One day long ago as a young undergraduate, I anxiously awaited my favorite professor to begin a class in understanding poetry. His desk and chair sat ominously on a foot high podium, so positioned it seemed to lord over us, his philistine students. When he entered the room on that memorable day, his stride was long and purposeful, like a man anxious to speak his mind. The step up to his chair was not enough for him on this day. Instead he literally jumped up on his desk, startling his expectant students. With his feet swinging freely, he addressed us with a tinge of excitement in his voice, “I’m going to read to you the lyrics of a song. What I want you to do is to determine whether it is a poem or not, and why?” Then he proceeded to read the words to Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “The Sound of Silence.” I will never forget the cadence of his voice, as if he were singing the words in a different key. His face became flushed as he reached the final stanza, “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. And whisper’d in the sounds of silence.”

What this teacher taught us that day was that words can transcend their literal meaning and speak to a part of our humanity that can transform us. Actually, any art form must transcend its medium. If it fails to do so, then, as Joyce so pithily enjoined, it is nothing more than pornography. But when it touches us, beyond what words can adequately delineate, it moves our spirit and raises our aspiration for something more. When Paul Simon wrote his lyrics, he was inspired by an emptiness that seemed to enclose him from all sides: “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share And no one dared Disturb the sound of silence.” The closing stanza cannot really be translated into a declarative sentence, for it leaves you breathless as it did that day when read by my professor. And yet you know what Paul Simon is communicating. He was speaking about a truth that no word or metaphor could adequately express, but that his lyrics could elicit in the heart and feelings of any person living in that time and circumstance.

Paul Simon was fortunate that he found a way to support his artistic ability. As a student in that class, I wondered whether I could write anything worth sharing with others and whether I could support a family in the process of doing so. Well, I finally reached a point about a decade ago when I could make an attempt at the first proposition and not worry so much about the latter. My family had become largely independent of me. And so I began to write.

You, my faithful subscribers, know that I began writing this blog in July, 2013, not quite two years ago. My motivation perhaps was a humble attempt to provide a counterpoint to Simon’s pessimistic refrain, “my words like silent raindrops fell, And echoed In the wells of silence.” My words may be critical, but their intent is to awaken a resounding echo of coherence and sanity in a world seemed bent on the insubstantial, the incoherent, and an insane competition for power and status, the very bane of human coexistence. Some of Simon’s angst comes out in my recent blogs on politics and the media like “Perverted Politics” “Compromise: An Unfulfilled Promise” “Why Fable News?” “Is our Free Enterprise System at Risk?” and more. But I also write about matters of the heart and spirit like “In the Zone,” “A Blossom in the Wilderness,” “A Congregation of Life Forms,” “The Womb of Life,” and more. I have written about dogs and centipedes and just about anything that my tagline promises, i.e., “A Running Commentary on Whatever.” But, in all these blogs, my muse speaks to me in fragments and is thwarted by my personal limitations and ignorance. Before I began this blog, I challenged myself to paint on a broader canvas framed only by the limits of my imagination and creativity. As you can readily see, that aforementioned professor had done more than introduce me to poetry.

What you may not know is that I also write novels, actually three novels: “A Culpable Innocence,” a work of historical fiction set in the context of the Vietnam War, “A Life Apart,” the story of a dysfunctional family’s journey into wholeness, and my recently published novel, “In Search of Fate.” The latter is a love story embedded in a high stakes futuristic adventure that bridges the divide between orthodoxy and conscience, capitalism and altruism, death and immortality, faith and fate. The inspiration for these novels came from that same undergraduate professor who taught me that words can be more than signs, but symbols for those unspoken truths that can only be experienced. As a novelist, I create characters and circumstances that speak to our human condition, while intimating our ability to transcend the “wells of silence.” There is another kind of silence that speaks in the heart of every human being like a siren’s call and intones loudest when voiced in the words of compassion and love. That silence can be couched within words that breathe hope and love and function as a wellspring of change. That silence masquerades as the quiet center of a storm, but its centrifugal force can sweep humanity into a future very different than Simon’s lament, “And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made.” His words, like my blogs, convey a specific message. My novels, on the other hand, live in the broader world of interrelationships and the national/international cross currents of culture, politics and economics. If you wish to explore that world as I envision it, check out my website at www.aculpableinnocence.com. There you will find synopses, excerpts and more information than perhaps you need or want. Although I have been reluctant to accept or promote any advertising on this blog, there are now over 1300 of you that seem interested in “Anthony’s Blog,” my running commentary on whatever. Only recently have I been persuaded that you might also be interested in Anthony’s world—my imaginative vision of our contemporary human condition.