The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbandi...
When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in th...
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side...
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situati...
I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...
What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully p...
Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.
Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walkin...
Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.
Nearly every book has the same architecture--cover, spine, pages--but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some book...
Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointmen...
Alas, many of these long-distance writers are not fascinating thinkers, and it’s a dubious premise that someone who would be dull to walk round the corner with must be fascinating for a six-month trek...
The language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.
A fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told t...
Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, ge...
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking...