As spring finally and fitfully makes itself known here in God’s country, our author reflects on how the rhythm of language reflects the rhythm of the world. Why do beautiful things haunt us so?

If you are dimly aware of a thing called “national politics,” and if you are also dimly aware that a lot of people are getting very red in the face over them, then you might, stifling a yawn, walk over to your bookshelf and pull down a collection of Emerson’s essays.

Far be it from me or anyone else during these twelve days of Christmas to put the kibosh on conviviality.

Outside the screened-in porch and downwind from us fourteen lambs graze in the dark.

It is a fantasy of the industrial episode—that brief blip in human history that began with the Industrial Revolution but is now showing signs of congestive heart failure, complete with the attendant edema below the knees—that infinite desires can be satisfied indefinitely in a finite space.

Is it permissible on a website devoted to the legacy of President Gerald R. Ford to admit a strong revulsion to presidential elections?

I expect most people agree that by making too much of a thing we can easily make too little of it—and also that as far as platitudes go that’s a fairly solid one.

Ernest Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” while on his honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a somewhat boyish looking woman (in the style of the day) and a Catholic, though not a very good one.

We do violence to a work of art by using it for our own ends, especially for our own ideological or political ends, which are time-bound and probably transient at best.