He committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best...
Carefully negotiated his way
Came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wro...
Where are you going? Quentin asks. To do my job. You need to start thinking about whether you’ve got what it takes to do yours. Hey, don’t— I slam the door and hurry down the hall. The Brightside Mano...
When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gra...
Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever...
There’s no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it’s all wishful thinking. Primitiv...
Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations. Like Stonehenge? Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois.
Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand. I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me...
Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.
Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish
Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke.
Mia’s eyes for too long would send me straight down the road Drew has already traveled. The reality of a stunningly beautiful and intelligent young woman explaining why it’s all right for you to make...
Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold...
I’m not sure Shad’s worried about that. You said it yourself, his concern is the special election. That means making good on his promise to make the system equal, i.e., to nail a rich white man. That’...
Every son eventually learns his daddy has feet of clay. You just happen to have a father of singular rectitude, so it took until you were forty-five. That doesn’t make it any less painful.
But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. —Aristotle
As I turned toward it, a premonitory wave of heat flashed across my neck and shoulders, and I felt the dry itch of the past rubbing against the present.
Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.