Here I am, back again, recommending another book. I think it comes down to the social creatures we are at heart. Those best portions of our memories—of travel, a good meal, an unexpected kindness—are never isolated; they are more fulfilling when shared.
I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging. Its sequel, More Rules forAging, comes out June 2.
Originally published a quarter-century ago, this book is a slim, deceptively simple survival manual for the twilight of life. Rather than offering earnest scientific breakthroughs or dense psychological theories on growing older, Rosenblatt delivers fifty-eight bite-sized, counterintuitive gems of wisdom rooted in a liberating truth: most of the little things we agonize over simply do not matter.
Armed with a rueful, tongue-in-cheek irony, he instructs us to stop defending our character, to run when someone says “we must do this again,” and to realize that nobody is thinking about us anyway.
Rosenblatt’s crystalline writing is breathtaking, the sagacity drawn from a vast repertoire of experience, a way of saying things that startles. Rhythmic in cadence, exhibiting sustained, aphoristic eloquence, it’s a book you’ll want to read, pen in hand.
A learned man—Harvard Ph.D., essay writer extraordinaire, journalist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books—he’s your Renaissance man. In his spare time, he is an accomplished jazz pianist who plays by ear.
Reading Rosenblatt feels as though he’s sitting at a table across from you in a quiet café, conversing like a friend you’ve known all your life and care deeply about. He makes you think, distilling options, engaging your interior life.
With grace, he helps you accept your griefs and regrets, revise your hopes, and embrace aging and ending.
A famed memoirist, he shuns nostalgia, exemplifying the sanctity of life’s daily rituals, whether making toast for a grandchild or paddling a kayak on a foggy morning.
There’s a sadness in finishing anything Rosenblatt writes—his sheer ability to extract wisdom from close observation reveals truths we too often miss. He lingers like the aftermath of a fine wine.
He once wrote of the writer’s calling, words that capture his entire spirit:
“What are we here for? We are here to write our way into the hearts of total strangers… If a piece of writing does not touch, alter, or shake the human heart, it is nothing. It is a beautifully constructed house with no one living inside” (UnlessIt Moves the Heart).
Few twentieth-century writers combine sensual brilliance, personal scandal, and literary influence as completely as the French novelist Colette (1873-1954). Revered in France as one of the great stylists of modern prose, she remains comparatively underread in America. Her life was marked by artistic triumph, erotic independence, moral ambiguity, and deep contradiction, qualities inseparable from the extraordinary vitality of her work.
I hadn’t encountered Colette until I came across reprints of several of her best-known works in the New York Review of Books, including Chéri and The Pure andthe Impure. Curious, I decided to begin at the beginning with Claudine at School, the first of her semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, featuring the rebellious schoolgirl whose wit, sensuality, and independence challenged conventional notions of womanhood as passive, domestic, and sexually muted.
The Claudine novels emerged from one of the most exploitative literary marriages of the era. Colette’s husband, the flamboyant Parisian critic and entrepreneur Willy, recognized her talent and pressured her into writing the series, which was initially published entirely under his own name. The books became enormously successful, while Colette remained publicly overshadowed. Her eventual break from Willy marked not only a personal emancipation but the beginning of her emergence as an independent literary figure.
After reading Claudine at School, I turned to Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, a massive and meticulous biography produced from nearly a decade of research in French archives and sources.
Thurman had previously written Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983 and later helped inspire the Academy Award-winning film Out of Africa. She was co-producer.
Her Colette biography became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, while France honored her with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016. She has also been one of the longtime staff writers of The New Yorker.
Yet I suspect many Americans remain only vaguely aware of Colette, even if they have seen Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated adaptation of her 1944 novella.
In France, however, Colette long ago entered the cultural canon, the first female president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, and remains a central figure in the French literary curriculum. Her Claudine novels, Chéri, and Gigi continue to be widely read.
Among her admirers were some of the century’s most distinguished literary figures: Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. William Faulkner reportedly kept her photograph on his writing desk, a tribute from one master stylist to another.
Upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman granted a state funeral, though the Catholic Church denied her religious burial because of her divorces and unconventional private life.
Colette’s writings eventually filled more than eighty volumes: novels, memoirs, journalism, literary criticism, essays on theatre, fashion, cuisine, and animals. During the First World War, she even worked as a war correspondent, visiting battlefields and interviewing soldiers.
