Category: Philosophy
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A Practical Philosophy of Love Revealed in this Memoir
Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child brought attention to our shared responsibility toward children. My disastrous experiment to grow up without social support revealed that it takes a village to raise a young adult. Over the middle decades of my life, I gained an ever-increasing appreciation for the importance of…
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Learn Practical Philosophy by Reading Memoirs
Memoirs elegantly resolve this deficiency. Reading a memoir, like reading a mystery, gives me the pleasure of losing myself inside another person’s thought process, a welcome reprieve from thinking like myself. At the same time, they expand my vocabulary of the human condition.
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Lessons from Kephart: Labels, Definitions, Language
When Beth Kephart’s son was diagnosed with a vague “disorder” she had to cope with the news. But how do you make sense of information that affects people you love when it is so technical you can barely understand it? You must sort out more than jargon. This is your son, and you must take…
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Break the Rules! A Travel Memoir with a Twist of Zen
The one rule he didn’t break was to put a finite time period on his memoir. He did this precisely. Mark Richardson’s wrapper story covers the couple of weeks during which he rode his motorcycle from Minneapolis to San Francisco. It’s tight, except for the strange fact that the material actually covers decades. It’s a…
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Are Memoirs True?
When we read fiction, we believe all sorts of wild things — travels to foreign galaxies, imagining fantastic creatures. But when we read memoirs we want to believe the events really happened. This is more complicated than it first appears. Memory is slippery. For example, I can not guarantee the exact words even a few…
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Be Here Now by Writing a Memoir
When I first heard the phrase “Be Here Now” in the early seventies, it was from the title of a book by Ram Dass. According to the book, the best way to live a full life is to savor your direct experience, whether smelling a flower, watching a sunset, or even when experiencing the sadness…
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