A study of others reveals the self as a mosaic of otherness.

In high school history classes, I never thought about history having actually happened around living people. The War of the Roses and French Revolution were not tumultuous events that shook and took lives, but lessons in textbooks I must memorize for quizzes. Considering the victims of Bubonic plague died six hundred years ago, being dead seemed their essence, and I forgot they faced their impending destruction like I will, hearts pounding, having only known life.

A survey of history prompts the conviction that mortality exonerates immorality.

The persistence of utopianism despite so many centuries without a utopia reveals a poignant conundrum. The world is getting no better, but that cannot quell the hope of a perfect society, for hope is born of unhappiness, and the world is getting no better. What refutes the dream, sustains it.

A gray, rainy evening yields the comforting thought that life keeps its promises when it makes none.

Though somber at funerals, I have felt a more stinging sadness sometimes at weddings. Into my mind, uninvited, enters the thought that all this champagne and merriment must end, that in a hundred years not a reveler in the room will be above ground. The thought of death enters such vibrant scenes as the greatest contradiction, a fate one feels is impossible yet knows is inevitable.

A trip to San Francisco reveals the city as an enclave of order within the rough lap of nature.

This was the world as the human mind had willed it to be, conceived it then created it according to its Euclidean desires. It was a world in which nature had no place and no right to be, except where expressly invited by sovereign man. Thus the only green I saw was the small trees planted along the streets, evenly spaced and neatly pruned, their tangle of roots invisible beneath the ground, their trunks disappearing through encircling iron grates.

The necessary sin of eating produces tension between the mind's prudery and the body's savagery.

Food is not merely the fuel we put in our body, food is our body. Every atom in this moving breathing edifice called me was looted from other existences, through the food that I, or while I was in the womb my mother, ate. My living tissues are compacted of bits of the dead, my muscles were once cows' muscles, my eyeballs were carrots.

Recollections and reflections on poetry, beauty, music, eloquence, and the conquests of great individuals attest the potency of passion.

When I listen to music, I wonder why I bother to write. If art should impassion, then music is art, and all other arts are music's understudies. Poems and paintings must go through the brain, using thoughts to stir feelings, but music has a backstage pass to the soul. Most cultures' mythologies have given music a divine origin, and what modern headphone-listener could wonder why? How else could arrangements of vibrating air dissolve us into ecstasy?

On dealing with the discovery that the world does not know your name nor wishes to learn it.

In our universal mutual oblivion of each other, fame is a fool's pursuit—but there are many fools. Point a television camera at any sport spectator, and he will gasp and grin and furiously wave, delighted to have his image transmitted to so many retinas. Yet since no one heeds a stranger's face on television, it being a common sight, only his friends who are watching notice him—the very people whose notice does not make him famous.

An account of waking at night to a bedroom, a body, and a life that have lost their familiarity.

Night thoughts, I imagine, offer a glimpse into the lunatic's world. For the lunatic sees a single fact or object with such utter lucidity, but also with such utter myopia, that it assumes a false appearance—false, at least, in the judgment of common sense.

A morning beach walk in the Pacific Northwest leads to the realization that there is no such thing as an ordinary day.

But if not mine, whose world have I stumbled into? Did God abandon creation to me? Did blind chance splatter matter into this miracle? I'd unfurl the flowers' petals and uncoil their stems to know, for they seem like signs, but no signatures are engraved within, not in characters I can read.

A reflection on the earth as life's home amid a universe of nothingness.

By day we are residents of towns and states and countries, but night reveals a different citizenship. Gazing up through the world's open roof at the worlds beyond, with awe and uncertainty we confess ourselves inhabitants of infinity.

The vastness and variety of California stirs a desire to grasp the whole of life in a single experience.

This whole wide earth is a great Diaspora of beauty, and there is no way to see that beauty unless we travel to it. To stand still is to miss out on life. The reason of my discontent was not that I never found a place worth staying, but that I always saw another place worth going.

On the notion that everyone is a stranger, because no one knows us from the inside.

Urged by this sudden craving for society, I go to parties, to weddings, to gatherings, anywhere people are, I mingle with the others, but my disappointment is almost instantaneous. We talk of the weather but never of the soul. So I retreat back into solitude, because to be with others who do not know you is lonelier than to be alone.

Seasonal apathy raises doubts about the value of living.

Though occasionally it snows and for a day or two beauty returns, this beauty does not revive me. Snowflakes seem to whiten the world to wonder, but underneath the mask of snow the land is still lifeless. Snowfall works the embalmer's art, sprinkling powder on the corpse of the world so that death appears peaceful and pretty.

The search for soul's gold leads to the paradoxical disappointment of getting what one wants.

What is the X we always imagine but never discover in things we desire? Dissecting my desires, I cannot tell what that unknown something is. I only postulate its existence negatively, by subtracting the reality from the expectation and finding a lack, like a chemist who knows something evaporated because the products weigh less than the reactants.