The Fountain

I just finished re-reading Annie Dillard's short little book "Holy the Firm" I highly recommend anything she has written. She thinks and writes about both simple and profound things in a way that prods and helps one to think about them in fresh and honest ways. Although her writing covers an uncommon range of topics, she is always as she says in "practicing unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. She is not often conducive to extracting short quotations because she circumnavigates a topic, weaving a web of images and ideas that lead surreptitiously to small discoveries. However, here is a brief excerpt. It conveys much fuller meaning within the context of the book, but I thought it apt and quotable anyway: It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely...

Rule No. 224:  People who habitually mark e-mails as "urgent" usually possess neither the authority to send an urgent e-mail nor the intelligence to tell the difference. Rule No. 309:  The cooking time is always 10 to 12 percent longer than the recipe says. Rule No. 565:  If you can hear music through the headphones of the person sitting next to you, it will never be a song you like. Rule No. 582:  The more wintry the adjectives used on the package to describe the gum, the less flavorful the gum. Source: Esquire Magazine Feb 2007

I was mildly startled recently to realize that I have been friends with Peter Bowden for almost four decades. Much could be said about the value of that friendship to me, from the early days of high school and college—sharing long conversations that helped prod and shape our thinking, helped us begin to discover who we were and to contemplate who we wanted to be—right up to this day—when, although far too brief and sparsely scattered, our visits always help me to re-orient and re-think what is most meaningful and valuable in my life. When we were in Phenix City for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, my younger daughter, Sarah (now 24), asked if we were going to get together with Peter and Valerie at Christmas, and if so, she didn't want to miss it. I suppose I had assumed that our annual visit was just another example of things children tolerate as they are obligated to tag along wherever their parents go. (I’m quite sure that our daughters could quickly name several e...

Pause a moment, please. "Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!" Source -- Hamilton Wright Mabie Go ahead and fast forward.

Okay. I'm going to stop time. It's the only way to do this. So every time I make an entry, I am breaking several laws; the primary one having to do with some sort of science thing that I'm sure I learned in school, but thought then that how would I ever use it later on. It seems to me that time has to come to complete stop in order to collect the words and block out the other noise that pulls me forward. So let's begin. On my desk is a calendar page, one of those small, desk-type calendars filled with pages about dogs, Jack Russell's. It was a gift that I kept on my desk at work. One page stood out among the other 364. A brown and white JR is standing in a field with one of those sad expressions that only a dog can show. The caption reads "being left behind is the saddest feeling a dog can have." It strikes me how this might be. And even though, they say, dogs have no sense of time so that whether you're gone for a minute or day, the celebration of the...