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Such Great Heights

November 10, 2014 Essays, In House

Plane Wing

I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard in Ohio anticipating a trip to Kathmandu, via Abu Dhabi, where I arrived one bright day at the end of October. In the book, Matthiessen descends to grey Kathmandu after two months climbing the pristine crags of the Himalayas. In the city, the planar snows can appear only as an afterimage, a ghostly trick of the eyes. Matthiessen has not seen the elusive snow leopard he hoped to find, which represented Zen transcendence. He wanted to reach that state, but discovers that, being human, he can only approximate it. That, he decides, is enough. Returned to his worldly self, nature has explained itself and him. Where the snow lives, the Sanskrit himalaya, is eternal. He, by comparison, is nothing.

Trespassing in Leechburg

November 7, 2014 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

cloudy road

We drive on a gray day in October, a scenic four-hour drive from my new home in Baltimore to my old home in Leechburg, a small steel town in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, where I lived from ages 8 through 15—the longest stretch of childhood I spent in one location. Though it’s a place I’ve often gone back to in my fiction, I haven’t returned in person in over 15 years. The trip is reconnaissance and romance: scene gathering for a novel and a chance to explore my memory with M.

Stepping Off

November 1, 2014 Essays, Issue 08, Issue 08 Essays

By RALPH SNEEDEN

“And we went on living it, like a wave, that doesn’t know
it is at every moment different water.”
—Alan Williamson, from “A Childhood Around 1950”

In 1967 I almost drowned when I wandered from a sandbar and dropped into a deep cleft. That particular summer on the Jersey Shore, my older sisters had taken to riding what seemed to be kind, propellant waves with the rafts our mother had rented near the boardwalk, the industrial canvas sort you couldn’t buy in a store. I wasn’t a confident swimmer yet, so my mother wouldn’t even let me near one, which made no sense; the rafts were oversized life preservers, after all.

Talmudic Lesson: God’s Smile

November 1, 2014 Essays, Issue 08, Issue 08 Essays

By ILAN STAVANS

There is one story that has always held a strange allure for me. It appears in Genesis 25:19 to 28:9 and is about Jacob’s theft of Esau’s birthright. Every time I read it, I feel haunted. In old age, a blind Isaac asks Esau, his oldest son, to visit him. He makes it understood that the end is near and asks Esau to gather food from the field and bring it back so he might be able to bless him.

Where Were You on 9/11? A Look at Richard Bausch’s “Before, During, After”

October 20, 2014 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

When the planes hit on September 11, 2001, I was in the F train. The conductor made a bland announcement regretting delays following “an incident.” “What incident?” I asked my neighbor. He shrugged. I arrived at my office at BusinessWeek, then at 6th Avenue and 48th Street, and watched the towers collapse on TV. My baby son was home with the sitter, my daughter at kindergarten. My husband was safe. No one I knew was hurt, miraculously. For months, I cried. I was terrified of a subway bombing. I tried to plan how we would evacuate in the event of a nuclear attack. On bicycles? With two small children? We don’t own a car. But a car would be useless. 13 years later, I can’t visit the World Trade Center site. My trauma was trivial compared those who were there or lost someone.

Rehab

October 14, 2014 Essays

By SAHIBA GILL

soldier homecoming in airport

I did not know who Bowe Bergdahl was when I first heard about him on the news in June. I followed his rehabilitation, which was briefly reported for a week or so and happened in ordinary details. Sergeant Bergdahl was returned from Afghanistan through a prisoner exchange with the Taliban, who had held him for five years. He was welcomed back by his parents and President Obama in front of the White House press corps in the Rose Garden.

Thoreau’s Borderlands

October 6, 2014 Essays, In House

By JAMES ALAN GILL

In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” he writes, “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.” It is this longing for wildness that drove Thoreau to live and continue to return to Walden pond; to seek out nature whether along rivers, or the seashore, in the Maine woods, or his home town.

But at times Nature complicates Thoreau’s idealism by presenting raw, untamed forces—true wilderness, rather than just wildness—that stand in stark contrast to the pastoral that he often evokes in his writing.

Spritehood

October 3, 2014 Essays

By ANDREW SHADE

drawing of dragon and sea

The continent, it turned out, was not ready for people. The settlers chopped down every tree and killed every animal, then started in on each other. They hoarded finite resources—furs, lumber, ore—until there weren’t any left to use. Counterfeiters discovered a way to alchemize gold, bringing about hyperinflation and economic collapse. The strong terrorized the weak, not just once but repeatedly, hounding them through one life after another. Normal people became outright thugs, enacting fantasies of domination. Dominated people had a tendency to become informal police, enacting fantasies of justice. Every so often a server crash would plunge everyone weeks into the past, to the most recent backup.

The Teak House

October 2, 2014 Essays

By LAMTHARN HANTRAKUL

house in black and white

I like pressing my cheek up against the cool embrace of the teak floor, letting the chill lap against my face, chest, arms, and legs. I especially like the feeling of a freshly mopped teak floor. The wood becomes softer, more soothing like a cool straw mattress in the hot summer. When I walk barefoot, the gentle tickle below my feet beckons me to lie down. I like the rush of wooden veins flowing underneath my thighs and arms, brushing them into slumber.I’ve tried resisting the temptation on many occasions, but I always succumb to the elbow-rubbing intimacy that ensues. Remain too far away and there is nothing to smell. Rub too close and all the pleasure is gone. But get close enough to brush your tingling nose against the grainy grooves on the surface and you become lost in the aroma. I steal another whiff; the smell is subtler than rosewood, more subdued than pine, but sweeter than cedar.

In House

September 22, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

pots

The ending place is empty—nearly. I am writing this in the beginning place because it seems not quite right to start in a place that is ending.

On the phone, completing the last of the cleaning, he describes to me the ending place. He is there and I am here. He describes the span of those walls (now spackled) in which we made our lives these past eight years. Walls from which we hung postcards and pictures, pieces of metal and lace, the mirrored shadowbox, the plaster cherub, all the instruments. There, where the doors were painted a sloppy garish teal long before our arrival, where the ‘beautiful hardwood floors’ finally gave up, splintered into thick spears. The EIK, table now gone, in which innumerable parties dwindled to their inevitable but elusive ends, linoleum peeling along its edge. But I am here, 100 miles west, two days in: surrounded by countless boxes, all the stuff, the anxious cats—on the cusp of the new, an expansive place—beginning.

All posts tagged: Essay

Such Great Heights

Trespassing in Leechburg

Stepping Off

Talmudic Lesson: God’s Smile

Where Were You on 9/11? A Look at Richard Bausch’s “Before, During, After”

Rehab

Thoreau’s Borderlands

Spritehood

The Teak House

In House

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