My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, w...
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown w...
Oh my gosh, he smells good, like some exotic but comforting spice, nutmeg or cardamom. Slowly Damian lowers his head to mine and I think my chest might explode, my heart is tap-dancing so quickly. I've imagined this and now it's really happening, I a...
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics ...
You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirt...
Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.” So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for...
Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos. "Welcome, summer" is what he says. Winter's unimaginable. The wood's a wickerwork o...
The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not lo...
With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too ... If the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, and our own emptiness, might actually become places to see. To see through to ...
Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a w...
No I am not okay. I've just been pulled out of play tryouts where I had to be the first to audition and everyone's trying out for the same parts, I just had a very bizarre conversation with the school secretary, Megan may be throwing up her cucumber ...
We humans may be brilliant and we may be special, but we are still connected to the rest of life. No one reminds us of this better than our dogs. Perhaps the human condition will always include attempts to remind ourselves that we are separate from t...
Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A...
Coyote, who is the creator of all of us, was sitting on his cloud the day after he created Indians. Now, he liked the Indians, liked what they were doing. This is good, he kept saying to himself. But he was bored. He thought and thought about what he...
Did you wish upon a star and take the time to try to make your wish come true? Did you try to paint the sunrise and find the gift of life within? Did you write a song just for the joy of it? Or write a poem just to feel the pain? Did you find a reaso...
They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kisse...
When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call ...
For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the Ameri...
Kronos couldn't have risen if it hadn't been for a lot of demigods who felt abandoned by their parents," I said. "They felt angry, resentful, and unloved, and they had a good reason." Zeus's royal nostrils flared. "You dare accuse-" "No more undeterm...
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth boun...
Do you fancy catching a movie at the Sturbridge Theater tonight? That new Robert Pattinson movie is showing,” I ask her, the phone cradled against my chest. “Definitely sign me up for that!” Ari replies, chuckling as I mock scowl. Her easy laug...
