Sublime

If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’ ”

Montaigne’s essay on death

“Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”

This particular night, he was also bummed out by the fact that his cat had died, finished off by a mouse that was in the process of being finished off by some D-Con poison. It was heartrending to hear him talk of the cat as someone with whom he could “communicate” in a building full of people who did not talk to one another. He added that the cat s

Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art. He mourned every time a production was over, and he rejoiced when he was cast in a new o

Primo Levi, who wrote about his survival at Auschwitz, described Elias, a dwarf who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was enormously strong, bestial, and quite insane, and with those qualities he not only navigated the Auschwitz system, where so many died all around him, but actually thrived. He ate, stole, an

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisf

In Atlanta, a few months after my visit with Walter, I would go to a Bearden exhibition at the High Museum. The pieces depicted his youth in Charlotte, North Carolina, before his family moved north. There was also a video installation showing in the center of the exhibition room. Albert Murray sits alongside Bearden in much of it. They talk about h

“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”