Dear Annie and Lindsay
I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…
Tag: Hamlet
“What Dreams May Come”
These passages, with their rich imagery and their unerring rhythmic ebb and flow, are among the most moving and complex speeches in our literature. But it is the soliloquy in the third act, “To be…
“Words Words Words”
Indeed, the very use of the word “revolution” is suspect because every historical event that people want to invest with drama and importance is given the honorific title “revolution.” –Avishai Margalit, Views in Review: Politics…
For Sure
Surely there can be nothing to distinguish us from the beasts, if we simply devote ourselves to greed and never turn our hearts to the Buddhist truth.—Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness What is a man,If…
Present Moment, Only Moment: Reminders
Let the soul be happy in the present, and refuse to worry about what will come later.–Horace, Odes You only live once. Keep yourself in the present. The past is gone, and the future is…
Memorable Scenes
It has been said of the play “Hamlet” that its best scene is the one in which Horatio first sees the ghost, or the one in which he tells Hamlet of it, or the one…
He Contains Multitudes
[Hamlet] inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors–and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he…
Darshan
The Power of a Photograph In the last couple of years I’ve read whatever books I could get my hands on Whose subject is Sri Anandamayi Ma (Her parents gave her the name Nirmala Sundari…
The Good News, 3.3.2017
The Good News is … In 2016 Lindsey Trout Hughes took three on-line writing classes with me, and—to her surprise and my delight— embraced her poetic vocation. She has graced me with epic emails, and scintillating…
Why Shakespeare Matters/1 by Katie Consamus
I’ve asked a few friends, a good portion of whose lives have been in the theater, if they’d be willing to write on the following topic because I was curious how they’d respond: Why Shakespeare…