Yet one finds little overt political or philosophical argument in her work. What distinguishes Colette is her total immersion in the senses. She does not merely describe experience; she inhabits it, merging the physical world with psychological perception.
One feels physically present in her prose: the ripening of a peach, the texture of a cat’s fur, the shifting power between lovers, the ache of aging, the fierce necessity of independence.
Her evocations of her native Burgundy possess extraordinary sensory delicacy:
“Je redescendais… Le jardin frissonnait encore, les roses étaient froides. J’attendais que le premier rayon de soleil touchât le mur, et alors l’odeur du buis montait comme une prière. Tout était bleu, argenté et nacré. C’était un monde où la rosée n’était pas encore de l’eau, mais une sorte de lait céleste qui adoucissait le monde avant que le jaune cruel du jour ne commence à le brûler.”
Translation:
“I would go down into the garden… The garden was still shivering, the roses were cold. I would wait for the first ray of sun to touch the wall, and then the scent of the boxwood would rise like a prayer. Everything was blue, silver, and nacreous. It was a world where the dew was not yet water, but a kind of celestial milk that softened the world before the harsh yellow of the day began to burn it away.”
She was equally perceptive about aging and female self-awareness:
“Elle regarda son reflet — le cou qui commençait à perdre sa tension, le fin réseau de rides autour des yeux qu’aucune poudre ne pouvait vraiment bannir. Elle ne pleura pas ; elle étudia sa ruine comme un général pourrait étudier la carte d’un territoire perdu. Il y avait une magnificence dans cette défaite. Elle se rendait compte qu’être une femme, c’était être une série de peaux, muées l’une après l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, on ne reste qu’avec les os de son propre caractère, qui sont, après tout, les seules choses qui durent vraiment.”
Translation:
“She looked at her reflection—the neck that was beginning to lose its tension, the fine web of lines around the eyes that no amount of powder could truly banish. She did not weep; she studied her ruin as a general might study a map of a lost territory. There was a magnificence in this defeat. She realized that to be a woman was to be a series of skins, shed one after the other, until finally one is left with only the bones of one’s own character, which are, after all, the only things that truly endure.”
She also possessed an uncanny sensitivity toward animals, especially cats:
“Elle restait là, ombre gris-argent, ses yeux comme deux raisins translucides. Elle ne se contentait pas de regarder ; elle humait la chambre. Ses oreilles bougeaient comme de petits radars indépendants, captant le bruit d’une aile de phalène ou le tassement lointain de la maison. Dans son immobilité, il y avait une concentration terrible et belle — l’orgueil d’une créature qui s’appartient tout entière et ne doit aucune explication au monde.”
Translation:
“She lay there, a silver-grey shadow, her eyes like two translucent grapes. She did not merely watch; she inhaled the room. Her ears moved like small, independent radars, catching the sound of a moth’s wing or the distant settling of the house. In her stillness there was a terrible, beautiful concentration—the pride of a creature that belongs entirely to itself and owes no explanation to the world.”
Colette’s private life, however, remains controversial. Her relationships were often transgressive; she had a strained relationship with her daughter, engaged in an affair with her teenage stepson, and continued publishing in journals associated with Vichy France during the Nazi occupation.
Thurman describes Colette’s maternal style as one of “ruthless detachment.” Much of the child-rearing was delegated to a nanny. Mother and daughter frequently quarreled. At one point, returning from boarding school, her daughter reportedly remarked that she wished they were Jewish because Jewish parents seemed more emotionally involved with their children.
Thurman suggests that Colette regarded motherhood as an intrusion upon the artistic life—a conflict that has shadowed many women writers navigating the competing demands of creativity, erotic freedom, and domestic expectation.
Her conduct during the Nazi occupation remains morally ambiguous. Although she used her connections to secure the release of her Jewish husband from internment, she nevertheless continued publishing under the Vichy regime, actions critics still debate. Thurman offers a pragmatic possibility: survival.
In many respects, Colette embodied contradiction, shaped by a conservative provincial upbringing while seeking freedoms historically reserved for men.
Though later embraced by many feminists as a symbol of female independence, Colette often denounced feminism, once remarking that women “deserved the whip and the harem.” In a 1927 interview with Walter Benjamin, she suggested that women wielding power could become “worse than men.” Bisexual and involved in numerous relationships with women, she nevertheless disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism, perhaps knowing the difficulties of gay life, Thurman suggests.
