Searching for Sunshine

Briefly, sun broke through!

So far we have had two sunny days in January. On Wednesday a weak winter sun appeared in the morning sky, brightened with time, but by early afternoon sunshine had been replaced by familiar cloud cover and falling snow, so I’m not counting that as a third sunny day. A day must be bright for at least four hours to qualify as a sunny one, and I think counting a mere four hours as a day is generous, don’t you?

Beautiful -- but not a sunny day

Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Reading the biography by Jonathan Eig at the beginning of 2025 gave me a better idea of the complexity and also the dedication of King’s character. When I looked at MLK quotes on Monday morning, this one stood out, given the times in which we live: 

 

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

 

-      Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

These days I am finding myself more troubled by the complacency of some than by the despair of others. Despair I can understand, but how can anyone not realize the “fierce urgency of now”? At the same time, the “vigorous and positive action” we need to take can be difficult to identify, so I appreciated suggestions last week from Robert Reich and value the “action items” a friend includes in her frequent “enCOURAGEment” emails.

 

A gathering in Suttons Bay last week provided metaphorical sunshine, demonstrating that people far from harm’s way care about those caught in the crossfires and want to see the federal government’s policies and actions return to the rule of law.

 

Catalog cover is book's cover illustration.

Another, different ray of sunshine came with the Spring/Summer 2026 Wayne State University Press book catalog. Right there on the cover, and again on the inside first page, is Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, a collection of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and comics, all exploring joyful memories of growing up Black in a city and edited by Desiree Cooper. Three cheers! I look forward to the April release of this book so I can offer it to my customers in Northport.

More information inside catalog

There are occasional days of sunshine in the direst of winters and moments, even hours, of joy to be celebrated every day.

 

Far From Home

Recently I chose an autobiography written in 1937 for my bedtime reading, that of Isobel Field, stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. This Life I’ve Loved is interesting all the way through, right from the beginning, but when her mother, Fanny Osborne, married for love the sickly RLS (with no idea that he was going to become famous), something magical happened. Newlywed Fanny and Louis, as he is called in the book, went on a wedding trip to “Silverado,” a deserted mine in Napa Valley, where the hot, dry climate was expected to—and did—improve Louis’s frail health, and after a while the rest of the family joined them.

 

We had some very pleasant times together before they left [for Scotland], and I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch in my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.

 

-      Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved

 

Isobel, called Belle, was herself a married woman and mother by this time and had never before heard her mother laugh! Can you imagine that? The power of love! Note: It takes a while in the Youtube video to get to the song, but don't miss it! A great rock hit from the Michael J. Fox movie, “Back to the Future.”

 

The story continues in Hawaii and eventually Samoa, where the Stevensons bought land, built a house, and Fanny began all manner of agricultural and horticultural projects while Louis devoted himself to writing. Such a different world from Up North winter!

 

The perfume of Samoa reached us while the island was still a hazy cloud on the horizon, a blend of ylang-ylang blossoms, wood-smoke and copra. We stood by the rail of the little inter-island steamer Lübeck watching Upolu take shape before us; thickly wooded, lettuce-green hills piled up against a blue sky. Along the beach, a row of small shops faced the sea, half hidden by the foliage of trees and shrubs. Lying on the reef and towering out of the water were the hulks of three men-of-war, tragic reminders of the great hurricane that had cost so many lives the year before.

 

There was no wharf and only a few boats came out to meet us. The natives had not yet learned to barter their seed necklaces and tortoise-shell work, or dive for coins. Several outrigger canoes paddled about the ship, filled with brown men and girls garlanded in wreaths and flowers….

 

Field notes that while many Hawaiians at that time had already adopted European dress, Samoan men and women still wore the lava lava. It was the late 1800s, before the coming of world war, when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom, although the missionary faction was eager for it to be taken over by the United States. Samoa, already being governed by Germany, Britain, and the U.S., seemed to be holding more tightly to its island culture, but in neither place were there anything like the big American multistory hotels that have since made their way to the South Pacific. When Isobel leaves Hawaii for Sydney, Australia, prior to making the move to Samoa at Louis’s request (realizing his health will never permit a return to his native Scotland, he wants his family together in one place), she describes the islands where she felt so long at home.

