Books

Comparing yourself at the age when a young writer died drives home how early their lives were cut off, since likely you are thinking, But I was just getting started! I still didn’t know anything!

There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world. If that sounds like woo-woo nonsense, it feels even more woo-woo to experience.

So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

The subject of this book is the affect of shame. No affect is more important to our sense of self or our identity, dignity and honor. And no affect is more important for our ethical and spiritual life. The affect shame as toxic is a source of most of the neurotic and character-disordered behaviors that we now understand. It is also the source of