If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The...

…this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is...

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

It’s one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you’re boozing with Yankee writers in Martha’s Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It’s something else to go home and visit with...

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if...

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one...

This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help BookorHow you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists,...

flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more...

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by...

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the...

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

….With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.

People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The...

You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me;...

How much better it would be if they weren’t so damn understanding–if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the...

You can get all A’s and still flunk life.

Polarities of the ‘authentic’ vs. the ‘inauthentic’ are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or...

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it...

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past...

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth...