Wood, glorious wood: Festivals showcase forests to furniture

Most people have on their long list of hopes the dream vacation, the dream house or the dream car. For me, though, it was always the dream table.

I was never interested in interior design, per se, but had seen so many gorgeous, mod conference tables in art galleries where I'd worked throughout the years that I nursed a secret yearning to one day have a huge, contemporary dining room table made to similarly minimal specifications with some exquisite wood or another. And, having put myself through college as a picture framer, I was more aware of exotic woods than the average home furnishings customer.

After logging in seemingly endless hours cutting, sanding, finishing and assembling mouldings from around the globe, I knew my wengé from my curly bubinga, the former of which is a dark grey-brown pinstriped wood and the latter known for its distinctively vivid, cherry-colored waves of grain. Both are from Africa and are but two of dozens of striking woods I came across during my framing years and with which I had ongoing aesthetic love affairs, all the while wondering if this was the one — the wood I'd use when I finally had my dream table built.

For a while, it was the bold and beautiful Americans that wooed me: the buttery ash, warm maple, stately walnut and handsome oak. Then I became infatuated with warmer clime woods, such as the Mexican cocobolo, Hawaiian koa, Brazilian jatoba and Tanzanian tambootie. Eventually, however, I met a wood like no other and knew the minute I laid eyes on it that it would one day become my table: purpleheart, a positively luscious specimen, whose name says it all, from South America.

The color is like nothing else, particularly after it's been freshly chopped or sanded; think 1999 Beaucastel Châteauneuf du Pape or just your favorite raspberry jam. The hue is spectacularly rich, with a vivid, lush glow and a grain like the finest silk taffeta.

It also proved to be the heaviest, densest, most difficult material I'd ever tried to cut. After learning the hard way that it must be shaved in paper-thin slices, I was not surprised when the supplier informed me, a little too late, that it has "severe blunting effects" on saws and is so strong, they make diving boards out of it. Still, it was always worth every exasperated grumble and trashed mitre blade.

Nevertheless, though it made lovely picture frames, what I really wanted was The Table, so when I moved here to Vermont — the place whence Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel obtained their best wooden ware — I knew the time had come to find a craftsperson who could make my dream come true. Mace Wicker not only came highly recommended and was completely amenable to using my basic — albeit massive — design, he also knew an ideal source for purpleheart, just up the road.

Woods of the World had huge 13-foot planks of 3-inch thick, rough purpleheart that, in its raw state, looks a bit like the flank of a prehistoric creature with gnarled bumps and a dull, gray exterior. I wondered if this could possibly be the same satiny, claretish stuff I was after. The proprietor explained that it most definitely was and, in answer to my eco-fretful questions, insisted it was from a fully vetted company with harvesting practices that do not in any way threaten the Amazonian rain forest. Whew! That would have been a deal breaker, so I was hoping for good news.

Within a couple of weeks, Mace and his helpers were lugging the most spectacular piece of furniture I'd ever seen into my house, in the form of a gleaming 77-inch by 42-inch slab of perfectly finished purpleheart and four block legs, all of which they bolted together using hidden steel plates that Mace had crafted specifically for this project. He'd also invented a decidedly Roman device consisting of two steel cross bars embedded in the table's underside, to prevent it from warping. Five years, countless dinner parties, household projects, homework marathons and perpetual creative kids' chaos later and it's still my dream table — versatile, hip, elegant and as durable as a boulder.

So, when I set out to do a bit of research on the Vermont Fine Furniture and Woodworking Festival — which takes place this weekend in Woodstock — the first thing I looked for on the Web site was Mace's name. Surprised not to find it, I thought I'd better check in and make sure my table hadn't destroyed his creative zeal as well as his saw blades.

Before I had a chance to ask about his woodworking career, we were recalling the monumental undertaking that was my table, chuckling in retrospect about the perhaps inadvisable decision to use such a formidable wood for it and eventually ended up talking about trees, rare and regional, and the many benefits and hardships of being a woodworker in Vermont.

