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Showing posts from April, 2011

A Stormy Day in Tornado Alley

I can’t think of anything that makes me feel more helpless than a near-brush with a tornado. Back in 1994 a tornado touched down a few miles south of our house. I will long remember that day. Jennifer and I sat on our front porch and watched the weird, thick, greenish-grey cover of clouds roll rapidly from west to east overhead. There was no sound. No wind. It was eerie. We didn’t have the sophisticated internet radar that we have today so I had to rely solely upon our transistor weather radio. The sense of overwhelming powerlessness, of impending chaotic doom, is something I still carry with me today. I told Jennifer then that it was in moments like that when I could best understand why people need to believe in some higher being. There is something profoundly human about us that needs a counter-force to which to make an appeal in the face of reckless natural power. We were lucky then. The other time that comes to mind was when Jennifer and I were celebrating our 13th wedding anniver

Linguistic Fossils of the Mind's Eye

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Illustration in Guy Deutscher's work on the evolution of human language. In January 2009, snow fell in the United Arab Emirates for only the second time in recorded history. This event was so rare to this region that there was no word in the dialect of local tribes to describe it. The fact there was no word for “snow” would let anyone paying attention know that Being in this part of the world had nothing to do with snow. Language has fascinated me for many years. I own several books on how language has evolved and how it sometimes paradoxically both reflects and impacts human experience. The grammatical conventions of your spoken native language are so commonly accepted by you and others in your culture that their importance goes unnoticed. But, their importance is greater than almost anything else we express about ourselves. I get a lot of blank stares when I attempt to explain to friends and acquaintances the critical importance of the grammar of our various languages in unders

The Fellowship of the Ring

Note: This is the first installment of a fairly high-level overview of JRR Tolkien’s great trilogy, the best-selling novel of the 20th century . I make no attempt to explain the story, except for the fragments that perked my interest this time around. If you are unfamiliar with Tolkien then shame on you; and what follows will likely be very puzzling. All page notations are from my original paperback published by Ballantine Books in 1975. I last read The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) in the winter of 2003. Even though I am very familiar with the story (this makes my ninth complete reading, I believe, with frequent referencing of sections of it through the years) each time the adventure is fresh and entertaining on a variety of levels. This time my tour of the great trilogy’s beginning, The Fellowship of the Ring (FOTR), was no different in my enjoyment of the tale, in seeing small details afresh, and in becoming reacquainted with aspects of the meta-narrative. I found or rediscovered sev

Great Ninths

Note: This is the next post in a continuing series on the greatest symphonies in classical music which I began last year. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824) is the greatest symphony ever written. It surpasses every symphony I have posted about in this series and it surpasses all its direct competition. No symphony compares equally with the brilliance of Beethoven’s Great Ninth in its combination of balanced orchestration, sophisticated musical ideas and themes, and the way its four movements create an unsurpassed grand structural force, a whole unto itself. The composition was of long-time interest to Beethoven . He wanted to do something with Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” for over two decades. The first movement creates an atmosphere of awe, an affirmation of Being, through a succession of struggles and triumphs. It is establishes a strong central theme that Beethoven will return to toward the symphony’s end. It is amazing to remember that Beethoven was completely deaf when he composed