Reflections through Literature: Life, Death, Baseball

Reflections through Literature has grown out of a long career teaching at universities in several countries and raises basic questions about life such as the nature of mortality, the importance of love, the practice of attention, the need for heroism, the necessity of renunciation, the possibility of suicide, the importance of baseball, as well as the threat of nuclear annihilation, the difficulty of surviving brutal dictatorships, and so forth. These issues and others equally important have been examined by authors through their imaginary characters in literature from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim. Since fictional lives unlike human lives are complete; we as readers know more about Frodo or Leopold Bloom than we do about most people. Literature is therefore an excellent medium for focusing on issues central to living.