Textes

Have been waking early these days and setting off for work before the sun is up. On the Métro at that hour, most of my fellow passengers are heading to jobs that most anyone who has the choice doesn't want -- cleaning offices, toilets, streets, or tending to other tasks that most people consider "undesirable." [...]

Snow coming obliquely through the gray light this morning has me thinking, as ever when the flakes come "general all over" like this, of the final lines of Joyce's masterful short story The Dead: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of [...]

Sometimes my notebooks have lines and sometimes they don’t. Writing with the lines and writing without lines are very different experiences. As a writer, I know that different pens and paper, like different places and moments, offer different experiences. The experience of writing with lines, I realized, can be likened to the experience of practicing [...]

Another one of those days. Everyone tells me it's warm, almost spring-like. And from the window it doesn't look like winter in the garden, although it is damp and overcast. Cats chase one another through the full bushes, up the leafy trees, over the rooftops. Isn't there too much green out there? Finally I just [...]

More words about the fundamental "oneness" of all things, as an aftershock rocks Haiti again and President Obama's second year begins, looking less promising than the first, and the days are growing a wink longer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the cat sleeps most of that time beside my desk as I work for [...]