Fixin' to get ready to get started

On the eve of the implosion of the Riverview Square Office Building to make way for the new Louisville arena (the site is visible on the right at the terminus of the Clark Memorial Bridge), no one could forsee that the arena financing would also implode within days.

An Afternoon at the Louisville Zoo

Afternoon in late July may not be the best time to see animals at their most active, but it is a good, lazy way to spend the day. As I've mentioned before, the zoo is a lovely place to take children, but it's also a great place to animal watch, people watch, and take a look at what nature has to offer. The Louisville Zoo offers great walking, beautiful habitats, and a few opportunities for food and drink.

Gorilla Forest provides information about gorilla habitat and information about the issues surrounding poaching, shrinking habitat, and conservation efforts.

Scotty is the name of our baby elephant. Now a year old, Scotty is enjoying new foods, playing in the water and basically acting like any excited, happy child.

The Zoo has a refurbished carousel that is both beautiful to see and (based on enthusiastic laughter of children) a joy to ride.

For more photos from the Louisville Zoo, please feel free to visit my Flickr site.

The real Gdańsk, as part of the Frugal Traveler's grand tour of Europe

Ever mindful of the real Gdańsk, whose German name (Danzig) inspired this blog, I am pleased to present a video drawn from the New York Times. The Times' Frugal Traveler feature has made Gdańsk the tenth stop on its twelve-city grand tour of Europe.

Annabelle

Within the expressive idiom of American folk music, is there a more compelling example of literary naturalism than Gillian Welch's 1996 ballad, Annabelle  (on Revival)?

In previous blog posts, on Jurisdynamics and MoneyLaw, I've come close to answering the question. Now I wish to say, emphatically, that Annabelle might well be the perfectly composed song in the Southern folk tradition:

Gillian Welch, Annabelle , Revival (1996) (live on YouTube)

We lease twenty acres and one Ginny mule
From the Alabama trust
For half of the cotton and a third of the corn
We get a handful of dust

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

I had a daughter, called her Annabelle
She's the apple of my eye
Tried to give her something like I never had
Didn't ever want to ever hear her cry

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

When I'm dead and buried
I'll take a hard life of tears
From every day I've ever known
Anna's in the churchyard she got no life at all
She only got these words on a stone

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

Frankfort Foray

I spent the end of the week in Frankfort, Kentucky. It's a lovely river town and home of the state's capitol. The old downtown has some great architecture, some good restaurants, and a great bookstore called Poor Richard's Books.

Poor Richard's is one of the reasons I am always willing to go to Frankfort. The bottom floor is a nice independent bookstore, where you can always find something of interest. And then there's the second floor. On the second floor, you find used books. Old books. Not so old books. Musty treasures. The lights are weak and quivering, so it's best to climb up there when the sun is shining. The second floor is an attic loft. Glorious, dust dancing in the light, and oddities of all sorts. I always feel I'm climbing up a flight of stairs and back 150 years when I go there. It seems like something out of a Dickens novel. Hot in the summer. Cold in the winter. And always treasures. Books with stories only limited by your own imagination.

Oh, I should mention that my husband, Kurt, a Kentucky historian and bibliophile, thinks Poor Richard's is one the best bookstores to locate books on Kentucky -- both new and old.

In addition to Poor Richard's, we visited the Frankfort Cemetery, visited some historical sites, and I got a few good photos. Hope you like them.

An angel from Frankfort Cemetery







The state capitol from across the river.








From the Liberty Hall Garden.

Ain’t No Reason (Things Are This Way)

There ain’t no reason things are this way
It's how they always been and they intend to stay
I can't explain why we live this way
We do it everyday.

Brett Dennen sings Ain't No Reason (Things Are This Way):

Craft Conference in Louisville

“Craft Conference ‘08: Unbridled Craft” will be held August 15 & 16 in Louisville, Kentucky, at the The Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft.

The conference will include workshops on felting, beading, woodturning, precious metals clay, metalsmithing, ceramics, bookmaking, printmaking, mosaics, puppetry, shibori, and leatherworking. Descriptions of the workshops (and registration) are available online.

I reaffirm my allegiance

Editor's note: The following letter, I Reaffirm My Allegiance, was originally published in the Washington Post on July 4, 1976:

What am I?

