Monthly Archives: January 2026

More to This

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“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
—Walt Whitman

Lying on my leather sofa. Scrolling through Facebook reels. My mind is quiet. My heart is unguarded. And then—there he is.

Standing alone on the rocks, guitar slung low, sunset pouring behind him like a benediction. Waves slam against stone, but he’s steady. Rooted. A white t-shirt clings to his chest, a pendant rests just above the place where prayer begins. He looks like someone who’s known both ache and awe but hasn’t run from either.

He strums. And sings.

“I’ve been thinking about dying…”

It grabs me. Grabs me deep. Not the lyric alone—but the way he sings it. Calm. Certain. Like someone who knows not only the shoreline but also the undertow.

I listen to the end. I sit still in its wake.

Later, I call my oldest sister. Ninety. Sharp. Aware. Lucid in a way that startles sometimes. I tell her about it. I play it for her.

Silence.

Then softly, she says, “Play it again.”

I do.

And there it is. The line that undoes me.

“My daughter says we live again…”

A child’s faith. A father’s voice. A goodbye that sounds like a hello in disguise.

She doesn’t ask what it means. She doesn’t need to. Some truths live in the body, not the brain. And some goodbyes don’t speak in past tense.

That’s what struck me about the song—about him—this barefoot man with a guitar and the Atlantic licking at his heels. He wasn’t mourning. He was offering. Not an elegy, but a threshold.

Suddenly I began to wonder—not just about dying, but about the shape of leaving itself.
How often the final word is really the first line of something else.

What I hadn’t yet named—what was already working on me under the music—was the song’s quiet insistence.

Over and over, Mark Scibilia returns to the same plea, almost like a whispered vow:

“Don’t you dare
tell me that there ain’t more to this.“

It isn’t argument. It isn’t doctrine. It’s defiance. He’s not trying to prove an afterlife. He’s refusing a small one.

The line keeps coming back like a tide, not to persuade us but to steady us—reminding us that our lives don’t fit neatly inside a closing. What we give our lives to has a way of exceeding the frame.

When he sings it, it sounds less like belief and more like fidelity: a promise to those he loves,
a promise to the life they’ve shared, a promise that whatever waits beyond this moment must somehow be wide enough to hold them all.

That refrain—there’s more to this—isn’t a conclusion. It’s a refusal to conclude.

What moved me wasn’t simply the lyric, or even the tenderness of a daughter’s faith carried in a father’s voice. It was the way the song refused to close in on itself. More to This doesn’t resolve so much as it opens outward. It leaves space. It resists the neatness of an ending.

I noticed my own response before I noticed the pattern in the song. I didn’t want the ending sealed too tightly. I didn’t want it explained away. I wanted to lean forward, not back.

Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.

I began thinking about how often endings—especially those that arrive at the moment of death—behave this way. Not declaring an end. Not insisting on finality. But gesturing instead. Toward light. Toward motion. Toward wonder. Toward something unfinished and unnamed.

Literature has long understood how difficult it is to stop speaking.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sends Sydney Carton to his death with a sentence that looks forward rather than back. “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” The line does not tell us what follows. It simply insists that meaning survives the moment.

Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby not on death itself, but on motion. “So we beat on, boats against the current…” The sentence ends. The movement does not. Time presses forward, indifferent but alive.

In Beloved, Morrison refuses to let memory die with the body. “This is not a story to pass on,” she writes—an ending that sounds like a warning and a summons at once.

And in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the novel concludes not with extinction, but with a completed gesture. Something is finished, yes—but not everything ends.

Different writers. Different centuries. Different convictions.

Yet we witness the same reluctance to close the door too firmly.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan does not receive a doctrine. He does not glimpse a mapped-afterlife. What he receives instead is recognition—a sudden clarity that loosens fear’s grip. Terror gives way not because he knows what comes next, but because something essential falls into place before the end.

Death happens. But it does not cancel significance.

Tolstoy never argues that life continues. He simply writes as if meaning does.

What struck me, once I saw it, was how consistent this posture is. Literary endings at the edge rarely snap shut. They soften. They widen. They behave as if language itself resists abrupt closure.

Then I began noticing the same thing outside of books.

Real life, it turns out, leans too.

Emily Dickinson’s last words—“I must go in, the fog is rising”—do not explain themselves. No reassurance. No declaration of belief. Just movement. Go in. Not away. Not gone. Into something obscured, indistinct, impossible to chart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have asked for “More light.” Not an answer. A desire.

