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We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.

Mary Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dark, the air is raining messages.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. T

Some people—grim arrivistes in the kingdom of the mind—talk about training your memory, making it fit and agile like an athlete.

Well, we all know what happens to athletes. Those hideously honed oarsmen all conk out in middle age, footballers develop hinge-creaking arthritis. Muscle tears set solid, discs weld together. Look at a reunion of old spor

Just as I'd put off the night river, I'd put off the sea. Both were like death. I am neither old enough nor young enough to write about the sea. It is both too big to be described and too basic to need description.

Charles Foster, Being a Beast

So that was the season of light. Stooping always over it, like a schoolmaster trying to catch me out in an act of enjoyment, was the season of darkness.

I can no longer pretend that the winter is fine. I have tried to tell myself that the country is not dead, but resting and regrouping, stroking the inchoate life inside it, and that that's what is h

We, too, know that winters are coming. For many of us it is the ruling fact: the whole year is surrendered to the cold. The thoughts and itineraries of the summer are the lackeys of the dark.

I fight hard against this demonic capitulation, but it is hard to enjoy an August day qua August day. The stronger the fight, the greater the acknowledgment of

What's an animal? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What's a human? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists—but a more stilted, stammering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and ta

So that’s my problem: the weird transformation of signal into action or sensation. The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgement that however good you get at giv

The blackbird remained as elusive as ever. Its abiding mysteriousness is one of the greatest bequests of my childhood. If I had thought for a moment that I had understood, it would have been a catastrophe. I might have ended up as an oilman, a banker, or a pimp. An early conviction of mastery or comprehension turns people into monsters. Those myste