And yet, despite these contradictions, Colette helped redefine what modern womanhood could be. She fashioned a public life of artistic independence, sexual autonomy, and professional achievement at a time when few such paths existed openly for women.
French culture has often shown a greater willingness than Anglo-American culture to celebrate women who combine sensual freedom with intellectual authority, as seen in figures such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Colette belongs within that lineage, though she remains more elusive, less ideological, and ultimately more instinctive than either.
Thurman’s biography succeeds precisely because it resists simplification. She neither canonizes nor condemns Colette, but instead reveals a woman of immense artistic gifts, profound appetites, emotional blind spots, courage, vanity, discipline, selfishness, and brilliance.
Above all, Colette endures because of the precision and sensual richness of her prose. Few writers have rendered nature, animals, desire, aging, and the textures of ordinary experience with such tactile immediacy and lyrical control. Whatever her personal failings, her writing continues to justify the devotion of her readers and her enduring place in French literature.
Today is “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” a chance to carry a poem with you and share it. Poetry speaks to the feeling dimension at the heart of who we are, most often through metaphor.
I’ve chosen Sara Teasdale’s “Stars,” first published in 1917. Teasdale is also known for “There Will Come Soft Rains,” whose title Ray Bradbury later borrowed for one of his most memorable stories. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
“Stars” is a short poem whose apparent simplicity conceals careful craft:
“Stars”
Alone in the night On a dark hill With pines around me Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars Over my head, White and topaz And misty red;
Myriads with beating Hearts of fire That aeons Cannot vex or tire;
Up the dome of heaven Like a great hill, I watch them marching Stately and still,
And I know that I Am honored to be Witness of so much majesty.
The opening stanza—“Alone in the night / On a dark hill”—does not suggest loneliness so much as attentiveness. The speaker is set apart in order to perceive more fully. The “spicy and still” pines engage not only sight but scent, grounding the experience in the physical world.
In the second stanza, the sky’s “white and topaz / And misty red” stars introduce a quiet richness of color. Rather than dramatizing emotion, the imagery gently intensifies perception, drawing us into a heightened awareness.
The third stanza personifies the stars as having “beating / Hearts of fire.” This is a form of pathetic fallacy, but it feels less like projection than kinship. The stars are not indifferent; they seem alive with a steady, enduring energy, untouched by time’s vexations.
By the fourth stanza, the speaker’s response becomes more clearly shaped: the stars “marching / Stately and still” evoke a ceremonial procession, ordered and serene.
The final tercet—departing from the earlier quatrains—serves as a quiet coda:“I am honored to be witness of so much majesty.”
The shift in form underscores the inward turn toward gratitude.
A small poem, yet it opens onto something vast: a moment in which solitude becomes not isolation but privilege—the chance to witness a universe both immense and strangely intimate.
Reading The Times Literary Supplement this morning, I learned of the death of Helen Vendler, one of our most astute literary critics, who died on April 23, 2024, at her home in Laguna Beach, California, at age 90.
I cannot quite account for how I missed this as she mattered enormously to me, beginning with my first encounter with her splendid elucidations of Emily Dickinson’s teasing, cryptic lines.
Harvard’s first female University Professor, the university’s highest academic distinction, Vendler produced a body of work remarkable in its breadth: essays and book-length studies of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Lowell, and Heaney, among others.
She declined to write on living poets, believing that time was needed to properly weigh their achievement.
With her passing, the great cohort of Anglo-American literary critics has thinned further: Kermode (d. 2010), Bloom (d. 2019), Perloff (d. 2024). Only Sir Christopher Ricks, now 92, remains among the preeminent critics of the last century.
Vendler’s particular gift was guiding readers line by line through the most demanding verse, illuminating rather than overwhelming.
She was a lifelong devotee of I. A. Richards, whose landmark PracticalCriticism advocated close attention to a poem’s formal patterns, setting aside authorial intent, reader response, and historical context. Poetry yields its meaning, Richards argued, through how it is shaped; above all, through its diction.
This was also the foundation of the New Criticism as developed by John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks (see Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn and Understanding Poetry).
It is the way I was schooled to read poetry, which may explain why I found Vendler’s skepticism toward deconstructionism and other theoretical fashions so congenial.
