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Dreams
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Before She Sends It
I dreamt that I was in London, offering my business card to English women in exchange for a hug. They seemed pleased to hug an American; I was satisfied with the arrangement, too. Then I met a woman who was visiting from North Carolina. I didn’t come all this way to hug someone from North Carolina, I thought. But I gave her my card, too.
December 2007Sy Safransky’s Notebook
October 2007
If I sit here waiting for the perfect sentence to show up, I’ve got a long wait ahead of me. Maybe the perfect sentence doesn’t want me to wait. Maybe the perfect sentence is tired of one-night stands with writers who fall in love too easily, who can’t be trusted to stick around when the perfect sentence turns out to be not so perfect after all.
October 2007Sy Safransky’s Notebook
June 2007
And the perfect sentence wandered through a foreign city where no one understood a word she said.
June 2007Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2007
I inadvertently stepped on my cat Nimbus in the dark this morning. I’ve already apologized, and she doesn’t appear hurt, but I feel as if I’ve started the day by invading another country. Would a jury of my peers convict me for such a careless act?
May 2007Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Good Day
On the bedside table is a card with a picture of a sunflower on it. Inside, my mother has written in her elegant cursive: “Decide to wake up each day with a smile.” Each word is underlined individually. It takes courage, I think, for a mother to write that after her son — my brother — has committed suicide.
May 2007
The Sun Interview
The Unseen Life That Dreams Us
John O’Donohue On The Secret Landscapes Of Imagination And Spirit
The U.S. is a great country. You can live the way you want there; you can be a self-made person. But sometimes, when all our energy goes into progress, acquisition, and productivity, it leaves a huge emptiness in the heart. I think the teachings of Meister Eckhart can address that emptiness, can show us how to be patient with it, and in fact bring us deeper into it. At the heart of our emptiness, we can actually discover nourishment in the secret landscapes of imagination and spirit.
April 2007
Poetry
An Anthology Of Chinese Poetry
“All has come to nothing,” he writes. / In old age his clothes are tattered and thin, / His hut without a door; sick, / He suffers bad dreams.
April 2007Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2006
What a big appetite fear has. What a succulent morsel I was last night.
May 2006Quotations
Sunbeams
March 2006The human imagination . . . has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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