Open, honest, illuminating, inspiring, heartbreaking, profound — I am glad to have read James Baldwin’s masterfully written essay, “Notes of a Native Son.” Yesterday morning, upon rising and after the coffee was on, I drank two large glasses of water. This morning I had less than a glass. Sometimes I have one, sometimes one and a half. Day in and day out, all through my growing up years, my father […]
The great naturalist, Edward O. Wilson, has died. But the world has not lost him, as the common phrase goes. He lives on his books, in his colleagues, and in the countless people he has influenced and taught. He lives on in the environment and ecosystems he helped and is still helping to save. It is not necessary to meet and know someone personally to benefit from his or her […]
Yesterday afternoon I cleared the driveway of snow with one of the old manure shovels my father and grandfather used on the farm during the Great Depression and after the Second World War, and which we continued to use in later years, and which now reside, along with several other tools from that earlier time, in an old barrel in the little shed behind the house. While I was out, […]
More snow during the night — about an inch, maybe a little less. Thirty degrees on the front step; barefoot down to the end of the driveway, and then back up, possibly a little colder. Still, relatively speaking, the weather is mild. Real cold — Solzhenitsyn’s cold and Jack London’s cold — is not a joke. It is not to be trifled with. It’s easy to walk barefoot outside for […]
If I am correct about the year, I first read Dostoevsky in 1984, on an airplane bound for Israel and the old city of Jerusalem. I had bought a paperback copy of The Brothers Karamazov, not quite aware at the time that I was beginning at the end, with what is considered the great writer’s crowning achievement. I read for several hours from Los Angeles to New York, and then […]
Illuminated by my faithful dragonfly lamp, a tiny insect just flew by, then disappeared into the dark regions of the desk behind the computer screen. Each of us, engaged in the doings of our lives. There are days I remember, from morning to night, such seemingly forgettable, unimportant things. I think this will be one of them. For how can I be sure that this will not be the last […]
I first clicked “like” in 2010. I have no idea how many times I have clicked it since then, but it surely numbers in the thousands. When we lived on the farm, I clicked “like” in another way — with a pair of sturdy wooden-handled pruning shears. I clicked my way through the damp, foggy winters, up and down rows of vines and trees. Those clicks may well have numbered […]
I remember one, a snowflakeit might have been, turned out to bea child’s hand melting in my own,as winter coaxed the last leafdown. “I Remember One”Recently Banned Literature, December 20, 2013 Canvas 333 December 12, 2013 . [ 1314 ]
And now, what if, perhaps, courage is best expressed by turning off our computers? December 9, 2021 . I Set Sail Not Because I set sail not because it is a kind sea, or an angry sea, or a beguiling sea, or a wise sea, or a blind sea, or a lonely sea. For the sea is none of those things; and the sea is all of those things. Know, […]
Every breath is a call to the joy of consciousness. If I’m afraid of that consciousness coming to an end, or try to think of ways I can hold onto it forever, the joy immediately slips away. Joy then becomes just one more word in a numbing, distracting intellectual exercise in which I’m both martyr and hero. When that happens, the moment simply goes on without me. It doesn’t matter […]
William Michaelian 