Her dictum to aspiring poets, “Write so your mother could understand,” captured her conviction precisely: convolution out, clarity in.
She was not without controversy. Her pointed dismissal of Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry in the New York Review of Books:’”Are These the Poems to Remember?,” drew sharp criticism for what many saw as racial bias in her canonical judgments.
That she apologized to Dove as she lay dying, speaks volumes to her integrity. Her criticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet she loved as a “fastidious aesthete” and “intemperate dogmatist,” illustrates her refusal of hagiography. She evaluated poets on aesthetic terms, not identity, and expected the same rigor of herself.
Her path to that eminence was hard-won. As a Harvard graduate student in the 1950s, she was told by the English Department Chair: “You know we don’t want you here…. We don’t want any women here.”
Pregnancy barred her from teaching. At 34, divorced, she supported a son on child support and the income from four courses, one of them in the evenings. When first offered a professorship she declined it. (She would not accept a position at Harvard until the mid-1980s.).
The irony is that she had not begun as an English major at all, winning a Fulbright in mathematics. But poetry had claimed her early. As a teenager, she had committed several Shakespearean sonnets to memory.
Fluent in reading Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French from her youth, she became, by common consent, the preeminent literary critic of the second half of the twentieth century.
Her honors included the Jefferson Lecture — the federal government’s highest humanities recognition; the presidency of the Modern Language Association; and 28 honorary doctorates.
Her final book, InhabitingthePoem: LastEssays, published by the Library of America, was written as she knowingly was dying and is a fitting capstone. Yeats presides over it, as he always did for her: “the finest poet of the twentieth century.”
As poet Tom Cook observes in the TLS, “It is hard to imagine a critic of her sheer range and depth, with the time and willingness to share it, emerging again.
It was at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1979, while doing a course in modern poetry, that I first heard of Philip Larkin, featured among the poets we studied..
Many critics consider him Britain’s best poet since WWII. Later, I would make him a staple of my own university courses in modern poetry. One Larkin poem that impressed me tremendously was “Church Going,” with its somber reflection on Christianity’s demise and, by extension, religion in contemporary life. Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull, was slated to visit our tutorial, only to cancel for whatever reason at the last minute. He died a few years later.
While “Church Going” remains my favorite Larkin poem, it had its thematic precedent, however, in modernist American poet Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” published in 1915 and revised in 1923. Like Larkin, Stevens takes up the embers of a once vibrant faith.
It’s not an easy read, Stevens perhaps with Eliot the most erudite of modernists poets. I’ve been thinking a lot of Stevens and this particular poem as Easter approaches. The resurrection, whether mythic or historical, is the poem’s underlying centripetal force that energizes this magnificent poem.
I.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
Commentary:
The poem commences on a Sunday morning, moving intermittently from the palpable, sensory present—an anonymous woman in nightgown, lounging on a couch, enjoying her coffee and oranges, a green parrot resting on her rug.
An interlocutor voice intrudes with philosophic reflection, setting up dialectic tension: nature’s plenitude versus a “silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” vague and distant.
II.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Commentary:
The idea of paradise distant and abstract, vividly contrasts with the pungency of the physical world, sufficient in both “grievings” and “elations.”
III.
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
Commentary:
The ancient myth of Jove, the Roman sky-father, and his non-human birth yields a deity absent of human experience, a monarch remote from sensory, earthly life, suggestive of Jesus born of a virgin (“virginal,” “star”). Blood, “commingling…With heaven” implies the Incarnation. “Muttering”suggests incomprehensibility, a divine speech not relevant to human need, an indicting of the traditional transcendent god, absent from daily life. The several symbols — Jove, blood, the Virgin, the star, the hinds (female deer)—suggest their man-made origins. Humans project on the universe their need for the palpable (i.e., “blood) to meet what fulfills their longing for a deity who co-mingles among them (“requital to desire”). Requital means reciprocation, a satisfying of longing. Several pivotal questions are raised toward the stanza’s end:
“Shall our blood fail?” — Will human desire for the divine simply die out?
“Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise?” — Or will we succeed in sacralizing earthly life itself?
“Shall it give back all that it has absorbed?” — Will heaven (the sky, the idea of transcendence) return what it has taken from us — our energy, our desire, our consolation?
“Or shall men gather and make hymns to what / Is left of paradise?” Or shall they celebrate / The sky, the sun, the earth?”
