Thoughts

In her 1982 essay, "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard emphasizes the value of living instinctively, of pursuing one's life purpose with staid determination. She argues that life is best lived in the moment, forgetting all that surrounds you and embracing your time here with passion. One of her illustrations is a powerful one. She tells of a man who shot an eagle, only to find a weasel skull attached to its neck.The eagle apparently had taken hold of the weasel, which then instinctively turned for survival to bite into the eagle's neck. Important to Dillard's essay is the contrast she strikes between mindlessness and consciousness, between living in "necessity"-- in spontaneous commitment to present circumstance with no regard for one's surroundings-- and living in choice, fully aware of the consequences of one's actions. It is a theme she lays down both here and as part of a memoir she penned five years later, called An American Childhood . ...

We can learn from our mistakes, right? In my case, I hope I've learned from them. In chronological order, here are several mistakes-- some of them serious ones-- that I hope to have learned from. This list, you would expect, doesn't cover all of my mistakes. 1. Third grade: My class was reading out loud the countries of Africa. As we did, I zeroed in on one that I was certain we'd missed: Niger. In fact, the teacher had read this country, but I pronounced it differently in my mind, so that I believed we had not yet read it. Ever eager to please, I shot my hand up to correct the teacher. He called on me, at which point I stated, "You missed one." "Which one," he replied. Here, then, is the crucial point of the story. Had I known that the word I was about to utter was a bad one, I would certainly have kept my mouth shut. Had I know that we had, in fact, read this country, I certainly would have relented. Neither of these things were true, however, and ...

Someone told me last month, thirty-five thousand miles above the ground, that life is about more than survival. We are meant to thrive. He said this, I think, because many of us find it much more comfortable to live life complacently, and even aimlessly. We'd rather be invisible to others and not face the specter of failure because doing so would prove we are a disappointment. This leads inevitably to a life marked more by survival than passion. We can't think much about living in unreserved boldness as we pursue our dreams-- if we have them-- because we are thinking instead of how to glean what we can from what we feel life has handed to us. It is this attitude, this passiveness about life that leaves us thinking ourselves fortunate that we are not worse off. Even more, our dreams say something about us. Henry David Thoreau wrote that "dreams are the touchstone of our character." What we hope for most expresses the things we value, and the things we...

I brought two necklaces home from Haiti. They look almost identical, except especially for their pendants. The pendant on one looks like something close to a shark's tooth and the other is a cross. I never wear the necklace with a cross. At first glance, it seems like this might be a sign of cowardice, as though I'm afraid to express my faith openly. When I tried the cross necklace on the other day, though, I noticed a different feeling. It wasn't the expression of my faith that I was trying to escape, but the flaunting of it. There is something culturally ingrained in that reluctance. That cross necklace is a symbol of Christ's sacrifice, yes; but-- for some-- it also represents the Catholic penchant for symbol, ceremony, and ritual. My reluctance to wear it is my subconscious agreement with some sects of the Protestant church that these practices and things truly are unnecessary ornaments on one's faith, a belief reflected at least in part by the Puritan traditi...

In 1994, Sven Birkerts published an essay titled "Into the Electronic Millennium." Here, he lamented the replacement of print media-- books, especially-- with electronic forms of communication like television and computers. In an essay with this title, one might expect that lamenting would be all he does, but Birkerts draws some interesting conclusions from the rapid development of what we now call the digital age, and makes some accurate predictions. Comparing first this advance of new technology with the replacement in ancient Greece of the oral tradition of Homer-- which involved the embedding of culture into poetry that bards would recite out loud-- with the written word, Birkerts goes on to argue that the use of visual forms of communication through electronic media changes the way we learn and think. Instead of discovering information through the logical and linear process of reading print, we learn through associated images that give us a general impression of the su...