All around me in the half-light of thirty thousand feet, people abandon themselves to sleep: mouths slack as babies’, heads lolled back. A brown-skinned woman in a pale turban dozes under an airline blanket that in this light is startling persimmon-gold. A child curls across two seats, pink headphones clamped against her silky hair. My […]
Read moreThe recent controversies about “free-range parenting” have me thinking about something every college professor deals with: the relationship between parents and their college-age children, which is often very different from what we experienced with our own parents when we left home. Recently a prospective student’s parents asked me, “So, everything you are saying about self-motivation […]
Read more“My mother had a collection of old lace, which was famous among her friends, and a few fragments of it still remain to me, piously pinned up in the indigo-blue paper supposed (I have never known why) to be necessary to the preservation of fine lace. But the yards are few, alas; for true to […]
Read more“…at the same time I felt so strongly the pull of another thing, a thing having to do with music, freedom, the future, individuality. This is an important reason why I became a writer, I think, for in everything I write, I am seeking freedom, which to me is a state that is inaccessible to […]
Read moreStruggling to absorb the wondrousness of Philae, the observatory device shot into space this week to stick to and photograph a comet, I can only fasten on the verb: harpooning. It’s a suitable invocation of an attempt to fasten ourselves to mystery, to the curved back of the large beast hurtling past our limited world […]
Read moreIt’s late October, getting on for evening, and in a backyard chair, wrapped against the chill, I find the same rare spot of unexpected contentment I find on my favorite path in the woods, at the place where the trees arch in a denser ceiling over the trail, swept sideways by the winds that blow […]
Read moreBenjamin Franklin once remarked, “Experience is a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.” Put another way, knowledge can be expensive, but a little pain can make it stick. Put a third way, I will never again — even in the fall, no matter how busy this busy time always is — […]
Read moreLast Sunday I was finishing up a 2-day, 40-mile bike ride to celebrate my 40th birthday, and it took me past a house where I knew there were dogs. They’d barked at me before but never left the yard; I didn’t even see any there this time. Nevertheless I geared up and pedaled harder, just […]
Read moreDear Cheapskate Readers: Sorry it’s been a little while – the summer got away from me a bit, and I have been working incessantly on the Giant Nonfiction Manifesto on Art, Technology, Politics, Gardening, Spirit, and Attention, of which you have all been reading bits and pieces here for some time. In memory of B.K.S. […]
Read more“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived [….] Our life is frittered away by detail […] Simplify, simplify.” […]
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