Parabola Magazine

2 months ago | parabola.org | Tracy Cochran

“What was that?”“I think he’s saying, ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’”“What’s so special about cheesemakers?”In the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the eponymous British comedy troupe portrays the people in the very back of the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount. They are straining to hear these timeless teachings, which is funny partly because we can relate to the difficulty. The word they mishear is “peacemakers,” and they were to be the children of God.

2 months ago | parabola.org | Richard Smoley

Great and unreckoned timeBears forth the unseen and conceals what has been revealed. Sophocles, AjaxTime, says one definition, is the measure of change. But if everything changes, what constant can we measure change against? The answer in ordinary life is simple: we measure time by cycles that are, from our point of view, stable—notably the apparent rotations of the sun and moon around the earth.

2 months ago | parabola.org | Richard Whittaker

“There are periods in the life of humanity—often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character—when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge.

Oct 25, 2024 | parabola.org | Tracy Cochran

I longed to get away. I yearned to get in the car and drive up into the Adirondacks or maybe the Berkshires. I wasn’t longing for a particular destination—some little town with a view of the mountains that was good for walking around—I was seeking myself. I told people that I felt the poignancy of summer slipping away. But really what I was feeling was grief at the way my life was passing seemingly without me. I ached to pull myself out of the river of time.

Oct 25, 2024 | parabola.org | Kent Jones

The gold dagger letter-opener in the red leather sheath. The stacks of Agatha Christie novels, every page thumbed over. The broken orange umbrella with the chiffon ruffled edges. The framed mirror on the mantle. The back door with the coarsened edges that never got a paint job after 1974. The CD player that no longer opened, positioned over the sink. The dusty Pimm’s Cup bottle in the dark of the cupboard in the pantry. The grooves in the floorboards in the front hall.