From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right fo...
Even if you don’t like Poe—he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.
Death is the mother of beauty, said Henry. And what is beauty? Terror.
But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.
But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It
And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or try...
And how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?
There’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and al...
The minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to pu...
Or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.
Never the way it seems—all good, all bad.
Like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him,...
Honestly can’t remember much else about those years
Garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline.
Dingbat,
Crazy, she’d said, but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a better way to go insane.)
With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affectio...
Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?Now you really sound like my dad.Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everyth...
While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other...