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Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
Thursday February 21, 2008
Greg Wolfe’s editorial in the current issue of Image (#56) makes a convincing case for beauty, the stepchild in the classic trio of transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. I’d like to throw into the conversation a lunchtime chat I had last summer at Image’s Glen Workshop — with sculptor Ginger Geyer, who was on the faculty that year.
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I am a Child of the Emperor
Wednesday February 20, 2008
In The Battle of the Books, Swift writes that “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Self-deception isn’t always that easy, however. Sometimes the reflection on the glass is too familiar to ignore.
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Doctor Stories
Tuesday February 19, 2008
Incredulity, boredom, a patronizing “isn’t that nice”: these are a few of the responses I receive when folks in or out of the medical profession learn I write in my copious spare time. Atul Gawande, Sherwin Nuland, Oliver Sacks, and Abraham Verghese aside, it strikes many people odd that a doctor would do something so–how to put it?–unproductive.
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The Violent Bear It Away
Monday February 18, 2008
It was late in the evening on Superbowl Sunday. Our son was already asleep and we were in bed, the blue light of our one small television casting a milky glow about the room. Burrowed under the covers, eyes half-closed, I reminded my husband, who goes to work in the middle of the night, that the 2:30 a.m. ringing of the alarm clocks (all three of them) was going to come awfully early for him. Sure, sure, just a minute, he said.
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The Prodigal Daughter
Sunday February 17, 2008
The definition of a good memoir, like St. Paul’s famous definition of love, is perhaps better fleshed out in considering what it does not do than what it does. A good memoir, for example, does not ignore the harsh truths of the past, but neither does it delight in placing blame; it does not enlarge the sins of others, nor does it downplay the memoirist’s own shortcomings. Rather, a memoir rings true when it devotes as much time to investigating the self as it does to interrogating the past.
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Current Issue
Issue 57
The sculpture of Richard Serra, Franz Wright on the Gospels, interview with Ron Hansen, fiction by Pinckney Benedict
Good Letters: The Image Blog
