“You were right to tell me that in life, it is not the future which counts, but the past.”

ModianoWhat kind of person believes that the past is more important than the future? Wouldn’t the least likely be someone with amnesia? The central character in this novel by Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano is a Parisian who has no memory of his life before the second world war. It appears … Read More

“August is huge and blue, a glittering gemstone curving dangerously at either end into what precedes and follows it.

spires croppedOne afternoon about twenty years ago, someone on NPR read the poem “On the Island” by Elizabeth Spires.  I was driving my car, and I was so moved that I almost went into the ditch. This poem is infused with tension between the past and the future.  Here … Read More