When I asked if any woods are now considered endangered, specifically purpleheart (e.g. should I feel guilty when I spread the N.Y. Times across my table or not), he explained that purpleheart is, in fact, often considered a "junk" wood in the sense that during the harvesting of mahogany trees, which is more controversial, they frequently find purpleheart growing wild among them and take them out as well. Of course, the dolphin-tuna equation popped into my head, but my concern was duly assuaged and we continued what was a wonderfully informative conversation during which I learned all kinds of things about the wild variations in trends, widths and pricing in the industry.

A couple of days later, my talk with Kathleen Wanner, assistant director of the Vermont Wood Manufacturers Association and one of the organizers of this weekend's Vermont Fine Furniture and Woodworking Festival, was equally enthusiastic and knowledgeable.

"We're building awareness of the authenticity, tradition and integrity of locally-made wood products and the long history of fine craftsmanship in Vermont," Wanner explained. "Most of the woodworkers here are very environmentally conscious and if they can't use regional wood, they try to make sure it comes from sustainably managed forests."

The Woodworking Festival features the work of 40 artisans, 12 of whom will be demonstrating their skills, with great music and food throughout the day as well. The event dovetails with the Forest Festival, sponsored by Marsh-Billings Rockefeller National Park, which includes a junior ranger program on environmental stewardship, wildlife habitats and clean air and water. In addition, there will be horse-drawn carriage rides, a working sawmill demonstration, lessons in making walking sticks and the Audubon Society will lead bird watching walks.

"When we first moved to this location three years ago, we thought it would make sense to do these as companion events and it's been a great partnership with Marsh-Billings," Wanner said. "A shuttle bus runs back and forth all day, so folks can see and purchase furniture and crafts and learn about forest ecology as well. It's very hands-on and interesting for all ages."

Vendors range from sole-proprietorships to large furniture-making companies, but I was curious as to whether solo craftsmen with small home workshops — like Mace — participate as well. "They do, though it's a challenge for us to find these folks who are working out in the backwoods making beautiful furniture one piece at a time," Wanner said.

As for whether Mace still does woodworking, alas, he does not. When I gingerly asked if it was my dream table that made him change careers he assured me, as best he could anyway, that it was more that he just wanted to switch gears, at least for the near future. These days, he installs woodstoves and was clearly tickled to report that one stove was recently delivered on a palette made of — what else — purpleheart.

Online: www.vermontwoodfestival.org

The greatest of virtues: Gratitude is healthy--for artists and art lovers alike

Vincent Van Gogh, whose churning fields of color and contemplative self-portraits seem to surge with generosity of creative spirit, said, "I have walked this earth for 30 years and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir."

For most artists, a muse usually comes in the form of a person, place or specific experience rather than an altruistic impulse or sense of indebtedness and, indeed, by its very definition, art is often a tacit expression of the id, the ego or, in some cases, the unapologetic, over-inflated bravado of its creator.

Though any form of artistic output requires a modicum of inward reflection, there is a great deal of work being made in every medium that goes far deeper than navel-gazing inanity or self-aggrandizing indulgence.

Van Gogh didn't have to paint those sunflowers, that starry night or his old, tatty shoes and yet his humble sense of appreciation — just for being here, on this earth — moved him to push paint around on a canvas and make pictures that have been inspiring generations of painters, writers, actors and musicians ever since.

Likewise, though German artist Käthe Kollwitz was forced by the Nazis from her post at Berlin's Akademie der Künste and feared for her safety while still making poignant charcoal portraits of wartime suffering in a tiny studio, she was grateful amid her fear and turmoil.

"There are moments on most days when I feel a deep and sincere gratitude," she said "when I sit at the open window and there is a blue sky or moving clouds."

According to Robert A. Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, the benefits of gratitude go far beyond creative inspiration. As editor-in-chief of the "Journal of Positive Psychology," instructor of courses with intriguing titles including the Psychology of Religion and Personality Theory, and author of numerous professional publications, studies and books on the topic, such as "Words of Gratitude For Mind, Body and Soul" (Templeton Foundation Press), Emmons has examined the mechanisms and benefits of gratitude from varying angles.

When I asked him recently if there is a measurable difference between simply feeling gratitude and actually expressing it, he answered in the extreme affirmative and had the stats to back it up.

