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What Does It Mean to be Alive?
“We don’t understand this virus from the inside out. We don’t even know in what sense it is ‘alive.’ It seems not to have any means or purpose other than simply to continue.…
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Letter from Eugene, Oregon
“How could this precarious situation come to pass? That instead of climate change we humans might instead be finished off a bit sooner by a simple attack of a highly infectious disease we…
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My Mother Did Not Teach Me to Knit
“For me, it just takes a little Bach in the early evening, well played. For one thing, it’s so wonderful to listen to something unabashedly complex again, after being clubbed on the head…
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Why Paint the Pot?
“I’m not really talking about painting at all, I’m talking about sketching. I don’t even own any paint except for a couple of cans stored in the garage and last opened five years…
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The Silence of It
“Let’s imagine that silence roams our world and sometimes inhabits a segment of space/time, effectively blotting out any sound that was there previously. And as an analogy, poetry roams our world as an…
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The Summer of Two Eclipses (Best of Hubris)
“There we were, a bunch of strangers in a random field, all facing the same direction as if we were sitting on the beach. But our heads were tipped back and we were…
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There Will Be No Worms in Gilead
“Isn’t there something deeply wrong with this picture? Yes, because it’s probably true. Those of us who take scientists like Guy McPherson seriously, we know the days of Happiness by Worm are on…
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What is the Heart?
“In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer did not really have a word for the human body. Not as a whole, only as an assembly of various limbs—and especially the ones that are…
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How to Escape the Flu & Other Responsibilities
“For years, I have kept a set of file folders in the back of the ‘General Reference’ drawer of my four-drawer, salmon-colored file cabinet, and inside these folders are classroom assignments for a…
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Spiritual Impressions Upon An Autumnal Shroud
“I pace my living room, imagining myself as a photographer: a person with a real, adjustable camera, a tripod, various lenses and light-focusing gimmicks (not too many), but nothing changes. There is nothing…