More on: Essays

You must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across.

i. MANY PEOPLE DIE in the book of Genesis, and we are, for the most part, told where the bodies are buried. We know what happens to the corpses of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Joseph. We sometimes get details about the procurement of a burial plot or the reconciliation of estranged brothers…

My mother and I are driving five hundred miles to see a replica of a mystery.

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.

On my first morning, I read from John’s Gospel, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It felt like a prophecy, the way my life would go. Something I could accept, because it would make meaning.

Watch the author discuss this essay in his InStudio interview. OUR FIRST TIME WAS IN NEBRASKA. It was winter. Holiday Inn Express. We fucked once in the shower and again, later, while watching a documentary about glaciers. I remember snow fell from the night sky and we watched it from our bed. I remember the…

In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors.

ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON, Irmak, Mahmut, and I—three secular Muslim Turks—took refuge in the cool, cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights. Our interest in the Gothic-Romanesque revival church architectural, mostly, we ambled through soaring galleries, admiring arches that shouldered the weight of the building and stained glass of biblical scenes that…

When I introduce myself, they generally reply with a greeting and their names, not that any of us think we will remember the names. But our politeness turns us from strangers into temporary acquaintances.

My belief: that the words are in the world, and that we are consubstantial with the world, that we are immanent along with it, the words become our world.