I am re-reading Shelby Foote’s massive, three-volume history of the Civil War. Foote, who played the role of courtly southern scholar and mischievous scamp on Ken Burns’ heralded PBS Civil War documentary, was one of my favorite human beings. He was erudite, witty, and—a startling claim for a historian, really—supremely soulful. He could sift through…

The French filmmaker Claude Berri made some remarkable films during his long career. He directed two of my favorites—Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, which starred the young Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil, and Gerard Depardieu. But he was more than just a director. He was an actor, and he served as producer on…

Everyone knows Rumi—thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’ rich, delightful translations. But how many know the other early master of Sufi poetry: Hafiz of Shiraz? Now, thanks to a new translation, Hafiz too can become a joyously playful companion on our spiritual journeys. Like Rumi, Hafiz was Persian, living in the fourteenth century—just a…

The biggest snowstorm in fourteen years was bearing down on the East Coast, and I was scared that I was pregnant again. Thursday at my part-time job, I’d fielded the e-mailed news bulletins that had called for some two feet of snow falling by the next afternoon, and asked my boss if I could take…

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— O, Wilderness were Paradise enow! —from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald I sat on the floor of my boyfriend’s apartment in Chicago this morning listening to the Dixie Chicks sing…

Two nights a week, I tutor students in the college’s writing center. Inevitably we have nights with no appointments, and the other tutors, also students, do their homework and monitor Texts from Last Night and Facebook. And we talk. We talk a lot about my pregnancy, probably too much, as they’ve come to refer to…

The Vienna Secession’s new exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries strikes me as somewhat apt for the artist, a man whose “Self-Portrait as Genitalia” looks at first glance like a cartoonish satyr stuck to the body of a chicken—but, on closer observation, reveals goateed Klimt with a haunch of engorged testicles and the plumage of an…

I stole the title for this posting from Joan Didion. One reason I stole it was that I like the brevity of the phrase: In Bed. There you have two short one-syllable words that share a precision, and the precision they share is this: here, now. And, yes, I stole those two sentences, too, from…

David, my boyfriend, has a master’s degree in philosophy, but the job he held most recently was at Christmas, repackaging Nintendo DS accessories in an unheated warehouse an hour and a half bus ride from home. Before that, he made cold calls for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to local businesses, trying to get their executives…

We were having dinner at a friend’s house: a gathering of colleagues enjoying one another’s company with good food, relaxed conversation, a glass of wine. While we spoke of neighborhoods, children, and schools, it dawned on me that my friend, Doug, lived just doors from my grandparents’ old house. My grandparents are now long dead,…