“Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw; formed by a contour of mountains into a basin… finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountain sides covered with rich groves… down to the water-edge: here and there precipices of rock to checker the scene and save it…
Category: Art
Tolkien: Creating Middle-earth
On Creating Middle-earth: “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection…
Civil War Art
Boys without fathers … some heroic men come home broken or not at all. Some battlefields are revisited from one year to the next. Veterans tease new recruits on spring campaigns with the bones of men left to winter over in thick forests. “About 625,000 men died in the Civil War. That’s more Americans than…
Fiction: A Doctor’s Mistakes
Graham wiped his eyes. “That watch … the one I gave you … it was for Nathan—my younger brother first — during the war. You are the light of the world like a city on a mountain … Nathan was the light of my family. Something about him—we could all love him without embarrassment—he was…
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In March 1822, as the Greek revolt gathered strength on the mainland, several hundred armed Greeks from the neighbouring island of Samos landed in Chios. They attacked the Turks, who retreated to the citadel. Many islanders also decided to join the revolution.[2] However, the vast majority of the population had by all accounts done nothing…
Healing a Midwesterner
A bullet through the skull is a quick way to end the life of a suffering animal but things aren’t as easy when it comes to old people. Not that I think we should kill old people, but after a week of watching my failing father-in-law endure many an indignity I wish there were a…
The Passing Train
On the Departure Platform We kissed at the barrier; and passing through She left me, and moment by moment got Smaller and smaller, until to my view She was but a spot; A wee white spot of muslin fluff That down the diminishing platform bore Through hustling crowds of gentle and rough To the carriage…
“Frame your mind to mirth and merriment which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.” William Shakespeare
“The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity; and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.” Friedrich Nietzsche Featured Image: What Freedom! by Ilya Repin
Fiction: Faith
The doctor led Thankful and Buck through the short, cool hallway to the adjacent room reserved for hopeless cases. There lay the lieutenant asleep. “He’s not dead, is he?” Buck asked from the doorway, craning his neck to see. “No, Buck,” the doctor replied and turned to Thankful. “You may want to say your last…
“To suppose that people do not feel things because they do not scream and yell and fill the air with their cries, is simple nonsense …” J.C. Ryle
How true this sentence. The squeaky wheel gets the attention. Still waters run deep. Heroes are often times so flamboyant. Victims, when photographed well, move others to tears. But what about the quiet man? Quiet men intrigue me. The quiet purposes of men suffering in silence so often lead to misunderstanding and lack of empathy….
