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Monthly Archives: March 2018
“While learning requires much effort, teaching entails an even greater one because it is more laden with moral and human responsibilities.”
Really? Moral and human responsibilities? Let’s think about that for a moment. Could it be the case that the teacher’s real work is to “animate inert knowledge with qualities of our own personality and spirit”? Is it our job to … Continue reading
“I can still see the frame of the arch between the living room and the hall bending maniacally the closer I approached.”
Hisham Matar, author of The Return, continues his description of the year after his father had been kidnapped by Qaddafi’s supporters, when the family didn’t know whether the father was dead or alive. “Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat. Looking … Continue reading
Posted in memoir, non-fiction
Tagged 2017 Pulitzer Prize Biography, alientation, anxiety, Hisham Matar, The Return
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“It should not simplify.”
Up and down and up again – the changes in the temperature this spring have caught me off balance more than once. Uncertain times call for poetry, I think, and for contemplating the purpose of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s book The … Continue reading
Posted in non-fiction, poetry
Tagged Nobel Prize for Literature, purpose of poetry, Seamus Heaney, walk on air
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“As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover.”
How can a writer who spent all but six years of her life in the same house, living what she herself describes as a “sheltered life,” create such astonishing fiction? In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty answers this … Continue reading