"Yes, there are added benefits," he said. "Psychological research has shown that translating thoughts into concrete language, whether oral or written, has advantages over just thinking the thoughts. A very fascinating study in 2005 examined what happened to people when they wrote a 'gratitude letter' to someone very important in their life whom they'd never properly thanked and then delivered the letter to the person and read it to them.

"At the immediate post-test, after one week of doing the assigned exercise, participants in the gratitude visit condition were happier and less depressed," Emmons said. "This boost in happiness and decrease in depressive symptoms were maintained at follow-up assessments one week and one month, and three months later."

Writer Gladys Bronwyn Stern summed it up decades ago when she said "Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone," but it's good to know that it's been scientifically proven.

Emmons' latest book, "Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier," published this year by Houghton-Mifflin, examines ways that having an attitude of gratitude can help us to cultivate more meaningful interpersonal relationships. With comprehensive research, case studies and a motivating list of ways we can develop a stronger sense of gratitude, Emmons shows that the act of giving thanks is tantamount to a multivitamin for the psyche and should be a part of our daily routine.

So, in the spirit of Van Gogh, Kollwitz and Emmons, I'm compelled to cite just a few of the many reasons I'm replete with gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day.

Unbeknownst to many of us, there are several arts organizations in Southern Vermont that, in addition to offering hefty rosters of traditional classes to the public, are also facilitating unusually innovative arts programs for specific segments of the population who are largely disenfranchised because of medical or economic reasons.

In 2004, the Vermont Arts Exchange, based in Bennington, founded The Healing Arts Initiative: New Pathways to Health, which brings customized outreach classes to health facilities in collaboration with administrators, faculty and students throughout New England. By integrating the visual arts, movement, music, writing and technology courses into staff training and patient care, these programs empower patients to find their own lasting, inner muse, thereby infusing rehab, recovery and pain management with the singularly healing power of art.

Then there's the Brattleboro Dance School, offering Art For All/Creative Dance for adults with cognitive and developmental disabilities, utilizing nonverbal communication and social skills, and creatively solving movement challenges while also incorporating instruments into the experience.

Kids benefit from community courses as well, when each year the Great River Arts Institute in Bellows Falls offers their low-cost Open Art after-school programs to more than 200 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, promoting literacy via multimedia art projects. Many classes result in handmade books constructed of various elements including original photographs taken by the students in their own neighborhoods, beautiful journals from nature walks or illustrated fantasy stories.

That's just a small sampling of the diligent, visionary work Southern Vermont arts organizations are doing to ensure that challenged or marginalized residents find creative paths toward well-being, education and inclusion in our communities.

Art is therapeutic in every way and I am very grateful for the generous people who make it more hands-on and accessible to all, along with the thousands of other folks who keep this area steeped in cultural pursuits by running galleries, museums, libraries, theaters, independent book stores, CD shops, art supplies and music stores.

Today, as you sit before a table laden with tryptophanic poultry and brimming bowls of comfort food, remember the words of Roman philosopher Cicero: "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."

Then there are the post-repast sentiments of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who once said, "I feel a very unusual sensation; if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude."

Perhaps most fitting is the acceptance speech that movie director Steven Soderbergh made at the 2001 Academy Awards, in which he asserted, "I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don't care if it's a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music … anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. This world would be unlivable without art."

Hear, hear and bon appétit!

Frailty of the human condition in one act: Oldcastle Theatre takes on the nature of memory

The most satiating theatrical experiences are those that take up residence in one's psyche for days after a performance, whether the aftertaste is joy, melancholy or simply an intriguingly fresh perspective on an old theme.

Take this week, for instance. Last Saturday, I attended the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "The Seagull," one of Chekhov's four major plays, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Days later, I'm still immersed in deep thought about the story, with its ensemble of troubled characters woven together by taut threads of torment, resentment, jealousy and unrequited love.

Its grip was reinforced by the scenes Chekhov had us witness and all they imply about what must have gone before them in the evolution of the tale. Nearly every script's narrative arc has as its foundation the characters' collective history, or back story, which gradually becomes evident as the play unfolds. Our assessment of each individual on the stage shifts and expands as each line is delivered until we've pieced together a picture of the past, which renders the present plausible and ripe.

