Baron Wormser: The System
Humankind never has been very aware of the consequences of their group actions, perhaps because large groups, in particular, are inherently thoughtless.
Baron Wormser: Vistas
I don’t doubt that somewhere in the United States some class or reading group, as a way of girding their collective loins for the upcoming election, is reading or rereading Democratic Vistas, an 1871 essay in which Walt Whitman surveyed American democracy’s prospects.
Baron Wormser: Disunited Delusions
Donald Trump, as an unrestrained American ego, seems like an allegorical figure of the sort that Melville had a fondness for—the Confidence Man, par excellence.
Baron Wormser: Agony
The agony I feel about the events in Israel, an agony shared by millions around the planet, many of whom may never have entered a synagogue, is very real. I wake up at night and lie there, held fast by grief, impotence, anger, and despair.
Baron Wormser: Five Easy Pieces
Bobby has the dis-ease that is bred in the easy-going yet overbearing ways of his nation.
Baron Wormser: The Dark Sky | Politics and Its Discontents
It may be that the love that lives within us cannot be turned toward something as large and seemingly abstract as the earth. But the earth isn’t abstract at all. Each moment is local and real and is always a place where we might begin.
Baron Wormser: Staggering
When each of us was alone, imagination often kicked in. Where else can a child go? What else can a child do? When asked what one was thinking, a child could answer with the blessed word, “Nothing.”
Baron Wormser: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Epitaph”
By tradition, poets have the authority to write epitaphs. It goes with their famous license, their claiming the verbal right to confront death in whatever context death presents itself while using poetry’s concision to arrive at a just, incisive summary.
Baron Wormser: Disconnected
[Tech companies] countenance evil—working children to death, creating environmental devastation, allowing labor practices to flourish not far removed from slavery, putting women in conditions that encourage sexual assault, paying people a pittance for dangerous work—while offering assurances…that no evil is being practiced.
Baron Wormser: On Moral Grounds
One can be humbled into silence and one can be humbled into words. Or one can feel both—the silence that underlies the words.
Baron Wormser: The Weight
Desperate for an assertive American task, people will grasp at some very wretched straws.
Baron Wormser: The Holy War
What resides within Christianity… is the God-person whose life and times were radical and disruptive.
Baron Wormser: Fool
After the fool leaves The Tragedy of King Lear, where
does he go?
Home to see the wife, play ringolevio with the
neighborhood kids?
Baron Wormser: Within The Weeping Was Joy
Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid
