For educated Americans, Tuesday’s election was a great sigh of relief. The wheels are coming off the clown car; the American legislature will no longer be giving a demented fascist everything he wants. Americans can turn to the understandably furious Canadians and say: that is not who we are. Over and over, candidates ran against…
To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even when the…
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying…
“Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you… until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.” “Man* is by Nature a…
