Court’s decision violates the right of Congress to legislate the nation’s purse, as granted by the Constitution.
The consequences from the holdup are lethal, especially for women in developing nations.
In Uganda, 88 teachers have been dismissed and thousands of students have dropped out, the majority of them girls. In Uganda, only a quarter of remaining students are females.
Early sell off of daughters as young as thirteen is increasingly common, as families seek to buttress income through dowries, consequent with the government’s reduction in food subsidies.
As is, numerous African women have been raped by warring militants, especially in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rape victims face social stigma and diminished prospects of marriage. The administration’s policies only add to their plight.
Let me tell you what’s happened in Lesotho, whose primary industry is textiles, its workforce 80% female. Due to Trump’s tariffs and a decrease in aid, orders have dried-up, resulting in mass layoffs.
Across Africa, reduced employment impacts health, imperiling the progress made against AIDS/STD. Most health care workers are women. It used to be that women could access an HIV test, averaging 12 cents a test. With suspension of aid, that option has virtually disappeared.
Pap smears are now largely unavailable; the fallout, cervical cancer rivals maternal mortality.
African children, many of them already undernourished, stunted in growth and suffering mental retardation, face the bleakest of futures.
Some women may resort to transactional sex as means to economic survival, increasing health risk.
With the pervasive suspension of birth control assistance, women lose the ability to limit family size. The average family size in Africa is 4.5. Still more in the Sahel. By the century’s turn, Nigeria alone will have a projected 750 million population.
Poverty is an enemy of the social fabric, contributing to domestic violence.
Poverty contributes to crime, much of it food theft.
Poverty increases migration pressures and with dislocation, still more violence, as is occurring in South Africa, migrants resented as competitors.
Menaced by climate warming, which Trump calls a hoax, Africans are confronted with daily survival made worse by prolonged droughts and tropical diseases.
Trump, however, dismisses developing nations as “shithole countries,” his racism creating a vast milieu of unprecedented suffering.
I’ve largely centered on Africa, but its experience is reenacted in other developing countries as well.
If there’s an area of life I’ve neglected, it’s music. Music, like reading, exercising, learning new skills, nurturing friendships, takes time.
It isn’t that I don’t have time. It’s more that I often squander it, unheeding Thoreau’s maxim, “Time is the stream I go fishing in.”
It wasn’t always this way. When I was young, I took a transistor radio nightly to bed, solaced by music into deep slumber.
Like my daily quest to learn Italian, I want to be more fluent in music’s idiom. I still don’t know how to listen to classical music with understanding.
I’ve been told Brahms helps you relax, sleep better. I need him for when I awake to night’s stillness, the indifferent stars, my mind ablaze with anxious thoughts.
Jazz, with its pulsating, sensual immediacy, its impromptu genius, I like, but don’t listen to enough.
The same with the vast tapestries of other music.
I can’t sum up what I’ve lost through my disconnect.
Musicians themselves can be great company, fellow pilgrims in life’s journey.
Until today, I hadn’t known that the eclectic David Bowie kept a list of his 100 favorite books. I’ve gone over that list. Oh, my god! These books, none of them airport reads, should be on everyone’s lists. They’re now on mine.
There are others like him, musical geniuses who have wrestled with life’s vagaries, the meaning of it all, how to live it fully, its sorrows and its griefs.
There’s Patti Smith, Rimbaud and Baudelaire enthusiast, Gifford Series lecturer at Yale, recipient of France’s Legion d’Honneur.
Joni Mitchell, lover of Yeats, Rilke, and the modernists poets.
Sting, who studied English literature, devotee of Shakespeare, philosophy and political theory.
Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature.
Maggie Rogers, a new voice for me, her sultry songs guaranteed to shake your hips to their beat. Rogers took time out to learn life’s purpose, enrolling at Harvard Divinity School, earning her master’s. Like Bowie, she keeps a booklist, owns a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse—“The best thing I own.”
So many others: Cohen, Morrissey, Mingus, Baez. Others still.
Why should I be surprised? Musicians are artists engaging life; their music, poetry.
By any measure, Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue last night following several days of suspension from America’s TV screens, gracious and moving, reconciliatory and earnest, may well represent a turning point in returning our nation back to sanity and preserving what distinguishes America from other countries.
We have a constitution, though not always adhered to, that remains the touchstone of our nation, latent with promise of “liberty and justice for all.”
Our Founding Fathers got it right with the Constitution, knowing firsthand the myriad dangers imposed by despotic government, leading to a violent seven year war of confrontation.
Credit them with foresight to intuit the latent dangers of the new nation lapsing into the old tyrannies, designing a Constitution of checks and balances, supplemented by the Bill of Rights that includes the First Amendment, America’s warranty of the citizenry’s right to to be heard.
Kimmel exercised that warranty last night, and we should all be grateful. I had begun to worry we might never see an election in 2028. Kimmel gives me hope.
Engraved on America’s Liberty Bell are these words: “Proclaim Liberty thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants thereof.”
Brimmings: up from the well 