It’s nine o’clock on Tuesday. First into the classroom today are my Advanced Placement European History students. I begin the class, as I always do, with a prayer, and then deliver a lecture on such Enlightenment luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. (Given the irreligious beliefs of these figures, the irony of prayer is not...
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Buried in History
In the summer of 2015, thanks to the generosity of friends, ex-students, and parents whose children I now teach, I spent a month in Rome. Since my return to the United States, several friends and family members have asked me to record my general impressions of “the Eternal City.” So here goes. First, Rome offers...
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The Seven Stairs and AIDS
Some 30 years ago, I read Stuart Brent’s The Seven Stairs, an autobiography about the author’s life-long love affair with his books and his Chicago bookshop, once a Mecca for bibliophiles and authors. Brent’s customers included patrons like Katharine Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway, and he counted among his friends numerous writers, including Nelson Algren. Though...
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Disabled
Dear Dr. R——: Recently, I read an article about the explosion in the number of Americans receiving disability from the federal government. In fact, that same government now pays out more for disabilities than it does for food stamps and welfare combined. Certainly, many of those receiving aid truly require this assistance. But after perusing...
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Country
Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
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Fascism in Montford
During the early morning hours of Monday, March 31, an unidentified person or persons smashed out the window of a ten-year-old Honda Civic parked on Cumberland Street in the neighborhood of Montford in Asheville. The car is registered in my name. My son, who works here in Asheville, had used the car for several years...
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Ready, Aim, Fire: Men, Marksmanship, and Public Urinals
American boys and men have always taken great pride in hitting targets. Whether that target was a bulls-eye during an archery class at summer camp or a catcher’s mitt in high school baseball, we applaud those who possess the ability to strike a target. The first act of an eleven year old given a BB...
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Return to Boonville
This is a story of a place, of joy and regret, and of a deed so romantic and so rare as to border on the fantastical. In the early fall of 1955, my father, a physician who had just completed an internship and a year of residency in family practice, moved our growing family from...
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Advice From an Old Coot
My dear Hobson, Given your exasperated response to my advice on making big bucks in the Land of O (“Surviving the Budget Crisis,” Correspondence, March), I conclude that your university taught you to appreciate the literary tools of sarcasm, sardonic humor, hyperbole, and irony. Points to you, nephew: You have acquired a carpenter’s box with...
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Finding Beauty
Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky In the last five years, a heightened awareness of beauty and the mystery of beauty has played with my senses more than at any other time in my life, excluding, perhaps, my childhood, when the world so often...
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Canticle for the Apocalypse
Something strange is haunting our dreams these days. The teenage cashier at the grocery store is conversing with a customer in front of my sister. “That’s right,” she says. “The only thing that will work now is for civilization to collapse so we can all go back to nature.” The next day I encounter a...
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Surviving the Budget Crisis
My dear Hobson, The bleak tone of your email has distressed me. You report waking on the morning of November 7 convinced that a vast majority of politicians—Republicans and Democrats—are certifiable lunatics. According to your somewhat incoherent letter—were you inebriated, or are all those sentence fragments and dangling prepositions the dismal product of your recently...
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Big Brother’s Big Plans
Some people have no sense of humor. In the summer of 1998, Eric Rudolph, bomber of two abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, was on the run from the law in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Scores of FBI agents and other officials, trailed by reporters and television crews,...
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Making Men out of Boys
“As a busily growing animal, I am scatterbrained and entirely lacking in mental application. Having no desire at present to expend my precious energies upon the pursuit of knowledge, I shall not make the slightest attempt to assist you in your attempts to impart it. If you can capture my unwilling attention and goad me...
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Duty
Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty. We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...
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Keeping Asheville Weird
On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park. The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them. The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks. In front of the drummers...
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Thomas Wolfe
Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader. Whenever I see a copy of War and Peace, I think not only of Pierre and Natasha but of...
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In Search of Flannery O’Connor
In late June, a friend and I traveled into Central Georgia, looking for Flannery O’Connor. Mary Ann had never heard of Flannery O’Connor. She didn’t know Hazel Motes from a hole in the ground and assured me she had never encountered “A Good Man Is Hard To Find“ or “The Life You Save May Be...
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Carolina Courage
“This all sounds fanatical if people don’t know about it. I’m not a radical person.” Despite her critics, and despite the rough reelection campaign she faces in Charlotte this fall, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC, 9th District) has spent the last two years fighting to bring her concerns before Congress and the American people. In...
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Lech Walesa’s Winsome Call for Globalization
For the last 20 years of the world’s bloodiest century, Lech Walesa, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, was a man on a pedestal in my pantheon of contemporary heroes, one of those who had helped bring about an end to communism in Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union. ...
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Kitchen Table Warriors
Whenever my family gathers together—usually at Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and nearly always in the rambling old home belonging to my wife and me in Waynesville, North Carolina—the conversation commences before the engines of the arriving cars have cooled in the driveway. This talk, which I have come privately to regard as the Great Conversation,...
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Getting With the Program
Suppose that you are one of five owners of a professional football team, which has just come off a losing season. You and the other disgruntled owners have gathered at a conference table to discuss plans for the next year. The five of you toss around ideas for improvement—a bigger stadium, new uniforms, more strategic...