Category: Literature
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title reveal!
I am pleased to reveal the title for my upcoming release.
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Keeping Christmas
The Ghosts of Christmas taught Scrooge to keep Christmas with charity; they also taught him to keep it with joy.
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Patience Obtains
For the past few years, I have had a quotation from St. Teresa taped on my desk: Patience obtains all things. I took it in the way of a hope rather than a promise. Now, with the publication of The Time Door, I have been thinking about patience, and what it obtains. I began work…
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The Most Dangerous Words
The most dangerous words are the ones that you think you understand. This is a trap of old books, where familiar words often hold strange meanings.
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“God Knows”
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
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The Quality of Love
When King Lear begins to realize the truth of his daughters’ love, he exclaims, “Ingratitude! Thou marble-hearted fiend!” He never understood the quality of his own love.
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Two Classics
I read two classics this past summer: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Dostoevsky’s Devils. I was maybe two hundred pages into Devils when I realized, with a measure of surprise, that the book reminded me of Jane Austen. Not the political revolution, of course, or the atheism and murder; the book’s conclusion, in which Dostoevsky…
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An Acquittal
Dostoevsky’s Devils is a 700-page epic of spiritual lawlessness, conniving, and singularly poor decisions. For most of the novel, this plays out in long conversations, awkward domestic scenes, and some very unfortunate social events. At the climax, everything joins in a conflagration of murders and suicides, with two or three natural deaths for variation in tragedy.…
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Happiness is an Aesthetic
There is a scene in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday where an English detective, impersonating an anarchist, is joined in a “foul tavern” by another English detective, impersonating a nihilistic German professor. The second undercover detective ordered a glass of milk, in keeping with the habits of the Professor de Worms. But he rejected,…