Steve Jobs, famously unsentimental about metaphysics, reportedly died repeating: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Awe without explanation. Wonder without commentary.

Claude Monet is said to have murmured simply, “It’s beautiful.”

Different lives. Different beliefs. Different temperaments.

Yet, at the edge, language leans in the same direction—not toward negation, but toward attention. Toward light. Toward something still being apprehended.

What interests me isn’t whether these people believed in an afterlife. Some did. Some didn’t. That’s not the point.

The point is posture.

Faced with an ending, we pause. We soften our language. We gesture rather than conclude. We speak as if relation has not been severed—only altered.

That notion brings me back to the song. To Mark Scibilia standing barefoot on the rocks, Atlantic licking at his heels, singing not a goodbye but a threshold.

Long after it ends, the song keeps playing—not audibly, but somewhere just beneath thought. What lingers isn’t melody so much as stance. The way it opens outward. The way it refuses to settle. The way it leaves me listening.

Perhaps that is the common denominator. Not belief. Not certainty. But attention.

We don’t close the door too fast.

We lean forward instead.

Even after the final note fades, something in us remains listening—
sure, somehow, that there is more to this.

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Remembering
Patrick Allen Duff
March 17, 1960 – January 28, 2021

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The Long Way a Voice Comes Home

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“The meaning of the past is never finished.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.

Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.

I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.

Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.

For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.

Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.

That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.

My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.

What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.

That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.

Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.

We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.

The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.

There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.

So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.

All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.

Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.

All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.

I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.

And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.

The Journey Is the Gift

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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). American novelist and essayist whose work consistently emphasizes process, patience, and the moral meaning of how lives are lived.

Hopefully, talking about December holidays isn’t limited to December alone, because here it is January—and I’m still talking.

“You and Gary must have had MAHvelous celebrations,” someone, somewhere out there, exclaimed.

Actually, we did. We started early, weaving joy into as long a string as possible. And get this—it’s the week after Epiphany, and we’re not finished.

For real. The trees are still up, their lights burning every evening. Lighted garlands trace the banister and the fireplace mantels in both the living room and the kitchen. Outdoors, lighted deer still prance on the deck, a Snoopy tree shimmers in the lower yard, and shrubs outside the kitchen bid a bright welcome.

Is that wonderful or what? Here we are, still enjoying our holiday decorations—largely Gary’s labor of love—which he began the day after Thanksgiving and created day by day thereafter, with no real rush to get anything or everything done.

Don’t worry. Soon enough we’ll box everything up and unplug the trees. We’ll pack it all away. But we won’t be finished. I’ll still be talking about something simple I learned this holiday.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I want to tell you why this might have been my best Christmas celebration ever.

I think I know.

Christmases past always felt like a frenzied process leading up to a single day. December 25 arrived. Poof. Done. Over.

Time and time again, I found myself humming “Is That All There Is” made famous by Peggy Lee.

The song opens with a childhood fire—flames consuming a house, a father carrying his daughter to safety, the world burning down while she stands shivering in her pajamas. And when it’s all over, the child asks herself:

“Is that all there is to a fire?“

Later comes the circus—spectacle, color, astonishment—followed by a curious sense of absence. Something missing, though nothing is obviously wrong.

“Is that all there is to a circus?“

Then love. Long walks. Gazing into one another’s eyes. And then loss. The beloved leaves. The heart breaks. But still, life goes on.

Even death, waiting at the end, offers no final revelation—only the same unanswered question.

Again and again, the song circles moments that promise transcendence but refuse to deliver a final explanation.

It’s as if the great events of a life—fire, wonder, love, even death—never quite measure up to the meaning we expect them to deliver.

This year, for the first time I can remember, I didn’t find myself humming that song.

I didn’t hear myself asking that question at all.

This year, I didn’t build toward a payoff.

This year, I didn’t measure the season by a single day.

This year, I realized that Christmas lives in the spirit we practice all year long, not in the triumph of a single day.

This year, I learned to take my cue from a slower rhythm—one built day by day, without hurry.

This year, I found pleasure in the making, not the finishing.

This year, the question never came.

Much of that rhythm was Gary’s, and I was wise enough to follow it and learn from it.

It applies to education—
not just the diploma, but the nights spent puzzling, reading, failing, beginning again.