So when I spoke with Eric Peterson, director at the Oldcastle Theatre in Bennington, about its production of Lee Blessing's "A Body of Water," which begins tomorrow night, I was a little taken aback.

"There is no 'Ah-ha!' moment when everything falls in to line," he said of Blessing's one-act, five-scene psychological drama. "There are more questions than answers and I always love plays like that."

Running through Oct. 7, "A Body of Water" is bound to ensnare our thoughts because it is — by its very premise — completely void of back story and yet brimming with possible scenarios via our own inexorable speculation and Blessing's clean, almost poetic dialogue.

A man, Moss, and woman, Avis, wake up in an unfamiliar mountain home surrounded by water. They know the identity of neither themselves nor the other. At first, their bewilderment engenders a modicum of levity as they try to ascertain the nature of their relationship and location.

"The first scene is farcical," Peterson explains. "It starts out like a comedy but then becomes a psychological mystery."

This darkening arrives in the form of a young woman named Wren, who supplies them with an explanation of their circumstances that is wrenching and ominous. Their only contact with the outside world, she eventually proffers two entirely different versions of who they are and why there are there, her own ostensible role in their lives also shifting and infusing the dynamic with further anguish and confusion. She is at once caretaker and tormenter, and it's possible that she is also their daughter, but, then again, perhaps not.

"A Body of Water" is a disquieting, thought-provoking meditation on the profound might of memory and the staggeringly crucial role it plays in our sense of self and our cognizance of reality. As Moss and Avis are yanked from one emotional chessboard to another, even down to the careers they may or may not have had, a sinister veil of existential panic settles like a disorienting dust over the proceedings.

The excruciatingly tenuous explanations that Wren offers them serves to dangle their own capacity to trust where it is perpetually out of reach, recalibrating the magnitude of human fragility and reminding us of our own vulnerability in any relationship. The cruelty Wren wields as she continues to force Moss and Avis to revise their views of themselves and each other several times over makes their plight that much more discomfiting and untenable.

Though they are obviously intelligent, educated people, Moss and Avis' inherent affability juxtaposed against Wren's obtuse malice renders the equation dangerously imbalanced. Avis' candor in trying to describe the situation — saying that her memory "went jogging and never came back" — only underscores the disparity of psychological wherewithal between the couple and their keeper.

One can't help but consider the terror of neurological disorders like amnesia or Alzheimer's anew when encountering the scenario that Blessing constructs. "A Body of Water" quickly dispenses with any misguided notion that ignorance is bliss, for it is not the lack of information that's frightening, but the idea that any one person could have the authority to assign identity and meaning to another.

That one's total sense of security could hinge on another human being's potential ethics, stability and foibles is a sobering concept and these weighty notions comprise one of the many layers in the psychological strata of Blessing's work.

The distorted scrim through which Moss and Avis attempt to piece together their place in the world brings to mind a 1962 surrealist film called "Exterminating Angel" by Spanish director Luis Buñuel in which the collective reason and rationality of a group of people slowly crumbles under the weight of perceived abandonment.

Guests at a dinner party are rendered helpless when the servants depart and, believing they've been trapped in the room, core fears and impulses take over. Their grasp on reality slowly evaporates, driving some to survivalist measures, others to violence and even suicide.

While the path from lightness to darkness in "A Body of Water" has a dash of Eugene Ionesco meets David Lynch to it, the unconventional plotline, with its intrinsic absence of character development, also recalls Samuel Beckett's rejection of traditional theatrical canons and his signature distillation of human traits and emotions.

We encounter a middle-aged couple and — because of the socio-cultural decoding expertise with which most of us assume we've been duly inculcated — our impulse is to presume basic truths about these people based on their demeanor, their eloquence and their appearance. With the methodical pacing and steady meting out of further clues, we are forced to discard the template against which we typically measure our experience of people because here it has been dismantled wholesale.

