I / We. Mine / Ours. How wide the expanse between these terms. When my wife told me, a couple of days before my first appointment with the urologist, she would be accompanying me, I said no. I had my reasons. As I lay in bed, half-watching an episode of Seinfeld I had seen countless…

Continued from yesterday. Some folks like to use the word “harvest” instead of the word “kill.” But we harvest broccoli and tomatoes and cabbage from our garden. When I take the life of a whitetail that will be butchered and stored in my freezer to feed the family through the winter, I think the only…

At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again. —James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” After the brief warmth of days barely above forty and lingering nights well below freezing, the snow that fell last week has become hard and brittle. Crystal upon…

I like movies because other people do the talking and they don’t expect you to say anything clever in reply. Also, something usually happens. I’m suspicious of mass culture, but I’ll say this for the masses—they mostly won’t tolerate two hours of some whiner going on about how exquisitely the world has wounded him. They…

Years from now, cultural historians, authors, and publishers will look back on the calendar year 2011-2012 as the year that attitudes toward the blurry line between fact and fiction changed. In early 2011 John D’Agata’s About a Mountain was published to much acclaim and hand-wringing. Those of you who followed the controversy over D’Agata’s admitted…

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that…

In the final scene of Anne Tyler’s novel Back When We Were Grownups, the uncle of protagonist Rebecca gives a speech at the party she has arranged for his 100th birthday. Throughout the novel, he has been an endearingly complex character, quite mentally alert for his age but with spells of irritability or of dissociation…

What’s wrong with this picture? A Sunday afternoon in March, sun breaking through the clouds and casting onto the wall. Last week’s roast chicken simmering into stock on the stove. Craig at his desk, typing up the selection for lectio divina at the weekly meeting of our Benedictine group. My nephew in a club chair,…

In 1990, when the New Kids on the Block were so popular that Walmart carried sleeping bags with the band members’ faces emblazoned on them, I joined the masses and bought the band’s second album, Hangin’ Tough. It felt good to be at one with the masses. Up to that point, I listened almost exclusively…