It was the 7th inning of last night’s Dodger-Blue Jays World Series game, the Dodgers leading 5-4. I needed sleep, so gave up watching, but nonetheless fervently hoped the Jays would pull it out against baseball’s best team money can buy and perennial champion.
I’m glad I left the screen early. The game went 18 innings! The Blue Jays lost.
For me, baseball is metaphor for something larger than itself—each batter in existential challenge, one against a field of nine. In short, the odds of getting that hit aren’t likely, and yet batters do come through, sometimes winning a game.
As I waited for sleep to descend, I thought of how tonight’s game reflected my America, facing the hegemony of an encroached political dynasty. Would things ever change?
I fell asleep, expectant.
And so with our nation.
I refuse to give up hope. There’s yet another day, another game to be played. Sometimes the unexpected happens—the underdog breaks through. That happens in life, too. We get that hit. We score that run.
As poet Joy Sullivan tells us, “i know nothing about baseball, but something in me breaks with joy when the runner rushes in, body flung & reaching, & the umpire lifts his arms out like a prophet or a mother & makes him safe.”
This morning I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm. Many of you are familiar with his books, wise in counsel, encouraging mindfulness engaged in the present, not burdened with trauma from the past or worries about the future.
I reached for Hahn, my amygdala working overtime, given the White House maelstrom.
Hahn reminds me that we are linked to an infinity beyond ourselves. We are all connected: sun, water, forest, and sentient animal friends.
That there is no permanence.
That entropy is life’s law.
I venture that our ultimate anxiety concerns our mortality
Peace comes, however, with its acceptance and doing good for others. Our passing doesn’t mean extinction, but rejoining that eternally existing phenomena that gave rise to our being.
Fundamental to Buddhism is that there is neither birth nor death, but continuum only. The Buddha perceived this truth 2500 years ago, confirmed by the Conservation Law of Mass-Energy —that mass is not created ex nihilo, nor destroyed into nothing. It simply changes its manifestation.
A cloud never really dies in becoming rain or snow.
We must confront our fears, not deny them, if we are to find peace, not seek escape in accumulation or media overload.
While I find the history of religion to be no less than a bloodbath, I think of true Buddhism as a way of life rather than a religion. It posits no deity. I completed an impressive course from a Dutch university several years ago that introduced me to its major tenets and, especially, to mindfulness enhanced through meditation.
I’ve been subsequently amazed with brain imaging results that show serious meditators experience neural changes at several levels, including an increase in gray matter density and cortical thickness in the hippocampus, responsible for learning, memory and emotion.
What impresses me most is that amygdala activity, the brain area responsible for our anxiety, is decreased, often after just eight weeks of consistent practice. I’m all for less anxiety.
With this new brain imaging technology now available, science is just catching up with the intuitive truths of Buddhism. I know of a Princeton professor who has dedicated his research to studying the liaison.
Several years ago, I undertook training in Transcendental Meditation. I didn’t really catch on how to do it effectively until last year when I read Yongey Mingyur Ripoche’s The Joy of Living and learned specific techniques. Unfortunately, I have failed to practice it consistently. I need to mend my ways.
The late film director David Lynch did meditation twice daily, busy as he was, never missing, until the end of his life and wrote a book about it, Catching the Big Fish, which I’ve read.
I am grateful for my time out with Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, a refresh on those values than quiet our anxieties and grant us peace.
Wishing all of you well, I trust my affection for all of you vibrates into a day of happiness.
I’ve been a reading addict since childhood, when as a young boy I’d walk a mile—sometimes more—just to lose myself in a library’s cool hush, seated at a table, surrounded by shelf-lined books inviting adventure.
My love for animals found early confirmation in the Dr. Doolittle books I devoured. I read every one. Years later, that same fascination with the speech of creatures led me to Jane Goodall’s revelatory studies of chimpanzees—proof that empathy can grow into insight.
Another passion took root in the dusty bleachers of Shibe Park—later Connie Mack Stadium—in Philadelphia. I loved baseball with an intensity only children know, lingering outside the gates, hungry for autographs as players boarded their buses. I read passionately about my idols—Ruth, Gehrig, immortals who remain with me.
Travel books, too, called out to me. Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath on Pitcairn’s Island transported me to the South Seas, where I imaginatively romped through Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. In later years, that early enchantment led me to consider emigrating to New Zealand. I was, in fact, approved.
Languages fascinated me. One day, at ten, I brought home books in Russian from Philadelphia’s Free Library, expecting the Cyrillic script to magically transform itself into English. That early infatuation would one day carry me across the world to Russia and the homesteads of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.
I call myself an autodidact, though I’ve graduated from several reputable universities. I started behind most students, having fled a troubled home at seventeen, enlisting in the Air Force, which sent me to Korea. Our base library was a single room, yet its shelves were somehow populated with a few classics. One off-duty evening, I pulled down a book called Look Homeward, Angel. It changed my life.
