Age often turns fire into placidity. Lytton Strachey, in his incisive portrait of Florence Nightingale, writes of her declining years: Destiny, having waited very patiently, played a queer trick on Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long…
All afternoon blown snow has screamed off the summits into sky’s high-altitude cobalt. Even now as the sun dips westerly and ice crags burn gold at the edges those snow-shapes keep hurling up, dervishing so wildly away over iron peaks…
The Starting Place In the early nineties I overheard a conversation in which a mother said she wouldn’t let her child, Will, play with the children who lived next door to her. For one thing, the neighbors ate out too…
We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. —Jack Kerouac About twenty years ago, I had a girlfriend who didn’t care much for me,
If you were to suggest to the fishermen and carpenters who live down the street from John Hay that he is one of the great artists and original thinkers of the latter part of the twentieth century, you could forgive…
What I wanted to do was follow the year around, recognizing that hours, days, months, or years are as elusive as unseen atoms (even though, universal law being consistent, we deduce their behavior with some success). I am not sure…
A few years ago, my wife and I spent two off-seasons living in a house on the edge of land and sea. It was the type of house all of us have dreamed of living in, not particularly large or…
Noah has promised to help bury the Olcotts first thing in the morning. As he waits in the kitchen for Arthur, he watches Alice at the sink. She pours a brown paper bag of strawberries into a copper colander. One…
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