I remembered the malangs of Shah Jamal, the dirty, shirtless renouncers with ratty beards and dreads and bare chests covered in necklaces of prayer beads, throwing around their arms in Charlie Manson dances and whipping out their old ID cards to say ...
The first dinner-party of a bride's career is a momentous occasion, entailing a world of small anxieties. The accomplishments which have won her acclaim in the three years since she left the schoolroom are no longer enough. It is no longer enough to ...
And I put my hand on her arm to stop her rowing. Aaron’s Noise roars up in red and black. The current takes us on. “I’m sorry!” I cry as the river takes us away, my words ragged things torn from me, my chest pulled so tight I can’t barely b...
Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than wit...
Most people say if you tell a wish it won't come true. But I don't think wishes work like that. I don't believe there's some bad-tempered wish-fairy with a clipboard, checking off whether or not you've told...But it's a long shot I'll get my wish, so...
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no...
I walked around him, champagne in hand. Great feeling. -Give me a flash, he said – just a little quick… I flashed opened the coat as I strolled by. He exhaled with a sigh- O, he said, Please Again. This time I stood squarely in front of him. He w...
Name one hero who was happy." I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' ...
Son: Father, you are my father. You sired me. I have sired no one because I left the primordial. I left you, I studied, I suffered, and my visions were pure. Before me, my father, new horizons were opened. Father: Yes, I am your father. I sired you a...
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and...
One night--it was on the twentieth of March, 1888--I was returning from a journey to a patient(for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door...I was seized with a keen desire ...
For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it's like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It's having outbursts of anger for what seems like no apparent ...
For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to maj...
But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up the home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of in-door colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food: ...
Anyone seeking to draw closer to God needs to curb the horizontal and ascend to God vertically,’ he said. ‘And this means giving oneself fully to God – with all one’s heart, body, mind and soul. There mustn’t be any dark corners.’ Skimmin...
I read once that you need two things to be happy. Any two of health, money and love. You can cover the absence of one with the other two. I drew comfort from this idea while I was fully bodied, employed, and unloved. It made me feel I wasn't missing ...
When I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone — not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I retu...
A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That w...
It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a “change of terrain.” It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave...
...it is a different matter entirely to commit military resources to keep peace in such areas, where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms - or even want them. The military need not do...
Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself ...