It applies to work—
not just the promotion or the retirement toast, but the showing up, the learning, the imperfect days that add up to a life.

It applies to friendships—
not just the anniversaries and milestones, but the long conversations, the forgiveness, the staying.

It applies to love—
not just the moment we fall, but the daily choosing, the adjusting, the patience, the tenderness that deepens over time.

It applies to vacations—
not just the photograph-worthy view, but the planning, the anticipation, the getting lost, the laughing along the way.

It applies to accomplishments—
books written one page at a time, great rides pedaled one indoor revolution at a time,
gardens grown one season at a time.

It applies, I think, to almost everything that matters.

What I was given this Christmas was not a better ending, but a better way of moving through things. A way that lets the journey matter. A way that frees us from asking too much of a single moment, and invites us to live more fully in all the moments that lead up to it.

And so the lights will come down. The boxes will go back into their places. January will move on, as it always does.

But I’ll carry this with me: meaning doesn’t arrive—it accumulates. With that gift, I found a better way to live inside my days.

Seeing Clearly Comes with a Price

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“New ideas pass through three periods: it is ridiculed, it is opposed, and it is regarded as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). German philosopher noted for his unsentimental view of progress and human behavior.

Epiphany! Of course! Tomorrow. One day away. But my mind keeps circling back to something that awakened me earlier, at the very start of December.

My fruitcakes, the last of the season, were in the oven. My kitchen was redolent with the aroma of butter and cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice and peach brandy. I was doing the cleanup of a gargantuan undertaking—fruitcakes that each weighed in at seven pounds, mind you—and I had two of them humming away in the oven. I started putting the mixer away, the hand mixer I used to turn the eggs into a proud, towering foam before folding them into the creamed butter and sugar. It was a choreography I had learned by muscle memory: beat, fold, lift, repeat, hope.

I looked at the hand mixer sitting on the countertop and could hardly believe what I saw. This poor old thing has been with me through decades of batter and holiday chaos, but apparently I had never actually looked at it with eyes as sharp as they were that day. Suddenly the vents and seams—those tiny nooks and crannies no one examines unless a guest baker is coming—were showing off little smudges of dried batter and a faint dusting of past Christmases. Nothing alarming, nothing unsanitary—just the honest residue of a well-loved tool that’s worked harder than most small appliances ever consent to. And I stood there wondering how on earth I had missed all that before.

Just as I was about to recover, I cast my eyes on the spoon rests—newer, used daily, and supposedly spotless because I wash them every single night. And yet, was that dust I saw? A faint constellation of tiny specks clinging to the cobalt glaze like stars that refused to set? My ordinary eyes never noticed a thing, but these new lenses seem determined to reveal every whisper of the world I’ve been breezing past. It’s not dirt. It’s not neglect. It’s just life—settling lightly, quietly, invisibly—until suddenly I was noticing more than I had bargained for.

Frankly, nothing in the kitchen escaped the spotlight.

That’s when it finally dawned on me: this wasn’t about cleanliness, or aging eyes, or domestic delusion. It was about wearing something new long enough for it to start teaching me how to look.

That “something new,” I realized, was my new Meta AI glasses. They’re ordinary enough at first glance. Dark frames. Familiar weight on the bridge of my nose. However, embedded in them is a quiet intelligence: a camera that sees what I see, microphones that listen, and a system capable of answering questions, identifying objects, translating text, and retrieving information without my ever reaching for a phone. They don’t replace my vision. They sit beside it, augmenting my attention rather than overpowering it. Impressive? Yes—but not seamless. Not yet.

In that moment, standing in my kitchen, I realized they’d already begun doing their real work—literally and metaphorically. They hadn’t changed the world overnight, but they had changed me: how closely I looked, how much I noticed, how quickly I drew conclusions. And if I’m honest, I wanted them to be everything to me right then and there. I wanted the future to arrive fully formed, yesterday. I wanted instant mastery, seamless magic, no friction at all.

Of course, great advances never work that way. Even these remarkable glasses come with limits, blind spots, and moments of awkward silence. They require setup. Patience. Practice. Updates. They demand that the human wearing them slow down long enough to learn how to use them well. And that’s when it struck me: what I was experiencing wasn’t disappointment. It was a learning curve.

And that, it turns out, is nothing new.

