“What do we do, my children and I, the days with no food?”
Mahama responded:
“Have the first one leave, have her leave on a day with no food.
Those who remain will watch her set out,
it will be their duty to cry.
When the heart suffers there is no hunger.”
There is something strange and mysterious about our feeling (for I certainly feel the same way) that our work is not the “real thing,” that it cannot be counted among the absolutely valid, authentic, and enduring classics. In part, this feeling has an objective basis, the fact that the great, authentic classics have withstood the test that still lies ahead of living writers…
I fear Tolstoy’s death. His death would leave a large empty space in my life. First, I have loved no man the way I have loved him.
I do appreciate the table-mat correspondence and I hate to bring a touch of gloom into the Friday Club but this place is straight asshole…
Part of this meme’s power stems from a long American engagement with images that put outspoken black men back in their place…
I am amazed at my own selfishness. When I bought the book I felt like a worm.
During the Great Depression John Steinbeck traveled through the Central Valley, recording observations of impoverished agrarian communities for the San Francisco Chronicle. In the midst of one such assignment, Steinbeck declines an invitation to the Jackson family home in San … Continued
In her will, she asked that her eyes (which had never failed her) be given to any blind person who through them might see…
I was having a drink on the balcony of a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn last April when I fainted, flipped over the railing and fell two stories onto a parked vehicle and thence into an asphalt parking lot some fifteen feet below…
We do not think enough about pain. Man is not innocent and he is not guilty. How to get out of that?
