Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almos...
The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously doe...
I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly aliv...
I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I’d already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it...
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable pro...
Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is th...
I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no cla...
Isabelle rolled her eyes. "Oh, for the Angel's sake. Look, if there's no other way of getting out of this, I'll kiss Simon. I've done it before, it wasn't that bad." "Thanks," said Simon. "That's very flattering." "Well, I'm not kissing the mundane,"...
The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the h...
The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of in the 'Protogaea' and of in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of , in the latter...
In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward acc...
And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them...
Eating be eating, b'ain't it, Birdie?' 'Nay, Uncle Bear: In Caermelor, at the Royal Court, they be so-oh, so much more advanced than anywhere else. 'Tis not done to wipe your fingers on your hair or the tablecloth, or belch, or speak with your mouth ...
Jen leaned around Sally and glared at her two best friends. "What are you two betting on?" "Good grief. What, does she have eagle ears or something?" "No you dork. Your whisper is just you talking in normal volume but making your voice raspy. Really,...
And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially discl...
Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to...
LOOKING The world goes by, and what have I to do with it? I merely observe how the geese stretch their necks towards the orange rim of sky. I watch how light fades and children make their way home, hungry and tired. The bushes outside become ghosts w...
A close examination of the instructions in the reveals that the meditator is never instructed to interfere actively with what happens in the mind. If a mental hindrance arises, for example, the task of contemplation is to know that the hindrance is p...
When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and...
Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will peris...
The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in w...