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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Witness Tree: Memoir Of A Ritual
It is a terrible thing when a brave person becomes afraid of you. It wakes you up. You see that, in Hemingway’s great phrase, you have “gone beyond where you can go.” It is unlikely you can save yourself, and unlikely that any one person — lover, therapist, friend — can save you.
February 1992The Sky’s The Limit
The same day I get the bad news about my gums, I find out the hole in the ozone layer is worse than anyone thought.
January 1992When Nature Is Larger Than Life
Imagine the humbling pause each of us felt to behold the faces of three naked and bruised whales just a few inches away from our own. For two solid weeks the global village never lost eye contact with these three neighborly ambassadors representing the mysterious tribe of great whales.
January 1992This Body
My daughters want to know why I’ve started working out at the Y. I want bigger muscles, I tell them. I want to be stronger. They think this is hilarious: a forty-six-year-old man acting like he’s sixteen.
December 1991Loyalties
I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.
December 1991Living The Writer’s Life
If you make effort, beings seen and unseen will help. There are angels cheering for us when we lift our pens, because they know we want to do it. In this torrential moment we have decided to change the energy of the world. We are going to write down what we think.
December 1991Russia, My Heart
Russia, once the poor turned to you, but you betrayed them. You told them how hard it was. You went on vacation and said help would arrive on the next train. In the bitter cold, they waited at the station, while their children starved, and still they waited.
November 1991Profit And Loss: Selling The Family Home
When you have grown from infancy to adulthood in one home. . . . The shape of the rooms becomes indistinguishable from the shape of one’s consciousness. I’m thirty-four years old, and that house and land are still the setting for half my dreams each night.
November 1991My Machines
There is a man I talk to in the Astor Place subway stop. He lives there, and he’s missing a tooth. Today his hair was wound around sticks.
November 1991The Seduction Of Consciousness
We don’t have a “drug” problem. We have never had a “drug” problem. We will not have a “virtual reality” problem. Past, present, and future, we have a consciousness problem — today compounded by the fact that it happens to be occurring in a Neanderthal political landscape.
November 1991
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