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.
So Near and Yet So Far
In a Rockville, Maryland, churchyard near the site of Chestnut Lodge, the defunct psychoanalytic mecca, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lie buried. Inscribed on their shared tombstone is the final sentence of “The Great Gatsby,” which encapsulates the theme of his novel and evokes the challenge of analytic treatment: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”