Sunday Night Journal 2005
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A Few More Words about Hiroshima and Nagasaki Amy Wellborn at Open Book picked up my last week’s journal entry, along with a letter from the Bishops’ Conference on the same subject, and an extensive discussion followed. I must say that I’m irrationally flattered that something of mine played a role in setting off a…
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Sunday Night Journal — July 31, 2005 I have little patience with the historical self-righteousness that comes so easily to much of the pampered West nowadays. Those of us born after the Second World War, who have had at least in physical terms the softest lives of any people who have ever lived, often seem…
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Heat. Humidity. Sex. It is miserably hot and humid here, as it normally is in mid-July. Air conditioning has transformed the South, so that this sort of heat is only a nuisance, not a major factor in how one lives, except that it drives people to stay indoors, so that the southern summer now resembles…
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To Pray As We Ought I don’t say this at all proudly, but I’ve never been much for reading Scripture on my own. Catholics of course are often criticized for this lack of attention to the written Word, but in my case the Church can’t take the blame, since I grew up Protestant and certainly…
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You Can’t, In Fact, Always Get What You Want (Waiting for Dennis) This is a Sunday Morning Journal. By Sunday night it’s very unlikely that I’ll have electricity, which means I won’t have Internet access. It’s possible that I won’t have a home, at least not one that is habitable without major repairs. We are…
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Independence Day and Indian Larry I occasionally watch a couple of TV shows, American Chopper and The Great Biker Build-Off, which, in case you don’t know, involve building custom Harley-style motorcycles. I guess I have enough Anarcho-American in me to be susceptible to the romance of motorcycles, and actually owned a couple of small ones…
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Sunday Night Journal — June 26, 2005 Last Saturday I went out to mow the lawn and the starter cord on the mower broke on the first pull, without starting the engine. Since the grass was well overdue for cutting I went right out to the hardware store to look for a replacement cord, based…
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A Ride Through Covington Last Sunday my wife and I delivered our daughter to a band camp at LSU, which is in Baton Rouge, a couple of hundred miles away on Interstates 10 and 12. Covington, Louisiana, the town where Walker Percy lived for most of his adult life, is just off I-12, and on…
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Distracted from Distraction by Distraction The phrase is Eliot’s, from the Four Quartets. I’ve always thought there was a certain amount of jive in Eliot’s work, as much as I love it, and until recently might have offered this line as an example: does it really say anything more than “distracted”? Yes, I think it…
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Call Me Shiftlet Some years back there was a widely reproduced frame from the Peanuts comic strip which showed one of the characters—I think it was Lucy—with a look of consternation saying “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand.” It comes into my mind frequently when some event, large or small, a local case of…
Light On Dark Water 