Things That Are: Essays

It seems strange for memories to run out of nowhere and circumgallop you like this. It seems strange for there to be memories; strange for there not to be memories; strange for time and space to have dissevered you from anything so radiant and pounding; strange for your mind now to disregard time and space so completely.

The Earth is not gigantic and the Moon is not slight, but the Earth has a core and the Moon does not. Or rather, if the Moon has a core, it is undetectably small and inert, like a frozen mouse. How do we know that the Moon has a mousy core? Whoever really has been a Lunar Interiorist? Here we shall invent a philosophy and call it Imaginative Exte-r

For an idea of how long your light takes to reach Earth, sing one line from a song, such as “Sail on, my little honeybee” and that is how long moonlight takes. The Earth can sing the same line back to you, to represent earthlight. “Sail on, my little honeybee.” As for the Sun, he should sing as lustily as sunlight; have him discharge the song “I Ga

When the past happened, it was as strange as the present, as anarchic and wild. Events stormed out of nowhere like obstreperous hippos. Once the past is over, though, you begin to administrate it, locking the days in cages and assembling them by genus and writing explanatory plaques for each. Plaster habitats with synthetic plants and painted savan

But the Jackson’s chameleon also confronts itself with its horns. Sometimes as it is roving the tree branches, gaping and hissing and swaying and surprising wasps with its projectile-tongue, it will by mistake grab onto its own forehead-horns and then panic, wrestling itself, frantic to escape its own frantic grasp, a one-reptile bedlam in the padd

But goats are generalists: the world is their meadow. Leave them on an island—they will not spend all their energy on refusal and regret but will experiment until they find something new to eat, life sufficient condiment for the scraggliest fare. Put them in a barn with frocks and cigars and political pamphlets and toy blocks and banjos and yo-yos

The personality that longs only for perceptible things is down-to-earth, like a dung eater. But the teetery-pea kind send out aerial filaments to hound the yonder, tending every which way, guessing themselves into arabesques, for they are fixed on the imperceptible.

What does it feel like to be dormant for a thousand years? Perhaps it feels like being dormant for a million years. Or for the twinkling of an eye, while a thousand generations of bright blue cornflowers flower and get plucked for twisting together with pale blue water lilies, for draping loosely around someone’s shoulders, for weaving into his hai

One little bird, however, performs a migratory feat reminiscent of birds’ wintering-on-the-moon days: starting out from Alaska, the blackpoll warbler flies three thousand miles east to Nova Scotia. There he gorges himself on webworms and sawflies and gets fat while waiting for a strong northwest wind to blow him off his twig out over the Atlantic O