DiaBLOGue

When I lay in a hospital very badly injured from the crash of my experimental airplane, a visitor asked me if I thought my injuries were a judgment for my sins. I remember saying no, and I even remember wondering that anyone should be so silly, let alone so tactless, as to ask such a question. But I don’t remember who asked it, and I don’t really want to. The asker and I have some differences in philosophy and theology that are so deep and irreconcilable that it would be difficult for us to continue to be friends if those differences surfaced again.

It was my father who taught me to love Emerson. I can remember him wanting to know what authors I was studying in my tenth-grade English class, and then, at the mention of Keats or…

“Not a day passes over the earth,” Charles Reade wrote, “but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great works and suffer noble sorrow. Of these obscure heroes, the greater part will…