Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots – places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.
We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.
We shed skins in life, to keep living.
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted...
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.
What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
Though old himself, he disliked old men.
His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?
We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe.
The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything – dead meat, living meat, old bones –.
He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door.
And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.
No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy.
Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through.
This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say – ‘One world at a time’?