• Philosophy - Poetry

    “Come ‘Ere, Quick, You Gotta See This!” Poet Alison Jarvis’s “Sky, River”

    March 4, 2023 - By 

    In her slim 2013 volume, “On Beauty and Being Just,” Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry attempts to unravel the mysterious pull and effect of the beautiful on human consciousness. Far from being mere surface gloss obscuring the deeper or truer nature of any given object or experience, beauty is central to human experience, summoning us to ever deeper exploration—and our own depths in responding to it. “Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation,” she writes. And perhaps most importantly,…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    Here Then Gone: The Short Half-Life of Ecstatic Moments

    March 11, 2016 - By 

     It was one of those Moments. The daylight waning, the sky a magnificent stew of cirrus wisps both vertical and horizontal to the west and south, stratus puff balls north and east, the trending-toward-full moon already up and peeking from behind the latter. At that still-point dusky moment transitioning from day to early eve, with the world perfectly poised between its in- and out-breath, the color palette of pale oranges, golds, purples, pinks, magentas and more seemed both fathomless and intoxicating. And then came the geese. They were in their classic extended V formation, winging southwest towards their home in…

  • Music

    Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto

    May 15, 2013 - By 

    Thirty years ago, the scientist, physician and essayist Lewis Thomas published an essay, “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” that concluded his best-selling book by the same name. Just like Mahler’s symphony, the brief (1,200-word) essay had a haunting, luminous quality. The difference was that Thomas juxtaposed Mahler’s themes of human mortality and its attendant melancholy with the sustained buildup of nuclear arms through the height of the Cold War in the 1980s. Facing personal mortality can of itself entail a kind of somber acceptance and beauty, Thomas suggested, especially when conveyed with the profundity of a…