There is probably an infinite variety of possible misbehaviours, and several flavours of both shame and pleasure that occur with them. Where there is not misbehaviour, there can still be secrecy, either by intention, or simply by keeping an experience inside one’s self. The child keeps some of his experiences inside, and perhaps returns to [...]
Taking an unfamiliar exit from a familiar building sometimes places me on a street that I do not seem to know. Sometimes passing through a different door leads to a different country, or a different time, with strange dialects and accents, and foreign behaviour. An interruption on a well-known path leads to an encounter with [...]
Teenagers in a suburb, unless they wish to participate in regimented, programmed activities, have few places to go. On warm evenings, we would sometimes sit on the lawn in front of a small church, talking and smoking near the yellow bug lights. We called this “purple city” because of the way everything looked as we [...]
From one place to another, on foot, through expanses designed for driving rather than walking. In a car, these spaces do not exist: they are not places, but transitions. Your surroundings are seemingly de-featured. Looking down or to the side, the first impression is of uniform grey and pale brown surfaces, surfaces with texture but [...]
In fifth grade, my friend Kevin and I did a class presentation and a science fair project on the electromagnetic spectrum, showing the way that all sorts of different energies are represented on the same spectrum as different wavelengths. We took some instructions from an old textbook for building a Hertz oscillator from car parts. [...]
Inflexible definitions of beauty are apparently inevitably overturned, in a process similar to the evolution of a theory into a tautology in the sciences. Depending on the entrenchment of the definition, it may have appeared at the moment of the overturning that beauty itself was being rejected and being replaced by ugliness, crassness, sensationalism, etc. [...]
Pain, suffering, loss, grief, can all initiate a sort of attenuation of experience that makes ordinary things appear more significant, or more beautiful. The wind shaking the leaves of a tree on the day of a loved one’s funeral, the silvery underside of leaves exposed in ripples across the tree, is seen more clearly when [...]
Beauty can be a facade. “True” beauty then exists only for those who can appreciate it, and can be joined to a nondescript or even hideous exterior. The hideous then serves to increase the value of beauty.
September 11, 2001: I am listening to the radio and hear the voice of a friend who is staying in Manhattan, on the phone with a reporter, giving his account of what the destruction of the World Trade Center towers looked like. He talks about a shimmering, then a cascade of glittering fragments of glass, [...]