Take the right precautions, and you are acting out of an abundance of care. You need not remain cautious, your steps slowing as you peer nervously ahead. You can move ahead with relative confidence. Nonetheless, you will still be mocked.
If the regime becomes repressive, Mohammed Mupenda added, “you can make a few good career moves snitching on your colleagues and neighbors, doing little else.” And there are cosmetic improvements: “Noisy minorities, bums, and panhandlers disappear from the streets, which visibly enhances the urban environment.”
I miss hugs, an accidental brush against a stranger’s arm, the downy head of a friend’s baby as I curve my hand to support it. But above all, I miss how people smell. The soft, milky smell of that baby’s skin. Exhalations of coffee, garlic, chocolate. The drench of heavy…
So often we walk at someone else’s pace, keeping up with a companion’s long strides or the pedestrians jostling alongside us. Sauntering requires a deliberate aimlessness, an ease.
The theme is coming clear: Principle is sacrificed in order to either amass money or protect money. But what about the tortuous pursuit of equality and justice in the United States? On the surface, that does not fit the pattern.
If a police officer or a soldier came into view, our first impulse would be to step into the shadows. If light glared, we would keep our heads down. If we got arrested for insubordination or treason or somehow thwarting the State, we could try to plead our case in court and might even prevail—as long as the judges were nonpartisan, detached from any political agenda.
On screen, even something happening in real time does not feel live. When does a piece stop being theater and become film, I wonder.
In everyday life, zozobra just means anxiety. But Emilio Uranga went deeper, exploring the sense of destabilization Mexicans have had for far longer than we have. Zozobra meant wobbling between two perspectives, unable ever to land.
When we are young, we talk with greatest feeling about our dreams for the future. The adventure of old age is staying alive just a little bit longer, and the great battle is with one’s own mind and body. Old people are fighting nonstop, even as they sit in sunrooms or knit with seeming contentment.
According to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, even six-month-old babies stress out when they see a spider or a snake.
Asked the overarching subject of her work, O’Connor replied, “The action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” If the life and work are inseparable, her faith and her work are even tightly bound. Yet dogma never kept her from seeing things whole.
I share our dog’s affection for Lakeview Park, its wide, smooth path rising and falling alongside three small lakes edged with reeds, a weeping willow, a dock, a steep hill. One Saturday morning in early October, as soon as the sun slanted through cold mist, we set off happily. By…