--tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do, we'll move away still further: into now -E.E. Cummings ("84") Moving, there's no doubt, is an ugly business. Ever so slowly, the life that you carefully built is dismantled: book by book, dish by dish, sock by hole-in-the-toe sock. There's a…
When I emerged from the train station into the city of Brussels this past summer, I was transfixed by its old world beauty and the storybook quality that the Gothic architecture imparted to the landscape. Although a part of me felt that I had stumbled into some kind of magical kingdom of waffles, frites and…
"I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words falling off my tongue.The robins had been a long time singing, and now it was beginning to rain.What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map, or an early…
When we cook things, we transform them. And any small acts of transformation are among the most human things we do. Whether it's nudging dried leaves around a patch of cement, or salting a tomato, we feel, when we exert tiny bits of our human preference in the universe, more alive. -Tamar Adler (An Everlasting Meal)My…
The resultant internal conflict is nowhere more clearly seen than in Crime and Punishment. The characters seem drawn from an imagined hell and yet...'We have never met them, but they are mysteriously familiar to us. We understand and love them, and finally we recognize ourselves in them. This is because they are no more abnormal…
Dining with Dostoevsky 