• So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Section Three (4)

    [I learned long ago to be cautious about considering something my own bright idea just because it came to me. Case in point, the following. Funny thing here, I distinctly got the word “Gothic” in the place where I finally put it, and distinctly resisted it because I was afraid it was an anachronism, and…

  • Conversations with Hemingway (5)

    Monday, May 3, 2010 7 AM. Reading Burke’s biography of Perkins in great hopes, I came to Tom Wolfe’s picking a quarrel with Perkins — for more or less unconscious reasons — and thought, “oh yes, I remember that kind of thing!” The letter full of a different viewpoint that can’t possibly be addressed successfully…

  • About that oil spill

    This may be of interest, from our friends Upstairs. I think it’s self-explanatory, except for their coinage of the terms person-group and social-group. That’s part of an on-going explanation of the ways in which we as individuals aren’t nearly as individual as we think we are. The guys had said that condemnation is not the…

  • So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Section Three (5)

    Claude Bowers on Reconstruction, racism, and the problems of our times. Monday March 6, 2006 Last night, for no reason I could have named, I found on my shelves Claude Bowers’ book about the reconstruction era, The Tragic Era, that I have carried around for years but never yet read. Friends, my suspicion is that…

  • Conversations with Hemingway (6)

    The War About God 7 AM Tuesday, May 4, 2010 The 20th century could be called The War About God, and that would be as close a clue to it as any. Started rereading For Whom The Bell Tolls last night. What an achievement. Papa, what do you know of the war against God? You…

  • Conversations with Hemingway (6)

    7 AM Tuesday, May 4, 2010 The 20th century could be called The War About God, and that would be as close a clue to it as any. Started rereading For Whom The Bell Tolls last night. What an achievement. Papa, what do you know of the war against God? You certainly left enough clues…

  • So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Section Three (6)

    Wednesday March 8, 2006 All right, Mr. Bowers, since I’m not doing the work I ought to be doing, let’s resume. I’m half through your book and the comparisons between the Radical Republicans of 1865 on and those of 1995 on are just startling! Stolen elections, blatant disregard of law to get what they wanted,…

  • Conversations with Hemingway (7)

    Tuesday, May 4, 2010 11 AM. So, Papa, more about Spain? There is always more about Spain. I just wish you could see it for yourself — and I wish you could see it in the 1920s, as I saw it. Nobody brought it closer than you did. And I can be there now, if…

  • Carl Jung : Where are Your Symbols?

    So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Part Three (7) [I had been discussing Reconstruction with Claude Bowers, author of The Tragic Era, whose take on things differed considerably from mine. And I had been sending out the transcriptions day by day to a list of friends. Then one day I got a massive…

  • Conversations with Hemingway (8)

    Wednesday, May 5, 2010 7:30 AM. I wake up, Papa, thinking about you and the Communists (having still been reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, of course). Is that what you want us to talk about next? If not, where would you like to go? Do you really want an abstract disquisition about politics and…