In 1965, on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific, six schoolboys, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, “borrowed” a local fisherman’s boat and took it on a joyride that lasted over fourteen months. They were bored, and so they decided to sail for Fiji, another South Pacific island five hundred miles […]
In Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this […]
The expression “dark ages” refers to the period of time after the fall of Rome in the fourth century A.D. until the resurgence of learning in Western Europe that started in about the eighth century. We call it “dark” because the light of learning that had been ignited by the Greeks and carried on by […]
In Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, we find eight-year-old Billy Watson in a railroad freight car waiting for his brother to get back. It is the 1950s and Billy and his older brother Emmett are riding the rails east to New York from Nebraska. A man drops into the car. The boy strikes […]
In Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away. One day, while wandering in the woods, she meets a boy named […]
Letter from The Editor Winter 2021: Two Stories When my wife and I visit my mother and stepfather, we often duck out to go for a walk in nearby Holton, a beautiful old town that lies on the prairie in eastern Kansas. We park along the street, walk the neighborhoods, and then poke around in […]
In Orthodoxy G. K. Chesterton articulates the Christian worldview in a way that will sound odd to the modern ear. Like later writers he influenced (such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), Chesterton was steeped in the mythology and literature of the West. His wide reading in the old Western literature gave […]
One of the ways we can understand ourselves better is to look at the metaphors our culture uses. Medieval and ancient peoples drew their comparisons from nature. Today we often look at things in terms of machines or computers. We tell our unmotivated children they need to “get it in gear.” When we forget something […]
When I was eight years old, my parents bought me a bicycle for Christmas. It wasn’t anything like my old bicycle, which had only one gear; my new bicycle had five. I couldn’t have told you then why five gears were better than one. To me it was like five pancakes being better than one […]
A friend and I brought our children to a playground one summer many years ago. As heat, humidity, and noise intensified, one of my twins became unruly and unkempt and had a wild look in the eyes. My friend’s child quickly backed away with fearful disgust and exclaimed, “A monster!” My friend quickly chided, “That’s […]