Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to...
So it is, out here on this island, where we dwell with our faces to the sea and our backs to the wilderness. Like Adam’s family after the fall, we all have things to do.
She’d been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.
She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed.
She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.
She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. 'I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was cle...
Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich peca...
One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was...
Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If
It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.
It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when everyday is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preach that God wan...
If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell.
I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to...
I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life’s injustices: that the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. My creditors would come to me mo...
How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?
How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simp...
How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them.
How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth—the many gods, the animate spirit world—and simply recast them in terms of our teaching.
His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in s...
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.