I am a free man — a good and decent man — a man of compassion, generosity, and understanding — a true friend, a steadfast ally, and a bitter foe.

I owe my allegiance to a government founded in the belief that among the rights of man are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, I would acknowledge no other. I can redress my government for injury; not satisfied with redress, I can elect a new one. I have watched my government function smoothly during periods of transfer of power caused by re-election, assassination, and resignation.

While other nations have a distinct race, religion, and/or geographic denominator, I live among people of my home without fear of intrusion by anyone — citizen or government designee — unless they have my personal invitation or a duly authorized search warrant.

I have a press to keep me informed — a press free to write, without inhibition, the truth as they see it. A press that needs fear no repression, no retaliation, no censorship so long as it prints the truth.

I live under a system of justice, merciful and fairly administered, where I am assumed innocent until proven guilty — a system which provides me appellate privilege while denying it to the power of the state.

I am free to go anywhere I want, earn my living in any way that suits me and, based on that freedom, I have created a standard of living unequalled in the history of man and envied the world over.

I have suffered in humility at the consequences of my mistakes — economic deprivation, social injustice, unequal opportunity and racial prejudice to name a few — but, once aware of these mistakes, I have set out to right the wrongs they created.

I have faced challenges to my way of life. I have fought and died countless times from Lexington and Concord to Vietnam. I was humbled at Valley Forge, Pearl Harbor, Corregidor and Malmedy. But these experiences gave me the character I needed to go to Yorktown, Gettysburg, Midway and Normandy. I cherish my freedom above all else — I bow to no tyrant.

I am two hundred years old today. I have never been so proud of my ancient heritage, so grateful for my present situation, and so confident of the future. Today, I reaffirm my allegiance to, faith in, and love of my country. To the proposition that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth, I do humbly pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

I am an American.

Louisville: This is our chance!

Vanguard Cinema hopes to open a space at the Mellwood Arts Center. This venue will be set up to screen everything from David Lynch, to animé, to Evil Dead! Add to that, they plan to have food, a full bar, and, well, EVIL DEAD!!!! (I don't know what else to say to get you there.)

They are planning "walk-in movies" night on August 15, which will include food from Christopher Seckman (North End Cafe), brews from New Albanian Brewing Company, and the Derby City Roller Girls.

If this isn't a party, I don't know what is.

I want to encourage you guys to visit the Louisville Vanguard Cinema site. With the current economic vibe, they aren't sure if this venture can fly. Visit the site and let them know how often you might visit. Better yet, become a member. $50 gets you 10 tickets, a bumper sticker, a Tuesday admission ticket, and a discount on merchandise. (Plus, if the venture doesn't materialize, they'll give you your money back.)

Louisville deserves a great theater for art films, nontraditional films (and — did I mention Evil Dead?) I miss the Vogue Theater. We need to replace her. Vanguard Theater could do that.

Great things to do with children in Louisville

Ah, summer. Lazy days. Children with no homework. No classes. Nothing to do? If you and your children are searching for something fun and/or educational to do this summer, Louisville has a myriad of wonderful kid (and adult) friendly places to visit.


J.B. Speed Museum
The Speed Museum has a wonderful permanent collection that will wow adults and teens. However, if you have children (or can borrow one), visit the museum's Art Sparks Interactive Gallery. Art Sparks has hands-on activities and exhibits to interest children and the adults who visit with them. The gallery has a section devoted to activities appropriate to children under the age of five. There are Saturday workshops, and a room filled with art supplies to allow a child's imagination run wild. Art Sparks really does ignite a child's imagination and offers an air-conditioned escape from the heat of July. Admission is $5 per person (free to museum members).

Louisville Science Center
The Louisville Science Center is a wonderful place for the whole family to learn more about everything from dinosaurs to battling bacteria. For children under the age of seven, the museum has an interactive exhibit called Kidzone.

The Louisville Zoo
Our zoo is beautiful (and I'm not biased). It has some great exhibits, including Lorikeet Landing, which allows visitors to sit in the habitat and feed the birds. These amazing birds will land on the people who enter their space (note to parents: great photo-opportunity!). The zoo also has Glacier Run Splash Park, a cool place to play in the water while seeing polar bear, seal and sea lion exhibits.

Enjoy Louisville. Enjoy the summer.

O lost!

