I can't sleep…
But none of that matters now. I look out at the hills and the lake again. I’ve been driving along these roads for nine decades, but I’m still struck by just how beautiful it is, and I never want to leave.
— Lisa Ridzén, When the Cranes Fly South: A Novel. Alice Menzies (Translator) (Vintage, 8/19/2025)
Notes:
“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before…It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give…” He’d isolated the ultimate kernel…the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.
— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)
Notes:
…These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.
Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself…
Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”
— Meghan Cox Gurdon, from “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book, Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.” (wsj.com, July 22, 2025)
Poet Andrea Gibson died on July 14, 2025 at the age of 49 from Ovarian cancer. Here’s some excerpts from an essay written by her friend and fellow poet Amber Tamblyn from a NY Times article titled: “A Poet Who Advocated Radical Tenderness“.
“Andrea had a unique ability to offer their readers and listeners a way of living, to show us how much we need tenderness, and how to be tender as a radical act. One of the last poems they wrote, “Love Letter From the Afterlife,” was written…for a fractured world. It asks us to do what might feel impossible right now: Soften toward, not away from, one another, even at such a heightened time of vitriol and hate. It was written by a poet who lived their brief life with a consciousness of something bigger than themselves — a collective belief, whether we are aware of it or not, that all of us long to feel less alone. […]
In a poem titled, “How The Worst Day of My Life Became the Best,” Andrea wrote:
When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?
[…} In 2023, a video Andrea made on lessons they learned after learning their cancer was now incurable, went viral. On a drive, they said, they had done the bravest thing they had ever done. “I picked my head up and I loved the world that I knew wouldn’t always be mine.” They went on, “I think many of us are doing it almost all the time; we are not allowing ourselves joy or love or peace because we are afraid to lose it. Don’t be so afraid of losing life that you forget to live it.” […]
Photo: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
But like all utopian visions, theirs had its contradictions. They’d sold all their belongings to build a boat. They were abandoning everyone they knew to live afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community, from all the things that bind a person to a place or its people, from the day-to-day indignities of ordinary life and the unseen rules whose weight perhaps you feel only in the place you were raised. After all, what is more self-interested than running away?
— Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, July 8, 2025)
Notes: