These recent acquisitions were shelved because my current stack is so tall that my youngest gently joked about it throughout her recent visit. She was not wrong. I also shelved The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro; 1989), which I (re)read with Commonplace Philosophy (this book was even more beautiful three-plus decades later), and the subtle, haunting Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Hiromi Kamakami; 2025 — review here). I’ve shelved Stephen Fry’s Troy (2021) for now because I am working though Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and secondary sources for study group and David Copperfield (Charles Dickens; 1850) for a UChicago Graham School course, plus Latin and music practice. The currently reading stack now looks a wee bit more manageable.
More than forty years ago, my college mentor recommended Testament (1983) in one or another of the several classes and seminars I took with him. When I was home a couple of weekends later, my mother channel-surfed in lieu of conversation, and William Devane’s face flickered across the screen. “Can we watch this for a bit?”
It wasn’t a long movie, over in a quiet horror and a sob.
I remember it as my first genuine glimpse into the lives of adults, of families. (And this is, of course, the gift of good books, films, artworks, music, etc. — that they help us understand what is real and true in ways in which what is real and true has not yet done, perhaps cannot do.)
The film, which was brilliantly cast with gifted actors (Jane Alexander, Devane, a young Luke Haas) who actually look like a typical nuclear family in a California hamlet, opens twenty-four hours before a nuclear attack. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily cries out in Act III, “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes too fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.” This not-looking, not-noticing is, of course, the essence of Testament‘s extended first act: that the father challenges the son to make the hill but pedals ahead, that the youngest would prefer to be a rat in the school production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (a wish denied that serves as heartbreaking foreshadow), that the mother fails to awaken in time to exercise, that the husband and wife make love rather than continue a painful discussion, and so on. Piano practice. Breakfast. Clutter. School. Work. Answering machines. Unfinished projects. Unspoken fears. Unmet expectations. Pain and beauty, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Life. And no one really notices. The rhythms and grace notes that underscore everyday life grow too subtle, pass unmarked, end uncelebrated.
And then the world winks out, a few lights at a time. We can wish that we remember everything, and how we survived, the mother tells her son as the movie concludes.
But is being the last woman standing on the cusp of the end of the world what a little girl conjures when she dreams about growing up?
Watching Testament decades later, with my oldest child, later with his sisters, perceptive and sensitive filmgoers all, I was challenged — again — to examine the course and content of my life. If it were all over tomorrow, would today have been enough?
Literature or art or music or conversation that makes. us. think. (like Testament, for example) hurts, doesn’t it? It forces us to re-examine ourselves and our lives in ways that may… that will disappoint us. Reconciling who we are with who we thought we might be is hard, painful work.
Thinking about Testament nearly always reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World.”
“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”
“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble — we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was being lots of quite awful things.”
Rereading the story as if it were in conversation with Testament makes me wonder if Bradbury misstepped. While we must be something more than not too bad, I’m not certain that being ourselves is such an unworthy goal — being our best selves, that is, and by doing so inspiring in those we love and those we meet the desire to be, in turn, their best selves. So that even if a big part of the world is being lots of quite awful things, we are not allowing the everyday to pass unnoticed and uncelebrated.
Speaking of works in conversation, Testament is on my mind because I am about to reread The Road as part of a deep-dive into Cormac McCarthy’s work. When I watched the film adapted from McCarthy’s dystopian novel, I concluded that Testament is far and away the more emotionally wrenching film, perhaps because quiet horror is more insidious and thought-provoking than graphic depictions of man’s inhumanity to man, and because the beginning of the end of all things is infinitely sadder and more painful than the near-end of all things.
Don’t you agree?
The above was adapted from a post that first appeared on my previous site more than twenty years ago.
When I returned from my walk, I shelved most of these and then reviewed my notes on Book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for this morning’s study group. This afternoon I finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005).
While walking along the Huron River last weekend, we found ourselves in one of those places that would probably prove a bit dodgy once the sun set but that in the late afternoon simply provided an image of nature and infrastructure in uneasy harmony. Much of the view from Amtrak’s Wolverine arrests my attention in the same way — the detritus of industry overlaid with fleeting glimpses of wildflowers and birds. I drove this time, but I think I will take the train again later this summer.
Today after chores, a long walk, main meal, and a short nap, I am settling into my favorite chair with the latest issue of The Atlantic to read Elizabeth Bruenig’s “Witness.” Beside me are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rosalind Rosenburg’s biography of Pauli Murray, Jane Crow. A long and dangerously hot weekend is forecast. Stay hydrated. Seek shade. And keep your cool.
Another stack of books to be shelved (although I will consult Homer and the Heroic Tradition soon).
This morning’s seminar on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke represented as profound a pivot from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as can be conjured, I reckon.
From this —
They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.
to this —
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.
I know, right?
But I have now returned to the forbidding and unyielding landscapes of Blood Meridian and am struggling with the assignment for our final class meeting: Develop an elevator pitch to convince others to read McCarthy’s magnum opus. That I loathe this sort of thing is as unsurprising as my recent discovery that Werner Herzog and McCarthy admired one another’s work. (Check out this terrific NPR feature.) Wait! I’ve got it: If, like Werner Herzog, you believe that “the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder,” read this book. Or maybe: Imagine a Moby-Dick in which the whales are people. You know what? I think I will mysteriously end video when we are required to share our pitches tomorrow.
Currently rereading Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy; 1985) for the final meeting of a nine-week course and reading The Dream Hotel (Laila Lalami; 2025) and Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Rosalind Rosenberg; 2017). I plan to participate in the upcoming APS Together, too.
In advance of seeing Shattered Globe Theater’s production of A Tale of Two Cities, I began rereading Charles Dicken’s most famous novel, but I needed to set it aside to complete assignments for two courses I’m taking. For those, I’ve been (re)reading the Iliad and several academic articles concerning Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian. Next month, a friend and I will embark on a study of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, so I’ve been reading some introductory material. (That same friend and I recently read and discussed Charlotte Wood’s beautiful novel, Stone Yard Devotional (2024). Highly recommended.) With the SciFri Book Club, I read John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (2025). In between projects and assignments, I’m making my way through Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Sarah Wynn-Williams; 2025).
While visiting a state park on Monday, I noticed that the spring gold — a color I don’t actually care for — had nearly yielded to green. “Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy,” I quipped, but then I could not recall the complete poem. Reading aloud from one of the first authoritative sites in my search, I thought that, while movingly beautiful (“In gold as it began / The world will end for man. / And some belief avow / The world is ending now. / The final age of gold…”), the poem seemed unfamiliar. Reading more carefully, I realized that I had recited an early draft of Robert Frost’s work. The poem we know, of course, is only eight lines:
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Each April, I promise myself I will read more poetry and perhaps memorize a poem. This year, I successfully kept the first promise: I finished Dante’s Purgatorio. My daughter and I read You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (edited by Ada Limón). And, as part of our dive into Brazilian-Portuguese literature, we also read Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems (Carlos Drummond De Andrade). Now, how to keep the second promise? Like high-impact aerobics and all-nighters, memorization is an activity that was more easily executed when I was younger, so I’ve begun this task gently, rereading and rereading. I think I’ve nearly got it and wonder if I should try another.
Nerdishly 