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).
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.
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.”
I love the early mornings, when the world holds its breath and my mind wakes like a small flame, flickering with new thoughts, questions, fragments of ideas, waiting their harvesting; when the day pulses with possibility.
I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary. I like her thoughts on keeping her mind young:
“Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference: to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm, etc.” (Diary, 1939).
Similarly, I want to emulate Dr. Gladys McGarey’s wise counsel, expressed in her remarkable book, The Well-Lived Life. Regarded as the mother of holistic medicine, she was 103 when she published it.
“You have to feel and know life is there to be lived. You have to live it. As you pay attention to life itself, life is like a seed. It has a shell around it. It has all the energy of the universe within it,” she says.
It’s thus with expectation I relish my morning rush—the gift of a new day to crack life’s shell and nourish its core.
I’m almost done reading Virginia’s Woolf’s Diary, 1918-1941. She means much to me ever since Howard Harper, a Woolf authority at UNC, introduced her to me.
Such a scintillating intellect. Writing didn’t come easily to her, frequented with anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, writer’s block, and bouts of depression. Without husband Leonard, I doubt she’d have pulled off her prodigious achievement.
The Diary serves largely as her workbook of creative struggle—getting things right, the interplay of new formulations, the unleashing of her interiority.
The Diary catalogues books she’s reading and plans to read. It teems with recall of literary and artist luminaries she knew intimately, many associated with the Bloomsbury Group to which she belonged—Strachey, Forster, Keynes, and her sister Vanessa Bell among them. Henry James, George Meredith and T. S. Eliot were frequent household guests.
She’s opinionated about several of her rivals, Joyce for instance. She adored Proust: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? You can’t go further than that.” And, of course, there were Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and not least, Dante, to whom she turned often.
She read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides in the original Greek and continued so throughout her life. I have her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek.”
Woolf spoke French fluently and read Proust, Gide, Flaubert and Maupassant in French. I hadn’t known until reading the Diary that she read Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Italian.
Largely self-educated apart from courses in the classics taken at the Women’s Department of King’s College (Women were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), her intellectual achievements are extraordinary.
I introduced my students in Modern Novel to her “A Room of Their Own,” a feminist classic elaborating the interiority of female consciousness and exposing the barriers silencing women’s voices. And then, there was Mrs. Dalloway and To a Light House, now canon staples of English literature.
Nonetheless, in reading the Diary I found myriad passages that grieve me. She could be elitist, contemptuous of the working class; condescending towards blacks; antisemitic: “I do not like the Jewish voice: I do not like the Jewish laugh”; she felt uncomfortable in the company of the disabled.
In many ways, her views were not atypical of the mindset of the snobbish British upper class in the days of Empire.
Despite these faults, I try always to separate the artistry from the life; otherwise, there would be few artists to pursue, given the human proclivity to misbehave.
And so, over the years, I keep coming back to Woolf—her ability to recreate the inner life, to make universal the world of the quotidian; the beauty of her lyrical prose, her experimentations with narrative, her wrestlings with life’s frequent inequities.
It’s with risk one voices an opinion on media these days, especially with FB, X, and Tik Tok swarming with heated blurbs hurled at those whose opinions run contrary to their own.
I’ve toyed, like my daughter, with abandoning FB, not only for its myriad inflammatory posts, but for its subjecting me to an onslaught of advertising memes. I don’t like being tracked.
I continue with FB only because of friendships made over the years. I don’t want them severed.
Not least, I hold memberships in several groups that have greatly helped me in their counsel and sharing of interests.
But the temptation to slam the door on media, nevertheless, remains strong. I think the Internet, in general, can be an unsafe place, affording anonymity to the mischievous and those just plain angry with life.
Lately, I’ve discovered that AI itself, sometimes useful to retrieve detailed info, can be programmed with bias, not only for what it yields, but for what it omits.
But back to media, I appreciated Sam Harris’ recent Substack piece, “We are Losing the Information War with Ourselves.” I’ve always admired his level-headed, spot-on appraisals of our human dilemmas, and suggesting their best remedies.
Space confines my commentary, but Harris rightly observes that “There is no party of murder’ in this country. And insisting that there is just adds energy to yet another moral panic. Social media amplifies extreme views as though they were representative of most Americans, and many of us are losing our sense of what other people are really like. Many seem completely unaware that their hold on reality is being steadily undermined by what they are seeing online, and that the business models of these platforms, as well as livelihoods of countless “influencers,” depend on our continuing to gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.”
His counsel is to follow his lead:
“Get off social media. Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life.”
For Dee Dee and me, not only the above, but evening baseball with our beloved Red Sox, even though they often break our hearts.
We’ve been hearing a great deal about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination, much of it pejorative in public media—and in some cases, disturbingly celebratory—even from a few of my own friends on Facebook.
Whatever one’s politics, Kirk consistently embraced conversation across divides, something rare in today’s climate of weaponized rhetoric on both right and left—rhetoric that too often spills over into violence.
I’m reminded of my own university experience decades ago at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when state police were brought in after radicals seized several buildings. Over lunch one day, a friend who later became a professor at UC Davis told me bluntly, “blood was needed to prevail.”
Kirk, however controversial his views, waded into the near-universal tide of leftist polemic across university campuses. He did so not with violence but with debate—introducing new lanes of conversation and allowing dissident voices to be heard.
Journalist and bestselling author Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis), himself a staunch liberal, shared this reflection on his encounter with Kirk:
A years ago, I got a message from Charlie Kirk. He wanted me to come on his podcast.
All I knew about him then was that he was a right-wing political commentator.
I don’t publicly discuss politics because my books cover health and the human experience, which is universal. So I asked my publicist—who is extremely progressive—if I should go on.
“Do it,” she said. “If politics comes up, steer it back to health.”
Charlie didn’t ask me a single political question. He was exceptionally kind and genuinely curious about my work. He had a better reading of my book than nearly any other interviewer, and he drew out faith-based parallels I’d never considered. That actually deepened my own understanding of my work. He mentioned my book far more than he had to.
I’ve been on big podcasts with meditation and self-help gurus who weren’t a fraction as present, kind, and curious as Charlie Kirk.
Our conversation changed how I see public figures. The 20-second clips and 280-character hot takes we see in our media ecosystem don’t capture the full breadth, depth, and humanity of a person. I now have no hesitations talking to anyone.
I respect Charlie as a curious thinker and fellow human. I respect his devotion to his faith and family. His willingness to talk with anyone was inspiring, unique, and beneficial. I’m sad he’s gone (Substack, September 13, 2025).
Easter’s words remind me of John Stuart Mill’s enduring warning against censorship:
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; if the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; and if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error (On Liberty).
Brimmings: up from the well 