In sum, the human-wrought Incarnation is needless, for Earth functions sufficiently as our sole paradise (i.e., heaven): “A part of labor and a part of pain.” Nature, woven into our experiential world, yields a friendlier, knowable cosmos, the stuff of human experience.
IV.
She says, “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
Commentary:
Here, Stevens address the poem’s pervasive anxiety, the longing for immortality. The woman worries that the beauty of the earth—the “green of April” or the “plum on the golden plate”—is too ephemeral to satisfy the human soul’s longing for something eternal. In rebuttal, the voice argues the insufficiency of vague, mythic afterlife narratives, the “chimera of the grave,/Neither the golden underground, nor isle/Melodious, where spirits gat them home,” to cyclic nature’s sustaining cornucopia of delight.
V.
She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
Commentary:
The woman longs for assurance of a heaven with its bliss in the conflict between rejecting religion and persistent emotional need. Mortality, the voice argues, heightens our awareness of present beauty resplendent in human event.
VI.
Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Commentary:
The interlocutor’s musing as to the nature of heaven. Is it a place of unchanging sameness, absent of ending ,where “fruit never falls” and the “boughs hang always in that perfect sky”? Is it a place, like earth, of continuing longing, “With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find…?” Mortality intensifies an awareness of life’s intrinsic value.
VII.
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
Commentary:
The poem’s climax opens with an extended auditory image of a naturalistic celebration of life—“a chant of paradise”!—cognitive of mortality, enhancing acceptance of its ending: “They shall know well “the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn.”
VIII.
She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Commentary:
The concluding stanza commences with the speaker’s rejection of the Resurrection:
“The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
Independent of a transcendent deity, we are granted autonomy (“freedom”), our lives governed by ancient, impersonal physical laws (the “dependency of day and night”) rather than a moral or spiritual prerequisite.
The stanza concludes with the image of an evening flock of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
“Ambiguous undulations” suggests impermanence, the inevitable intrusion of change as life transitions from beauty to death. We, like these birds, glide gracefully (“extended wings”), “sinking” inevitably toward the “darkness” of extinction.
REFLECTIONS:
Previous to my retirement, I had taught this poem for some twenty years as part of my course in Modern Poetry, unceasingly admiring its resonant Keats and Wordsworth innuendos.
Paradoxically modern in its delivery, cerebral and image focused, the poem is rooted in English Romanticism, celebrating the imagination’s witness to our fated passage into a parenthesis of light suspended between spheres of darkness.
Like much of Romantic poetry, again that of Wordsworth in its blank verse of unrhymed pentameter, melancholic disposition, rich symbolism, and lofty diction, its voluptuous fantasy, reminiscent of Keats, it supremely celebrates nature.
While there is an insistent tension through much of the poem between nature’s plenitude and the woman’s expressed need for something more, it’s crucial to Stevens’ purpose of philosophical debate.
The final stanza proffers epiphany, the woman’s possible acceptance of a cosmos devoid of divine certitude—“the old chaos of the sun,” a realm of “ambiguous undulations,” where no promise of resurrection intrudes upon the flux of being. We cannot be sure the woman is even present here. Critic Frank Kermode points out Stevens preference for open endings. He sees the poem’s final stanza as process, not conclusion.
Distinguished critic Helen Vender reads the poem as a movement toward a “natural supernaturalism”—a vision in which transcendence is reabsorbed into nature. The final stanza’s birds and “ambiguous undulations” affirm process, not permanence.
Stevens’ masterpiece, a secular hymn, grants solace not in transcendence but in the acceptance—and even the aesthetic affirmation—of metaphysical ambiguity: the freedom to choose, to become arbiters of all that we define as beautiful, grounded wholly within a mortal world.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
This year I decided to overhaul my reading habits by adopting what I call focused reading—pursuing a subject deeply rather than wandering endlessly from book to book. Instead of grazing randomly across titles, I try to follow a particular vein: reading several works that illuminate a topic, an author, an era, or a historical moment until the subject begins to feel textured and alive.
For years, though my reading had been eclectic, and not without pleasure, I began to sense that the most memorable intellectual experiences of my life had come, not from isolated books, but from immersion, one work leading naturally to another, ideas conversing across pages and centuries.
Reading then becomes less a pastime than a form of exploration, the mind moving gradually through a landscape rather than darting past it from the window of a passing train.
