Where Disconnected Facts Have A Way of Connecting
Ruminations…
Explaining the Baltimore Orioles to Myself:
A number of years ago, I wrote a short story called The Life of Birds.** In the story, a young somewhat adrift fellow named Ben oversees a small nature sanctuary. While leading a group of bird watchers through the forest, he points out a brightly colored orange and black oriole in the canopy. An off topic conversation then ensues about baseball teams named for birds – St Louis Cardinals, Toronto B
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Something for election seasons from Walker Percy:
Something for election seasons…or whenever – a favorite bit from The Moviegoer: “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world…Down I plunk myse
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Piss holes in a snowbank. This is another thing about eyes – some eyes, at least.
Last week, I wrote about seeing with instruments. That got me wondering again about what science shares with religion. Well,…”Jackson Pollock on the Mount” – the graying paint-spattered priest in As It Is On Earth – wonders as well. Sermonizing on the rationale of Science’s Method, he asks the question: “Is Faith in Reason a Reasonable Faith?” Taylor Thatcher, o
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What are Richard Rorty and Walker Percy looking at?
Two of my favorite writers on their garden benches, a tree over each of their left shoulder, and their heads tilted slightly rightward…as if they share one of As It Is On Earth‘s character’s poignant tendency “to see the slant of things better that way.” In AIIOE, I was interested in two aspects of seeing: one literal and the other figurative. In the former sense, I tried to capt
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Some Thoughts on Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
“Back and forth I paced, probing the floor with seamless and well-constructed arguments. Then, rearing back, I would thrust irrefutable conclusions into the ceiling. Chalk crumbled in my hand and flew through space as I struck broad decisive strokes across the lecture hall slate – Gutenberg in a monastery vineyard, toying with a wine-making screw press; Einstein, trying in frustration to coo
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Names and Meanings
Firstly, a shout out: to Mark Mathew Braunstein whose photograph of Mamacoke Island graces the cover of As It Is On Earth, and to Andy Carpenter who found the photo, and then designed it into AIIOE’s lovely book jacket. Mamacoke Island plays a big role in the story. Its more than a place; its a character. It too has been caught in the turbulence of the river and the Age of Discovery. And like othe
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Rivers & The Clash between the Earth and the World
In his essay, The Origin of the Work of Art, the philosopher Martin Heidegger made an important distinction between the Earth and the World. Roughly, the “Earth” is the biotic entity that precedes humanity, and the “World” is what humans make of the earth when they show up on its surface. One might say the Earth is the back drop to the activities of the World, but it is not
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Matryoshka dolls and A Brief History of Time…
If it is true that we as individuals are actually the sum of what has gone before us, i.e., the historical context within which we find ourselves (living at a particular time, in a particular place, from within a particular family) – or as my narrator Taylor Thatcher suggests: “It was Galen McMoody who first made me realize that I was just another casualty of history…of histories. A hammered pin
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© Copyright 2012, Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright