Contemplative essays on language and meaning
"Lord: it is time. The summer was too long.", Rainer Maria Rilke, "Autumn Day" The window in the guest room at Soriano nel Cimino never closed all the way. I noticed it the first night, and every night after, for years. A gap of maybe half an inch at the bottom of the frame,...
Never to get lost is not to live. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost The rain in Lisbon that afternoon came sideways, off the river, the kind that makes umbrellas useless and irrelevant at the same time. I was standing under the awning of a shuttered tabacaria on Rua...
There's a bench in Paley Park on East 53rd Street in Manhattan that I've walked past maybe a hundred times without ever actually sitting down on it. It's one of those small vest-pocket parks the city tucked between skyscrapers in the 1960s, complete with a waterfall wall that drowns out the traffic...
A meditation on the liminal moment between night and day in a European village square, when the world belongs only to those who rise before it.