Convivium

“It’s in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear,” writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman’s insightful memoir Hogs, Mules and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm . “Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of [...]

I don’t know about you, but I was surprised to find that that commonplace expression originates with Napoleon Bonaparte. It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. It also aptly characterizes one of the main goals of visualization, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of [...]

A chance encounter (at a local meeting of Camino aficianados) resulted in an extended conversation about the ways and means and the whys of travel. David Levin has been a serious and life-long traveller. When he learned that Classical Pursuits will be going to Vietnam and Cambodia this fall, his eyes lit up and he [...]

Here was the headline in the book review section of the  Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper that caused me to stop and take notice. “Vincent Lam’s first novel, about Vietnam, has makings of a masterpiece.” Vincent Lam is an emergency  physician Toronto who also writes – very well.  His first book Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures won [...]

Just last night, during intermission at a concert, I overheard a conversation between two people, one asking the other if she planned to join the fall Classical Pursuits trip Vietnam Voices: A Balanced Opposition. Over the din, I heard her response: “Oh, no, I could never go to Vietnam. I am an American.” Vietnam has [...]

It seems I was barely back from India before I was heading back to the airport en route to Savannah to discuss Flannery O’Connor – for the fourth time. You might think that this would be a rather hum drum same old, same old experience for discussion leader Nancy Carr and me. But we both [...]