Something dark and sharp must live deep inside me, because when I read “There Are No Psychopaths,” I am disappointed. Psychopaths explain so much. The twisted little smile that crosses someone’s face, quickly hidden, after they cause pain. The impulse, spreading fast these days, to watch the world burn.
When I asked for a curator at the Saint Louis Zoo who would educate me about animal communication, I was hoping for chatty, irreverent primates or soulful, wise elephants. Instead, I was sent to Dr. Ed Spevak, the zoo’s acclaimed curator of invertebrates. Brilliant, fired with enthusiasm for his subject…
A meeting on Zoom sounds like a relief until I remember I hate it. Texting keeps me in touch with friends so swiftly and constantly, I forget how much I miss them.
Some of us need to be in a certain place, or with certain kinds of people, or in a certain emotional climate....
Last week, I read a delightful story on a friend’s Facebook page, full of specific details about a farmer who realized that someone was taking eggs and potatoes from his farm stand without plunking any money into the honor jar. She was hungry and broke—times were increasingly hard—and too proud…
The masochism of it never sat well with me. Watch, on a screen, your nightmares acted out? Fix your eyes on that screen while your heart pounds faster and faster, your breathing shallows, your guts clench, and the worst possible things happen? It sounded like a mad scientist’s torture experiment.
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.” But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted, I have…
I was railing again about Eve. For Eve. Why should she take the rap for humanity’s fall, just because she had a healthy curiosity? Then I remembered Pandora, whom we blame just as angrily for the unleashing of our woes. But think of living with that box, gazing at it…
The unbearable whiteness of being....
“But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we…