Author Archives: James Mustich

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. Is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (a sylvan setting might provide it, or […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. If there were an archaeology of consciousness, fieldworkers would sooner or later discover that prayer lies at the deepest layer of our urge to language. Before we knew we had selves to talk to, I’m sure our fears and longings found their expression in the supplication of unknown […]

A poem from A Month of Sundays. A clutch of daffodils stopped my eye As Wordsworth whispered verses to my ear — Its yellow now in memory as bright As in that glancing moment two days past — Of recollections flowering and clear That poetry could summon to make last In extended moments of rhyme […]

“In order to live quietly” in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. Reading E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime a while back, I came upon a passage that crystallized some thoughts about Lenù and Lila, the Neapolitan girls whose friendship is portrayed with fierce fidelity in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The sentences from Ragtime appear in a […]

Seems like a good time to share what I wrote about the poet in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: In the first stanza of his lovely lyric “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth recounts his vision of                            . […]

I: La Bête Humaine The older godsHad endless powersDivorced from prayerAnd solid flesh,Publicly hauntingEndless hoursFrom poised and preciousAltitude. But all aloneThis Christ desiresA physicalAnd private painThat is our own:Thus he requiresNew faith in bloodySolitude. Now Pilate, withGreat savoir faire,Delivers ChristInto our hands.Such intimacyThis God demands.It is His humanAttitude. Jesus is condemned to death     […]

Albert Camus, The Plague:“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” ❦ Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations:“The body is an afterthought. We don’t stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; […]

A poem from A Month of Sundays. They seemed insignificant in that busy weekWhen dreams were sent spinning in the vivid air:To creation’s commotion, what dead could compare?       No hour lingered to hear them speak       The invocation of time’s elegy. Second sight of first things, death hovered, a mirage,In the wilderness […]

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain:“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one […]

Reading Neal Stephenson. We were away from home for a wedding. With some hours to kill before the convivial festivities began, I found a bookstore in which to spend some quality time with myself, browsing. I thought I’d pick up a slim volume—poetry, perhaps—for intermittent reading through the next few days without adding much heft […]