Friday February 14<\/p>\n
Garrison Keillor, now and again, jusk knocks me flat with his eloquence and passion for words. \u00a0 Here’s a piece I came to cherish decades ago. \u00a0It makes a good celebration of Valentine’s Day in this most wintry of winters.<\/p>\n
Seven faculty — \u00a0Yvonne Antczak and Melanie Mayberry (SOD), Mary Serowoky and Carmen Stokes (CHP), Shadi Banitaan (E&S), \u00a0Pam Wilkins (SOL) and Laurie Ann Britt-Smith (CLAE) and I will climb in the E&S nifty van for a c. 4 hour trek to Xavier in Cincinnati for this year’s Heartland Delta Faculty Conversation weekend. \u00a0Laurie Ann is one of the plenary speakers.<\/p>\n
Have a great weekend.<\/p>\n
john st sj<\/p>\n
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The Heart of the Matter All lovers are secret lovers. \u00a0They require vast privacy because their passion, so gorgeous and thrilling to each other, is incomprehensible to everyone else, a joke, even to their own children. \u00a0No one can quite imagine the spark that lit the fire between one’s parents; their desire seems improbable, like love between porcupines.<\/p>\n So the children of lovers become the chaperones of their middle age, forcing them to find even more ingenious disguises — including the ultimate one, indifference. \u00a0For it’s the purpose of every couple to keep their secret, their magic, knowing that public disclosure diminishes its force. \u00a0Telling the world the truth about your true love is a doomed enterprise, amusing for the world but disastrous for you.<\/p>\n Love is the mainspring of our lives, and only fiction and songs tell the truth about it. \u00a0Newspapers are useless on the subject, offering antique Victorian wedding announcements, quaint old advice columns, the tangled illicit affairs of the prominent and the dull narcissism of their confessions, shallow “life style” pieces about sexuality and family, the same old horse feathers — all of it valuable as some sort of dismal folklore but nothing sharp and authentic, nothing as informative as Bobbie Ann Mason, Roy Orbison, John Cheever or a few thousand other storytellers.<\/p>\n This is a huge lapse of journalism that makes it impotent to describe the real world. \u00a0After all, love is no light breeze on the lake. \u00a0People die for it, people leave home, \u00a0people throw away political power for love and even for the thinnest illusion of it, as if power were cold coffee. \u00a0. \u00a0. \u00a0.<\/p>\n . . . .\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Passionate love is more powerful than greed, stronger than the force of inertia: It has power to arouse us from the couch, whip us into shape, light the bonfire of curiosity and propel us on lifelong adventures against staggering odds. \u00a0People are capable of such love at any time of life, and people in love are capable of anything at all, including homicide, poetry, heroic fasts or endless revels. \u00a0People in love walk straight off the cliff and into midair, and so long as they hold onto their secret they never fall into the sea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday February 14 Garrison Keillor, now and again, jusk knocks me flat with his eloquence and passion for words. \u00a0 Here’s a piece I came to cherish decades ago. \u00a0It makes a good celebration of Valentine’s Day in this most … Continue reading
\n<\/strong>Garrison Keillor – Valentine’s Day 1989 — New York Times Op Ed Page<\/strong><\/p>\n