Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Selective Sensitivity

On one of his trips [in South America] ([Franz Stangl] confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped  next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train,  trotted…

Things Fall Apart

I had returned to China looking for my old country. I found an even older and more decrepit one. It called itself new and belittled everything old, such as courtesy, culture, civilization. No one under…

Start Where We Are

Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why c­an’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…

Today’s One-Liner (#16)

Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss. –Svetlana Alexeievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich.

Give This a Shot over the Next Few Months

We all can render a great service by listening to opposing opinions without agitation, discourtesy, or violence, and by offering our opinions not as nonnegotiable demands but as calm, courteous statements. –Eknath Easwaran, The End…

Invitations and Incitements

I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…