This year I began, as usual, with my annual eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction culled from authoritative sources. But going forward, I hope to limit that list to perhaps twenty titles—books that seem especially deserving of attention.
Alongside these, I’ve begun concentrating on several areas. This year they include the farming iconoclast Wendell Berry; the conservative economist Thomas Sowell; the late historian Walter Johnson; and the classical world—an area where I lack deeper exposure.
Next year, should I still walk the planet, I can imagine expanding the method further: perhaps ten topic areas, each composed of primary and secondary works. Five books per topic would yield roughly fifty works of focused reading, in addition to the twenty eclectic titles.
To give an example, one of this year’s areas of focus is the classical milieu. Staying within my five-book limit, I chose the following:
• The Republic — Plato • Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle • The Bacchae — Euripides • Metamorphoses — Ovid • Letters from a Stoic — Seneca the Younger
So far, my experiment is yielding dividends. I’ve committed to reading a minimum of fifty pages a day—assuming an average book length of about three hundred pages—and by mid-March I’ve completed twelve books. Last year, by contrast, I finished only twenty.
I should confess that Atomic Habits by James Clear helped inspire the discipline. Clear’s practical application of behavioral psychology, ideas traceable to B. F. Skinner, encouraged me to approach reading not merely as an aspiration but as a daily practice. Nowadays I cringe when my routine threatens the minimum and will sometimes delay sleep simply to complete my pages.
Such discipline may seem quaint in an age that offers a thousand distractions. Once it was linear television that eroded the nation’s reading habits; today, the Internet amplifies the trend. Last year, nearly half of Americans, 48.5 percent, did not read a single book. In Britain, the figure stood at 40 percent, according to a YouGov poll reported in the Times Literary Supplement.
Bottom line, Americans spend roughly four to five hours each day watching television or streaming media; in Britain, the average approaches four and a half hours. Platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook dominate much of that viewing.
Add the hours spent on smartphones, computers, and tablets and the total easily approaches seven hours a day, nearly the equivalent of a full workday, devoted to screens. Much of that time is spent watching movies, sports, or the endless scroll of digital entertainment.
Younger generations, though still fond of sports and films, increasingly inhabit the fast-moving currents of TikTok, YouTube, and video games.
Reading, by contrast, has steadily fallen out of fashion.
Nor has reading alone suffered. The social fabric has frayed as well. I remember when houses faced the street with broad porches where neighbors gathered in the evening, waiting the advent of night’s coolness, conversation drifting unhindered from one subject to another, board games on small tables, laughter an abundant sprinkling of neighborly fellowship.
This simple act of sitting together seemed reason enough to linger.
Today, many houses turn their porches to the rear, facing private yards rather than the street, as if community itself had quietly retreated.
Perhaps this is why books continue to matter.
Reading restores a community the modern world has forsaken.. Open a book and time folds in upon itself: Plato resumes his patient inquiry into justice; Seneca counsels composure in adversity; Ovid reminds us that the human story is one long sequence of transformations. The centuries speak again in voices at once distant and intimate.
Books, in this sense, comprise the old porch of civilization.
There we sit again with the living and the dead alike, the conversation unbroken. The room grows quiet, the hour late, yet the mind moves freely—wandering Athens with Aristotle, pausing in the tragic shadows of Euripides, or returning, perhaps a little wiser, to our own small corner of the world.
So I keep my modest covenant of fifty pages a day. Not simply to finish more books, though that is pleasant enough. I read because within those pages waits a larger company and a wider horizon.
In a distracted age, the turning of a page may be one of the last quiet forms of freedom left to us.
I’ve just finished Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Wendell Berry’s TheUnsettling of America.
I’ve never read two books simultaneously before, but the pairing worked. The Goldfinch proved a genuine page-turner for me—a Dickensian, plot-driven suspense novel layered with thematic, even philosophical, meditations on life’s meaning.
Berry, by contrast, is at his consummate best in The Unsettling of America, distilling a passionate defense of the rural, the sanctity of non-industrial agriculture free of chemicals and heavy machinery. It is, finally, a lament for the erosion of community in our contemporary drift toward urbanization and accumulation. Berry is Thoreau à la mode. Simplicity, he reminds us, yields contentment.
I’m now reading Berry’s Jayber Crow, perhaps the finest introduction to his Port William novels, sixteen in number.
