Category: Books
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Maybe We Should Read the Classics More Often
Most novels start when we open the cover and turn to that first page. But not this one. It started when the car went into park and we walked across the gravel parking lot. I found myself wandering through an antique mall in St. Louis, you know the kind, where the aisles are narrow and…
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What Are We Waiting For? A Conversation Hemingway Started
First there was the Old Man and the Sea, a book that had already quietly rearranged some furniture in my thinking, and then arrived, Islands in the Stream. That’s the spirit I’d like to carry into what I’m sharing here today. Pull up a chair. Bring your coffee. There’s a particular kind of conversation Hemingway…
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From Troy to Rome: What Virgil Is Doing to Me
This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here. I did not expect Homer to spoil me so thoroughly. After months with the Iliad and the Odyssey, those wild, wind-torn worlds of Achilles’s rage and Odysseus’s wandering cunning, I turned the first page of Virgil’s…
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Penelope Speaks, Part 2 — The Reckoning Arrives
I promised you “the rest of the story.” Here it is. And I will warn you upfront: it is not a comfortable place to land. When I closed Part 1 of this series, I told you that the further I moved into The Penelopiad, the more the Odyssey lens would shift from clarifying to uncomfortable.…
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Penelope Speaks — And I Finally Know How to Listen
There is a specific kind of reading experience that only happens when you have already done the work. Not reading more books, necessarily — but doing the reading inside yourself that prepares you to receive what a book is offering. I had that experience once already in this journey, when a copy of The Penelopiad…
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Standing at the Edge: A Reflection on Homer
This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here. I’ve just closed The Odyssey, and I’m sitting here with that particular kind of quiet that follows a long journey — not restlessness, not exactly satisfaction, but something closer to arrival. The Iliad and The Odyssey…
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Rilke and His Encouragement then and for Now
There’s something about sitting with a cappuccino that invites honesty. Maybe it’s the warmth, or the quiet ritual of holding something steady while everything else feels uncertain. Gathered here around this table—books half-open, notes scattered, maybe absently tracing the rim of my cup—and the conversation turns, almost inevitably, to Rilke. Specifically, Letters to a Young…
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The Full Arc of Transformation
Circle of Jacques-Louis David, French, 1748–1825. Calliope Mourning Homer, 1812. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.231. Personal photography. This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here. “Who are you? Where are you from? Your city?…
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When Ithaca Becomes a Mirror: Transformation of the Home
Personal photography. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Greek and Roman Galleries. This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here. So, what did I carry into Book 13? A tension of how faithfulness in a marriage may have been viewed in the Bronze Age, but…
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Was It Wander… Lust? — The Longing Beneath the Map
Painter of the Boston Polyphemos, Greek (Athens), Archaic period, about 550 BC. Drinking cup (kylix) with Circe transforming Odysseus’s men. Ceramic, black-figure technique. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accession 99.518. Personal photography. This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here. Book 11 stopped me.…
