a meditative yet exuberant journey through the world within and the world without, inspired by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami : the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.

“What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in The Message (public library) — his soulful and sobering reckoning with the power of words and the power structures roiling beneath the landscape of permission for making the images and ideas we call art. What... See more

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.

Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.”

burnout is “a loss of friendship with a very personal sense of the unknown”

H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and... See more

Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes.

Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them... This is not intellectual love. This is a love for souls, from all of me towards all of them in their entirety.