Category: Language

To the woman who has me looped. Brown Penny I whispered, ‘I am too young,’ And then, ‘I am old enough’; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. ‘Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.’ Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon. W. B. Yeats “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.” Immanuel Kant I’ve loved this poem for a long time. But it was only a few years ago that I think… Continue reading

Teshuva—which is usually translated as repentance but literally means return or turning around—is central to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for Jews, which ended at sundown today. This essay is initally about how we turn ourselves around, specifically with how we learn to trust others when we lack some basic trust in the world around us and then it moves on to talk about the connection between trust in others and trust in a process or ideal that we might call God. Much of the beginning of the essay, however, is mostly about my cat Bobcat. How do we learn to trust? People who abuse others typically don’t trust others–they expect to be abused themselves and deep down believe that they have to do unto others before others do unto them. Morality and civic virtue are practices that survive only when we live in a community in which people have some… Continue reading