Browse Topics

Visitors

Sharing C rations, picking up where you left off, stealing forbidden knowledge

Room One

I am in Room One, the first on the left at the top of the wide marble steps, with the rest of the first-graders. The mothers are beginning to leave. A lot of kids are crying. It still has not occurred to me to be afraid.

Idols

Bob Dylan, the Holy Blessed Virgin Mary, J. Pierpont Morgan

Why Schools Don’t Educate

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and others to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

The White Guitar

In fourth grade, after the bra-and-girdle notebook affair, we all fell in love with Julia Harris. By “we” I mean the foreign boys in Madame Bouvet’s class, and also Pascal Fourtané, the only French boy we foreigners hung out with.

Comforts

Clean sheets and warm wool blankets, barn swallows, music

Sunday

Then she is walking across the lawn toward you in her silky blue dress. An old woman now, but more handsome than ever with her pure white hair up in a bun, her smile, the little blue vein in her forehead.

Sunbeams

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Bomb

“The Ed Sullivan Show,” 50,000 tons of dynamite, the word hope

What I Have Guessed