We appear to have lost the instructions
How many books have you read, a friend asked, in your life?
Not an easy question to answer, having neglected to keep a list. In the absence of documentary evidence, I resort to a process of estimation. This will require some clarification of each of the terms of the question. Continue reading “Books”
Tonight was a typical night, at least for this summer. The boy and I had dinner – tonight was leftovers, he had steak, I had monkfish – but it was later than usual as he had spent the late afternoon swimming with his friend. We watched the last bit of a Pixar film and by that time it was within an hour of lights out, so he got his second hour of screen time – playing an interminable online game where one solves idiotic puzzles and logic games to get points to, in his case, build an airport – before brushing his teeth and going to bed. He gave me a big hug, told me he didn’t have any clean clothes – I reminded him he had a giant pile of clean clothes that he had forgotten to bring up to his room and put away properly – he told me okay – we hugged some more, the light went out, and I left the room. I checked again in 15 minutes and it was silent, completely silent, the way only eight year olds can be silent when sleeping. If he had been trying to fool me, there would have been sound.
Continue reading “Space”Every night is different. Some nights, the boy goes loco after having too much cookies and cream ice cream. Some nights, the dog goes loco for no reason at all, chasing endlessly around the stairs and the back room and the front porch, chasing what, an imaginary squirrel? a ghostly deer? Some nights nothing happens at all, and the boy goes to sleep quickly after talking about the Hardy Boys, and the dog quickly relieves herself in the front lawn and hurriedly comes back inside, and I watch Hogan’s Heroes and compose myself ready to bed.
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch described the source of the divergence in forms of art routinely displayed in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. The major Christian denominations disagree about a wide range of matters of doctrine and practice, about which they have argued for many centuries, and one area of dispute concerns the appropriateness of certain objects and images in places of worship. MacCulloch pointed out that the varieties of church practice with regard to the display of images stem from differences in the interpretation of Hebrew scripture, in particular disagreements about whether, in the Book of Exodus, the first commandment is really comprised of two commandments, or, to put the contrary view, whether the second in not really a commandment at all, but only a coda to the first.
Most Friday nights my wife and I eat dinner at the same place. We sit at the same table with the same waiter and order the same cocktails, the same entrees. We’ve been doing this long enough that they know us. They know our habits and have been known to call and ask if we’re coming if tables begin to run short. We’re not alone in this. There are many people who frequent this particular place regularly and have been doing so for years. And so, it came as a surprise on a recent evening when walking up to the front door we encountered another regular patron berating the manager for their policy requiring masks. This was not a reasoned argument for or against the effectiveness of wearing masks against the spread of coronavirus. This was closer to a toddler’s temper tantrum thrown by a grown man who, by all outward appearances is professionally successful if not well adjusted, verbally abusing a hospitality worker as if it was his God-given right.
Continue reading “On Kindness”