Dear Lord: The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect the way it is. So here's the deal: You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. OK, deal. In…
And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and…
"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground." -A Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin) Last week on my way to a scone making class in San Francisco, I started reading A Game of Thrones. While I realize that scones and A Game of Thrones…
As they aged, they grew more avid of beauty, the royal sea in their eyes in town, the dunes' scimitar shadows, the ever-perishing skies. The two were storing all this--for what? -Annie Dillard (The Maytrees)This past week, I've felt a little like pinching myself. Between the birthday wishes I got from some of my favorite…
"But then there was a star danced, and under that was I born." -William Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing) Today, dear readers, is my birthday; I am officially 29 years old. Most surprising of all is that, contrary to my expectations, I am not in the least disappointed at being--finally, officially-- on the brink of 30.…
"A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate…
"What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn't alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her…
In Saunders' opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.…
But this sun--the one over Providence--was doing the metaphorical sun one better, because the founders of the university, in their Baptist pessimism, had chosen to depict the light of knowledge enshrouded by clouds, indicating that ignorance had not yet been dispelled from the human realm, whereas the actual sun was just now fighting its way…
Dining with Dostoevsky 