Leaves in the Wind
by David Bentley Hart
Leaves in the Wind will be devoted to all the things I have been writing about for years—World Literature; Religion, East and West; Philosophy (with a current emphasis on philosophy of mind); Theology; Metaphysics; Culture; Music; The Visual, Plastic, and Dramatic Arts, including Cinema; Baseball, including an obsessive veneration of Frank Robinson; Asian Arts, Languages, Literatures, Philosophies, and Religions; Japanese Aesthetics; Why Frank Robinson was the greatest player in the history of the game; Political Theory; Romanticism; Crab Cakes; Why there should be a national monument to Frank Robinson; The Sciences; Obscure Books; Philosophical Idealism; and so on.
As in the past, I shall write in various forms—essays, short stories, long disquisitions, dramatic dialogues, poems, satires, conversations with Roland, or whatever else takes my fancy. I’ll make every effort to be as diverting as possible without becoming merely facetious, and as reflective as possible without becoming merely ponderous. New material will appear more or less weekly. One regular feature will be devoted to great but largely unknown works of literature. This follows from an article of mine that has proved more popular than I could have anticipated, “Books from a Vanished Library,” which also served as the introduction to my collection The Dream-Child’s Progress.
One recurring feature will be Q&A posts in which I shall also attempt to answer questions that have come my way from subscribers, either on a particular post or on some topic that I have addressed elsewhere in my work. I may even try to answer questions on topics I have never addressed before at all, if I can think of something sufficiently insightful, witty, or flippant to say.
In time, a short podcast may be added to the mix.
I can promise that it will be entertaining. I can even promise that it might occasionally—just for mischief’s sake—be profound.
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(Rising from his humble beginnings—laboring in obscurity at a manual typewriter, nourished entirely on the blue crabs and oysters he was able to gather up along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay each morning, then forced to live a peripatetic life wandering Cambridge to Cambridge—David Bentley Hart eventually insinuated himself into the company of influential men and women and then, by their good offices, into print. He now lives in a savage region where Maryland crab cakes have to be delivered by overnight air delivery. His last remaining ambition is to visit Kyoto before he dies.)