Long grow the days, and long lie the shadows. The year's second half is upon us. With fractal precision, life's second half has likewise begun. Or so I hope and fear, all at once. In words written under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod and familiar to the readers of this forum:

• Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Some two dozen weeks after I originally wrote O lost!, some of the emotional urgency has indeed dissipated. Perhaps it is merely a function of light and warmth; if so, the cycle will turn by and by, and soon enough I shall again walk among the shadows. But if perchance by the light of fireflies I have lain soft and supped in languor, may the Lord not let die in my heart the memory of loneliness and bitter cold.

---

O lost!
[Originally published on Jurisdynamics, January 28, 2008]
It is the darkest hour in the deepest night of the coldest season, and through the shadows I reach for twin sources of literary inspiration linked by the most tenuous of connections. O lost!


First I look across time and the river to a Southern writer not yet forgotten, the master behind the South's greatest autobiographical protagonist, Eugene Gant:

When will they come again? When will they come again?

The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more. The women weeping at the gate have gone and will not come again. And pain and pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, for death and the dust will die. And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

And thence I look forward to Lost, even though I linger still in the twilight between seasons three and four. Lost is filled with characters who articulate diverse brands of faith, with wildly variable degrees of sincerity and credibility, but none speaks more powerfully than Mr. Eko, whose path to the priesthood took him through a simultaneous baptism, confirmation, and ordination in a shower of heroin. Though Mr. Eko slew many men, the last three with a machete while wearing a clerical collar he had not yet earned, he was holy beyond contemplation, let alone expression.

This was Mr. Eko's final confession:

I have nothing to confess because I have not sinned. Everything I have done, I have to done in order to survive. When I was a boy, I killed a man in order to save my brother. I am proud of what I have done. I have done the best I could with the life I was given.

I have done my best. I confess nothing, except this report as true as it is heartfelt: Lost, I too walk between the twin shadows of despair and defiance.

Amazing grace, in the key of black

» Cross-posted at Jurisdynamics «

Negro Spiritual Singers, from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project, entertained King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the White House, June 8, 1939.

addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart — Ephesians 5:19, RSV

The Negro spiritual is a powerful and influential art form. Through their music and their words, spirituals transformed the tragedy of slavery into an enduring expression of faith, hope, and love.

Among the many beautiful songs within this tradition, Amazing Grace stands out. And how:

Hat tip: Already Not Yet and Rick Ianniello.
Wintley Phipps says he has God on his side, at his back, and in his soul. I am in absolutely no position to question any of that. I come solely to show that Reverend Phipps also has music theory and cultural history in his favor.

Amazing Grace uses a pentatonic scale. Properly spaced, five intervals within any octave are sufficient to generate an astonishing diversity of musical idioms, including Celtic, blues, and Negro spiritual. The belief that the pentatonic scale is the native tonality of children underlies Orff Schulwerk, a method of music education perhaps best known for withholding keys from kids' xylophones.

It's easy to generate a pentatonic scale. You can climb the circle of fifths on a piano. Starting at middle C, this trip yields the note sequence C G D A E. If you have a violin handy, the strings there give you the last four steps in that sequence: G D A E. Rearranging all five notes within a single octave gives you the pentatonic sequence, C D E G A.

Or you can subtract two from seven and yield five. Remove the fourth and seventh scale degrees from the familiar "do-re-mi" diatonic scale — or F and B — and you will reach the same C D E G A sequence.

Most simply, you can follow Reverend Phipps's advice and play just the black keys: G♭ A♭ B♭ D♭ E♭. How sweet the sound.

Finally, as for the cultural history of the Negro spiritual, I am pleased to leave the explanation to The Spirituals Project, whose mission is "[t]o preserve and revitalize the music and teachings of the sacred songs called 'spirituals,' created and first sung by enslaved Africans in America in the 18th and 19th centuries":

Editor's note: This Spirituals Project video presents an excerpt from I Can Tell the World, a new documentary by Larry Bograd and Coleen Hubbard.

We hate Duke

»  Cross-posted at The Cardinal Lawyer  «

In Danzig U.S.A. and elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we take college sports very seriously. Partisans of the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky spare nothing in passionately supporting their teams — and in vigorously opposing their teams' rivals. If there is one opponent that unites the Cardinal Nation with Wildcat Country, it is Duke University's Blue Devils.

