Anything you lavish with attention will become a mirror, a portal, a lens on the meaning of life — a dandelion, a muskrat, a mountain. A snail. Not long after I wrote an existentially hued children’s book about a snail, a friend sent me Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s slender, splendid memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (public library) — the …
In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a memorial profile of “California’s Mother of Gardens” — a hopeful antidote to the undoing of the human world, celebrating the woman who covered Southern California with the loveliest trees and flowers, having made a life at the crossing point …
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing just before the Little Prince sighed his timeless sigh: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” No one has written about what it takes to see — and how to do the looking — more poignantly …
In ten billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen and burn out, swallowing the inner planets of our Solar System into the abyss of its collapse as the outer planets drift farther and farther. In time, the cosmos itself will run out of energy and none will be left to succor life — …
Mars and Our Search for Meaning: A Planetary Scientist’s Love Letter to Life Read More »
Once, Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) set out to write a memoir. But she found that “it felt too much like stripping in public,” so she abandoned it. Today, all of her autobiographical reflections, all of her overt politics, all of her creative credos come down to us solely through her interviews, now collected in Octavia …
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” A generation after her, Henry Miller placed at the heart of the art of living the fact …
How to Befriend Time: The Gospel of Pete Seeger and Nina Simone Read More »
