“The End of Exams”
“The conclusion of final exams and the end of a school year bring into the vacuum they create a celebratory fervor akin to that felt by soldiers going off to war. One might expect quite the opposite: for the students have completed their onerous work and the warriors are only preparing to begin theirs. But […]
Continue reading“Insights”
“At this point, Skylar lacked all but the vaguest ideas about the nature of this certitude. But with deep conviction, he knew it to be true. Human beings come to grasp profound truths in trans-rational illuminations: sometimes coming in dreams, sometimes in trances or during prayers, sometimes during moments of sublime calmness induced by intoxicants. […]
Continue reading“Our House”
“After Bosch’s lurid phantasmagoria, Skylar welcomed Graham Nash’s lullaby. It floated past like a soft-pink and baby-blue laud to the high joy of living in innocence and love, exalting the domestic to the level of the sacred. By doing so, it portrayed home as the utter opposite of what it had always meant to Skylar. […]
Continue reading“‘Our House’ Redux”
“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“Utah’s Magnificence”
“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“Yak’s Room”
“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 […]
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