Category: essays
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Subject and Object
On the first day of my first metaphysics class, the professor asked a student to count the objects in the room. She confidently totted up the people, the desks, and had started working on the whiteboards and pens when he interrupted her. “What about the chair legs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Or the screws…
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Eighty Six Christmases
I suppose I feel as if it’s my job, along with taking care of my mother’s financial and medical affairs, to try to convince her that as long as she’s alive there is joy to be found, at least occasionally, somewhere, from something. In pistachio ice cream or lights on a Christmas tree or a…
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Unstately Estate
The week surrounding my parents’ estate sale was, perhaps, more eventful than I might have liked, a trickster deity’s bulleted list of “what can go wrong, will go wrong.” Friday, February 1st Early afternoon Late afternoon Evening Saturday, February 2nd Morning Afternoon Evening Sunday, February 3rd Morning Afternoon Evening Monday, February 4th Morning Afternoon Evening Tuesday,…
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Not Going Gentle
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light. For the past few months I’ve thought about little else, and I think about it gingerly: Dylan Thomas meant something more noble than this. * * * My eighty-three-year-old father is…
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State of Grace
I. The Burial of the Dead Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers. When we pull up in front of my parents’ house I notice the trees first. The almond whose slender shimmering leaves splashed my bedroom walls with pale green light as I studied Eliot, then Heidegger,…
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Monastic Meditations
The New Camaldoli hermitage perches atop a mountain just south of Big Sur. The dozen or so Benedictine monastics who call the hermitage home earn a portion of their living from fruit and date nut cakes and a small bookstore and gift shop. But their primary source of income is a retreat house and guest…
smallstonebuddha 