 

…I leaned on the rail looking at the town before me. Flooded with moonlight, it was bright against the dark blue hills. Here and there roofs showed above the tree-tops, no one building rising high enough to spoil the symmetry. From the shrouded mystery of Diamond Head to the purple shadows of Waianai the city never looked more beautiful.

 

I thought that I was seeing it for the last time. In a sense I was, for a phase of my life ended then, utterly unlike anything that went before or came after.

 

Honolulu, so peaceful, so beautiful, was to suffer tragedy and blood-shed, and change into a bustling American city before I saw it again; the dignity, the romance, the charm of an island kingdom gone forever.

  

The United States of America annexed Hawaii in 1898, following what the American president himself acknowledged as an illegal invasion by U.S. Marines in 1893 supporting a local insurgency. There had been factions in Hawaii at least as long as Europeans and Americans had been accumulating Hawaiian land (often by marrying into landed Hawaiian families), a complicated history certainly not taught in my grade school when Hawaii became the 50^th state in 1959.

 

(What today of Greenland? Is there a lesson in the history of Hawaii for Greenlanders? For Venezuelans?)

 

As for me here in northern Michigan, Isobel Field’s stories of her stepfather have whetted my appetite for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the next book I have now begun An Inland Voyage. In the preface by his widow, she writes,

 

Like Branwell Brontë, of whom he could never speak without emotion, [Stevenson] would sit poring over maps, making imaginary journeys. 

 

-      F.V. de G.S. [Don’t ask me what these letters stand for, other than the ‘F’ for Fanny!]

 

Just so, as a lover of maps and of armchair travel, I anticipate sunny hours ahead in Europe with RLS as I turn pages and journey with him in my imagination. 

 

In his Samoan compound, where evening prayers were part of daily life, writer Robert Louis Stevenson soon tired of formulaic recitations and began writing his own prayers. Here is the last one he wrote, the day before he died: 

 

When the day returns, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to labor, happy, if happiness be our portion, and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

 

Really, what more can we ask?

The Subject Is Courage

Cold midwinter is the time to call on your sisu!

A good friend commented recently that citizens of the United States are now becoming “accustomed” to living with daily fear and uncertainty, adding, “Black people have lived this way for centuries.” The same can be said for Native Americans (and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world invaded by Europeans), certain (but not all) immigrant groups, gay people, etc. To survive and thrive under constant threat requires courage, and now is no time now for anyone to be fragile.

Former enslaved people who fled the South in the Great Migration knew fear both in the homes they fled and on the road north, and danger did not stop when travels ended. Whether the ultimate destination was the northern States or Canada, equality of opportunity was not granted upon arrival. Nevertheless, those migrants saw improvements in their lives. Perhaps most importantly, they gained hope. Courage they had all along.

Isabel Wilkerson‘s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration tells this story beautifully and is a good book to read, if you haven’t already, during Black History Month.

I am only about halfway through Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (and less than halfway through Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith), because at bedtime and in the middle of the night I turn usually to fiction. The King biography, however, is quite readable, and when I sit down with it in the late afternoon or early evening, the pages turn quickly. It is not, let me make clear, a hagiography. The author presents MLK’s flaws and self-doubts along with his courage and other virtues. (People often say of some admired person that he or she “was not a saint,” forgetting that those elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church were all human beings, and none was perfect.) His personal courage inspired others.

 

King’s fervor lit a flame in many of those who heard him. Jesse Jackson, who was fifteen years old at the time of the 1957 Lincoln Memorial speech and would go on to become a minister, activist, and presidential candidate, said King’s emergence offered concrete hope that racism could be fought and beaten. Before King, there seemed to be two options: “You could go into a deep dark hole,” Jackson said, or “you could adjust—adjust to be the best pool player, adjust to be the best singer, the best barber.” Now King offered a realistic third option, Jackson said: “You could resist.”

 

A younger friend once asked me, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her that depended on who you were, how old you were, where you lived, and what was going on your life. The Sixties were not the same for everyone, and neither were the Fifties.

 

Many historians would describe the 1950s as a time of tranquility, a time of prosperity, a time when the gap between the Left and Right narrowed and Americans, for the most part, agreed that they were fortunate to live in the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. But such descriptions overlooked many who did not feel so fortunate. Once those who were overlooked began to express their discontent, once they began to yearn for more, the picture-perfect image of America in the 1950s showed cracks. Where would the fight for real freedom spread next? It would spread almost everywhere, including Mongtomery.

 

When Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon or spoke at a rally, people were inspired by his fervor. No demagogue, King was also persuasive in his reasoning and offered a hopeful vision of the future. 

 

Fear is contagious. It resides in the most primitive part of the human brain, always ready to be activated by threat, real or perceived. Survival of the prehistoric group depended on the contagion of fear. 

 

But fear can be overcome, and courage, like fear, can also be contagious. 

 

Courage was contagious in Mongtomery, Alabama, in 1963. It was contagious during World War II in the French village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, where villagers took a united stand. I’m sure everyone reading my words today can come up with examples from personal experience, as well as from history. Real leaders are courageous and inspire others to be brave. 

 

“Courage is like a muscle,” in the words of John McCain. “The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.” Before he died, McCain worried that America’s cultural courage muscle was growing weak from lack of exercise, and that, he warned,

 

…means trouble for us all, because courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, compassion, and humility. In short, leaders who lack courage aren’t leaders.

 

--Here I want to shift gears, so hold on! Let’s take a look at standup comedy! What? Yes! 

 

Historically, jesters in a royal court, besides telling jokes and performing acrobatic tricks, were permitted to speak their minds freely, even going so far as to criticize the monarch. At times they were trusted advisors to kings and emperors, while at other times speaking truth to power meant they risked their lives. Their courage provided both a safety valve and a warning. 

 

And so it is fitting that in a country whose government is supposedly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” comedians all over our land provide criticism of nominal leaders (I really do intend that adjective), along with more general entertainment, and my favorite these days is Josh Johnson. This young man is both brave and funny! He makes me laugh! 

 

Laughter—how subversive! We are never thoroughly beaten down if we can still laugh. (Do you think Winston in Orwell’s novel 1984 ever laughed?) When someone tells important truth in a way that provokes spontaneous laughter, our courage can get a big boost.

 

Where do examples of courage in our world today, in the United States, give you inspiration and hope and make you feel a little braver yourself? I take heart from the examples of U.S. House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, California governor Gavin Newsom, and others. Even Senator Mitch McConnell—and I am no fan of his political views in general; quite the contrary—managed to locate his cojones and speak out against January 6 and vote against the abominable Hegseth nomination. The City of Brotherly Love has stood out en masse. Who stands out for you?

 

As for those of us who are not in Congress, not governors or mayors or ministers with large congregations, we can still spread the contagion of courage among ourselves and to others. Yesterday morning an old song came into my head, something my sisters and I learned as a hymn in Sunday school when we were little girls. Take a listen, and tell me if this doesn’t strengthen your resolve to do whatever you can, day by day.

 

Another Sunday school song: "Open up your heart and let the sun shine in!"

Small readings from small writings bring large thoughts.

"Books are my rivals for her attention!"

When I take on the reading of a very big book, one that will require a long stretch of days and nights to get through, I always have on hand a few volumes of lighter literary weight, fiction or nonfiction or a mixed stack of the two. The past few days, when I finish a chapter from Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, I’ve turned to a modest book from the category of “books on books,” William Dana Orcutt’s From My Library Walls: A Kaleidoscope of Memories. Published in 1945 under wartime conservation restrictions, the book’s author refers several times to aspects of World War II, but his main topic in each short chapter, or essay, is a memory evoked by a photograph or drawing or framed autograph letter on the walls of his private home library.

