How many languages are spoken by the world’s people?
Try seven thousand. That’s an impressive number— at least until you discover that many are on the way out.
In the next hundred years, fully half of these languages will have died. What, if anything, can we do about it? Should we even care?
To help give meaning to my later life I have created a mantra. This three-word phrase expresses spiritually a response to the events that mark my days.
My brief formula for dealing with those happenings is “The mystery deepens.”
I apply these words to gains and losses, insights and impasses, surprises and well-worn actions. Throughout, the phrase says something about the kind of person I am.
One of the special pleasures of later life comes with encountering again the works of art you loved long ago. It is both agreeable and poignant to meet your earlier self through books, songs, and films.
Among the movies that touched me in 1940, when I was twelve, one stands out. That was The Great Dictator, in which Charlie Chaplin took on Adolf Hitler.
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
These were the last words spoken by Steve Jobs as he lay on his deathbed.
We have this information thanks to his sister, Mona Simpson. She shared it in a memorial service at Stanford University on October 16, 11 days after her brother’s death.
What if a surgeon engaged a personal coach to watch him (or her) at work and afterward made suggestions for improvement?
That’s what Atul Gawande has done. In case his name does not reverberate in you, he’s the 45-year-old Boston surgeon who, among many other good things, writes perceptive articles for the New Yorker magazine.
Like many other Catholics of my acquaintance, I frequently feel distress at the bishops of our church. As a group and as individuals, they too often take positions that violate my sense of what they should be saying.
This applies especially to political pronouncements. Though I want them to offer leadership on public issues, I cringe when they take a position that is too narrow or short-sighted.
“You can’t go home again.” This saying rates as one of the best-known American proverbs. It served as the title of a novel written by Thomas Wolfe and published in 1940, two years after his death.
The words have been on my mind for the last two weeks. Thanks to a delightful surprise invitation from the current owner of the house where I grew up in Watertown, my two sisters and I had the pleasure of going back to a home that I had left way back in 1949.