Sartre's "No Exit" comes to mind as well, with its confinement of three people in a room for the duration of the play and the declaration that "l'enfer, c'est les autres" or "the underworld [Hell], it is the others." They excavate and examine one another's faults, fears and transgressions, but ultimately their own thoughts are what truly hold them captive.

Blessing's choice to denude Moss and Avis of any personal history or identity and to go through the discovery process together seems to have, at its most elemental source, at least some avowal of French philosopher Jacques Derrida's convictions about the self and the other.

According to Derrida, the concept of the self is interdependent with the concept of the other. He believed that the metaphysical works of numerous philosophers before him validated his theory that these concepts are implicitly defined by opposition and cannot be articulated separately.

Peterson echoes the theme. "It's about identity," he affirms. "If I don't know who you are, can I know who I am?"

As to whether "A Body of Water" will linger like Chekhov in the minds of its audiences, with the Oldcastle Theatre's all-Equity company taking on a consummate writer like Blessing — who is renowned for compelling works such as "Chesapeake" and "A Walk In the Woods" — I think it's a given, and so does Peterson.

"The thing I like about this play is that people will be talking about it for days," he attests. "They'll disagree and nobody will be wrong."

Online: oldcastletheatreco.org

Finding the perpetual student within: Education is everyone's oyster — at any age

A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

When Alexander Pope penned these pointed heroic couplets in 1709, they were intended as earnest advice to writers and "criticks" — encouraging them to learn their craft well in order to best uphold the standards of the Greek and Roman writers he so admired.

A mere four lines from the total 738 that comprise his epic comment on the literary scene of his day, "An Essay On Criticism," they encapsulate Pope's lifelong study of ancient writers such as Petronius, Virgil and Homer.

As someone who concurs wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but who is nevertheless overwhelmed by the centuries of wisdom one could and should digest, I fear there are vats of knowledge I will never guzzle simply because there isn't enough time.

The key is to drink deeply of the topics that truly float one's boat and the timing couldn't be better. A hefty number of organizations across southern Vermont are about to begin courses with enticing titles such as "Jazz in America," "Drawing For the Absolutely Terrified" and "Pirates, Jack Tars and Seadogs," in addition to more standard fare, including creative writing, ceramics, yoga and cooking. Regardless of medium or muse, there is a remarkable roster of classes being offered throughout the region by outstanding institutions.

Of course, one also must shed any notions that adulthood signifies the end of education; though we're all enrolled in the school of life, sometimes the orbit in which we find ourselves gets a bit predictable and we don't expand our horizons. It can also be a daunting notion to re-enter the world of studying, note-taking or even, yee gads, pop-quizzes.

Nevertheless, there are those eternal students who, no matter what's happening in their professional or personal lives, are always taking classes in one intriguing subject or another.

Last May, at age 95, Nola Ochs became the oldest person to earn a college degree, graduating in the same class as her granddaughter with a bachelor's degree in — what else — history.

I remember an older gentleman in a women's studies class I took in college. He was 64 years old, semi-retired and just wanted to expand his horizons. Despite a lot of sideways looks from his punky peers and a dismissive teacher who was clearly disquieted by both his wisdom and his gender, he stuck it out and ended up being the most interesting person in the class.

While the professor seemed to imply that women's issues did not predate Betty Friedan's pivotal tome, "The Feminine Mystique," this plucky guy — the only y-chromosome in the class — had a great deal of insight into the preceding decades that spawned the entire movement, having seen firsthand how things like WWII changed the socio-economic landscape for the women in his life.

He was also the only person in the class beside me who knew anything about the suffragettes and we traded family lore about our English great aunties who were card-carrying members. His presence in the class certainly expanded my knowledge of the experience of women in this country and I was further inspired by the way he seemed to approach every exam, discussion and paper with the same zeal as a kid downing an icy glass of lemonade on a hot day. He drank it up in a way no 20-year-old did.

Likewise, at about age 70, the father of a good friend in California began regularly auditing classes at Stanford in areas he always wanted to study, but never could during his five decades as a psychologist. Sometimes it's art history, sometimes world religions, but it's always fascinating to him. And yet, he'd be hard pressed to find a broader range of subjects at that hallowed institution than we have available right here.

