Author: Tim
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Back Mountain Road
Somewhere between Snowshoe Mountain and Cass Railroad in the West Virginia mountains is a two lane paved road you’ll miss unless you know what you’re looking for. “Back Mountain Road” winds for miles along the side of the ridge, looking down on red barns and gold hayricks. I drove it one August day looking…
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Conversation: Experienced High, Barely Remembered.
I see that look. What is this pretension, this business of “conversation as high art”? Don’t people converse all day long, you’re thinking? No. Most people pass their lives and never hear a Conversation. They cannot imagine what they’ve never heard. I’m not interested in a phenomenology of general human conversation. Nor am I interested…
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Voltaire: “I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he doesn’t steal my spoons.”
“I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he doesn’t steal my spoons.”
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“Doctor Zhivago”: How A Poet Lives And Works
A masterpiece has depth of layers, extends over time, and crosses cultures. Its power never exhausts. Such is “Doctor Zhivago”, by Boris Pasternak. Consider layers; it can be read, variously, as:1. the romance of Yuri Zhivago and Lara Guishar;2. an expose of the inevitable hostility between social engineering and private lives;3. a historical snapshot of…
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October 1961: The Wreck
October 1961: The Wreck I am five years old and looking down on my grandmother in her open and brightly-lit coffin. My father holds me up; I feel his strong hands in my armpits, and from behind me I hear him whisper “She died from a fractured skull.” He wants me to see her and to see…
