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Sonnets on a bookstore’s demise, 1990. ​1 Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud,A newspaper focuses my attentionUpon a quiet headline with its mentionOf City’s Oldest Bookstore, Shutting Down. Imagining a map, I scour the townBut the damned store eludes my apprehension —Aloft in our Florida-bound suspensionI wish my fellow passenger would read aloud. No […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang. Despite the solemn invocations of […]

Face to face with destiny. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be. However, punctuality has been impressed upon her, and whatever face […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 3 “Everything flows; nothing remains,” is how Guy Davenport rendered the most famous maxim of Heraclitus, immediately annotating his translation with bracketed alternatives—“[Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”—and following these with a formulation nearly as well known: “One cannot step twice into the same […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or bewilderment and anxiety or even gladness—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 2 Near the midpoint of War and Peace, Tolstoy offers a key to the book’s concerns: the significance of its “war” belongs not to campaigns against Napoleon nor to the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, so vividly sketched in its chapters; neither does the meaning of its “peace” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]