Month: January 2005

Midmorning and the raccoon is among the plant saucers that serve as water containers for birds. In fact, it stands in one and looks about vacantly. Then it is o...

The city as society’s agent abandons its denizens as night abandons light, as easily as it discards the aged and children and solitaries. The melancholy o...

A brilliant full moon is casting cold clear light straight through the curtains and onto the bare floor. I look up, startled and shivering, thinking: What a mes...

In his Chronicle of the Crusade of St. Louis, the thirteenth-fourteenth century writer Joinville mentions an incident refering to hermits. On his party’s ...

In a passage somewhere in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, the protagonist, who is a Chinese farmer, looks at his fields and reflects on an impeding famine. T...

I look around proudly housework done everything clean then, I frown it won’t last already dust on the mirror

What is the vilest stereotype of a hermit? Start with the image of the old loner, secretive, suspicious, furtive. That is what Lance Morrow begins to depict in ...

In most Western languages, the word “disaster” comes from the Latin dies aster, meaning “bad star.” According to this primordial view of...

Little is known of the 14th-century English anchoress Christine Carpenter, but a book and a film have decided on versions of her life and motives. Anchoress of ...

At dusk, the full moon is a lantern hung in the trees, the slender pine trees against the sky like black grill-like slivers over the source of light. In a nearb...