Always Advent

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by Clare Siobhan

The “alien torture chamber” episode

Summary:
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy suffer torture and manipulation at the hands of powerful captors who want to elicit a response of compassion from an on-looking mute alien who can absorb others’ pain.

As a character study and an examination of loyalty and self-sacrificing friendship in the Kirk/Spock/McCoy trio, this episode excels. There are numerous character-revealing moments as each man in turn offers himself to save the others. This episode also offers interesting parallels with modern issues of medical ethics and contains several Christian symbols and thematic elements.

Story synopsis:
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a planet in a solar system in which the sun is about to go nova, an event that will destroy all the planets orbiting it. Their mission is to evacuate the members of a scientific research team who have been studying the star as its destruction approaches.

Some of the planets in the system are inhabited. Two beings, called Vians, capture Our Three Heroes and place them in confinement with a girl who can’t speak but who can sense their emotions. She can also take their physical pain and injuries into herself and dissipate them—she is a being known as an “empath.” They realize that in absorbing the injuries of another person, the empath could actually physically endanger herself, but they assume that in such an event her instinct for self-preservation would prevent her from going that far. McCoy names her “Gem”.

The Vians are aware of the impending destruction of their solar system. They say they have the power to transport the inhabitants of only one planet to safety. The Vians torture first Kirk and then McCoy because they want to see if, during her time with the three men, the empath develops a willingness for self-sacrifice that overrules her instinct for self-preservation. Only then, the Vians insist, will she prove her planet and her people worthy of survival.

As McCoy lies dying from his torture-induced injuries, the Vians tell Kirk and Spock that during their captivity “everything that is truest and best in all species of beings has been revealed by you. Those are the qualities that make a civilization worthy to survive…” If Gem’s planet is the one that will be saved, the Vians must make certain they are worthy of survival. “Her willingness to give her life for him will prove this.”

Story analysis:
This is one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek, but I do have one problem with it. The Vians’ claim of a “one planet limit” is arbitrary and unconvincing. Throughout the episode the Vians display their incredible power to conjure up any object or bring about any circumstance they desire to elicit a reaction from their subjects. If they’re so powerful, why can they not transport the inhabitants of all the planets to safety? Or why couldn’t they have contacted the Federation years ago to launch a massive solar system-wide evacuation?

Am I nitpicking? Perhaps. But the reasons and motivations in a story like this should be airtight, and they’re not. I just don’t buy this “one planet limit”.

But I’m willing to put aside my incredulity in order to examine the Vians more closely. They possess unspeakable power, and unspeakable arrogance. They think they can declaim from on high which planet’s population they will save. A population must first prove itself “worthy” to be saved.

This is sick.

But isn’t this is the way human beings, particularly scientists, think? Modern scientists have the power to create human life in their laboratories AND the power to decide which of the lives they create are worthy to be saved. Medical doctors decide whose “quality of life” is “acceptable” enough to justify to continuing treatment.

The day is already here when the severely disabled can be put to death for the crime of being a burden to society or to their families. To some, they are no longer “worthy” to be saved.

The day is coming when even lives conceived naturally will have to prove themselves–pass a genetic screening test in order to be deemed “worthy” to live. (Or perhaps to receive coverage from a health insurance provider…) Those who do not pass muster will be selectively aborted or consigned to liquid nitrogen. (Or denied coverage…) It’s already happening with increasing frequency: the April 2007 issue of The Atlantic (p36) reported on an EMBO paper called “The Future of Neo-Eugenics”. According to The Atlantic report, approximately 6120 Down syndrome babies are conceived each year in the United States. Of these, nearly 30% are aborted. Overseas the percentages are higher: 32% in Western Australia and over 80% in Taiwan and Paris.

“Prenatal screenings will grow more comprehensive and may eventually cover all known disease genes,” says the report.

The power of a geneticist or a fertility specialist is as high above the human embryo’s capabilities of defending itself as the Vians’ power is above Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. So too is the power of a doctor or judge above the capabilities of the severely disabled.

(To read The Atlantic’s summary report go here and scroll all the way down to the last article. The EMBO paper is available for purchase at this website.)

But let’s turn the tables. What if the Vians were to analyze the population of planet Earth in the early 21st century? What would they find? A planet full of people who, like the empath and like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, are willing to endure suffering, pain, and even death for one another? Or would they find a population of people whose “instinct for self-preservation” dominates to such an extent that we pursue our own ambitions, agendas, momentary pleasures, economic interests, conveniences and material comforts at the expense of others? Does the modern human race demonstrate “everything that is truest and best in all species of beings?” Do we possess the qualities that make a civilization worthy to survive?

If our star was about to go nova would the Vians bother to save us?

How blessed we are that the real Savior of our planet knows we could never prove ourselves worthy, yet still values and loves us despite our sinfulness. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans chapter five, verse eight)

Christian elements:
This episode contains several recognizably Christian symbols and thematic elements. Perhaps some of them were not inadvertent:

• When Kirk, Spock, and McCoy arrive in the Vians’ underground laboratory/torture chamber, they find Gem lying on a platform, which is shaped like a cross.
• The torture of Kirk and Spock involves hanging them up in a cruciform posture, by the wrists.
• McCoy’s injuries – congestion of the lungs, bleeding into the chest and abdomen, severe heart damage, massive circulatory collapse – are consistent with the injuries suffered by victims of crucifixion.
• In the episode’s coda scene aboard the Enterprise, Mr. Scott declares that Gem was the “pearl of great price” featured in the story of the merchant (Matthew 12:45-46).
• Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Gem demonstrate the virtue of self-sacrifice. Gem even takes on the wounds of the ones she is to save: see Isaiah 53, especially verses 4-5.

Favorite moment:
One of the ways the Vians torture and test Our Three Heroes is by giving Captain Kirk a choice between sending McCoy to the torture chamber next, which will likely kill him, or Spock, who will be brain damaged and permanently insane.
McCoy and Spock argue over which one of them will go—each insists on himself being the one to go with the Vians. But Kirk tells them that the decision is his and his alone.

As medical treatment for the injuries Kirk suffered at the hands of the Vians, McCoy administers a sedative to the Captain. Spock then informs McCoy that since the Captain is now incapacitated, he is in command and that his command decision is to go with the Vians instead of McCoy.

Spock sits down and continues adjusting a piece of equipment in order to devise a means of escape. The empath approaches Spock and just looks at him, evidently liking what she sees: she fixes him with a gaze of tender admiration tinged with humor, as if to say, “Ah, I see through your impassive mask and sense beneath it a soul of deep feeling and unshakable virtue, which I admire very much.” The moment passes quickly, but it demonstrates that skillful storytellers develop character not only by that character’s dialogue and action, but also by other characters’ reactions to him or her.

McCoy then sneaks up on Spock and gives him a sedative. A moment after Spock, still protesting, drops unconscious to the floor, the Vians appear and take McCoy away to be tortured.

Favorite quotes:
McCoy: “I can’t destroy life, even if it’s to save my own.” Touché. Interesting tie-in here with embryonic stem cell research, abortion, and euthanasia of humans. Also, McCoy has a telling flashback in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that makes this line of his all the more poignant.

Kirk, addressing the Vians: “Love and compassion are dead in you. You’re nothing but intellect.” Could we not address in this way the scientists who manipulate embryonic human life and who promote abortion and euthanasia of human beings?

McCoy: “I’m a doctor, not a coalminer.”

“The Empath“
Original airdate: December 6, 1968
(Star Trek: The Original Series, 3rd season)
63rd episode produced
67th episode aired
Written by Joyce Muskat
Directed by John Erman

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Nazareth, that is, where one works, where one obeys, is a house one builds in one’s heart, or rather, a house that one allows to be built in oneself by Jesus’s hands.

–Charles de Foucauld (photo)

(A good article about Charles de Foucauld at Godspy)

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by Clare Siobhan

Part One: “Always try the next store.”

All we wanted were Simple Replacement Fixtures, but Home Depot didn’t have any. All they had were complete kits that required us to remove tiles and mess with pipes, and for some reason—call it a Bermuda Triangle of the mind—we decided this would be a swell project.

After banging a hole in the wall and removing the old fixtures, cutting his finger on a shard of tile in the process, my husband discovered that we lacked a certain tool (I forget which), so he trotted down to Menards, which is closer to our house, to find it.

Imagine his surprise when he discovered that Menards had exactly what we had been looking for BEFORE we demolished half our bathroom wall.

