…with a side of Virginia Woolf’s elated infatuation. “Tell me nothing of rest,” the young Beethoven bellowed when he began losing his hearing, resolving to “take fate by the throat” despite his disability. A century later, another trailblazing composer of uncommon artistic ability took her own fate by the throat as she faced the same […]
Voluptuaries of geometry and color, elaborate living urns, lavish lampshades for the place of some sea god, miniature Hindu temples, gorgeous drag queens of the deep, otherworldly amphoras from the bottom of this spectacular world. A century-old annual report by one of the greatest public-good institutions our civilization has produced — New York’s Cooper Union, […]
“Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.” In the 1850s, Emily Dickinson’s passionate first love shaped her uncommon body of work for a lifetime to come, shaped the spare and searing poems that would go on animating lives for generations to come. In the 1950s, Rai […]
A subtle celebration of the terrifying tenderness that makes life barely survivable but also makes it worth living. “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum observed in contemplating how to live with our […]
“Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them… Love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up… Love your heart. For this is the prize.” Thinking lately about what it means to have the right heart, which intimates the question of what it means to […]
A love story, a time story, an invitation not to mistake difference for defect and to welcome, across the accordion scales of time and space, diversity as nature’s wellspring of resilience and beauty. Great children’s books move young hearts, yes, but they also move the great common heart that beats in the chest of humanity […]
The wonder of wading into the black lake boiling with light. What is it about the human animal that impels us to interrupt the elemental elegance and perpetual incompleteness of a perfect ellipse with an arbitrary point we call a beginning? And yet here we are, once every three hundred and sixty-some days, marking the […]
A glance over the shoulder of time to reveal the patterns, themes, and ideas that steady us and shelter us in the tempest of life. Like every year, this annual glance over the shoulder of time is a composite of the essays that most resonated with readers and those I most enjoyed writing, the overlap […]
“Not because happiness exists, that over-hasty profit from imminent loss, not out of curiosity, or to practice the heart… But because being here is much, and because all that’s here seems to need us.” In the bleak winter of 1922, a “hurricane of the spirit” swept the ailing and downtrodden Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, […]
Branchings of belief from the lovely common root of “holy” and “whole” in the interleaving of all things. Some years ago, at a gathering exploring our human search for meaning through a kaleidoscope of perspectives in the middle of the redwoods, I sat down for a conversation with an astronomer I had just met, who […]