All work stops at The Washington Post when everyone feels the whole building lurch and groan. The press is running. Steven Spielberg’s The Post recounts the story of The Washington Post, at that point a small, family owned newspaper, crashing onto the public scene as the editors attempt to publish classified White House documents on the Vietnam War. The paper owner, Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), … Continue reading The Post
This past July on a warm summer afternoon, I attended a family friends’ poetry night—a classy little shindig with hors d’oeuvres, heels, sophisticated people, and, of course, poetry. A few months later, one of these poems unexpectedly resurfaced in a conversation with a friend. It was a poem entitled “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” by Christina Georgina Rossetti: You tell me that the world … Continue reading The World Is Fair, in Spite of the Old Fall
This is the cold time, the long time, the Lenten time. All of creation groans for new life, but the ground whispers, Not yet. All of God’s people groan for the final redemption, for the here-and-now of God-with-us, but the still, small voice whispers, Not yet. The Resurrection is coming. The Resurrection has come. From an eternal perspective, the Resurrection is. Christ cried, “Finished,” as … Continue reading In My End is My Beginning: On the Mercy of Time in the Season of Lent
When an employee at Bordeaux University was told to rearrange the morbid artifacts of an out-of-the-way store closet full of shattered skulls, guns, hangman’s ropes, and aborted fetuses of siamese twins in 2009, he moved a few jars to find, on the back of the shelf, a tall, sealed beaker covered with decades of dust. It contained the lost amputated right leg of the great … Continue reading Leg in a Jar: The Amputation of the World’s Greatest Actress
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. —Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray The video opens with a typical vlog set-up: A woman sits centered in front of the camera, her pristine background out of focus. The Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic is enough to make any 22-year-old vaguely covetous. Her platinum blonde hair … Continue reading The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism
He meets your eye from the book’s broad flyleaf, a vivid figure on a ground of flame blue. Piercing through a quizzical squint and the flash-fixed vapor of a cheeky cigar, the gaze is more forward than one expects from such age. Facing the title page’s monoglyph—Design—the portrait reads like a dare. In a way, it is. A household name in his native UK, Terence … Continue reading The Unlikely Peripatetic, or, A Postscript to the Paperclip
“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow … Continue reading Life with the Moomins: Lessons in Stability and Freedom From Moominvalley
When the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt spoke to a group of Hillsdale students about her time teaching poetic composition to the actor James Franco at the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program, she mentioned a poem they had studied, a cinematic oddity by American poet Robert Lowell titled “Skunk Hour.” In the poem, a speaker climbs a hill and views parked cars (“love cars” as … Continue reading A Backward Leap
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end. From: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm” I have lived in the same house in Southern Michigan since I was four years old. It’s an … Continue reading The Sledding Hill
My great-uncle’s full name was Verdon Ganger, but everyone called him Bud. By the time I knew him, Bud was a soft-spoken widower in his 80s, who kept an immaculate garden and took a keen interest in the birds that nested in his backyard. As a little girl, I never bothered to think of him in terms beyond that. Like all the others who … Continue reading These Worlds We Hold: Memory and the Role of Storytelling
Hillsdale Forum 