Once armed with the Simple Replacement Fixtures, the project was straightforward: replace the current fixtures, patch the wall, replace the tile. We did encounter one hitch here, in that the box of tile in our garage labeled “Beige Tile” did not actually contain Beige Tile, but Pink Tile.

Another trip to Home Depot.

That’s three so far, just to Home Depot, which includes returning the supplies for the aborted wall-demolishing project. I stopped counting the trips to Menards.

The tile available at Home Depot didn’t really match the existing tile, but we weren’t going to quibble at this point. All things considered, the hall bathroom looks pretty good.

Now for the master bathroom.

We didn’t make the mistake of immediately smashing all the tiles this time, and anyway, we had the Simple Replacement Fixtures from Menards. It was a simple matter to replace the existing fixtures with the new ones. But the shower still leaked, and tightening the porcelain “dream bathroom” handles only caused them to shatter in our hands. My husband broke one, I broke the other. (This is when I cut MY finger.)

The problem was that the washers were worn and needed to be replaced. When my husband attempted to do this, he discovered that the critical nut, that-which-had-to-be-unscrewed in order to do this blasted job, was inaccessible to any wrench we owned because the doofus who did the original job did not leave a large enough hole in the tile.

After a pause long enough to smack ourselves in the foreheads—I smacked him and he smacked me—we went back to breaking tiles, but this time with more finesse due to our new Tile Cutting Drill Bit.

We began replacing the showerhead. The strap wrench broke, making the shower unusable because my husband did manage to loosen the showerhead enough to cause the water to spray straight out the side of the nozzle rather than out the front. Eventually he went to Menards and bought a bright red pipe wrench, something along the lines of “Miss Scarlet in the Dining Room with THIS HONKIN” BIG WRENCH.”

Both bathrooms are now fully functional. Total time elapsed: three and a half weeks. Total cost: a thousand years in purgatory.

Part Two: “The Interior Torrent”

We awaken at 5:30 am to what sounds like a torrential downpour.

That’s odd. Rain in August in California?

As the fog clears we realize it’s one of our backyard automatic sprinklers spraying the outside of our bedroom wall because for some reason it’s frozen in place rather than oscillating back and forth.

My husband gets up and discovers that the sprinkler is aimed directly at our open bathroom window and is hosing down the inside of our bathroom quite nicely. Everything is soaked.

This was a much simpler problem to fix—just a little tweaking of the doodad on the sprinkler. While he was at it, he replaced another sprinkler head in the front yard that had been doing a creditable imitation of Old Faithful for several weeks.

Part Three: “I refuse to give birth at Home Depot”

I’ve been in labor with our third child since 4 am. The two older kids are outside running in the sprinkler, and the contractions on this muggy summer afternoon finally feel like they’re getting somewhere.

We call the babysitter and prepare to go to the hospital.

Not a minute later, for some unfathomable reason—another Bermuda Triangle of the mind?—our five-year-old son suddenly takes an interest in a section of capped-off water pipe sticking out of the side of the house. He puts his foot on it and stands on it, impressed with his own sense of balance.

Before one of us can say, “Don’t stand on that, it might break,” it breaks, and water issues forth from it like the very fluid from the amniotic sac of a laboring elephant, except that it doesn’t stop.

Did I mention that I’m approaching transition labor as we gape at this spectacle, knowing instantly that our third child will not be brought into this world without a trip to Home Depot?

This labor—which we had been coaxing along all day with back-rubs, showers, and poetry reading—is now going full bore.

And my husband is gone. At the hardware store.

I actually have very little recollection of what happened from this point on. I stood out in the backyard alternately watching the gushing pipe and my watch, when suddenly my husband appeared out of the haze as if in a dream. He disappeared to the back of the house and shut off the water main.

When he reappeared, he assured me that if he couldn’t fix this in ten minutes, he’d explain very calmly to the babysitter why they wouldn’t be flushing any toilets that day, and we’d go.

Ten minutes?

That’s ten contractions, my good man. Visions of giving birth in the car assisted by a gas station attendant swim through my head.

Then he crouched, surreally, next to the broken pipe, with the HONKIN’ BIG WRENCH again, plumber’s putty, a new cap for the pipe.

