"What is sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself?"- Cicero, On Friendship Three weeks or so before Will died, I telephoned him at the hospital. When he answered, his voice was not much above a hoarse whisper. He was nauseous, he told me, and …
How our bad manners are destroying democracy
Even as everything is falling apart around us, resist the forces of barbarism by practicing the "good manners" first taught to you by your mother in the nursery.
Frost’s transgressive conservatism
I recently set myself the task of systematically reading every poem Robert Frost ever published. This amused my wife, who pointed out that it seemed unlikely that there was anything in the ratty, pencil-marked, taped and re-taped green volume of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost that has graced my bedside table ever since we were married …
His light was always on – a tribute to Dr. Patrick Keats
There are certain people in our lives who we unconsciously come to expect will always be there. They are the ones who always have been there. The stable ones. The rock-like ones. The buttresses, who quietly go about the business of holding things together, without ever drawing attention to themselves. For the very many of us who …
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Casual thoughts 