Yahia Lababidi, Revolutions of the Heart:“Belief, in the midst of chaos, remembers the indestructible world.” “Bodies are like poems that way, only a fraction of their power resides in the skin of things, the remainder belongs to the spirit that swims through them.” ❦ Samantha Power:“The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot […]
Author Archives: James Mustich
“in invisible ink on the walls of the mind”
From a notebook: On War and Peace, 1 A couple of years ago, Margot and I embarked on a tandem reading journey. Concerned that I was succumbing to digital distraction and losing the ability to concentrate, I prescribed myself Proust as a therapeutic measure: I would immerse myself in his imagination for ten pages a […]
The Years and The Days
A reflection from A Month of Sundays. “The years teach much which the days never know,” said Emerson; they gather to themselves our hopes and fears, faiths and failures, loyalties and memories, allowing the past to assume an almost institutional presence, a corpus of authority and belief that guides—knowingly or unconsciously—our thought and action. The […]
In Weather
A reflection from A Month of Sundays 1Pervasive enough to be invisible, powerful enough to disrupt, if not destroy, the shape and substance of our lives, weather is a wonder worthy of our admiration (if not, indeed, our worship). Yet the weather comes and goes so quickly our direct regard of it seldom relaxes into […]
Who’s Watching
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 […]
Pondering Prayer
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 […]
Easter Sunday
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 […]
Stuck in the Neighborhood
“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 […]
It‘s Spring (and Wordsworth‘s Birthday)
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 . […]
The Stations of the Cross
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 […]