The Limits of the World

Thoughts and Musings

Goddard MFA Faculty member Micheline Marcom recalls what Schopenhauer said: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” She wonders how we might, in our “Information Age,” see better.

Seeking Asylum: 100,000 Stories

Thoughts and Musings

You could say I lost my belief in our politicians. They all seemed like game show hosts to me. — “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” Sting I. Empathy and the Iliad I read an article this week, published four years ago in Scientific American, about how empathy had...

To Literature

Thoughts and Musings

She’d been feeling sad all week and she said it was because of a conflict with her lover or place of employ or caused by reading too many vacuous comments in the newspaper and the proud ignorance and misanthropy of the readers got her down.  Or its cause was the news...

Urgency & the Word

Thoughts and Musings

For the first time in seventeen years—since I began writing books in my late twenties when I undertook advanced studies and completed my MFA—I found, in the fall of last year, that I no longer felt the urge to write anything.  It was if for seventeen years I had been,...