“Pagan” or Sublime?
When the curtain rises on Brian Friel’s renowned play, “Dancing at Lughnasa,” Michael, a pleasant young man, addresses the audience as though he’s lying on an analyst’s couch: “When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, different kinds of memories offer themselves to me.” He was only seven, but the memories still make him “uneasy;” it was a time of “things changing too quickly.” These memories unfold for us on the stage.
Closings
At a funeral, I read Tennyson’s poem, “Crossing the Bar,” written when he was 80. He requested this poem be printed at the end of future publications of his work. He was closing his life’s work knowing he soon would be “crossing the bar.”
Seeing Red
Many countries that have colonized indigenous populations have issued subsequent apologies for earlier atrocities. Since 1999, Denmark has issued three apologies to Greenland, the most recent in 2025, when, in an emotional speech, Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen apologized to the Inuit population for the 1960s forced contraception of thousands of indigenous girls, many as young as 12, denying them the right to decide to have children or not.