the novice

Category: essays

  • The Amish Farmer and the Fourth of July

    in

    Note: The past year has been an almost unbroken chain of some illness or another. Lyme will do that, it seems. I’ve spent the past few months—figuratively and literally—getting back on my feet, and had to set aside this writing in the process. Happily, I’m now able to draw that hiatus to a close. Welcome…

  • Nine Observations on Two Weeks Without Food*

    in

    Your body runs cold. You learn why we call it sustenance. You understand how food affects — how it creates — mood and other mental states. Day trips and “lunch” with friends are less memorable. You grok the incredible gift of food security. Coffee shops become cheaper and healthier. I have not once overthought a…

  • After Conceit, Conversation

    in

    Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there,…

  • “What have you got to show for it?”

    in

    I woke this morning to an hour and a lifetime lost. Almost 37. What have I to show for it? Nothing that will outlast me. Nothing compared to some peers. Nothing I once thought I could achieve with hard work and a little luck. I sat with these thoughts. Saw them for the feints they…

  • Twitter, Warfare, and the Imagined Rival

    in

    The first casualty of war is not truth, but compassion. Compassion dies long before the first shots fired. It was lost in the weeks before the first men fell, in the years before treaties were broken. We use these events to date our conflicts, but in truth they begin long before, in the moments when…

  • Winning Won’t Make Us Happy

    in

    Ambition is killing us. It promises happiness and never delivers. It keeps us bent toward hypothetical futures, distracted from our own time. It leaves us anxious and edgy and wanting. And yet it feels so very right. We have been trained from childhood to set our sights high, to give 110%, to reach for the…

  • On Simple Pleasures

    in

    For all my life I’ve wanted more. More money, more stuff, more space to store the stuff, higher status, more Twitter followers. Yet these rarely bring lasting happiness, and they pale beside the plainer delights. Last week I asked: Why do the greatest pleasures tend to be so simple? A touch. A taste. The murmuring…

  • There Are Never Enough Springs

    in

    I stood for a moment in complete silence broken only by the note of a song bird and the susurration of the breeze in the wayside grasses. It was one of those moments of happiness and contentment which give reality to death, since however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.‌‌—P.D. James,…

  • The Consolations of Aristotle’s Ethics

    in

    I have long ignored the wisdom in Aristotle. I thought his Nicomachean Ethics was an antique. Teleology? Please. ‘Incontinence’? Heh. The book is dry and disorganized and reads like the lecture notes they probably are. (Cicero, says Plutarch, thought Aristotle’s writing ‘a river of liquid gold.’ It seems he had a different edition.) But hidden…

  • The Lamp, the Lifeboat, and the Ladder

    in

    The summer after my 8th birthday, I walked the aisle of a brush arbor revival meeting to announce that I was ready to join the family business. I’d been called to be an evangelist. The revivalist that night was my great uncle Paul. Paul was the best known of the ordained Swadleys, the ranks of…