Writing a memoir, as I have recently done, offers the chance not only to reflect on your life but to give expression in words to its meaning. Rather, one should say, to its meanings.
Probably, you will recognize and perhaps develop themes that run through the times of your being alive. They will serve as markers in weeks, months, and years that otherwise can seem chaotic.
This month’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature was a man I remember first encountering in the fall of 1992. My wife Susan and I were standing in the senior common room in Harvard’s Quincy House when one other person came into the room. He walked over to Susan, stuck out his hand, and said “Vargas Llosa.”
Not everyone would have known, but Susan immediately recognized the name of a Latin American literary lion. Mario Vargas Llosa went on the give a talk to common room members that fall. Unfortunately, on that occasion he did not talk about writing, a subject I would like to have heard him discuss. Instead he told us about running for president of Peru, and failing to get elected.
A few feet away from the doors of my parish church, I was attempting to park my car in a tight space. Suddenly I heard shouts from behind the vehicle, followed by angry beatings of fists on my car’s trunk. Clearly, some guy was irate at me.
When I got out of the car and looked back, I saw the fellow still flushed with anger. He accused me of being a blind driver who did not know what he was doing.
“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off loneliness. He never rejected the world. If he had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”
Quotation from Let the Great World Spin, a novel written by Colum McCann
When your God-damn atheists become as dogmatic as some religionists, you know we're in trouble.
Thank you, Dawkins, Hitchens and your fellow evangelists of atheism.
The death of Dr. Robert Butler has stirred both my emotions and my thoughts. When word came that he had died on July fourth, it struck me as unlikely, even impossible. After all, I had spent the first full week of June with him as I took part in the Age Boom Academy for journalists conducted by his International Longevity Center in Manhattan.