“The gods themselves are not so forever glad,” Melville writes in Chapter 106 of his epic work.

“Fiction is about a question I don’t know how to pose. If I could articulate it, it would be a different kind of writing”—Hari Kunzru, at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 20, 2024.

“If you keep things on a psychological level,” the Zen teacher Maurine Stuart told Helen Tworkov, “you cannot understand what makes life magical.”

What is the sound of one hand clapping? sages ask. Might it be the response to United Airlines bringing one safely home at 7:54 a.m.--but only eight hours late, because landing lights at the airport are currently broken, making all night-time arrivals impossible?

Every generation seems a foreign country to those who came before, as to those who follow. More taxingly still, visas are not easily acquired and passports soon grow outdated. Are we doomed to remain mostly trapped in the era to which we belong?

April 16th, the day after taxes are traditionally due, brings the ultimate pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: Helen Tworkov's searching and rigorous book on the modern West's encounter with Buddhism, Lotus Girl.

The energy, the horns, the sirens through the night, the eager faces moving (and talking) so fast: am I on Third Avenue or somehow airlifted to the New York City of the East, Mumbai?

A morning in San Francisco: Grace Cathedral, the Apple Store, City Lights Bookstore and Cafe Zoetrope: four cardinal points of a happy modern life.

Might Mason & Dixon ultimately be the great Sixties novel? It certainly makes counter-cultural notions seem as durable as 18th century prose--even as it makes the Age of Johnson seem as revolutionary as a Dead concert in Golden Gate Park.

The world looks so vast in the dark: how much is that a source of terror, how much a cause of solace, and even inspiration?

The only way to say anything fresh and penetrating about the world is to step away from it: nobody can catch the larger picture from a millimeter--or a second--away.

“No matter what happens—always behave as if it hadn’t…That’s what we do in England,” a woman says in a script that Christopher Isherwood and Gavin Lambert wrote in the 1950s.

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” said Joseph Brodsky, when Poet Laureate. “One is not reading them.”

We either love the divine or we love ourselves, Pascal tells us. But isn’t the point of most lives to love the divine in ourselves and through ourselves?

“Only the good worry about whether they were wrong,” wrote John le Carre to his older brother, at the age of 75. Le Carre's whole life was spent worrying about the relationship between being good and being wrong.

There’s so much of everybody else’s business to be in these days, there’s no time for our own.

A child criticizing his parent really has only one thing to attend to: how much is he repeating the mistake that wounds him so much?

The never-ending dance of constancy and change: this week's sakura and the pagoda at 8th century Toji.

Kinship is seldom defined by those who look or sound like you; it’s only a matter of who feels, or thinks, who lives as you do.

We’re living so close to what happened a second ago, we can’t see what happened ten years ago—or the wider arc of history.