In 1862, at twenty-one, my great-great-grandfather John Hodges Wadhams left Goshen, Connecticut, to seek his fortune in the West. In 1992, almost exactly 130 years later, I began keeping seriously the journal of my own early adulthood. John was the son of an old Connecticut farming family. Church, town, party, father and Civil War suppliedContinue reading “The Court of Final Appeal”
Tag Archives: Increase Mather
Neoptolemus
We have already met him. Neoptolemus arrives on Lemnos as the younger man Odysseus brings to retrieve Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles. He resists the deception Odysseus requires. That is Neoptolemus at his best: resistant to manipulation, not yet corrupted by the compromises of war. Sophocles gives him dignity in that moment of resistance.Continue reading “Neoptolemus”
Thanksgiving as Strategy
Because they were educated on the West Coast, my children were taught next to nothing about the original colonies beyond the reductionist claim that the Pilgrims were “colonizers,” a word now used less as description than as accusation.[1] They learned to dismiss the charming saccharine gloss of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving with knowing irony, andContinue reading “Thanksgiving as Strategy”
Protective Arts 