True to the traditional athletic preferences of Kentucky and North Carolina — two states where the cultivation of tobacco surely gives rise to their unusual predilection, unknown elsewhere in the South, for basketball over football — Louisville and UK partisans have historically trained their hatred at Duke's basketball program. But a recent decision by Judge Phillip J. Shepherd of the Franklin County (Ky.) Circuit Court gives people across the Bluegrass State reason to despise Duke football as well:

Maybe you can win for losing

A Franklin [County], Ky., Circuit Court judge sided with a devilishly clever argument and ruled in favor of Duke University yesterday in a breach of contract lawsuit brought forth by the University of Louisville.

Judge Phillip J. Shepherd agreed with Duke’s lawyers — the football team is so bad that any replacement would do.

U of L sued Duke for $450,000 — or a series with another Atlantic Coast Conference opponent — after the Blue Devils backed out of a four-game football contract with three dates remaining.

The contract called for a penalty of $150,000 per game if a date with a “team of similar stature” could not be arranged.

Duke’s lawyers argued the Blue Devils, which have a record of 6-45 over the past five seasons, were so bad that any team would be a suitable replacement.

Judge Shepherd agreed in his summary:

“At oral argument, Duke (with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty) persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower. Duke’s argument on this point cannot be reasonably disputed by Louisville.”

Kentucky courts interpret contract terms “according to their plain and ordinary meaning” barring any ambiguity. According to Shepherd, finding a suitable replacement literally meant any NCAA Division I team would suffice – including those in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-AA.)

After the teams played their initial game in 2002, a 40-3 U of L victory in Durham, N.C., Duke opted out of the remaining games in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Thanks in part to Duke’s cancellation, the Cards scrambled to find a 12th game for the upcoming season before signing an agreement with Memphis in February. U of L will play at Memphis on Oct. 10 and the Tigers are scheduled to play at U of L in 2010.

“We’re disappointed with the ruling,” said U of L spokesman Kenny Klein. “We will take our time to review the decision and explore our future options.”

[Other sources: (1) An earlier article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, (2) ESPN.com, and (3) Red Lion Reports.]

Strictly as a football fan, albeit one who is a Louisville Cardinals partisan, I respectfully disagree with Judge Shepherd. There is no adequate substitute for Duke football, a patsy nonpareil in college football. There simply is no other (1) Division I-A team (2) that plays such appallingly bad football (3) so consistently and persistently (4) all while maintaining its membership in a Bowl Championship Series conference.

As pleased as I am to witness a revival of the Louisville-Memphis rivalry, an old Metro Conference basketball grudge match moved to the gridiron, what I really want is a series of virtually guaranteed wins against the worst major college football team. And that team, despite its university's immense wealth and its city's sports tradition (think of the Bull Durham and the 1942 Rose Bowl), is the Duke Blue Devils.

Silver threads and golden needles

In Danzig U.S.A., we love old-time country music. There's a lot of loving and cheating, losing and loathing in our music. Here are four versions of an old classic, Silver Threads and Golden Needles:

Wanda Jackson	The Springfields
I don't want your lonely mansion, with a tear in every room All I want's the love you promised beneath the haloed moon But you think I should be happy with your money and your name And hide myself in sorrow while you play your cheating game Chorus: Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine And I dare not drown my sorrows in the warm glow of your wine You can't buy my love with money, for I never was that kind Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine [Wanda Jackson version only:] I grew up in faded gingham where love is a sacred thing You grew up in silk and satin where love's the passing game I know now you never loved me, and I know I was a fool To think your pride would let you live by the golden rule (Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn)
Linda Ronstadt	Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn (live)

Bonus multimedia:

With some help from Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn perform Silver Threads and Golden Needles as The Honky-Tonk Angels:

Butchertown Neighborhood Worth a Visit

Louisville's Butchertown Neighborhood is filled with great architecture and good neighbors. Much like Clifton, Butchertown's residents are mixed lot. It's a great socio-economic group. I had a chance to walk around the neighborhood in early June, and I thought I would share some photos.

St. Angela Merici

St. Angela Merici on the campus of Bellarmine University in Louisville. Photograph by Daniel Light, March 7, 2007.

Another Music Festival in Louisville

Join us at the Mellwood Arts Center, June 19 - 22, 2008 for Terrastock 7.

There will be three stages (2 inside, 1 out).