Playtime in the single digits!

Lovers and collectors of both art and books will understand my astonishment at the number of framed items Mr. Orcutt found room to hang on his library walls. Though the Artist and I managed to find room for both in our old farmhouse, visual art and bookshelves are always competing for wall space—and the items that prompt Mr. Orcutt’s memories are not, for the most part, pieces of art but framed ephemera he collected along with his books. The memorabilia even includes (he admits in both cases) a couple of items given as gifts not to him but to his wife, though he calls them “my,” not “our” library walls. His home library, I muse in wonder, must have been a very large room! Unfortunately, the book’s only photograph is a portrait of the author. We are not given a look at his library.

Sunny thinks she's cuter than WDO, and she's right!

William Dana Orcutt was born in 1870 in New Hampshire and lived into the 1950s. Entering young into the business of printing set his life’s course: In addition to writing books, he made a career of book and type design, with a reputation as a historian, as well. See this entry on the Dorcester Atheneum if you are interested in the history of American books, because Orcutt is an important figure in that story. His long, rich life, as the book I'm reading makes clear, intersected with many other important literary figures of his day. 

 

But my intention today is not to dwell on Orcutt’s life but to give you an idea of this one little book. He wrote many, most of them larger and more “important,” but anyone interested in American history and literature will find fascinating gems in this small volume. 

A small package reveals gems of history.

Each—let me call them essays--. Each essay in the book is no more than three to six pages in length, reminiscences that are grouped geographically, with the last two parts, “The Literary Hub of the Universe” [Boston] and “Star-Spangled Banner,” devoted to American topics. This Sunday morning I reached those final sections of the book, which were perhaps the most fascinating to me of all, particularly Orcutt’s memories of his relationship to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. 

 

As a schoolboy assigned to memorize Lincoln’s famous speech, young Orcutt pictured in his mind a great auditorium filled with people who received the president’s words with thunderous applause. Years later, when a “charming” volume was issued, reprinting and glorifying the address for a worshipful public, Orcutt happened to meet a “picturesque, elderly military gentleman” who had been a member of the Gettysburg Commission and who was the last living person to have been on the platform at Gettysburg that day! The elderly gentleman sputtered and scoffed at the glorified picture that day given in the new book. He told Orcutt:

 

“…Instead of being greeted as a masterpiece at the time of its delivery, most of those who heard the Address, and practically all the critics, considered it a colossal failure. Lincoln himself was mortified and chagrinned.” 

 

This, we must understand, was after a crowd of 100,000 people had been standing for two solid hours while the speaker of the day, famous orator Edward Everett, the main speaker of the day, read his two-hour-long speech. When Lincoln's turn came, the weary crowd met his brief words with silence, and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, remarked to the man sitting next to him that the president had “made a failure.” With his mind on the war and its human cost, not on polishing his personal legacy for the ages, Lincoln probably did not declaim in strong, ringing tones. And after all, he had been asked to say only a few dedicatory words. 

 

Across the country, newspapers (except for five who reviewed it positively) reported the Address as a flop.

 

…[S]ome even went so far as to criticize its political philosophy. It remained for the Edinburgh Review to discover its greatness. Here the statement was unequivocally made that the Eulogy delivered by Pericles in memory of the heroes of the Peloponnesian War could alone be compared with President Lincoln’s classic words. 

 

Abashed, American editors took another look and changed their tune. All these years later, who in the world ever quotes from Everett’s two-hour speech?

 

I am not—please do not mistake me!—comparing President Biden’s farewell address in stature to Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, but there are a few similarities: Both men were exhausted by the burdens of office when they spoke. Biden, like Lincoln, spoke briefly. Both spoke from the heart of the test the nation was undergoing. 

