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When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists. Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile. One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her… read article
John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a… read article
"It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions."
"You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive."
“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.” It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are… read article
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I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their loss and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”: “Sharp crocus wakes the froward year; In their old haunts birds reappear; From yonder elm, yet black with rain, The cushat looks deep down for grain Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes The redbreast to the sill for crumbs. Fly off! fly off! I can not wait To welcome ye, as she of late. The earliest of my friends is gone. Alas! almost my only one! The few as dear, long wafted o’er, Await me on a sunnier shore.” Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove. In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."
Landscapes of queer joy The post Cobi Moules appeared first on The American Scholar.
A vibe shift in favor of annexation would be counterproductive 🌏