According to the Terrastock Festival Site:

Each Terrastock Festival builds on the successes of the previous ones. The events are conceived in a spirit of peace, love and co-operation purely in order to celebrate the music championed by the The Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine and the Terrascope Online web community.

Terrastock is not an indie-rock A&R feeding frenzy. Bands and artists are there at the personal invitation of the organisers because we love their music and they love the way we do things. It's simply about the music, and about the whole Terrastock spirit. If you've ever been to a Terrastock, you'll know what we mean...

Click here for a list of bands.

To order Tickets, click here.

Forecastle Festival

The 7th Annual Forecastle Festival will be held on the Belvedere July 25-27, 2008. The festival offers music, art, and activist information. Founded in Louisville, KY, the gathering is described as "a symposium for musicians, artists, and environmentalists. Forecastle connects the progressive Midwest."

Check out this year's lineup: http://www.forecastlefest.com/lineup.php.

It's a good event for the whole family.

Maysville Kentucky -- Life in the Slow Lane

Kentucky has much to offer, and with the price of gas why not enjoy what the state can provide?

I went to Maysville, Ky., for a few days. Maysville is at a bend in the Ohio River, across from Aberdeen, Ohio. It's a pretty town with a great deal of pride in its history and its preservation.

My husband was there to research; I took the time to check out some beautiful architecture and find some good photos. Hope you enjoy.

FAT Friday Trolley Hop

Those of you who will be in Louisville on Friday should head down to Frankfort Avenue for the FAT Friday Trolley Hop. From the Mellwood Arts Center to Stiltz Avenue, you would be surprised just how many shops and galleries will be open. It's a great chance to see what's going on in the neighborhood, to meet with others interested in the Clifton/Crescent Hill community, and to just have fun. A list of events currently planned can be viewed here.

It looks like there may be a chance of thunderstorms Friday, currently the national weather service suggests those will be late in the evening.

Hope to see you in the neighborhood.

Living the good life in Clifton

I live in the Clifton Neighborhood of Louisville. It’s a neighborhood bounded by Brownsboro Road on the north, Ewing Avenue on the east, I-64 on the south and Mellwood Avenue on the west. (However, I like to claim all the way east to Bayly—that way I can count a Heine Bros. and a Carmichaels Bookstore as part of the neighborhood. There are many reasons you should consider living in (or at least visiting) the Clifton neighborhood. One of those reasons is food:

1. Coffee Shops.

I can walk to four different terrific spots for coffee: Heine Brothers, Java Brewing Company, Caffé Classico, and Nancy’s Bagels. (If you like dark roast, get a cup of Nancy’s Thundermuck. It is delightful.)

2. Restaurants in general.

We’ve got it all here in Clifton. We have high end spots like Volare, Basa and Bourbon Bistro. We have an excellent Asian Vegetarian restaurant, Zen Garden. North End is eclectic, delicious, and Kentucky Grown. We’ve got two great pizza places, Clifton’s and Fat Jimmy’s. And then there are the more exotic: Sari-Sari (Filipino) El-Mundo (Mexican), Shiraz (Middle-Eastern), and the Grape Leaf (Greek).

Now that spring has come, almost every Clifton restaurant and coffee shop offers outdoor dining. Come join us for breakfast, lunch or dinner. We'd love to see you.

Play Ball

The Louisville Bats won their home opener on April 11 8-5. It was a high-scoring game, and so fun for those of us who know little about baseball -- who do not spend the game listing hits, errors, and other esoteric statistics. The team will be in town all of the coming week, playing against the Pawtucket Red Sox from Friday April 11 to Monday, and then playing the Norfolk Tides through Friday, April 18. (See schedule).

The team, a farm team for the Cincinnati Reds, and the field itself are a wonderful part of Louisville – particularly in the spring. (In the heat of the summer, I’m not as big of a fan of outdoor spectator sports.) That said, I would suggest anyone visiting Louisville during baseball reason take an afternoon or an evening to attend a game. I honestly don’t think there’s a bad seat in the house. There’s a merry-go-round and other attractions to keep the kids happy, and a microbrewery just outside (Brownings) that you can enjoy before or after the game.

These are a couple shots of the game and the field that I took last night.

