There is no Frigate like a Book

BY EMILY DICKINSON

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

“You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice.”

-James Agee

His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered a fatal heart attack; on May 16, 1955, in a New York City taxi cab while en route to a doctor's appointment. Age 46.

Original illustration

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The text was penned at a time when scientists were investigating the possibility of regenerating corpses with electricity.

"You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?"

- Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

Ron Hicks painting

“It is the end of a family - when they begin to sell their land. Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live - no one can rob you of land.” 

― Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness.”

― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Photo: Galveston, Texas, December 2021. The Truehart Adriance Bldg. Designed in neo-renaissance, high Victorian style by noted architect, Nicholas J. Clayton in 1882 for H.M. Trueheart & Co., first chartered realty firm in Texas. (The bldg. withstood the 1900 Storm!)

It is an absolute gift for an artist to spy the evil in the heart, then cultivate it, personify it, and explore it in a work of art.

This fascinating, NEW documentary about Flannery O’Connor premiered last night and can now be streamed at PBS. I think Flannery would approve of the production.

“My God, the bee is the hero!”

- Samuel Goldwyn, after reading the first pages of Maurice Maeterlinck‘s “The Life of the Bee“.

In an exuberantly poetic work that is less about bees and more about life, Maurice Maeterlinck expresses his philosophy of the human condition. The renowned Belgian poet and dramatist offers brilliant proof in this, his most popular work, that "no living creature, not even man, has achieved in the center of his sphere, what the bee has achieved." From their amazingly intricate feats of architecture to their intrinsic sense of self-sacrifice, Maeterlinck takes a "bee's-eye view" of the most orderly society on Earth. An enthusiastic and expert beekeeper, Maeterlinck did not intend to write a scientific treatise, even though he details such topics as the mathematically accurate construction of the hive, the division of labor among community members, the life of the young queen and her miraculous nuptial flight, and the movement and meaning of the swarm. An enchanting classic by one of the most important figures of world literature in the twentieth century and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature, this fascinating study is a magnificent tribute to one of the most orderly communities in the world. It is also filled with humble lessons for the human race.