Musings

One of the things we humans do best is to sort our experiences into categories. Unlike other creatures, who seem to live in a seamless world of moment-to-moment events, our species has the capacity and evidently the obsession to pass judgment upon each and every thing that befalls us.

During this past winter’s depressing combination of below-freezing temperatures and COVID-induced seclusion, half ready to commit myself to a mental health facility, I stumbled upon a wonderful antidote to the blues of any sort. It’s titled “The Letters of Vincent van Gogh,” first published in 1914, and includes over 900 letters, more than 650 of which were written by Vincent to his beloved brother Theo.

    One of my earliest memories is helping my mom and my grandpa plant a couple of trees.  The planting occurred at Grandpa’s summer cottage some fifty miles north of Chicago, Illinois, and seemed to my young mind a fun, but altogether ordinary, thing to do. Mom had...

Several years ago, on a trip to England with friends, we decided to visit Charles Darwin’s home in Downe, some fifteen miles south of London in the Kent countryside. The home itself proved fascinating, not because of its architecture or historical importance so much...

On the 10th of December, 1996, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, experienced a rare form of stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Within four hours, she watched her mind lose its ability to process information. “By the end of that...

Kids come by it naturally. A stone, a leaf, a snowflake—any object, no matter how ordinary, can be transformed by the mind of a child into something special and full of mystery. Seen this way, the world teems with wonder and delight. Years pass and the child outgrows...

Every year about this time I find myself thinking a lot about my dad. It was right around now, many years ago, that he started on what proved to be an epic walk. Dad was born in 1910 and died in 2002. He married Mom in the middle of the Great Depression and eventually...

  One of the least understood and most valuable entities in the universe is the three-pound electro-chemical tangle of nerve cells known as the human brain. Consisting of some 100 billion neurons and another trillion support cells, the brain is in essence a...

Everybody knows the universe is a big place. What’s hard to grasp is how big. A few years ago I bought my wife a telescope for Christmas, figuring she could check out the moon and a few planets and get a fix on a star or two and help fill in some of the gaping holes...

On a recent road trip out to Washington State and British Columbia, I found myself astonished by the beauty and variety of our continent. Not that this insight is anything new. My wife grew up near Seattle, and through the years we’ve driven or flown out there several...

In Chad Harbach’s superb novel The Art of Fielding, in a burial scene near the end of the book, one of the characters says of her dead father, “You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error,...