The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken in the race of days. To all the small miracles you rushed through. Learn to linger around someone of ease
The last minute is basically my only real skill. In college, (and high school, and since I can remember) there must have been things I occupied myself with in the hours between when I left class or left a social event and when, at 1am, or 3am, or 6am, I sat down to start work. But mostly what I remember is those frantic hours, the world around me silent, tunneling to the forced singularity of focus. There was a street lamp right under my dorm window, five stories down. It came back on at 5am, and at least once a week I would watch it spark to life, as the morning leaked back into the world, and I would feel like I had acquired some substance, like whatever was coming next would be survivable, like this version of myself, awake, capable of driving the work of two weeks into two hours, was worthy of praise. I felt tangibly good at something, the way I imagine athletes feel. I liked writing, but I liked at least as much being able to say "I wrote it in an hour" about something I’d written. I still do. At this point, after many years of operating this way, I can see the seams, the flimsiness of it, but I have been relying on the last minute for so long that I don’t know how to do otherwise. If television in the last ten or fifteen has a cohesive thesis - and I believe it does - the thesis is that work will save you. Work replaces the family. It orders the world into meaning, and lifts singular identity into a high and visible register. It's easy to see why the promise appeals. You don't have to love anyone, or make anyone love you; you just have to be really, really good at your job. To do something reasonably, in manageable pieces, means to admit my limitations, to turn work from the register of miracles back down to the everyday, where it is just work.
Everyone was young, but they all looked old. Eyes wide open, wandering Manhattan it’s difficult not to ask: Is New York City falling apart? I suppose, technically, it is, perpetually, given the amount of scaffolding everywhere you look. Scaffolding as a permanent fixture of older buildings. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again. Maybe cities excel at this kind of erasure? When I walk cities I rarely feel that sense of past-people or rituals I feel in the mountains of Japan The old roads in Japan have their own tchotchekes, but for the most part contain something “like a scent,” which is, above all, fun, and is perhaps the thing most easily lost in the chaos and nowness, the inherent “nowhere,” of the big cities, and those dusty plains of the old west.
—with that eager, amateur’s love. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. Or it might even be in actual school. In my classes, I ask the students to find a poem they like and to get it by heart. To see someone in their late teens or early twenties, often by gender or ethnicity different from the author, shaping his or her mouth around those sounds created by somebody who is perhaps long dead, or perhaps thousands of miles away, and the students bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility, so that they’re both possessed and possessing—those moments have been very moving to me.
Mary Oliver’s Poetry Found a Second Life As a Meme
But of course, the magic of the poem, and that of many of Oliver’s poems in particular, is how it creates this sense of being implausibly singled out and told what you were waiting to hear.
"Friends, it's time for me to recharge the batteries and take a Pome hiatus. This third run has indeed been a charm; thank you so much for reading! Stay well, support your local poet, and see you somewhere down the road. -M x" "the song was in fact the joyous concordance of a moment that would not come again"
“But in the end we did my actual favorite thing, which is staying in the city over a major holiday weekend. Staying here over Thanksgiving or Christmas is the closest you will ever get to seeing a private New York, a New York as a small town, the bare, dead, and wonderful skeleton that remains when scrubbed of both transplants and tourists, when divested of anyone with anywhere else to go.” “We filled our apartment with loud, bright, sincere, concerned people being loud and bright and sincere and concerned at one another.”