Since my experiment of reading two books at once has proven fruitful, I’m also reading A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer.
Iyer never disappoints in his genius for illuminating the subtle ambiences of disparate cultures. I confess I’m easy prey for this particular read as a longtime devotee of Japanese culture, now under threat. May ikigai, the art of pursuing one’s bliss, never meet its end.
My decision to weave a topical thread through my otherwise eclectic reading marks a meaningful turning in my reading approach. Last year I read twenty books. With ten already read this year, I anticipate—barring life’s interruptions—fifty or even sixty by year’s end.
But numbers surely are incidental. To read this way is to live more than one life, testing long held convictions, enlarging sympathies, and keeping my mind unsettled in the best sense of the word.
On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.
I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.
I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.
Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.
I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:
“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”
The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.
That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.
The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.
Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:
“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”
Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.
Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.
In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.
I’ve been absent from Brimmings for nearly a week, recovering from a serious bout with the flu—the fever lingering for ten days. A chronic cough remains my daily companion.
That hasn’t stopped me from reading—slowly, attentively—six books already this year.
As I’ve previously shared, alongside my annual eclectic reading list, I’ve committed to a topical approach to reading as a way of resisting intellectual grazing and cultivating sustained attention (Topical Reading). I’ve begun with Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, now in his ninety-second year.
I didn’t want to one day come upon his obituary and feel the guilt pangs of having neglected an agrarian pacifist, a champion of the local, often described, without much exaggeration, as America’s “moral conscience.”
Berry has farmed a 125-acre hilly tract adjacent to the Ohio River at Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky, for more than forty years. Farming, for him, is not metaphor but moral practice. As he writes, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.”
Academically, Berry is no lightweight: a BA and MA in English from the University of Kentucky, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a Guggenheim that took him to Italy, he taught briefly at New York University before returning—against the counsel of colleagues who believed he was jettisoning a promising academic career—to rural Kentucky and the family farm.
They were wrong.
Berry has since written more than fifty books spanning essays, novels, and poetry. His great theme is stewardship—not management or control, but reverent care. “The idea that people have a right to an economy that destroys nature is a contradiction,” he writes, insisting that economic life must answer to ecological reality.
For the farmer Berry, stewardship begins with the soil: an antipathy to chemicals, a reverencing of the biosphere, and a life lived according to natural rhythms. He is deeply opposed to industrial agriculture, which he regards as a cultural as well as ecological calamity: “Industrial agriculture is not just bad for farmers; it is bad for land, for rural communities, and ultimately for culture.”
Among American environmental writings, the two most salient works I’ve encountered are Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Thoreau’s aphoristic brilliance lends itself to endless quotation: “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify,” while Carson’s prose approaches poetry. Her opening paragraphs of SilentSpring remain, to my mind, the finest in environmental literature, exposing the arrogance behind what she called “the control of nature, a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.”
I’m only in the early stages of getting acquainted with Berry, but he keeps distinguished company with Thoreau and Carson in his passion for preserving nature’s bounty and the pulchritude of a simplified life lived in fidelity to place and community.
In this sense, Berry reaches back to Thomas Jefferson, whom he quotes more than any other figure: “In my own politics and economics I am Jeffersonian.” Jefferson believed liberty was best secured in small, decentralized communities of independent producers, warning that distant power—whether governmental or economic—inevitably corrodes responsibility and freedom.
Though Berry was an activist who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and has voted Democratic, his politics resist easy classification. He has lamented that America’s two major parties have grown increasingly to resemble one another.
There may appear, at first glance, to be overlap with libertarianism—his opposition to big government, military expansion, and imperial intervention—but the resemblance is superficial. Libertarianism exalts the autonomous individual; Berry emphasizes communal obligation. “We do not have to sacrifice our economic well-being in order to act responsibly toward our land and our neighbors,” he writes. “Rather, we must do so in order to preserve our economic well-being.”
Berry has his critics. His suspicion of technology strikes some as untenable in a hungry, overpopulated world. Can an aggregate of small family farms feed a wired and burgeoning global population, particularly in parts of Africa?
I find myself grappling with his apparent parochialism. Only a tiny fraction of Americans now farm. What of the rest of us who earn our livelihoods elsewhere? And in an interconnected age, can the local truly stand apart from the global?
