“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the generosity of strangers. It is especially gratifying to perpetuate the spirit of generosity if you have arrived at the ability to do so by way of struggle and privation. No one takes more joy in giving than those who come from little. That is what the philosopher-poet May Sarton (May 3,… read article …
The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war. In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied… read article …
“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.” …
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.” …
On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature. …
“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.” …
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” …
“A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used.” …
“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.” …
On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self. …
“We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.” …
“Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement.” …
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey. …
“Our foot’s in the door.” …
“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.” …
“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.” …
“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.” …
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” …
“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.” …
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” …
“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence.” …
“My conscience of life and eternity is not a mistake, or a loneliness, or a foolishness — but a warm dear love of our pour predicament.” …
“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.” …
“The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of life, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed.” …