Things That Are: Essays

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.

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

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.

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 Trees Dream of Being Trees The tree decided to stop growing after it grew its thousandth leaf. “No more,” it whispered, and started throwing flimsily attached twigs and old nests down, and shaking the birds out. “I am a terrible tree! A thousand leaves is more than enough to prove that! I am slow and slight and my leaves are not lustrous. I ha

Jellyfish do pulse their bells, but this pulsing influence is minor compared to the influence of the ocean. For instance, the by-the-wind sailor jellyfish is born in the middle of the Pacific Ocean either with its sail tilting to the right or its sail tilting to the left. All the right-sailed ones blow to California, and all the left-sailed jellyfi

Terns and shearwaters also fly astonishing distances over water, but as they are flying and swimming birds, the whole ocean is for them a stopover. They can plop down on the water when they get tired and have some Fish Delight. Blackpoll warblers cannot swim, for they have tiny grippy bone-toes that do not serve in the water (try swimming across th

(for caterpillars have only six real legs—the rest are fake: mere stumps to keep their hind parts from dragging and getting scuffed),

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