Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 […]

A poem from A Month of Sundays. The figure at the window Allows the light to come and go, Describing with curtains a house’s share: The common cause of tenderness, The record of living that dissolves to mess, The lazy courtesies all houses wear To dress anxiety in homely weeds. Such duplicity defines our needs: […]

Alice Munro, “Miles City, Montana”: “In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide—sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real […]

On the letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. A few weeks back, under The Next 1,000 rubric in Newsletter No. 28, I wrote about As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. The reader who’d added it to the ever-growing list of titles at the website was my wife, Margot, and […]

Sunrise, sunset, and J. M. W. Turner’s book of hours. That voice, at the start, could have stopped with the light, left heaven and earth glad in its glow. But so lithe was light’s beauty, so playful its touch, that the voice quickly conjured the rest of creation, indulging light’s longing for things to caress. […]

On public opinion and the imaginative void of our modern moment: a historical glance. Oscar Wilde defined public opinion as “an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.” I took special note of that description when I came across it in Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden […]

My romance with Madame de Staël. I fell in love with Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) the first time I met her. We were introduced by Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author as well of two of the most marvelous books I know: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of […]