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Entitification
As a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I know the female breast is a frequent guest in many works of the genre. Honesty compels me to admit that, as a straight male, I am not fundamentally opposed to such nudity. However, there are some reasonable grounds for objecting to nudity in works of fantasy…
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Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship
In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it in a day. Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up…
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No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life
“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.” Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child….
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Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other
“Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games.” The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want but knowing what we…
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The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” “In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self…
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