Behind the Wall
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. ...
Occupy Galt’s Gulch
“Each of us in this room has warmed ourself at fires we did not build, and each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig.”
— Mark Shields, as heard, October 1997
I am not ashamed to confide, O Dearest and Most Equable of All Reader...
Prolegomena to Any Future Life
I.His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful...
Can’t Buy Me Love
Say you don’t need no diamond ring
And I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of things
That money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money
Money can’t buy me love
— The Beatles, Can’t Bu...
A Good Offense
Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: wa...
Odalisque
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.
— Milan Kundera
A happy and...
Resurrexit
I. To a Child dancing in the Wind
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Lov...
What Immortal Hand or Eye…
It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and a...
Altar of a Minor God
I break out into this declaration not because of a lurking tendency to megalomania, but, on the contrary, as a man who has no very notable illusions about himself. I follow the instincts of vain-glory and humility natural to all mankind. For it can h...
