Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him.
silence
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
Take Me Home
While teaching English to communist party officials in post-war Laos, Kathryn Kefauver Goldberg reflects on silence and the legacy of trauma.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How To Be, In Silence
The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens to Your Identity When You Don’t Speak to Anyone for 27 Years
Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.” True hermits, according to […]