“Matins for My Father”

Whom I’ve never heard sing, not once, not even
as a joke, because he was shamed as a boy
when his voice broke in choir, raw tones scattering
the sanctuary like caught moths.

Not even when I was young, his voice a low path through nightmare,
reading so that I wouldn’t dream of dying & not when he survived
his heart’s closing in the dentist’s office, lifted high & away
in the helicopter like a terrible star.

Not even so early, dawn aching open, when he is first to wake
& straps on a headlamp to feed the horses in the morning cold,
the field’s chorus soon to catch & everything certain—not even,
not yet, as the trees glitter with spider eyes tucked in the bark,

sparrows still settled, which he’ll call to tell me about—
little things the Lord shows me, he says, in the dark. 

Courtney Flerlage

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”

I take this moment to again complain about Brideshead Revisited… and how Julia’s marriage is invalid but also when it ends she decides to treat it like it is valid, because getting an annulment would be too easy, I guess. When you don’t take the mercy on offer because you think that’s for other people you’re going crazy places.

B. D. McClay, “Cooltholicism”

A quite mediocre person can do spectacularly wicked things without thereby becoming impressive.

Elizabeth Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” 64–65, quoted in Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 4.

Plant sequoias.

Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

The LRB is the house magazine of the British intellectual elite. In the TLS they talk to the world. In the LRB they talk to each other. The dons let their hair down. Professor Ricks tears his out. Everyone is in character. Ellipsis, allusiveness and casual snidery propagate a coffee-house atmosphere which is no doubt part of the appeal. More important, however, is that good minds are at their best when writing like this, on their mettle rather than up on stilts.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”

But one surprises within oneself the church-going urge to be more serious.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”