Known and Strange Things

All too often in our media, the words take us all the way there, but the photographs, habituated to a certain safety, hold back.

old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.”

I am half-asleep, and therefore more awake than if I were completely awake.

Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.

FEW THINGS ARE more mysterious than someone else’s favorite film. To hear it named is to be puzzled. You appreciate its merits but not how it can be preferable to all others. Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible

objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.

people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It’s a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax.

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

infelicities