Berry would respond that the issue is not technology itself, but dependence. “There is a difference between being technologically advanced and being technologically dependent,” he reminds us—a distinction too often elided in contemporary debates.
Ironically, Berry would fit comfortably in an Amish community. He still plows with horses. He owns no computer, television, or mobile phone, and has no internet access. He writes first in pencil, then types. He uses electricity sparingly, supplemented by solar panels, and his writing studio is without electricity. He walks the talk, living a life rooted—quite literally—in the land. Thoreau would have approved.
An iconoclast, Berry remains well worth reading. Growth, he reminds us, is not synonymous with the earth’s welfare. Economies, like soils, can be exhausted. Big government and industrial systems, he argues, erode local responsibility, foster dependency, and inflame military and international tensions. Rural poverty in places like Appalachia persists, in his view, because urban prosperity has been purchased by the plundering of these regions.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal.
In 2015, he became the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
That same year, the Library of America published a boxed set of his work—an honor accorded to only two living American writers at the time.
Berry may be impractical. He may be impossible to scale. But he leaves us with an uncomfortable and necessary reminder: care, once abandoned, is not easily restored—and neither are the land, the culture, nor the communities that depend upon it.
Silence has always allured me, most often when it is bound to expanses empty of people—though not always. I can find it just as readily in a library, or even in my own home when left to myself.
It is not, I believe, a resistance to an oppressive environment—work, academics, trauma, peer pressure, or the quotidian churn of human caprice—what psychiatry terms “psychological reactance.” It goes deeper than that, perhaps rooted in my introversion, which inclines me away from crowds and constant social encounter.
I carry memories of three landscapes that produced instant rapture: a sense of detachment, of absence from time itself—something larger than me, and yet intimately felt.
The first occurred when I was a graduate student in North Carolina, visiting the hillside at Kitty Hawk where the Wright brothers first achieved sustained flight in their ungainly aerial contraption. I had gone with friends, who wandered along the beachfront below, leaving me alone atop the hill. There, history seemed to recede. The wind moved through the grass, the sky stretched open and unmarked, and for a moment the present dissolved, as though time itself had paused in reverence.
Then there was Arlington National Cemetery, its vast rows of symmetrical white grave markers extending beyond easy comprehension. The stillness there was not empty but weighted, a silence shaped by collective sacrifice. For a brief moment, the eternal peace of America’s fallen became my own.
Most memorable of all were Scotland’s Highlands. Driving eastward from Edinburgh, they rose suddenly and unexpectedly across the horizon—rugged, green, and seemingly untouched by human intrusion. I pulled over, stepped out, tested the firmness of their verdure beneath my feet, and listened to what I can only call their shouting silence. That moment remains my most cherished travel memory.
As an English major in college, I once took a course devoted entirely to Wordsworth—England’s great poet of landscape. I am, perhaps, a rarity in having read all of his several hundred poems. Among them, “Tintern Abbey” most fully captures my response to those landscapes:
“…that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul…”
Literary scholars describe this response under the notion of the sublime: the experience of being overwhelmed through intimacy with nature, a flash of clarity in which one intuits a larger coherence behind nature’s mystery. Wordsworth gives it further voice:
“And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man….”
Psychology approaches the experience from another angle. One theory frames it as a sensory reset—the mind’s need to unburden itself from obligation and affliction, a release from the cognitive overload of daily life.
I am especially drawn to E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis, which proposes that humans evolved in constant contact with nature, calibrating the nervous system through millennia of hunter-gatherer life. In that context, a deserted landscape could signal safety—the absence of predators, permission to rest.
Another perspective, the Default Mode Network, suggests that quiet environments can trigger awe by suspending habitual rumination. Freed from constant external demands, the mind drifts toward reflection, memory, and imaginative connection. In such moments, the brain is allowed to hear the rhythms it evolved to monitor.
This makes intuitive sense. We live in a world saturated with anthropophonic noise—human-made sound without pause or mercy. Though nature is never truly silent—wind, water, and the subtle movements of life persist—these sounds soothe rather than assault. They restore rather than demand.
Wordsworth seems to anticipate this longing even in the heart of the city. In “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” he finds London redeemed by a rare moment of stillness:
“Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!”
Perhaps silence, then, is not an absence but a presence—one that returns us to ourselves, quiets the mind’s noise, and restores a way of listening we once possessed, and have not entirely forgotten.
Brimmings: up from the well 