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Why We Are All Addicted

I maintain that the essence of addiction is craving for an experience or object to make you feel all right. It’s the craving for something other than the self, even if that something is within the realm of the mind. Addiction is fundamentally human; it affects everybody.

Sunbeams

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

May 1994

Perfect Rooms

The language is so much bigger than I am, so much older, more beautiful. How can I hope to tame it, cram it into a style?

Sunbeams

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

Erwin Chargaff

Walking In Tierra Del Fuego

Finally it occurred to me that the landscapes looked unfamiliar because in 1920 there were no trees. The forested hillsides and lake shores I’d believed to be ancient sanctuaries of wild beauty had been stripped bare only twenty years before my birth.

Waiting

For a parent to come home, for the funeral of a friend, for a lover to arrive

Sunbeams

Skilled labor teaches something not to be found in books or in colleges.

Harriet Robinson

Tea For Two

Since Karen left me, my evenings are quiet and predictable. No longer does she greet me the moment I open the front door with her wiry silence, unnerving as eye contact with a tiger pacing its cage.

Stuck

The map I left for my wife merely depicted a mountain a hundred miles north of home, and I was twenty miles from the pavement. Soon the sun would be out of sight, and everyone knows what happens on a warm night in the desert when the sun goes down: the snakes come out. And the Mojave green rattler was indigenous to the area. While it was true I had a snakebite kit, it was also true that you can’t walk far once bitten and even bites that are nonlethal can result in permanent crippling.

Sunbeams

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

Louise Erdrich