We Are Losing Our Words
We corkscrew downward, using the nation’s declining literacy as a reason to degrade the quality of reading material, which then further constrains our vocabularies and decreases our literacy….
We corkscrew downward, using the nation’s declining literacy as a reason to degrade the quality of reading material, which then further constrains our vocabularies and decreases our literacy….
Whatever winds up documenting modern lives holds nothing like Henry VIII’s love letter to Anne Boleyn, signed, “written with the hand of him who wishes he were yours.” Our martyred heroes will not send letters from Birmingham or any other jail. Contemporary epistolary novels will be a rally of terse texts.
To the Cynics, the goal of life was, in literal translation, freedom from smoke—meaning false beliefs, pretense, and shallow lures.
Our corpses enrich your gardens, aerate your lawns, and plump your birds. Yet you see cicadas as a plague and a punishment?
Our tastes are being changed for us, homogenized by algorithms that force clicks of approval into spirals of popularity.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaimed only, “Beautiful!” Martin Luther relaxed into amiability and said only “Yes.” Truman Capote—and this revelation breaks my heart—kept repeating “Mama.”
The pattern of our favor indicates that the substance in question is not “race” at all, but a clump of biomolecules called melanin. Swayed by ancient symbols and contemporary prejudices, we, supposedly the creatures of reason, react powerfully to the black-and-white extremes.
One of the throughlines in Matisse’s work was his love of water: swimming in it, rowing across it, and above all, painting it. He described the water in Nice as “the color of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier, and the kingfisher, melted together, and yet it is like none of these.”
Our marriage has changed the way the town has, stacking up dreams, failures, exciting beginnings, convergences of interest, losses, and new capacities.
We cannot mend our minds and bodies without understanding the stories they tell.... “You can’t get to healing if you don’t recognize pain.”