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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

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

“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

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

Adam named all the mammals and the birds—so forging a connection with them that went to the root of what both they and he were. His very first words were the names. We are shaped by the things we say and the labels we give. So Adam was shaped by his interactions with the animals. That interaction, and that shaping, are simple historical facts. We’v

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

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

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

A problem with decisions between past and future was you made them in the present.

Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

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