We will leave early this morning for another long walk at Silver Falls. But the countryside we will drive through to get there is every bit as beautiful in its own way, and as worth walking, except that the walking would have to be done on roads. And so, that we may see one beautiful place, roads take us through other beautiful places, while keeping us apart from them. And […]
All of Herman Melville’s poetry, complete in a beautiful, one thousand-page book — the new Library of America edition, out just days ago, is already in this reader’s hands. This is another of those projects I enjoy so well, like the slow and careful reading aloud of Thoreau’s fourteen-volume journal, which I have currently under way, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the complete works of other writers I have […]
I acquire bits of knowledge as if I were stringing beads. But there is no knot at the end. And the older beads slip off into my lap. From there I take them up and hold them to the light. And back on the string, they are new again. The stream that leads to the falls at the north end of the park is running low, and much of its […]
When I say is, of course I mean seems.
Canvas 1,239 — August 12, 2019
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Canvas 1,238 — August 11, 2019
If I am what I eat, I would rather be a bowl of ripe berries than a plate of spiced beef.
If I am what I think, I would rather be a waterfall than a flag or a border.
If I am what I believe, I would rather be free than blind reason and order.
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A full pint basket of beautiful ripe fruit — I picked the last of our blueberries yesterday. In the evening, the first flight of geese. The gentle summer continues. By the front step, on the big rhododendron, next spring’s flower buds have already formed. Before lunch, I ate one slice of a fresh, sour, Gravenstein apple. I could feel the juice on its way down, spreading a tart panic. It […]
On the road, the notion of time evaporates so quickly, I have to stop and think to know what day it is, and even then I’m not quite sure. A minute, mile, or hour farther on, the fact is gone again, along with its meaning and its need. We left on Monday. That much I know. But I hardly prize the information. If today is Thursday, the name is the […]
If there is a spirit world, why not this one? Late yesterday evening, the crows half-flew, half-drifted every which way on the southwest breeze, which was strong enough to make their frequent treetop landings a challenge. This one? No, this one! Here? No, over there! Haw! — and yet the grand and glorious silence was never broken. The clover was drunk on sunlight. Now it’s snoring in the dark. And […]
In his journal, Emerson writes of walking with Hawthorne, talking with Thoreau, Carlyle’s latest book, and Tennyson’s new poems. In mine, I write of you, in terms of my own plain self. And this is our wealth: that we are each a funny blend of science and superstition, of pain, nerve, and luck. And this is our grief — the loss of dear Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son. August 4, 2019 […]
When one lives a simple life, is there a need to impose order? Doesn’t disorder arise from wanting what isn’t needed, and by following what’s traditionally accepted as the right way of doing things — doing what we are expected to do, buying what we are expected to buy, believing what we are expected to believe — without examining their wide-ranging, murderous implications? Observe an angry, disordered household, and see […]
William Michaelian 