After Korea, I read everything Thomas Wolfe wrote, visited his home in Asheville, eventually enrolling as a Ph.D. student at his alma mater—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Pulpit Hill” in Wolfe’s novel. On my first campus day, waiting to register for classes, I bumped into a retired professor, who asked what brought me to Chapel Hill. “Thomas Wolfe,” I said without hesitation.
A serendipity moment, that professor had known Wolfe. Becoming lifelong friends, they traveled together to prewar Germany, where Wolfe witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, which he would later feature in You Can’t Go Home Again. He shared anecdotes about Wolfe, who stood six feet, six inches. His hands too wide to use a typewriter, Wolfe wrote standing up, a refrigerator top serving for a desk.
Despite the scores of books I’ve read, there remain gaps I want to fill. The books I’ve read have been my faithful companions along life’s road, shaping who I am.
Were I granted another life, I think I’d come back as a librarian. No other choice comes close.
More than eight billion souls rise each morning to breathe another day—many of them lonely. While others seem to rollick in life’s plentitude, they feel left out.
Loneliness has many strands. Ultimately, it’s feeling you’re disconnected. Or like the world’s hung up on you.
Loss is loneliness’ common denominator. It comes in many currencies: loved ones who’ve died or drifted away, a romance gone sour, schoolmates reduced to memory, a job that vanished overnight, aging, the slow erosion of health
According to a Gallup/Meta survey, 25% of people in 140 countries experience loneliness “very or fairly often.” In the USA, 1 in 3.
Loneliness can be grievous. Even fatal. There seems to be a herd instinct governing human behavior. We like togetherness. Like cows in a pasture, we like facing in the same direction.
And yet the paradox: you can feel most alone in a crowd, the noise of others drowning out your pulse. For introverts like me, solitude grants restoration, not exile. My happiest moments have often come in silence: in a garden, along a woodland path, or beside a pounding shore.
A few days ago, I wrote of three places I’ve been that have sustained me, each of them granting solitude—a chance to reflect, to locate myself, to fish in life’s stream, that rare chance to glimpse Eternity.
Recently, I’ve found someone, Scott Stillman, who shares my love for solitude, writing eight splendid books on this theme. He has a way of putting things:
you are not broken for needing stillness
you are not flawed for shrinking from noise
your mind is simply attuned to something different
Every New Year’s Day for the past six years I’ve posted on Brimmings my annotated recommendations for the finest fiction and nonfiction reads. I spend hours culling my lists from authoritative sources. I give emphasis to canonical works, both domestic and international—books intellectually stimulating, challenging, and broadening, the kind that will still be read generations hence. Often one of my criteria has been to fill gaps in my own reading, those books I should have read long ago, but somehow missed.
But lately I’ve been musing on a new way of choosing books—more personal than public, more in keeping with my desire to read systematically, to fill in the areas I don’t know well but should.
While my published lists have value, they fall short of providing full acquaintance with an author through a single recommendation. A fragmented forest, bisected by a highway or development, comes to mind—isolated stands of trees cut off from the territorial expanse essential for their flourishing.
It used to be that when I encountered a great writer for the first time, I would read five books: two about the author (often biographies), and three by the author. It worked well—Tolstoy, for example.
But now I want to do better still.
Perhaps I could read not only by author but by theme—a focus on, say, the environment, doing a minimal five books, maybe beginning with the late E. O. Wilson, who never disappoints, or the sagacious Carl Sagan. Reading only The Great Gatsby hardly gives one the fullest sweep of Fitzgerald’s range and mastery. It’s like movie buffs: if you admire Tom Hanks, you don’t stop at one film.
To really round out my education, I should read chronologically, starting with the classics. I’ve read and taught Euripides’ Medea, but it’s only one play—nineteen of his tragedies survive.
So yes, I can focus on an author or a theme—or read chronologically across disciplines.
Here’s another approach: why not read geographically, and I mean largely internationally? I know so little of Chinese literature, philosophy, and culture—the same for India and Japan.
Or I could venture a European country that most readers overlook—Finland, for example, a nation whose people are addicted to both writing and reading, dark interminable Arctic nights surely contributing. I already have Finland on my list.
I’ll still publish my annual New Year’s list, but when push comes to shove, know that privately I’ll be trekking the road not taken.
I’m about to eat breakfast, but I feel guilty for the good life I wake to daily when so much of the world, removed from our shores, knows only war, destruction, death, and incalculable grief: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and Gaza. Still others.
I am moved by Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah’s recent poem about Gaza. The death toll, vastly civilian, now approaches 70,000.
Joudah has lost 100 members of his Gaza family. He has served as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders.
Since his poem is under copyright, I can only share an excerpt:
“And out of nowhere…”
And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation from her rescuers, all men on their knees and bellies clearing the man-made rubble with their bare hands, disfigured by dust into ghosts. All disasters are natural including this one, because humans are natural. The rescuers tell her she’s incredible, powerful, and for a split second, before the weight of her family’s disappearance sinks her, she smiles, like a child who lived for seven years above ground receiving praise.
PostScript: Joudah is a winner of The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and long listed for the National Book Award for Poetry (2024).
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.
Brimmings: up from the well 