Reading literature is a slow business, unhurried, steady, pick-and-shovel work through an often at first unyielding field of words. Forgetting that makes what is valuable a frustration, and we risk leaving the literary land before there’s fruit to harvest. The American author O. Henry (the pen name of William Sidney Porter) was a prolific writer …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Sharp Writers, Sharp Readers
Sharp writers make fine distinctions and sharp readers find them. In a collection of his work entitled What Are People For? (1990), the Kentucky novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry, long a steward of both the land and traditional thought, opens his essay “God and Country” with this careful sentence: The subject of Christianity and …
Reading Patiently
I had occasion in a recent post (The Mystery of Reason) to quote the British philosopher A. E. Taylor, who was commenting on the riches to be found in a certain dialogue of Plato. His sentence was as difficult as his insight, and it bears understanding to know how the author composed that sentence, because …
The Mystery of Reason
The word mystery has an unexpected beginning. The Greek verb from which it derives means to close one’s eyes, not to avoid what cannot be explained, but to still oneself to understand. The idea is not unrelated to the derivation of our word school, meaning originally leisure in Greek. As a place of learning and …
A Sign of Critical Thinking
At a train station nearby, workers have extended fencing around a battery of new electrical equipment and attached a sign reading Trespassing Not Allowed. The old fencing that guards the adjacent area has its own sign, but that one reads No Trespassing. Why the change? Who could possibly know. But whatever the reason, the two …