A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, randomness, consciousness, etc.
After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold—I finally began to read him…
I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...
We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into…
Religion (at least certain versions of it) offers a clean slate: “all is forgiven.” Yet mere time offers something almost as powerful. We…
The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…
Even if you were immortal, you couldn’t have your childhood back.
I wrote this for my friend Adrien Converse, the artist Lurm. In their livestream series “Live with Lurm,” Adrien reads pieces of writing for the very first time, then improvises music in response....
A diary or journal doesn’t just reveal a person’s inner life. It helps create it, by structuring and deepening one’s ongoing dialogue with…
Here’s one of the most wonderful passages in all of Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”:...
So much of philosophy feels almost purely academic: questions about whether we’re brains in a vat, or whether we were created a second ago…