Tolstoy was always the moralist disguised as a storyteller. He couldn’t so much as describe a hayfield without planting in it a parable, and How Much Land Does a Man Need? is among his most ruthless little lessons. At its heart, it’s an absurdly simple tale: a peasant named Pahom believes that with just a … Continue reading How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Tag: existential
Winter’s Gibbet: A Scaffold Without a Show
“A scaffold without a show, a sermon without words. Here absence hangs heavier than any corpse.” - Me The trouble with gibbets is that they're both too much and not enough. Too much when they hold their grisly trophies aloft for the crows; not enough when they stand bare against the horizon, gaunt as a … Continue reading Winter’s Gibbet: A Scaffold Without a Show
Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
Cinema, despite its thunderous claims to originality, is in truth a great necromancer. It raises the dead more often than it invents the living, and its spirits wear borrowed costumes even when paraded as new. When James Wan and Leigh Whannell conjured Insidious, they weren’t scribbling out some pristine mythology in a Hollywood boardroom but … Continue reading Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
On the back of a rotten dream and a few following unsettled nights, I dragged just about every scriptural reference book I own out, blew off the dust, and began scratching out the following. It’s heavy but it’s worth the toil. I think. The Catholic doctrine of Purgatory has always been a scandal to the … Continue reading The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
The Great Grift of the Double Income
We’re told, in the dulcet tones of history textbooks and corporate diversity videos, that the ‘double income household’ was the great liberation. Women marched out of the kitchen, men learned how to boil an egg, and all was well with the world. Cue a slow-motion montage of shoulder-padded power suits, briefcases clacking like castanets, and … Continue reading The Great Grift of the Double Income
Wording 