Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Deep Thoughts
It was, as is my habit, an early morning for me. Weekday or weekend, I get up before the sun. I walked to the library of this magnificent place we’re staying in Healdsburg, alone, since most people have the good sense to sleep in late on a Sunday, and I was intent on writing about something which has been on my mind a few days.
The shelves of the library were filled from end to end, and I was drawn to one particular pair of shelves which seemed surprisingly homogenous. On the spine of a book it stated: HARVARD CLASSICS and, beneath that, THE FIVE FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS. There were dozens of them, all numbered and arranged sequentially, with various public domain classics from the past couple hundred years of writing. I suspect someone bought it years ago from one of those Sunday newspaper magazines for folks that wanted to appear erudite by filling their nude shelves with impressive-looking volumes. The capitalized declaration was, for me, more like an intellectual pratfall. (more…)
