“As though perfectly cued by an all-wise disc jockey, the child-pure simplicity of “Our House” seeped into the air. The song could have been the tune invented by a five-year-old during his first explorations of the tangled grounds (with the warped and wizened cedar tree, wild blackberry vines, and sun-freckled glade) of his great-grandmother’s farm: […]
Continue reading“But the finest visual treats were those furthest removed from the travelers’ point of vantage. In the distance, shimmering in that soft, other-worldly light which dusk sometimes brings, gleaming in palest silver and chastened white, loomed a vast temple structure part celestial and part chthonic: a building of rock reminiscent of Karnak, Angkor Wat, or […]
Continue reading“This small bedroom functioned for Skylar as a cave did for a young sadhu, as the Telesterion, or great hall, did for initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries, as an incubator did for hatchlings, and as the crow’s nest did for the lookout on Magellan’s Concepcion when the ship emerged from the Chilean straits and its […]
Continue reading“In these walks, Em and Skylar noticed clouds like elephants with upthrust trunks that faced off one against the other, campus lawns covered with yellowed leaves like powdered mustard sprinkled from some godlike hand, denuded trees whose limbs resembled superimposed photographs of ballerinas experimenting with graceful shapes of arm and hand, and sunsets whose golden […]
Continue reading“It looks empty,” he pointed to the coaly heavens, “but it’s actually full of dark matter. The stars look tiny, but some of them are ten million times the volume of the sun and a million times brighter too. We all look solid, but we’re really 99.99 percent empty space. Atoms are proportionately as far […]
Continue reading“Pages of books worked like wings to carry him back (and even forward) through time, across vast oceans and over the mountains, rivers, and deserts of far-off continents. By the genius of the books’ authors he was introduced to beggars and princes, lovers, lechers, tipplers, gamblers, and thieves. He heard the piteous wailing of starving […]
Continue reading“That spring Skylar’s senses tuned exquisitely into nature. He noticed the first gorgeous flowering of the rosebud cherry trees, whose blossoms were unevenly pink, ranging from rose to pastel, and further, even to white, and which, from a distance looked hoary. The long-stamened, yellow-green flowers of the Ohio Buckeyes appeared just before their distinctive, five-parted […]
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