It’s one thing to order the destruction of an historic rose garden; more tragic, though, is that there’s always someone willing to follow such orders, when the intelligent, logical thing to do is refuse: No — if you want to destroy something everyone holds in trust, do it yourself, with your own hands, for all the world to see. And if you’re worried about blisters, you might try a moral […]
Having fortunately lived long enough to finish reading all three volumes of Vincent’s letters, I have moved on to Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, in Boris Brasol’s English translation, published in two volumes by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1949. After years of being away from Dostoevsky’s great novels and stories, coming upon him in the somewhat more casual, conversational mode of his periodical writings is much like having coffee with […]
We don’t plant our sunflowers, they plant themselves. Each year they’re different. This year almost all have multiple heads, a few with dark centers, most with light. Many have lateral growth, each branch ending with its own head or heads, some blooming all the way to the ground. And there’s one very rugged plant with only one head. The plant is about five feet tall, but now that its seeds […]
We spend our entire lives breathing, taking into our lungs and bloodstreams that which is outside the body; and yet a vast majority of us, despite this simple, obvious fact, see ourselves as something apart from nature. Deprived of air, the body dies. The body also requires water. Again, water that exists outside the body must be taken into the body in sufficient amounts, or the body dies. The same […]
It was early in the morning on the last day of July — yesterday, in fact — that I noticed the scent of dried and drying grasses in the air, of ripening and spent seed — that distinct valley smell, leavened by dew and blent with the dust of harvested fields. That same day, a few hours later, we decided that the unidentified seedling in our cedar-and-juniper wilderness might well […]
This is a Wednesday that feels so much like a Friday, one is sure Sunday is near. But what if I’d never seen a calendar, and had no idea what they were? What if I didn’t know names had been given to the days of the week? For me there would be no week, no month, no year, only seasons. There would be the kind that are short, which pass […]
How long has it been since I’ve felt a sense of belonging to any particular country? When I was fifteen, though I’d yet to fully work it out in my mind, the notion had already struck me as folly; and to this day, it seems that one’s conscious presence in this world is too great a miracle to waste on such a rude concept as nations, with their ideologies, flags, […]
I don’t believe in an afterlife — certainly not one in terms of punishment or reward, of safety, security, bliss, or pain. Neither do I believe that I’ve lived before, in the sense that I’ve passed through previous incarnations that have led to the one I’m living now. I don’t say these beliefs are wrong. I only say that in the sense in which they’re traditionally accepted, they don’t ring […]
This drawing reminds me of something that happened a few days ago. While I was watering the flowers in one of our wine barrels, two tiger swallowtails fluttered past me from behind, just above my left shoulder. I fluttered after them. Up over the fig tree we went, past the birch, and into the neighbor’s yard. We were halfway down the street when I remembered I couldn’t fly. I turned […]
Even after a thorough washing, the fingertips of my left hand wear the strong scent of marigolds — this from having plucked three mostly dried blooms from their plants. On each side of the marigolds, we have lobelia in two clay pots. The pots and the marigolds are on an old mossy concrete bench. The bench looks like it belongs in a cemetery. Bees love the lobelia. The lobelia love […]
William Michaelian 