More on: Essays

I am content to dwell in ambiguities and conflict, understanding, as I see it, that we are all caught in inescapable systems, systems of value or belief, linguistic systems, systems upon systems within systems, which permit or preclude, which shape and suggest and stifle our apprehension of reality.

Russell’s description of oblivion as a poison is clarifying. The book left me wondering what our modern oblivions are. Into what vaults do we deposit our lives, robbing ourselves of the tools to understand them?

A family lives here, here things are a bit wild, yes, I’m trying to maintain, give me grace, please, look, there’s beauty in the attempt—and all of this is not only the subject matter of the yard, but the aesthetic, let’s call it, an aesthetic of too-muchness, or, as in a line from a poem I jotted down in my commonplace book, “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.”

Objects that explain themselves make no demands.

I felt a thrilling moment of relief, amazed that I had been freed of the burden of a child, then crushed by guilt for having felt so.

Christ’s resurrection is the lodestone of my life, my hope, my faith. And the early church had a rich symbolism for this: the resurrection took place on the first day of the week, which was also the day after the seventh day—the eighth day. This Sunday of all Sundays represents a new creation, eternity breaking into time. The eighth day represents eternity contrasted with the time of this world.

When the day of commencement came, I treated it like any other day.

I remember her first cries, high-pitched and alien, as if coming from another world into this one, into all this mystery and peril.

How deeply Brother terrified me, I realized as I walked back home.