Happily, he was able to cap off the pipe and we left our household with fully functional toilets, to give birth, two hours later, to our youngest child.

When we called the babysitter, she congratulated us warmly and informed us that she had to pan-fry the planned dinner (pigs-in-a-blanket) because the oven had made this weird clicking sound and then gone pffffffssssst.

Sigh.

(This is a silly piece, reminiscences from my married days. The first one reminds me why I tend not to take on these kinds of projects anymore, the second why I’m happy just lugging a hose and sprinkler around the yard, and the third just makes me and my children laugh at the comedy of errors associated with Number Two Daughter’s birth.)

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by Clare Siobhan

Fasting simply means going without food for a time. Many people have undergone a fast for medical reasons, such as before getting a blood sample drawn or before surgery, or for other health reasons, and in these cases the rules are clear: “No food or water after midnight the night before,” for example.

The Catholic Church also prescribes a fast for our spiritual health, on two special days during the year: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Here, too, the rules are clear:

No meat. Only one full meal that day. Two smaller meals that together do not add up to one full meal. No food between meals.

This is the minimum penance required by the Church, and even then it is not binding if it impairs your ability to work or otherwise perform your duties on those two days. Fasting is not dieting; it is a spiritual practice.

The Church encourages us to do more, though, if we can, and make regular fasting and penance part of our lives, year-round. If you’re old enough, and if you’re not expecting or nursing a baby, and if your health permits it, try one of these fasts:

• Observe the old-fashioned Catholic custom of eating no meat on Fridays even when it’s not Lent. Many people are unaware of the fact that we are really expected to abstain from meat on all Fridays, even outside of Lent. However, church law says we may eat meat on Fridays if we substitute some other form of penance.

• On Wednesdays and Fridays, consume bread and water only. This is a popular fast, promoted by the Marian devotion movement.

• On Wednesdays and/or Fridays, consume nothing except water all day. (Or black tea only, which the Irish called a “black fast.”) Break your fast with your family at dinnertime. If you want to extend the fast, begin it the night before by passing up dessert and eating no snacks that night. And if you’re skipping breakfast, no fair sleeping in: get up at the regular time and spend that time in prayer.

• Eat three meals a day as usual, but consume nothing between meals and skip all desserts or other sweets.

• Follow the rules of fasting normally observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday: partial breakfast, partial lunch, full dinner, no snacks, no meat. Poor Clare nuns, following the practices of St. Francis and St. Clare, fast like this every day: 365 days a year. Try fasting like this for the 40 days of Lent.

• Resolve not to have a second helping of anything. To make this even more penitential, have someone who doesn’t know you’re doing this load your plate for you, so you’re not tempted to give yourself a second helping at the front end.

But why would anyone want to do this? Yes, fasting is a form of penance and reparation for sin, but how does going without food help us grow closer to Jesus? What do I mean when I say that fasting is the “bat phone” to the indwelling Holy Spirit?

Here are a few things I’ve experienced and learned from fasting:

The self-control learned from fasting spills over into other areas of life. If you can learn to control your appetite for food, you can also control your other appetites.

When I haven’t eaten all day and I’m hungry and tired, I feel a greater unity with the poor and a greater desire to help them, because they often must fast not by choice but because they have no way to get food. Jesus is very close to the poor.

When I’m so hungry that even birdseed begins to look appetizing, I have a greater understanding for people who chase after all the wrong things in order to satisfy their spiritual hunger. If my body starts to complain after only a few hours without food, imagine the many souls who are suffering deeply after going for years without Jesus, the only true spiritual food.

I realize that sometimes I eat mindlessly, out of boredom, or to comfort myself. Fasting teaches me to make use of food and other comforts more mindfully and with greater appreciation. Fasting empties us out so that God can fill us up.

If a fast is going well (not by my own efforts but by God’s grace), my body stops complaining and a spiritual awareness kicks in. My desire for food disappears, in fact. I become interiorly docile and peaceful, and my body and my mind become aware of what my spirit lives daily—longing for the day of perfect union with Jesus. “My soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me keeps vigil for you.” (Isaiah 26:9)

Just as often, a fast won’t go so well, and I arrive home from work hungry and irritable. That is the time to humbly accept my human weakness and break my fast so that I can contribute to a peaceful, happy atmosphere in my home and not make my penance a cross for the people I live with.