 

President Biden’s short address to the American people did not receive a failing mark from the country as a whole, but his critics on the Republican side of the aisle (see Fox News if you care to) spared no insult. It’s true that the elderly president, aged by the office (as it ages all who pass through it), as well as struggling against the stutter that he has worked so hard in his political career to overcome, sometimes fumbled his words. “He can’t even read!” jeered his detractors. They called his message the “worst” in history and “dark,” refusing to acknowledge that we are living in dark times, much of that darkness their own intentional creation. 

 

If history survives into the future, which seems rather an open question as this brave new world grows more and more shameless in mendacity and subject to more and more manipulation of fact, perhaps all this will get sorted out. For now, I can only make my own judgment. Without television, I watched President Biden’s entire speech on my little phone screen, and I give him high marks not only for honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness but also for seeing and facing the world as it is and asking us to do the same. I wish I shared his optimism, but certainly I agree that not giving up hope is essential to the future of our country. 

 

On Monday, in honor of the national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., I will be reading from a book on King's life. My radio will be silent. I’ll only look at my phone for texts from family and/or friends. When I come back to this blog with a new post, perhaps by the end of the week, perhaps not until the following week, I'll have a lovely surprise to share. Meanwhile, let's pray for peace in Gaza, freedom for Ukraine, and relief for those made homeless by fires or other blows of fate.

Honor him on January 20.

To Every Thing, There Is a Season

Looking up Nagonaba from marina

The shift from Saturday’s heavy traffic, in Leelanau County and all around Grand Traverse Bay (my sources report), to empty parking spaces all up and down the streets of Northport comes accompanied by a change in the weather. Balmy, light-filled, summer-like fall mornings have given way to leaden skies, blustery winds, and whitecaps on the water. Zip the liner into your trench coat. Go outside. Test the temperature. Go back inside and look for a vest to wear under the coat. Even knitted cap and mittens are not amiss. But the color goes on, and I saw a shaggy mane this morning by the side of the road. Autumn is not over. This shift is not as sudden as it seems, either: it’s been in the works for a while, caterpillars and birds on the move and plants making and scattering seeds.

Black walnuts on the ground

If last weekend was peak color, how quiet will the bookstore be this week? When I couldn’t get Sarah an appointment with her regular groomer on Monday, I threw caution to the winds and set up a session on Tuesday morning, and while Sarah was being made prettier than she already was, David and I took in Jean Larsen’s show at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City. Yes, I had three days off in a row – Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday! And look at the improvement in Sarah’s appearance! Can you say “criminally cute”?

Before

After

Inspiration struck on Monday, thanks to clouds that kept interfering with the sun, discouraging me from committing to projects in the yard, and instead of digging up the garden I did a major overhaul upstairs, from clean sheets on the bed to moving furniture. The old mission desk (missing center drawer) on the upstairs landing had never done anything there but collect junk. I never had used that corner as a writing studio, a fond dream when we first moved into the farmhouse. So now the desk is in the back bedroom upstairs, looking out over the meadow in the direction of the sunrise, and it’s set up as a permanent drawing station, inaugurated with a session that very afternoon. I tried it out this morning for an hour, too, and it was dandy, even before sunrise.

Flowing lines, object contours, contrast of light and shade – so wonderfully wordless! No, I certainly have not given up reading! What I have done in the last few days, however, is to shift over to books that focus on nature, re-reading Tom Brown, Jr.’s The Tracker (one of my old favorites, and I have his book The Vision close at hand to read next) and an equally inspiring book I discovered more recently, Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape, by Robert Hart.

The essence of life should be continuous creativity: in working out creative and comprehensive solutions to one’s problems, one rises above them. They become smaller, less tormentingly insistent, until, perhaps, in time, one realizes they have just faded away.

Are problems tormenting you? Wouldn’t you welcome a meditation practice or a book that let those problems fade into the background, even if only temporarily? Forgive me for repeating myself – I’ve recommended the title before – but Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation combines both approaches. If you never pick up a pencil, simply holding this book and turning the pages slowly as you take in the author’s words and drawings is a calming meditation.

