by Wayne Allensworth Christina’s World (Andrew Wyeth) Once upon a time in a world that seems like a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a creative writing piece inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s painting. I was 13 or so, and the paper was for an English class. The teacher liked it and read it aloud to her classes. I can’t remember what I wrote, but that painting made quite an impression on the young me...
By Wayne Allensworth (Factfile.org) The man who was our greatest living writer, a man who wrestled with God along with the ghosts of Faulkner, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Conrad, has passed away at the age of 89. May he rest in peace after having struggled mightily as an artist with the big questions—meaning, purpose, God and Man, life and death, good and evil–he never let go of in his...
By Wayne Allensworth The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, is a personal favorite of mine and a movie that influenced a whole generation of filmmakers, the generation of Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese. Spielberg has said that he watches The Searchers before beginning each new film project, and the opening doorway sequence (pictured below) has shown up in other films–notably...
By Wayne Allensworth On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read verses 1-10 of the Genesis creation narrative as they orbited the moon: We have lost the sense of wonder, of enchantment with and in our world. So many of us have become enveloped in a technological cocoon that regaining it will be difficult. Man has successfully manipulated his...
By Wayne Allensworth Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s Minstrel of the Dawn, the travelling troubadour of Don Quixote, who warned Sundown to take care, languished in loneliness In the Early Morning Rain, and who wondered what would be discovered If You Could Read my Mind, has passed on at the age of 84. Sometimes I thought he could read our collective mind, as his songs were at once deeply personal and...
My favorite Easter hymn:
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
By Wayne Allensworth The picture below, of Christ being led to a snowy Golgotha, is from a movie that, along with others from the film’s director, have often been chosen as among the hundred best ever produced. Rating movies can get complicated, but nevertheless this film belongs in any cinematic canon. The director is Russian Andrey Tarkovsky. The film is his Andrey Rublev (1966) about a...
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