an old writer and his words

  • IN AN ALIEN LAND

    He came, stayed a while, and left, and it was only when he was gone that most missed him. Some say he will come back but others are skeptical, and no one really knows for certain. Some actually say that he didn’t leave, that he simply changed, and might appear when no one expects him.…

    Lou Faber

  • AMOUR

    A voice clear, jazz straight up in six strings with no surprises, but sitting next to my wife and lover it is what an evening wants in much the same way as a night in the heart of winter demands spooning beneath the blanket pulled up to our chins the outside world, having ceased to…

    Lou Faber

  • ENLIGHTENMENT

    He wasn’t sure he wanted it, was fairly certain he did not, and in that moment, was certain he would get it, so he began developing elaborate plans on what to do with it when it arrived. He laid them out in painful detail, each step, each move carefully choreographed. He waited patiently, each minute…

    Lou Faber

  • EOS

    Tomorrow the morning will arrive as it always does, eating the last vestiges of night, painting the sky in puce and crimson. It will foretell the rain that will carry our dreams down the hill and into storm sewers, eventually to wash into the lake. But in that moment when the sky is ablaze, none…

    Lou Faber

  • NANQUAN’S SICKLE

    If you ask the teacher where you can find the key to enlightenment, what do you do when the teacher stares back at you in silence. If the teacher asks you where he can find the key to enlightenment, do you tell him that he possesses it, and if you do, will he simply stare…

    Lou Faber

  • MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (GWB VERSION)

    Strangely enough I can imagine Segasa Tokugawa standing on the parapet of Osaka Castle saying only a fool like Toyotomi either father or son would wage a war on Korea to expand his empire and stand here and say mission accomplished while so many at home mourned the loss of sons or innocence, or both…

    Lou Faber

  • PEACE, PAX, SHALOM, SALAAM, SHANTI

    There is certainly a reason, though in the time it will take us to find it, we likely will no longer care. The easy things so rarely matter, and we turn our backs on them hardly thinking, only to regret it when they slip away, and only then does their value appear.

    Lou Faber

  • AWAKENING

    The epiphany comes, he says with a smile, when you first discover the puzzle within the puzzle and the hidden logic finally triumphs. It is always there, she notes, right in the title as clear to the eyes as the nose on the face of armless man who has no mirrors.

    Lou Faber

  • PEACE

    There will come a time she says, when all of this will matter greatly, the question is how you will know that moment has arrived. I assume, he said, it will announce itself, or at least make its presence known. No doubt, she replied, you will search for it, but just like me, you will…

    Lou Faber

  • RESOUNDING SILENCE*

    (*Be forewarned, this is a shift from the usual post. On December 14, 1992 there was a shooting on the campus of Simon’s Rock College of Bard. A professor and student died, four others (my son included) were seriously wounded. Twenty years to the day later, in Connecticut 26 people died in a shooting at…

    Lou Faber