Muhammadābād One of my all-time favorite people and one of the people whose example I continually return to in my thoughts – a saint indeed. He came up in a conversation with a friend about Occupy Wall Street, so I post this fine little obituary. I thought I had posted it before at some point, but […]
Category Archives: Comments on Life
Saint Charles Gray of Eugene.
31-Oct-11Strange Odd Coincidence.
24-Oct-11Down at the Occupy Wall Street protests, I passed a woman I knew from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place where. She was deeply engaged in a conversation, and I remembered from talking to her once that it wasn’t the most astounding connection of my life, so I passed on without making any fuss about […]
Grit, Drive, all that, whatever.
20-Sep-11Someone sent me a video called “The Secret” – apparently a pop-culture phenomenon – which claimed that the secret to everything, riches, love, fame, power, all that, was, more or less, desire mixed with positive thinking. If you want it enough, and believe you can and should have it, you can have it. This probably […]
Understanding and Virtue.
15-Sep-11“I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here…. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by […]
I am continually impressed by Goethe’s genius – his capacity to productively see. “Beauty is perfection in combination with freedom” is put as no one else can put it, and the more you think about what keeps things and people which are formally perfect from possessing the elevating radiance which distinguishes true beauty, the more […]
Law 2, Mind 0.
30-Jun-11The landscaping crew gets a four-day weekend this weekend, and after a particularly grueling four days – we planted a tremendous number of plants – I stopped off at the supermarket on my way home. I wanted to buy some beer. Of course, I was asked for I.D. Being thirty-five and sporting the gray hairs […]
Stabilitas Loci.
08-Jun-11This week marks three complete years in the woods; I moved up to the cabin full-time just as the private school year was coming to a close in 2008. Since that time I have spent ten seasons here; and a season apiece in the two most interesting cities in America, a winter in New Orleans […]
Summer, from Staten Island.
04-Jun-11As I have mentioned before, the printed Staten Island book was a selection of the essays I wrote about the Island; there were others which did not make the cut, for various reasons. Of the four essays I wrote about the seasons, the editors wanted to include “Spring” and “Summer,” but I felt that they […]
On Artistic Discipline.
17-May-11From Carey’s Wallace’s essay on maintaining discipline as an artist. The most difficult of all tasks, for precisely the reason she indicates: There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives. So far I’ve kept to precisely the opposite pattern – bursts of […]
Love and Being Loved.
06-Nov-11buy Gabapentin canada The rest of this poem is nothing special to me, but I was very affected by these lines of Philip Larkin: In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have […]