Every major human advance arrives this way. First, we notice it. Then we misunderstand it. We expect too much of it too quickly, and then—inevitably—we bump into its limits. Those limits can feel like failure, but history suggests otherwise. They are simply the cost of learning how to live with something new.

When humans first began cultivating crops and domesticating animals, the breakthrough wasn’t just agricultural—it was psychological. Trusting stillness over movement felt risky. Seeds didn’t always sprout. Weather didn’t always cooperate. Settling in one place meant betting survival on forces no one fully understood. Over time, though, farming reshaped daily life, social structures, and governance itself. The curve was steep, but what followed was surplus, stability, and civilization.

The printing press brought a different shock. Identical words, multiplied endlessly, unsettled centuries of authority built on scarcity and control. People feared heresy, misinformation, and the loss of trusted intermediaries. Literacy spread unevenly. Regulation lagged behind invention. And yet, once the dust settled, knowledge belonged to more people than ever before. Public discourse—messy, noisy, vital—was born.

Industrialization asked humans to relearn work itself. Machines didn’t just replace muscle; they redefined time. Clocks ruled lives. Cities grew faster than systems designed to protect the people who powered them. Fear followed—of accidents, exploitation, obsolescence. But so did labor laws, safety standards, and new ideas about rights and responsibility. The curve bent slowly, but it bent.

Even space exploration followed the same pattern. Leaving Earth wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was an existential one. Seeing our planet from orbit changed how we understood borders, fragility, and shared fate. Early failures were deadly. Political tensions ran high. But from that uncertainty came satellites, navigation systems, and weather forecasting. Today, those quiet technologies are woven so tightly into our daily lives that we forget they were once unimaginable.

The digital age repeated the pattern yet again. Invisible files. Disembodied conversations. A world “online” but nowhere in particular. We worried—rightly—about privacy, fraud, misinformation, and attention itself. Still, we learned. We adapted. We built guardrails, however imperfectly. Entire industries transformed, and daily life reshaped itself around screens and networks.

Seen this way, AI doesn’t stand apart from history. Instead it stands squarely within it. What feels different now is simply proximity. This time, the new tool touches something we assumed was uniquely ours: perception, judgment, cognition. No wonder the learning curve feels personal. No wonder I felt it standing there in my kitchen, staring at a hand mixer I thought I already knew.

The common denominator in every one of these moments isn’t the technology itself. It’s us. It’s our impatience, our hope, our tendency to expect the future to arrive fully baked, and our equally reliable ability to adapt once we slow down long enough to learn how to look again.

In reality, though, seeing clearly has always come with a price. But history suggests it also comes with a gift: the chance to notice what was already there—and to decide, deliberately, what to do next. With AI, that choice feels newly charged. The learning curve may follow a familiar pattern, but the pace does not. Our impatience is sharper. Our expectations louder. We want these systems to do more for us now—think better, decide faster, anticipate more—long before we’ve fully reckoned with what it means to share our cognitive space with machines.

Whether we name it or not, we are entering a moment of profound convergence. Tools no longer merely extend our hands; they begin to extend our judgment, our memory, our voice. This will unfold whether we welcome it or resist it. Choosing not to look will not slow it down. The real risk is not that we move too fast, but that we move forward without paying attention—without asking what is being gained, what is being lost, and who is being asked to adapt first.

And so I found myself back where I’d started—standing in my kitchen, my Meta AI glasses still resting on my nose, fruitcakes humming away in the oven, spice and brandy thick in the air. The mixer was wiped down. The spoon rests rinsed and set straight. Nothing dramatic had changed. The room was the same size. The work was the same work. But I was different, if only by a degree or two. Wearing something that asked me to see differently had taught me to pause before assuming I already knew what I was seeing.

That, I think, is what every learning curve ultimately asks of us. Not mastery on day one. Not perfection. But attention. A willingness to see more than we saw yesterday, and to accept that clarity often arrives before comfort—especially when the future is arriving faster than we expected.

As we enter the first full week of 2026, may we resist the urge to demand that the AI future hurry up and behave. May we recognize the wobble for what it is: not failure, but infancy. And may we remember that while we cannot stop this moment, we can choose how fully we inhabit it—eyes open, hands steady, and minds engaged.

Here’s to clearer sight, steadier hands, and the faith that, given time and care, we’ll learn how to use what AI offers us without surrendering what makes us human.