The official dog breed of the University of Louisville

University of Louisville partisans know that the pug, in every sense but the most formal, is the favorite dog breed of the Cardinal Nation:

Carson McCullers, Wunderkind

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. — Carson McCullers

« Crossposted at Jurisdynamics »
To many of my fellow residents of Danzig U.S.A., I often say that my best preparation for becoming law school dean at the University of Louisville was to reread the works of Carson McCullers (1917-67). Plagued by atrocious health and a tempestuous love life, McCullers wrote her best-known work before she turned 30. Her harshest critics consign her to "minor" status and dismiss her work as "Southern Gothic." Her staunchest defenders argue that her literary legacy of "speak[ing] for the physically and psychologically deformed, the unprotected persons in an often indifferent world, is rich enough to earn her a permanent reputation as a great artist." Flannery O'Connor notwithstanding, I think it fair to call her the finest writer Georgia has ever produced.

Read the rest of this post . . . .An anthology containing The Ballad of the Sad Café reminded me of Carson McCullers's genius. The richest phrases from these stories are jewels that burn the skin at the slightest touch:

• The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain. (The Ballad of the Sad Café)


• With inner desperation he pressed the child close — as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time. (The Sojourner)


• By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love. (A Domestic Dilemma)

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Carson McCullers (1940)

I want to write like Carson McCullers. I wish I could channel her. To the extent I have traversed some of the geographic and emotional space that Carson McCullers called home, perhaps I shall.

Along the tortuous and mostly frustrating path toward personal and professional satisfaction, I've gotten waylaid from time to time. Quite a bit, to tell the truth, and more than I would wish on anyone I liked. Perhaps the worst of these detours was law school.

That said, if my professional life has achieved anything of value (to others if not to myself), it is this: Though you studied law, your life might not be an evil bankrupt waste. In a very real sense, my goal of channeling the literary spirit of Carson McCullers may yet redeem this small corner of my life.

Wunderkind that she was, in real literary life as in the autobiographical short story by that name, Carson McCullers established her reputation with her first novel: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). In his celebrated review of this book, Richard Wright said that Heart was "not so much a novel as a projected mood, a state of mind poetically objectified in words, an attitude externalized in naturalistic detail." Inner Landscape, 103 New Republic 195 (Aug. 1940). "Whether you will want to read the book," he wrote, "depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality."

What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest. That is a skill associated not with youth, but with experience. The inspiration for the title of her first novel, The Lonely Hunter, a poem written by William Sharp under the pen name Fiona MacLeod, expresses a distinctly middle-aged sentiment:

• Green branches, green branches, I see you beckon; I follow!
• Sweet is the place you guard, there in the rowan-tree hollow.
• There he lies in the darkness, under the frail white flowers,
• Heedless at last, in the silence, of these sweet midsummer hours.


• But sweeter, it may be, the moss whereon he is sleeping now,
• And sweeter the fragrant flowers that may crown his moon-white brow:
• And sweeter the shady place deep in an Eden hollow
• Wherein he dreams I am with him — and, dreaming, whispers, "Follow!"


• Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
• What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
• Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.


• Green is that hill and lonely, set far in a shadowy place;
• White is the hunter's quarry, a lost-loved human face:
• O hunting heart, shall you find it, with arrow of failing breath,
• Led o'er a green hill lonely by the shadowy hound of Death?


• Green branches, green branches, you sing of a sorrow olden,
• But now it is midsummer weather, earth-young, sun-ripe, golden:
• Here I stand and I wait, here in the rowan-tree hollow,
• But never a green leaf whispers, "Follow, oh, Follow, Follow!"


• O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
• O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.
• Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Here in the heart of summer, life is sweet to me still. The harvest is yet to come; I might find in motion what I lost in space.

Of late I have devoted considerable time to pondering and to watching the classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. One scene in that movie invariably reminds me of the exuberance of youth. When I stop thinking of this scene as an emblem of "juniority," I shall be dead, or at least fit to die. George Bailey tells his future wife, Mary, "Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful . . . . I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that."

I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. Like my literary hero, Carson McCullers, I'm going to tell stories full of pain and longing. I know better than to imagine that telling such stories could ever keep feelings of pain and longing at bay, for it is the essence of the human condition to love through faith rather than reassurance, and more often than not to wait in vain for the transformed echo of love songs one has sung. Between hunts on the lonely hill called life, I shall find solace in giving voice to sorrow and Sehnsucht.