Case in point, at the Community College of Vermont, the curriculum goes deep and wide: Shakespeare, African literature, travel writing, cultural anthropology, mythology, the Holocaust, visual cultures of the modern world, zoology, medical Spanish, music theory, the psychology of consciousness, macroeconomics, power electronics, even fossils and evolution.

The Howard Dean Center in Springfield has an impressive lineup as well, with courses as varied as Web design, carpentry, horticulture, audio engineering and film as art.

Smaller organizations also have an eclectic assortment of classes and workshops. At Main Street Arts in Saxtons River, there's meditation, line dancing, string band, drumming, painting, memoir writing, storytelling and acting. The Writer's Center in White River Junction offers intensive courses in poetry, fiction and jumpstarting your novel.

Great River Arts Institute in Bellows Falls is offering still life painting, art of the stone wall, art on the rails letterpress, printmaking and encaustic painting (using a wax medium that suspends the pigment, in the tradition of Jasper Johns and other modernists).

River Arts School in Brattleboro lists staples such as life drawing and illustration, as well as an increasingly popular technique known as book arts, which explains the construction and decoration of an object considered by many to be as sculptural as it is literary.

The Vermont Arts Exchange in North Bennington includes sessions of landscape and portrait painting, precious metal, jewelry making, rug making and oil pastels. It is also the school with the painting and drawing classes for those who are "Absolutely Terrified," which is some of the best PR I've ever encountered in the world of education.

Out of pure curiosity, I took a peek at what Stanford is offering this semester and, frankly, nothing wowed me as much as what's available here in Vermont. There's even a class there called "The Time of the Object," which was so very uninspiring I couldn't even bring myself to read the description.

On that note, I leave you with a list of the organizations hereabouts offering far more thrilling options, but first a bit more of Pope's motivating iambic pentameter:

Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art
Art from that Fund each just Supply provides,
Works without Show, and without Pomp presides:
In some fair Body thus th' informing Soul
With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the whole,
Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains;
It self unseen, but in th' Effects, remains.

Online

www.thewriterscenterwrj.com

www.vtartxchange.org

www.mainstreetarts.org

www.greatriverarts.org

www.rivergalleryschool.org

www.froghollow.org

www.deancenter.org

www.galleryatthevault.com

Giving voice to what we believe: NPR producer explores universal notion

On the first day of fifth grade, circa 1972, my classmates and I were instructed to write a one-page essay on what we believed in — no mean feat for a 10-year-old who spent most of the time fretting that her nose was too elfin or with said protuberance buried in Enid Blyton books or Betty and Veronica comics.

Looking back on where my priorities lay at that age, my essay was probably a rambling jumble of unfinished thoughts about how I believed that kids should not leave homework until the last minute, that older sisters should not bully younger sisters and that rice pudding was really gross. In other words, it was likely a whingy roster of average pre-adolescent obsessions about foibles, siblings and general daily trials such as unappetizing dishes at dinnertime.

Lucky for me, that myopia was soon ripped open by a trio of groovy, newbie teachers who, in the "combined classroom" setting popular in those days, did their darndest to get about 60 kids to reconsider their world from new and, to use the lexicon of the day, radical angles.

There was Mr. Berry, who addressed us as if we, too, were 30-ish political activists who cared deeply about things like the Vietnam war, littering and Jungian psychology; Mr. Lindbergh who, with dulcet tones and gentle manner, ended each day reading aloud to us from books such as "Where the Red Fern Grows" or "Travels With Charley;" and Ms. Ayling who taught us about Bella Abzug, the women's' rights movement and how the birth control pill heralded a social revolution.

And yet it wasn't only school that kept me steeped in thought-provoking ideas and sensibilities. With working-class parents who recalled the terror of buzz bombs during WWII, an atheist grandmother who regularly disparaged Nixon, my older sister canvassing for the McGovern-Shriver campaign after school every day and perpetual familial fears that my brother might be drafted, I already had some fairly strong opinions about the world. It was just that no one had ever asked for them.

Plenty of folks go through life keeping their beliefs largely to themselves, for one reason or another, although given the right opportunity even the quietest voices can rise and be heard.

