Author: Tim

• For Isaac: Behind “The Boundered Lip”

  You were almost 19 in October 2017, and among the hovering family in the hospice room where your grandfather was dying. As the deathwatch ticked hour on hour, I was anxious for how you would cope. From my bedside station at dad’s head, I sneaked looks across the room, right past his face, to check…

• Stone Tomb Angel

  Your second century of mission here. Stay on, we pray.Still stay, still wait the trump of God and hand, that day,to your arising saint your newly green bouquetbecause she’ll need, from joy, some blooms to wave.I fear I’ll never know your name to praiseyour granite silence. Some sadness in the wayyou sit, where vagrants hide…

• Soren Kierkegaard: “If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. ”

  

• Don’t argue about abstractions.

  It isn’t that abstractions don’t matter or aren’t real – they are. It’s rather that abstraction does not offer, in real time, as the argument develops, any feedback loop. So as the conversation proceeds the two thinkers become more and more abstract. So their disagreement grows as they talk, because the layers of abstraction are…

• Beauty is obvious, Ugliness requires a lecture.

• Josef Pieper..”…only the silent hear…”

  “Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.” – Josef Pieper

• G. K. Chesterton on dragons

  “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” — G. K. Chesterton

• Bob Dylan on “what a song is about”

  Bob Dylan, 1984: ‘Someone asks you what a song is about. You say, have you heard it? They say yeah. You say that’s what it’s about: you heard it. That’s what it’s about; it’s about that.’

• Boris Pasternak: “Lara walked along the tracks…to call each thing by its right name.”

  Laura walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields.  Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower -scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her that her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book.…

• Rules For Walking At Night In A West Virginia Holler

  I seem to have lots of memories which involve walking at night through the woods on dirt roads. There are rules. (Note: This is a companion chapter to “Rules About Monsters Around Your Bed”. ) We always leave the warm house after midnight. The flashlight splashes a long oblong of light in front of our…