Fasting is definitely worth doing. If you have trouble persevering in a fast, try offering it up for a particular intention or for a particular person who needs your prayers. Use your fast to make reparation for a specific fault or sin—one of your own or one of the “societal” sins, such as abortion, sins against chastity, pornography, gambling, and so on. God will honor every effort.

(This article originally appeared in the Family Centered Faith Formation News, volume 4, issue 6, February 2007, produced by the Holy Trinity Office of Religious Education, Westmont IL)

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“Union with God is achieved when man’s intellectual powers seek truth, when his volitional powers choose good instead of evil, and his affective or emotional powers seek beauty.”–Quigley

Quigley who? I dunno. Just Quigley.

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A Word That Means ‘Divorced’

by Clare Siobhan

(This article originally appeared in the January-February 2007 issue of Faith & Family Magazine.)

I hate describing myself as “divorced.”

Somehow that word implicitly says, “Yes, I’m divorced and proud of it! Good riddance to him!” As if I actually want to be living this way.

I wish there were a single word that encompassed everything the word “divorced” has come to mean for me.

I wish there were a word that meant, “Yes, I’m divorced, but I don’t believe in divorce; I didn’t then and I don’t now, but it was kind of forced upon me by the no-fault divorce laws. My husband had checked the box that said “irreconcilable differences.” I don’t think our differences were irreconcilable, but once you find yourself the respondent in a petition for the dissolution of marriage, there’s not much you can do.

The judge even made a point of saying to my soon-to-be ex-husband, “Don’t worry, you will get your divorce.” His divorce. Not mine.

Is there a word that says, “Not only do I not believe in divorce, I thought my marriage was divorce-proof”?

We learned Natural Family Planning before the wedding and practiced it in accordance with the Catholic Church. We both agreed that divorce would never be an option for us. We were committed to the lifestyle of Dad supporting the family and Mom being the primary at-home caregiver and educator of the children. We were leaders in our parish choir. We agreed on the moral and religious upbringing of the children. We adopted a child from overseas. We volunteered with the local pro-life group. We even taught Natural Family Planning, for Pete’s sake.

How did we end up divorced?

When someone asks you if you’re married, single, or divorced, simply answering “I’m divorced” does not quite express the drowning feeling that comes with realizing one person cannot hold down a full-time job, keep the house decent, keep food in the fridge, keep close watch on the children’s schoolwork, friends, spiritual upbringing, encourage them to grow in faith and virtue, keep the lawn tended, manage maintenance and improvements on the house, take care of the pets, make sure the children practice their instruments and do their homework, take them to basketball practice or the occasional gymnastics program, make sure the laundry gets done, pay the bills on time, manage the endless stacks of papers that seem to accumulate all over the house, take the children to the dentist, the doctor, arrange for childcare when school is not in session, and so on endlessly …

One person can’t do all of that and do a consistently good job at it, especially when the children’s father does nothing to help and in fact seems hell-bent on undermining my attempts to bring them up.

He refuses to help pay for the children’s Catholic education and does not reimburse me for any of the children’s medical expenses. He allows the children to watch movies that I wouldn’t let them watch, listen to music I wouldn’t let them listen to, and do things I wouldn’t let them do. On several occasions one of the children has asked him if he’ll buy them new shoes. His reply? “That’s Mom’s job.”

Perhaps there’s a single word that says, “Even though I’m alone and struggling daily with the weight of too many responsibilities and not enough time, money or energy, I admit to some ambivalence.” As difficult as this single mom lifestyle is, it’s better than what living with him became: our marriage looked perfect on paper, but of course it was difficult. We each struggled with our disappointment and disillusionment in our own way, but twelve years into it his disappointment and disillusionment with our marriage and also with his career led to a mental health crisis in which he became suicidal. The upheaval and stress in our family was already unbearable, but as part of his therapy, he embarked upon a career change which entailed relocating us all to another part of the state and entering a full-time graduate school program funded by the proceeds of our house sale.

I’m embarrassed to admit that at the time I actually thought this all-out pursuit of his dream was a good idea.

