You’re In Here, Too
It’s morning but still dark out. It’s also raining and cold. I’m walking out of the twenty-four-hour fitness center, on my way to the all-night Waffle House, when a woman hails me from her car. She has just run away…
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Essays
Leaving Walden Pond
It wasn’t mere crankiness that made Henry David Thoreau suspicious of civilization and all its defenders, title, and awards. Rather, he thought that civilization already had more champions than it deserved, and that it was not his particular genius to…
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A View of the Lake
The lakes of northern Michigan were mysterious to me when I was growing up. There was always at least one undeveloped side and a few swampy coves on each. I saw the trees on the lake’s edge as the border…
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Hard Labor: Thoreau and the Meaning of Work
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and…
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The Choice Of Emptiness
These are excerpt from a little known but important book, The Choice of Emptiness by Jim Ralston. We’ve published several chapters from this book before (Issue 86). Ralston’s story lives on in me, though; I’m moved, again and again, by…
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