It’s spring, and an old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of golf. My thoughts concentrate on three conditions that no longer seem to exist, neither in golf nor in the society. Golf, as the game was designed and expected to be played, is out of sync, out of joint, with the society determined to paralyze the game.
Continue reading → Dr. Howard Stein on Golf and the Principle of Consideration
At the end of the nineteenth century, in a graduation speech to Barnard College graduates, William James made the following statement:
Continue reading → Dr. Howard Stein and the Habit of Intelligent Choice
In a conversation with Robert Chapman many years ago, he who was the co-author of the play, Billy Budd, and the director of the Loeb Theatre at Harvard University, I mentioned a playwright whose work seemed limited to me.
On September 11 we commemorate the loss of thousands of people to an unnatural disaster. Every year the human race suffers the loss of thousands of people to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, blizzards, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes — disasters that we have very little chance of avoiding and no one to blame; only Nature.
My brother, Frank, will be ninety in December. He was a math teacher in high school for ten years and a teacher of rhetoric, speech, and theatre in college for thirty years. He lives in a nursing facility in Florida, where with the help of nurses, nurses’ aids, doctors, and the kindness of strangers his mind is active despite a frail body.
I, his baby brother age seventy-six, am his power-of-attorney and speak to him as often as I possibly can.
Yesterday I spoke to him early in the day, and he was completely dispirited.
“Babe,” he said, “I can’t bare it any more. That horrible incident in Oregon crushes me. Would you do me a favor? Would you write something that I have been preaching for decades now?”
“I’ll do anything I can for you,” I answered.
“Maybe you could send it to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times or The Saturday Review?,” he said.
“The Saturday Review is not likely, Frank,” I said without explaining. “But I will send whatever you say to The Times.”
…of my Big Chief writing tablet begs me to fill its
empty lines
With words that mean this day has meant more
than other days to me
Because they do grow shorter as the years add up
And even an hour seems to run its course
more swiftly.
One hand of the clock hastening to catch
its look alike
Only to hang there together, suspended in time
For a brief moment before disengaging
and moving on.
It leaves this viewer somewhat short tempered,
Even nettled for having used the precious
moment
To observe and record time gone by,
Even wasted.
But was it?
by Marshall Jamison
The Time: January 1944.
Men who’d sailed the North Atlantic in convoy for up to four or more years began to breathe a little easier on the crossings from Boston and Halifax to the waiting ports in England. It looked then as if the U-Boat Wolfpack that had used the merchant ships as targets for their torpedoes for those years were almost cleared from the North Atlantic.
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