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Waiting

Everything that has ever been in this house is alive, in you, in us. We’re going to spread that kindness — the winter fires, the rain splashing in on your bedroom curtains in July, the kitchen’s warmth, the light of the chandelier in your eyes, your moonflowers, your roses, the red in the dogwoods. I’ll give it away again and again and you do the same, you hear?

No Safety

An Excerpt From Cover-Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power

A massive dose, even a mid-range dose of radioactivity, the kind you’d get from a nuclear plant accident, is not necessary to produce cancer. “Routine” radioactive emissions will do it.

Mrs. Reilly And Her Little Ignatius

Book Review

A Confederacy of Dunces is most triumphantly a symphony of voices, a wonderfully wide range of authentic-sounding voices which would be distinctive even if they were never named.

On The Mind And Cancer

I think it’s important that we appreciate that what we’re doing with this approach is to bring to awareness an unconscious tool that has existed in our culture for centuries, that tool being the use of physical disease to meet important emotional needs. Disease has been called Western civilization’s only form of meditation.

Mysteries And Metaphors

A New Look At Cancer

I’m on my way to the biggest — and for me the most enigmatic — of cities, New York, to attend Cancer Dialogue ’80, an historic gathering of physicians, scientists, and researchers brought together by the Omega Institute to shed light on the most frightening and puzzling disease of our time.

No Enemies, Except Ourselves

Book Review

Women conspire to be manipulated and used while simultaneously controlling others in subtle but equally manipulative ways, and neither behavior is necessary, to be who we are.

Iowa Diary

I often feel, in this mixture of silence, isolation, ignorance and pettiness, that if I were struck by a virus, I wouldn’t fight it; I’d give up and implode and disappear. Dangerous signals, those. Not that I will put any effort into taking my life — I feel in large measure that it’s already taken. So I have to leave this place, and fight to get it back.

The Real Work

Poetry effects change by fiddling with the archetypes and getting at people’s dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change. A poet would be, in terms of the ecology of symbols, noting the main structural connections and seeing which parts of the symbol are no longer useful or applicable, though everyone is giving them credence.

Back From The Dead And Goofy As Ever

Book Review

Characters in the novels of Anne Tyler are imprisoned by people, places, things, by the whole fabric of their past lives, but they dream — some of them — of escaping. Their means of escape is through other people. They envision in the other a life more like the one they want to lead, and their decisions to change are sudden.

The Eleventh Man

As I trudge up the road from the bus stop, I pause to catch my breath as well as the view. Before me loom towering white cliffs; beneath are the lush fields and orchards of the moshav, and beyond them is the Sea of Galilee or the Kinneret, as it is called in Hebrew, “the violin.” The curving road is lined with small stone houses; I had been told that Elyah’s was the last hut, on the highest slope.