Archive 2025
Click on the author's name: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joe Bonomo, Anne Lamott.
January 10, 2025
from The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Facing his demons head on, he got to ‘the general through the specific’ which is what all great essayists do.”—THE
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between the World and Me, The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. In 2023 Mary Wood, a white teacher from South Carolina, insisted on teaching Between the World and Me, despite threats of being fired by the school board. Coates traveled to South Carolina to support her.
The Paragraph of the Week is from his newest book, The Message, in which he describes his reaction to the event.
The Paragraph of the Week
The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of hectoring fanatics. And instead I'd found that there were allies fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate. I think that was correct. What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job over a book.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Comment
When he writes his books, Ta-Nehisi Coates pictures a black audience. In Between the World and Me he writes directly to his son, and in The Message, his most recent book, he has in mind his writing students at Howard University. “When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible,” he explains, “to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate.” But when Mary Wood, the white teacher from South Carolina, risked her job by assigning his book, he learned that a white audience too got the message about systemic racism precisely because he did not “translate” and was honest about his own experiences and the long history of oppression in America and around the world. Facing his demons head on, he got to “the general through the specific” which is what all great essayists do. Identity may have been the vehicle for such honesty, but in the end his books affirm that the human condition is what matters.
—THE
January 17, 2025
from “Montaigne”
in Representative Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“...the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his last book, Three Roads Back, Robert D. Richardson, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, wrote about the way grief led Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James to insights about their common theme, resilience. “What all three writers and thinkers teach, through their lives as much as their writing is how to recover from losses, how to get up after being knocked down, and how to construct prosperity out of the wreckage of disaster.”
Our Paragraph of the Week is from Emerson’s essay “Montaigne” and the commentary is from the postscript to Richardson’s book. Taken together, they provide the solace of the long view when society appears to have taken another calamitous course.
[Note: We made slight changes in the formatting of the original Richardson commentary to fit our two-paragraph format.]
Paragraph of the Week
The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral, the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commentary
There is a lot of resilience hidden in that word “somehow.” Resilience is not in general quirky or unusual, nor is it a resource available only to those of iron will who can alter their views or transcend their feelings. Resilience is built into us and into things. Of the persons treated in this book, Emerson had the most profound and nuanced understanding of the real nature of resilience, and of the extent to which we, and all of nature, are caught up in it. Emerson called the process “compensation.” That is the title of the third essay in his Essays First Series (1841). The subject had fascinated him since childhood, he tells us, and he began to seriously work up the subject for a series of lectures he gave in 1837. In 1839, the year his daughter Ellen was born, he was still working on it. Coming right after “History” and “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation" remains a crucial leg of Emerson's thought, and the best single statement of how the resilience we sometimes feel in ourselves is in truth a universal law or force, discernable anywhere one looks. Resilience is part of the nature of things.
—Robert D. Richardson
January 24, 2025
from “Origin Stories”
in sweet
by Joe Bonomo
“I silently begged, pleaded with Molly to talk to me.”—Joe Bonomo
Joe Bonomo is the author of eight books of prose including the essay collection Field Recordings from the Inside and the award-winning collection of prose poems, Installations. Today’s Paragraph of the Week is from “Origin Stories” which I found in sweet magazine. You can read the full piece here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I silently begged, pleaded with Molly to talk to me. Anything, I won’t tell! I’d gently hold her warm mutt head in my hands, bend her dog face to mine, lock eyes, hers brown and soulful, and implore her: say something, anything. Let me know that what I know is true. Say something. In the craziest moments, we came close. So I felt. Close to talking. What would she say? What language would she use to mend the cleavage between animals? This I must know. Say something, anything, I won’t tell! What I really didn’t know—beyond if she could, or would she, or what she’d say, what complaints or agreements or backyard or rec room secrets she’d whimper—was where I’d go if I heard her right, what world I’d tumble into, what world I’d leave behind, if Molly said.
—Joe Bonomo
Commentary
In the opening paragraph of “Origin Stories,” Joe Bonomo yearns to enter the world before language to see if his words are true. Gazing into the eyes of his dog Molly, the “warm mutt head” close to his, her face turned toward him, the eyes “locked” and “soulful,” he longs to “mend the cleavage between men and animals,” and at times, “in the craziest moments,” Molly on the verge of speech comes “close.” All dog lovers, I suspect, share this desire to be in on their dog’s secrets, curious about the complaints and words of gratitude their dogs might offer, though such mundane concerns do not ultimately drive the writer here. He longs to probe a more essential mystery about language. In this prose piece about origins, he wants know what world he would “tumble into” if he could understand her speech, and, most tellingly, what, if anything, in the world of words he leaves behind is true.
—THE
February 7, 2024
from “The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed”
in The Washington Post, January 29, 2025
by Anne Lamott
“Do what’s possible.”—Father Tom Weston
Anne Lamott is the author of seven novels and several bestselling books of nonfiction, including, Operating Instructions, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son, and a classic book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. “The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed” appeared in The Washington Post, last month. You can read the full essay in the Washington post here and, for followers of Facebook and X, for free here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I think we need and are taking a good, long rest. Along with half of America, I have been feeling doomed, exhausted and quiet. A few of us, approximately 75 million people, see the future as a desert of harshness. The new land looks inhospitable. But if we stay alert, we’ll notice that the stark desert is dotted with growing things. In the pitiless heat and scarcity, we also see shrubs and conviction.
—Anne Lamott
Commentary
Anne Lamott is urging love not complacency. She passes on the advice of her Jesuit friend, Father Tom Weston, to “do what’s possible.” To be “kind to ourselves,” “take care of the poor,” “get hungry kids fed,” and “pick up the litter.” When she quotes Molly Ivins who said “Sweet Pea, we got our horse shot right out from under us,” Lamott adds “it hurts like hell and we loved that horse, and people are laughing at us.” Yes, pain, grief, and humiliation are what we suffer now. We need a rest. She insists, though, that the stillness of now is like the calm before a dessert storm, and the blast of spring will come. See the “dubious patches of pale green” down by the arroyo? It’s already begun.
—THE