World Enough and Time

World Enough and Time explores the way primary people and places influence our lives. The author also reflects on writing, aging, belief, doubts, regrets, and satisfactions.

In a series of personal essays, World Enough and Time explores the way primary people and places influence our lives. It also reflects on writing, aging, belief, one's doubts, regrets, and satisfactions.

Of the hundreds of people we encounter in a lifetime, only a few influence us profoundly. Carlisle writes about his parents, professors, a university president, and his wife-individuals "who have made me who I am." Carlisle also reflects on the way primary places in his life have shaped him-his hometown, Lake Michigan, and the mountain valley where he lived for ten years. His hometown and stable family provided a solid base but also forced him to contend with the town's class and race prejudice. Lake Michigan has always inspired him with its beauty and sobered him with its violence. Clover Hollow helped him understand the value of a past he had rejected for decades.

The essay "A Time Migrant's Journey through Higher Education" traces the dramatic and disorienting change in universities since the 1960s as professor and provost Carlisle experienced it-from academia's post-World War II promise and growth, through the disruptions of the late '60s and '70s, into the culture wars and the subsequent loss of funding and prestige. Several essays reflect very personally on aging, dying, religious faith and doubt, the author's regrets, but also on his satisfactions.

The book invites readers to think about the places and people in their own lives, as well as about aging, belief, regrets, and satisfaction.