I draw a leaf . . . Still it is moving. Still the birds are on the wing. Still I can hear the silent falling of the snow . . . Some of the grasses are long, others are short . . .

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The noisy campaigns will not last forever.

P.S. Another good idea is music, so if you are free on the evening of November 3, come get a ticket from me for Tristan Eckerson's live performance in Suttons Bay. I also have a few of his CDs left, "Leelanau Night," his original compositions on solo piano.

Joining Love and Power

...And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a resignation of love. 

We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.

-       Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967

In the Sands, the Dust, the Snows, and the Mud of Time

[A] track is a temporary thing. Unless the mud goes suddenly hard and turns gradually to stone, tracks do not last. They fade, and as they dry, the wind sweeps them relentlessly level to ease its way across the ground. Tracks exist at the interface where the sky drags along the surface of the earth. They exist for a relatively brief time in a narrow level near the surface of the ground where the wind and weather move across, changing the temperature and building information into the track. Nature conspires to steal even the traces of passage. Most tracks made in the world go under unseen. I try to follow every one I can.
- The Tracker: The true story of Tom Brown, Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins.

One of the many glories of an unpaved road is the way it holds tracks. On our morning walks, Sarah sniffs the grass and weeds at the side of the road: that’s her morning newspaper, her nose telling her who’s been where and what's gone on. While she uses her nose, I depend on my eyes to note the patterns made by a tractor, trails of another, earlier walker, the narrow, winding path of a snail, tiny bird footprints, a place where a deer leaped or stepped daintily across the road or where a coyote trotted or strolled, or the surprise evidence that sandhill cranes have been in the neighborhood. 

Until the rains come, that is, washing the slate clean until the next round of news is printed.

Noting tracks, following trails gives me an anticipation for winter and reminds me of the year I spent an hour a week just sitting outdoors, being in one place.

The more we learned to let our attention wander and come to rest on the thing at hand just often enough to catch the disturbances, the better we became as trackers and as observers of the woods.

I was reading those words one morning out on the front porch, before sunrise, with many different messages coming to me through the window – tapping of a woodpecker, crow’s call, screech of jay, rustle of linden leaves, my attention wandering easily and seamlessly from the words on the page to the outdoor sounds and back again.

Our intrepid Ulysses reading group will be getting together next week to discuss Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and to propose our next reading adventure. Now that summer is over, we will probably return to “challenging” books, books for which we feel the need of “a support group,” as one member called it when we first came together to read James Joyce. But first we’ll be talking about Hemingway, and I’m still sorting through my responses on that score. Never mind separating the man from the myth – it’s separating the writer from the myth that concerns me.

A recent New York Times “Bookends” piece asked, “Do We Mistake Inaccessibility for Brilliance?” In other words, if a book is very, very long and difficult to read, do we think it must be a work of genius? Hemingway does not force us to that question, especially with his short stories. His style can hardly be called convoluted.

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

Does the simplicity of Hemingway’s style mark it as as a work of genius? Did he, as has often been said, as he himself seems to have claimed, give us a new way to see the world?

In a way, it seems, every writer with a voice of his or her own cannot help giving a new way to see the world, for despite our commonalities and connections and dependencies, despite the cultural grids through which we perceive, each of us must perceive the world for ourselves. I cannot see through your eyes or hear through your ears: what world do I have to offer except the one my own eyes and ears, my own hands and feet and nose and mouth and skin and muscles give me?

So that can’t be the question. The question has to be, instead: Do I see the world differently for having read Hemingway? Do you? Or can any of us only read his work through the myth of Hemingway the writer? 

I’ll leave the questions there for today, but please feel welcome to leave your two cents' worth. It's a quiet, rainy Friday. Sarah and I are at the bookstore. What are you doing with this only September 18, 2015, of your life?

Don't Read My Blog Today

Today is the national holiday to honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Please take time today to read about and remember his life. It is important to keep all of Dr. King's dream alive--equality for all Americans, an end to poverty, and peace for the entire world.