Rachel at the Well and Jane Eyre
Some years ago, Jerry and I had dinner in Washington D.C. with a learned and accomplished professorial couple who’d been married and deeply in love for their…
Paris Nightlife: A Poem
Paris is romantic, everybody knows, And that may be, but I doubt It could be less so to me, trying To sleep – “Do you hear? Go…
The War of The Rings: Richard Wagner and J.R.R. Tolkien
Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung is a masterpiece of modern art and is perhaps the greatest triumph of the artistic spirit since 1800. J.R.R. Tolkien’s…
Resurrection
I am already a dead man: I have broken faith With the life entrusted to my treasuring, and Not once, but again and again, as if at…
The Poetic Interiority of Sensuality
Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo chinati e chiusi, poi che ’l sol li ’mbianca si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo As gentle flowers, by the frost…
Libidinal Heights: Love, Lust, and Redemption in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is considered a passionate love story, a “tale of love that is stronger than death,” centering around the generational story of Catherine Earnshaw,…
Made in Italy: A Poem
There is this room. There are the paintings, Family photographs standing in their frames, Sofas, cushions – books, magazines, coasters On the table – the little Italian…
God Makes Marriages: Reflections on My Anniversary
Thursday, January 20th, was the 23rd anniversary of the day Jerry and I got married. In rabbinic tradition, God makes marriages. In fact, that would be the…
Love and Communication
Love and Communication. Paddy Scannell. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021. Paddy Scannell’s new thought-provoking book is a sort of intellectual and scholarly testament. He even suggests…
Love and Other Conversions
Sometimes individuals change not only their belief systems but their deepest selves and life orientations. Conversion, in the empirical sense, usually refers to a person’s newfound acceptance…
Saint Jane Austen
Among the realist tradition of writing, I must profess a great fondness for Russian realism. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak strike me as having produced a great corpus…
Plato and Love
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul. And your neighbor as yourself. This is the first and…
The Music of Love
I am not actually a child of the Sixties, although I almost was. Born in July 1959, I had a fairly contented, provincial Scottish boyhood when all…
Process and the Derailing of Reality: Erotic Theology (Part VI)
In part five of this essay we looked closely at the forgotten early modern Platonic thinkers Giordano Bruno, Ralph Cudworth and Anne Conway and their theories of…
Process and the Derailing of Reality: Love and Violence (Part V)
In this fifth part of the essay I would like to consider what a Platonic speculative realism might tell us about Eros – desire in all its…