"This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women," a collection of 80 absorbing essays based on the NPR show of the same name, gives voice to private citizens and public figures. Based on eminent journalist Edward R. Murrow's venerated 1950s-era "This I Believe" radio show, the book contains views from present day luminaries such as Gloria Steinem, Colin Powell and Eve Ensler, as well as those who were in Murrow's original broadcasts, including Helen Keller, Albert Einstein and Oscar Hammerstein.

Some are simple and moving, others complex and bold, but all are fearless, forthright and timeless.

A few entries paint social observations with a broad philosophical brush, such as Mr. Hammerstein, who declared: "I am a man who believes he is happy. What makes it unusual is that a man who is happy seldom tells anyone. The unhappy man is more communicative. He is eager to recite what is wrong with the world, and he seems to have a talent for gathering a large audience. It is a modern tragedy that despair has so many spokesmen, and hope so few."

Likewise, the words of Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan, brim with an egalitarian celebration of humanity: "I believe in the brotherhood and equality of man. I recognize no division or privilege based on race, color, family or wealth. The only badge of honor and nobility that I recognize is the purity and righteousness of a man's life."

At 7 p.m. Saturday, Jay Allison, who co-edited the book and co-produces the radio show with fellow NPR reporter Dan Gediman, will speak at Northshire Books along with Casey Murrow, the son of Edward R. Murrow.

With the immense popularity of the radio shows and the book, the breadth of their contributors and the journalistic brilliance of the founder himself, "This I Believe" is an ever-pertinent source of insight and connection in which a core impulse of human nature is eloquently and mightily manifest.

Edward R. Murrow once said, "The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it."

Respectfully expanding upon Mr. Murrow's discerning observation, Allison and Gediman also created "This I Believe," the Web site and nonprofit organization, "to promote the free and respectful exchange of ideas." Giving anyone and everyone an opportunity to express his or her personal philosophies via an online database of personal essays from around the globe, the site invites regular folks like you and me to tell the world what we believe.

A remarkably intimate peek into the achievements, hardships, regrets and revelations of people from more than 70 countries, the site is an expansive example of the computer at its best, making the world seem smaller by sewing the experience of humanity together across the ether.

"This I Believe" asks all of us to look within and express our innermost credos, though it's not the first such publication to do so. Way back in 1941, a book called "Vermont Is Where You Find It" by Keith Warren Jennison asked the same thing, in so many words. Pairing stark portraits of Vermonters with wry questions and observations, one page asks "What do you know today … for sure?"

Go to the "This I Believe" Web site and you'll see just what 241 fellow Vermonters know for sure. They believe in a great many things, including the power of goodness, of laughter and of working together. They believe that everyday life is filled with profound moments, that creatures should not suffer because of human greed and that toddlers can be our teachers. They believe in the right to dignity, in giving oneself the gift of time and in hope. One woman even believes in soil and expounds upon her conviction as passionately and powerfully as her online kin.

The sum of these varied versions of "This I Believe" — the book, the old and new radio show and now this visionary database of personal principles — is a wealth of wisdom and compassion that serves to edify, inspire and galvanize us all.

It is particularly striking to note how many of the essays from the original show are germane to our present-day socio-political climate. Pearl S. Buck, who recorded her thoughts for Murrow's show in 1951, seems to have presaged the current state of international affairs.

"I believe that the normal human heart is born good. That is, it's born sensitive and feeling, eager to be approved and to approve, hungry for simple happiness and the chance to live. It neither wishes to be killed, nor to kill. If through circumstances, it is overcome by evil, it never becomes entirely evil. There remain in it elements of good, however recessive, which continue to hold the possibility of restoration."

One of the "This I Believe" online entries, from a man in Vermont, decisively synopsizes Murrow, Allison and Gediman's collective motivation: He believes there is a person inside all of us who needs to be heard.

Say what you have to say on the "This I Believe" Web site and head to Northshire Books for what is sure to be an enthralling evening built around one of the airwaves' most consistently meaningful shows.

Online: www.thisibelieve.org

www.northshire.com