One of the intentions of this blog—among other things—is to produce something my children can look back on and glean why I did what I did in raising them, and what some of my broader goals were. A crucial element in a well-rounded human being is some education in art. This is not to say that art is necessary for survival, but it offers a quality of life insofar as it allows you to tap into emotions belonging to situations you may never personally encounter.
I believe art is the expression of the human experience. I believe good art reaches the largest number of people because it touches something genuinely true. Understanding art does not require a shared identity, politics, or history. The singular element it requires is empathy—not necessarily empathy for the artist, but empathy for the expression of the human condition itself.
One powerful tool for cultivating this is poetry. The modern world is more inclined to understand poetry when it is paired with melody, but a dynamic poem can carry tremendous power on its own. When I was about twenty years old, I inherited a book from my grandmother titled Best Loved Poems of the American People. I still hold it with great reverence, and its poetry has served me on many occasions.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is The Raven. My first experience with it did not come from the book itself. Like many kids in the 1990s, much of my early exposure to culture came through cartoons. In one of the early Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, they performed an abridged version of The Raven, narrated by the incomparable James Earl Jones. That was my first encounter with the poem.
At its core, it is the story of a man lamenting the loss of his wife, haunted by a bird he cannot rid himself of—a creature that continually repeats the word “nevermore.” Whether the raven represents a demon or serves as a metaphor for something else is outside my expertise. After my father died, I experienced many dreams in which I awoke and had to return to a dark reality. These were painful moments that felt very much like being haunted. While loss is experienced differently by everyone, I can understand the terror of wondering whether a deep wound will ever heal.
There are several other poems I love as well. One is A Shepherd to His Love, another She Walks in Beauty. I often reflected on these poems when I felt for the nearest crush in my younger years. They held something poetic and true—something I felt in my soul for these women. While that passion ultimately faded, it remains important to have a place where adoration can dwell.
A Shepherd to His Love includes the line, “Come live with me and be my love.” She Walks in Beauty opens with, “She walks in beauty, like the night.” Having access to such expressions gave me tools I still carry today. Understanding what you feel can be deeply challenging. Finding fragments of a kindred soul written on paper can be deeply rewarding, because it allows you to walk away with a clearer understanding of a complex feeling. The adoration you feel has words—and you are free to adapt them and carry them with you as your own.
In the truest sense, I am a collection of poems, songs, television quips, and other small tools I have shaped into a personality. My expression has been influenced by people like Shakespeare, who wrote the line I used when I first started dating my wife: “Doubt thou the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love.” I meant to tell her that everything else in the world could be questioned—but never my love for her. Seventeen years this February, and I have kept that promise.
Ultimately, I want my children to possess personal depth. While I believe most people experience deep emotions, true depth comes from understanding those emotions—pulling at their strands, examining them, and expressing them intentionally. If you have met my children, you would likely find them to be verbose and colorful creatures. I am profoundly grateful for the personalities they bring into the world, and I hope that some of the fragments of human experience I absorbed through art have played a part in shaping them.
My hope is that they learn to engage fully in the range of the human experience—joy, sorrow, regret, lust, anger, jealousy. The fullest expression of humanity lies in our ability to share it. As people, we die alone, but we thrive in community. I simply want my children to find their place in the great village of the human experience.
This piece is the beginning of a series. In future entries, I want to return to specific poems, songs, films, books, and moments—some small, some defining—that helped me understand myself and others a little better. Not as prescriptions, but as offerings. These are the tools I found along the way.
If my children ever read this, my hope is not that they inherit my tastes, but that they inherit the habit of looking—of listening closely enough to recognize themselves in the experiences of others. Art taught me that we are never as alone as we feel, and never as separate as we imagine. If they can carry that with them into the village of the human experience, then this series will have done its work.
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