I’ve participated several months now in a kind-of book group with a like-minded half-dozen or so “mature” guys in which the little wrinkle that makes it not quite a book group is that we don’t actually read entire books. Instead, we tackle brief essays, generally just one or two per month, of some 3-12 pages each (at least so far). I hardly need mention that essays, especially at this stage of life, have the great advantage of not requiring the long slog of sheer reading time that books do. This helps us all avoid the occasional book club scenario of…
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“Here is a symbol…” begins the Robinson Jeffers poem, “Rock and Hawk,” the order of those in the title, as in all poetry, meaningful. The setting is a “headland” of Jeffers’s beloved and rugged northern California (Big Sur) coast, where we read (and see, through the poet’s eyes), a hard, unfeeling gray rock, “standing tall…/where the seawind/Lets no tree grow…” Jeffers lets us know the rock has also proven unmoved by earthquakes and “ages of storms,” so stout and unyielding it is in its essence, repelling all who would seek to impinge on its domain. With one exception. Because after…
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Historians hail Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1440 as a seminal shift in human civilization, and so it has been. It would take another nearly four centuries, until 1826, before Nicéphore Niépce captured “View from the Window at Le Gras” via a “heliotrope” process that has been immortalized as the world’s first photograph. Parlor game enthusiasts might argue these centuries later about whether Niépce’s picture was worth more or less than any proverbial thousand words set to type by Gutenberg. But what we have learned as we creep up on the 200th anniversary of Niépce’s accomplishment is that…
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“Home” most always represents both a real, particular place and a metaphor with almost unparalleled richness in human life. Home, as the ancient maxim has it, is not only where our hearts are, but also where we lay our heads down on familiar pillows in beloved zones of comfort, where we are (or at least nurture a hope to be) most ourselves and most accepted and understood as the selves we are. It’s where we go to regather ourselves in times of turmoil and crisis, whether of inner identity or outer world upheaval. To “go home” is to “call it…