By Chandler Ryd He drives a two-seater into the motor court of a sprawling Victorian estate. He steps out of the car and enters the house, looking darkly into the distance. She descends a curving staircase to welcome her guest. This is the first thirty seconds of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” music video, but a similar scene plays out every day in bars, coffee shops, … Continue reading Blank Spaces

By Dr. Dwight Lindley To answer this question, we will have to ask first what “literature” itself is, and second, what “reality” itself is, for my opening suggestion is that we have trouble with this question because we are unclear about its terms. First, then, what is literature? While there have been many answers to this question, I think we can isolate three strands of … Continue reading What Has Literature to Do With Reality?

By Madeline Johnson Sentences are like pagodas: airy little meeting places for human communion that reveal their creators’ inner characters and shape the shared environment in unrepeatably particular ways. And like pagodas, they’re better when they’re colorful. I’ve heard my generation described as “aggressively inarticulate”, and while I count myself the awestruck friend of many strikingly articulate young folks, I myself readily subscribe to the … Continue reading Common Nouns and Action Verbs

By Christopher Riley All photos by the author. Buildings are both the most abundant and least appreciated of artistic creations. Ask an educated man to envision art, and he will, more than likely, imagine merely da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or the jarring cubism of Picasso. The lowly Greek Revival residence standing a few blocks from his home hardly merits notice. Paintings and sculptures, cloistered in … Continue reading The Art of Architecture in Hillsdale County

By Lara Forsythe Every day this past summer I hopped off the 5:08 outbound train and began my ten-minute walk back home just as the church bells rang six. Having made it a habit of slipping out of my heels after exiting the station, I would often finish my route bare-footed. I grew up in this suburb. I knew my way around. The houses were … Continue reading Out on the Porch: The Life and Death of an American Architectural Icon

By Emily Lehman As the school year picks up, the perennially polite Hillsdale student body asks one another, “How are you?” And as the semester goes on, the answer becomes more and more predictable: “Busy.”Many of us are. One of the best and worst things about Hillsdale College is the overwhelming number of good things to do. We’re a pretty committed crew and we’re proud … Continue reading Leisure

By Christopher McCaffery In Midtown Manhattan a writer, Jack Kerouac, prepares for his interview on TV. “We’re beat, man,” he says. “Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means something. I invented it.” For the television audience he announces, “We love everything, Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all. We’re the vanguard of the … Continue reading “Do you think this is the good life?”: Part One of Three