To say that things rapidly went from bad to worse is quite an understatement. You couldn’t possibly understand unless you had been there. He threw himself into his re-education with a single-minded zeal that left our already-sputtering marriage dead in its wake. I was alone with the children every day, home-schooling them, and alone every night after the kids went to sleep because he would leave the apartment and go to his studio, often not returning until breakfast the following morning.

On the few nights he did stay home I was still “alone,” or worse, having another one of those knock-down, drag-out, plate-throwing, epithet-hurling arguments. I had never cried so much in my entire life, before or since, as I did during those bleak final months before his aggressive and erratic behavior prompted me to call the police and have him removed from our home to the local psychiatric ward.

He called me from the ward two days later to say he wasn’t coming back.

Even now, more than four years later, I still steer myself into the circular mental rut of second-guessing my phone call because it led to the debacle of our separation and ultimately to our divorce. Was it really so bad? Lots of people live with worse marriages than this.

Or do they?

Does raising his fist to strike me, body-checking me backwards into the bathroom, and then stomping on my foot count as spousal abuse? Was I supposed to wait until he really injured me before I called the police? I wrote him emails and spoke to him on the phone saying I wanted to be reconciled with him, but he never responded.

Should I have been more insistent?

When he filed for divorce, is there anything I could have done to stop it from going forward? How do I encapsulate in one word the anxiety of wondering if I could have done more to save the marriage? Worse, wondering if I didn’t do more because deep down I really didn’t want the children or myself to go back into that situation?

How can you sum up the loneliness and unease you feel as a single person in a couple’s world?
My close Catholic friends are welcoming, understanding and accommodating, but sometimes they’ll say something, or one of my prayer group friends will lift up an intention “for all our husbands,” or I’ll see one of these couples exchange a special look or someone will announce that they’re expecting another baby.

Those moments can be difficult.

My non-Catholic friends and family don’t understand why I’m not dating. Because there’s no annulment, I tell them, which at the moment is a convenient excuse. What if the annulment is granted? After my experience, I think I would run screaming from the prospect of a second marriage.

When I first meet someone new, especially at my parish, I always hope that person is not as critical of divorcees as I used to be. I used to assume divorce was always the mutual decision of moral weaklings, people who couldn’t tough it out during the hard times, people who too easily threw in the towel because working it out was just too much work or would require the eating of more crow than either party could stomach.

I was better than those people.

I know better now. I am a towel-throwing moral weakling with no taste for crow. My husband and I had younger married friends, who looked up to us, who were stunned by the news of our divorce. I’m still stunned at how far we fell, and yet, this view from the bottom enables me to see how arrogant, self-confident, and judgmental I was.

What do I know, anyway? My husband and I had all the answers and look what happened to us.

Everything is a gift from God; anything good is purely his doing, not mine. When I thought I had it all and knew it all, all I had was my own self-righteousness and self-sufficient pride.

Now that I have very little and know only that I failed miserably at my vocation, my eyes are opened and I can finally see God’s hand in my life as he faithfully provides for me and my children. His mercies are brand new every day; he is my portion and cup, the Divine Spouse, the beloved of my soul.

Is there a word for all of these mixed-up feelings?

How can I hate being divorced and yet be relieved at the same time? What do you call the embarrassment of being so handily un-high-horsed coupled with the paradoxical sense of gratitude to God for such a fruitful humiliation? How do you describe in one word the sense of being overwhelmed by everything but knowing that in Christ you can do all things if you lean on Him him and trust totally in him?

I used to look down on people who described themselves as “divorced”. But that’s only because I didn’t realize how much meaning and experience could force its way into such a small word.

A word that more adequately sums up everything the children and I have been through — the anguish, the shame, the frustration, the sense of loss — all strangely illuminated by a stubborn hope-in-spite-of-it-all, is The Cross.

These days I don’t feel the cross of my divorce as acutely as I did two or three years ago, but sometimes it still digs deep. Those are good times to remember to offer it all up for my friends and family members who are still married — all married couples, in fact — knowing that if it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody. (originally appeared in Faith & Family Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007)

Help for troubled marriages:
Retrouvaille: very high success rate for healing severely troubled marriages.
National Marriage Encounter

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I read more than one book simultaneously, but this is extreme, even for me! (Click on the picture to read the titles.)

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Welcome to Clare’s blog, which I undertake in direct violation of this adage, attributed to Samuel Johnson “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

www.samueljohnson.com