Greetings, friend! Welcome to my website.
The site’s tagline is We Shall Not Cease from Exploration and it derives from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Little Gidding is the fourth and final Quartet and these lines are among the most famous:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Perhaps less famous but for me even more powerful are these parallel lines from East Coker, the second of the Quartets:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
I have been reading the Quartets since I was in my twenties and I always found something that takes me deeper into my lifelong quest to understand the nature of time and how we best live in a world where time inevitably passes.
In 2011, I moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia. I knew no one. I had given up the lawyering I had done for 35 years. I was starting afresh as a writer. I had no stature, no grounding. I felt old. But then I read these lines from East Coker and I paused. I had read them hundreds of time before but they hadn’t meant anything, but this time it was different.
I read them as an injunction, as a command. I might have somehow become an old man but that was not where the story ends. Old men, they should be explorers. I may have become an old man, but damnit I was not going to stop exploring.
This website – in short stories and cartoons and articles I have written as a journalist – catalogues some of the exploring I have done. The pieces don’t have an overarching theme, but that is of little concern for “here and there does not matter.” They represent the best record of what I have been thinking and feeling and learning and finding in the last many years.
I invite you to join me in my explorations. Take a look at the work that is collected here and let me know what you think.