Paul Éluard, surrealist and poet, famously said, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” While culling through the Slow Muse archive, I also found the two quotes below from nature writer Ellen Meloy that weave into Éluard’s thread. Some of these are perennial themes: What it means to feel a sense of […]
Nature
The World Before Our Eyes
Milford Sound in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park The sum of our own positions on things we value determines the shape and texture of our social lives. This is why contemporary Americans acknowledge the things they find beautiful and talk about them all the time. Our commonality as citizens resides almost exclusively in the world […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Repair and Revere
Hurricane Sandy (Photo: NASA via Getty Images) Storms, especially the ones as enormous as Sandy, move me to sober. Serious circumspection seems appropriate as my friends in New York and Virginia get dropped from the grid and swamped with water. But it is also a humbling reminder that we can never step out of the […]
Going with Unexplained
A view from The Donkey Show (Midsummer Night’s Dream meets 80’s disco) ____ Nature does not stop to grieve, an observation that since time began has either appalled or inspired the human beings who have made it. Poppies sprout in bloody battlefields, and birds sing outside death-room windows. On one hand, the big thing that […]
Seeing is an Inside Job
Rothko Chapel, Houston The truly great ones are fresh continuously, repeatedly. Like a painting you can sit in front of for hours and never fully grasp. When I was just beginning to study art, I asked my professor about Mark Rothko. He and de Kooning were the giants of the generation of artists who inspired […]