"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself." -Virginia Woolf (The Waves) Five years…
Here we are, yet again, in the Emerald Month; it crept up on me this year rather unexpectedly. Truth be told, my sense of time isn't so impressive these days. In part, I blame California and its lack of seasons. It's very disconcerting for a person to live in what essentially amounts to "season-less" time--one…
Sometimes the hunter would stop for a moment; then he would hear the many-voiced drone of the life of midges, small birds, worms and ants, and the rustle of the lumps of earth that this population harried and shifted about, so as to feed itself and stay active. The forest was like a crowded city...Moist…
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…
“In time,” the philosopher Schopenhauer put it, “each moment is, only in so far as it has effaced its father the preceding moment, to be again effaced just as quickly itself. Past and future (…) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension…
We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them--we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving…
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be…
It strikes! one, two, Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch, Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest; Would thou could'st make the time to do so too; I'll wind thee up no more. -Ben Jonson I don't know where the time has gone. How (really, how) is it already August 13?…
Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasureDid through my body wound my mind,You took me thence, and in your house of pleasureA dainty lodging me assigned.-George Herbert ("Church Music")Time is a little of the essence here since I'm a) still in the process of shortening my paper to conference length, b) quite tired since…
Dining with Dostoevsky 