Essay |
“Pol Pot’s Secret Prison”
“… how, when they returned to their homes in early 1979, after the Khmer Rouge had been toppled, the villagers found their rice fields littered with mass graves and wells stuffed with corpses …”
Essay |
“Nightwalking”
“Sometimes it seems I spent my childhood walking at night, hiding in ditches, calming wandering dogs. Of course, that was only part of my childhood, the night half, the hidden half …”
Essay |
“On Portraiture”
“Maybe because survivors of the Holocaust, when I was growing up, left much of their interior lives unspoken — to hush up their own memories, to protect their children — I tried to teach myself to read emotions on the human face.”
Essay |
“The Way to Loreto — A Very Brief Poetics of the Fathomless”
“The Loreto-Principle states that it is impossible for a historiographer who sets out on a pilgrimage from Rome to Loreto to ever reach his destination. He will ineluctably get lost on the way.”
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“Irrigation Days”
“Mark caught his first wife cheating — there was even a detective involved, over from Fargo — and married his second wife right after the divorce. They were both named Tammy.”
Essay |
“Reading Chekhov in a Pandemic”
“Chekhov is the perfect writer for our current moment: aware and tolerant of life’s ingrained inertia, he pushes us to at least challenge it.”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”
Essay |
“Echolocation”
“Just before a suicide there is – trust me — a split-second stripped of tormenting voices and mocking tunes and whatever injury or guilt, rage or despair led to this enormous silence.”
Essay |
“The Guitar Lesson”
“I am sixteen. I have recently been kissed by my guitar teacher, a man of nearly thirty years, but I have been numb to that and to everything else since my father’s brain embolism propelled him into the hospital a week and a half ago.”
Essay |
“Abiding Beauty” and “Battle of the Horns”
“When we were boys, we called it The Cabin, though by then it had things that on buying the place our grandfather had lacked: light, heat, plumbing, telephone – all the modern rest.”
Essay |
“The Latest Scar in Time”
“May I clarify more of the ‘crack-up’? The non-speaking self draped itself with a different garter and gown, of the reading and reflective self — a near impossible person to share with others in mixed company …”
Essay |
“Filling In the Shadows”
“Perhaps our unconscious need to reclaim our identity — our sense of self — explains why we go to great lengths to replace the body’s lost accessories — the ones we can live without but often define us in others’ eyes.”
Essay |
“Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy”
“The separation between the dead and the living becomes, if only fleetingly, no longer ‘definitive and fateful.’ It is instead a frail telepathy, a murmured voice at a séance, a portal between life and afterlife …”
Essay |
“In the Beginning: the Importance of Wildlife in the Development of Human Thought”
“He named man and woman but left the animals nameless. A horrific act — not to be named. But left the naming to Adam as a stronghold against the void.”
Essay |
“Remembered Bodies”
“I hear the last lines of ‘Leaflets,’ which Adrienne Rich published in 1969: I’m thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need. And all my body’s forces of animation try to tell me, still, that the task to need better ought to be our common business.”