Author John Steinbeck at work.

Solitude & Loneliness: Pondering Steinbeck While Reading Thoreau

One of the great things about reading a lot is that it gives you the insights of triangulation. One book illuminates, interprets, and perhaps even disagrees with another, though the authors never met.
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Ai image of Clay behind the wheel of the Caddy with the late Senator Alan Simpson in the middle and author Jack Kerouac riding shotgun.

Running Out of Gas (And the Value of the Humanities)

I nearly ran out of gas yesterday on a remote highway in the Bitterroot Mountains. It was a winding, narrow road with no shoulder to pull off onto ... but more of this crisis later in the story.
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About 40 boxes of books culled from Clay’s massive personal library sit ready to be taken to their new home.

The Great Downsizing Campaign

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” — Thoreau
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John Carey, an early and influential mentor of Clay’s, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford University.

Remembering My Beloved Oxford University Mentor

Clay remembers an early and influential mentor, Professor John Carey of Oxford University.
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Are We Rome?

Answer: we are Rome … but are we doomed to suffer the Republic's fate? Clay parallels the Republics (Rome's and our own) considering ways to avoid Rome's calamitous end.
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A 1769 advertisement, placed by Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia Gazette, offering a reward for the return of an enslaved man named Sandy.

America at 250: The Racial Divide

Last week, I spoke at a symposium on race and the American Revolution. This essay is the result of my deliberations for that event and is one in a series of essays I’m writing reflecting on a range of issues as America approaches its 250th birthday.
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The Latest in My Great 2025 Downsizing Campaign

Friends have encouraged me to downsize for well more than a decade. I’m making progress!
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The World of Error in a Galaxy of Facts

Clay ponders the “Truth Taser.” The best invention since the Veg-O-Matic?
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Inspired by Thoreau and the inevitability of time, Clay undertakes sorting through a six-decade collection of thousands of books.

My Adventures in Downsizing

After spending five or six decades buying books, an enormous number of books, I have begun to downsize.
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A rare photograph of John Steinbeck, his dog Charley, and the truck camper, Rocinante, taken in the hills near Salinas, California. The image is one of the few that exist from Steinbeck's 1960 road trip that became the basis for Travels with Charley.

You Don’t End up Here By Accident: Rediscovering Steinbeck’s California Beneath a Lone Valley Oak.

Inspired by an image of the famous author in an old poster, and after years of searching, Listening to America’s Russ Eagle, with the help of intrepid friends, discovers the remote spot in the hills near Salinas, California, that John Steinbeck, his dog Charley, and the truck camper, Rocinante, visited on their 1960 journey.
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