Met with no traffic during this morning’s run through the neighborhood. Back in the house before four-thirty. A starry sky, with a bright, waning, super-blue moon. Air clean and free of wildfire smoke. Spanish. Read a page of Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez. Italian. Read a passage from a translation of Homer’s Iliad. How much of effort is really the reaffirmation of one’s ego-identity? Axe, muscle, gravity. But when I chop […]
Dripping maples, full birdbaths, flowers bowing their heads. Since yesterday morning, the temperature hasn’t gone up or down more than two degrees. We leave the house open. Last night, we could hear the crickets. Rain or no rain, now is their time. Thoreau’s journal, February 1854. One day, he followed the tracks of a fox in the snow over a mile. No phone, no map, no app. Strolling vs. scrolling. […]
A genuine fall rain, windless, steady, straight down. Sixty degrees. Feet and legs wet from walking at a leisurely pace through a large commercial parking lot. Sandals and puddles. Let us practice nonavoidance, and proclaim it our beliefless, faithless faith. On the front sidewalk, met with a wet, stubborn bee. Old Books. Brief prefatory note by Robert Wiedeman Barrett “Pen” Browning (here signed R.B.B.). The Letters of Robert Browning and […]
O, to read our autobiographies to the end, and arrive at our original perfection! . [ 1802 ]
What grew in me without my knowing, what crept stealthily into my burgeoning little boy’s identity and went unrecognized for years, was a keen sense of competition. The expectation, need, and desire to be the best was administered in tiny doses without their knowing by family, friends, acquaintances, and teachers. The best reader, the best speller, the best runner, the best at throwing or kicking a ball — the process […]
After my hospital adventure, I wasn’t able to go back to school right away. But the time finally came when I was deemed strong enough to return to the classroom. The first day, instead of catching the morning bus to school, my mother took me in the early afternoon, after lunch and recess. It was story time. If I remember correctly, the teacher read to us, but we might also […]
A fine school of words, and the fishermen asleep at their nets. . [ 1668 ]
A falling star — a petal bright, from the flower. * Some books I leave open, so that during daylight hours, I can read a few lines from them in passing. Diaries, journals, letters, poetry, too — and it’s all poetry, beginning with the light coming in through the window. Or call it pollen, or honey, because the words coat the wings, and sweeten the tongue. * How many things […]
Not many days ago, and an equally uncertain number of nights, I read backward and aloud the last page of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. Standing before our big front window, paced by the commas, I read the words slowly and with feeling. When I reached the top of the page, I wondered if the author might not have done the same thing himself. It’s possible he could even have written […]
William Michaelian 