This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy
To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even
This is a choice we rarely name. Putting effort into how much ambiguity we can handle can define a career and give us a path forward in our social and cultural interactions as well. Our desire for clarity is based on safety and how we think about risk. If you know exactly what
"Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you... until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that."