Yesterday I was hiking a small, nearby mountain with a friend. I always feel my mood shift as soon a I reach the point where the old firs take over. The hike is only a mile, but you can wind around to shorter paths and stretch it out if you want to linger or get […]
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Why Literature Can Save Us
The remarkable Richard Bausch has reminded us that literature can indeed save us. “For me the greatest hedge against evil has always been the power to imagine the other. To enter the reality of the other. And literature, is, isn’t it, an exploration and confrontation of exactly that.” Bausch is a prolific American original. I could write a […]
Read the rest of this entry »William Butler Yeats
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me to the bone. ~ Willam Butler Yeats, from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems For more on the life of Yeats, here’s a fascinating biography and a number of poems. Started my day reading about his life and a number of his poems. […]
Read the rest of this entry »Brother, Electric
We’ve got rain in the forecast for tonight and I’m hoping it arrives. The break from the heat is so welcome especially since I just spent five days in Utah where the air was so parched and nasty I couldn’t wait to return to Oregon. Trouble was it was 97 when we landed. Color me […]
Read the rest of this entry »I disappeared into books when I was very young
Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised me was there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, and that I came out and met other people there. Writers are solitaries by […]
Read the rest of this entry »Novels change us from within
In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book we find ourselves slighting altered as human beings. Novels change us from within. ~ Donna Tartt […]
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