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Stage Fright

A spelling bee, a lesson about survival, a couples-only swingers’ club

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Friend Of The Sun

Sunbeams

When Pablo Casals reached ninety-five, a young reporter asked him a question: “Mr. Casals, you are ninety-five and the greatest cellist who ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?” Casals answered, “Because I think I’m making progress.”

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Letters To My Friends

Every time I take a book out of the library and the librarian consults the computer to determine my past crimes, I expect her to discover the Gary Snyder book I lost two months ago. But it never appears on the screen.

Telling Stories

Fur

Late at night in New York’s Museum of Natural History, time comes to a stop. The dust settles slowly on the dioramas and displays, and nothing stirs it. Not a muscle shifts: The head of a sperm whale is wrapped in the tentacles of a giant squid, forever.

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Mulberry Street

The Story Of A Photograph

I felt tired, as if I’d just returned from a trip, a journey that had begun a long time ago, when an unknown craftsman had built a model ship, which had somehow ended up in a Mulberry Street window. The journey had been one of gradual attenuation: a ship, with its immense physicality, had been transformed into a replica, a symbol, and then the replica had been reshaped into a photograph, a symbol of a symbol. Did this attenuation, this slow dematerializing of wood and sail and sunlight, serve a purpose? And what was the next step: a leap into words, into pure meaning?

Gray Rain At Graceland

So I’m surprised at the thrill I feel as I pull into the Graceland complex. Even in this chilly rain, with just a smattering of tourists; even in this atmosphere of shameless commercial necrophilia; even so, there really is that odd elation Paul Simon captured: “I’ve reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland. . . . There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland.”