Howard Axelrod > Quotes

“Occasionally, I’d notice I’d lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“The morning was beautiful. The whole Hudson River Valley was beautiful. I thought of the last page of The Great Gatsby, the green land flowering before the Dutch sailors’ eyes, that last moment, Fitzgerald wrote, when man was face to face with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. I thought of Dirk’s inadvertent similarity to Gatsby—the unused rooms of his house, the twenty-two televisions, which were maybe the convenient, modern stand-in for glittering parties, and I wondered what part of the past he was trying to recapture. I wondered if it was similar to the feeling of community my parents were trying to recapture every time they drove through Newburgh. And I wondered if it was similar to what I was trying to recapture by living in the woods, just in my own solitary way.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“The late fall afternoon had filled the house with a heaviness of waiting.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“There was only that fathomless void of what her father had felt losing his father, and of what she had felt losing hers. She apologized for crying. There was a tremendous loneliness in her, so beyond her daily concerns, which I’d never imagined she had. An otherness from everything else in the world. It wasn’t that I’d still thought of her as an extension of me, the way so many children think of their mothers, but I’d assumed she still thought of me as an extension of her. Most of the time, for better or for worse, that’s how she acted. But there was this other part. A part of her, because her father was waiting there, already tending towards the beyond. And I suppose it was the first time I knew, really knew, my mother would die. Her father had passed on that forever to her, and some day she would pass on that forever to me. She wouldn’t be there to answer a call from the hospital, or be there for me not to call from the woods. That’s what death was—no matter the love that had preceded it, there would be no answer, no possibility of an answer, forever.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“[It] strikes me that my morning walks are like Post-it Notes to myself, the kind my mom put on my bathroom mirror when I was a kid. Unlike hers, they convey no information—no went to Star Market, no clean up your room. They just say: look around, go slowly, feel yourself a part of something bigger than yourself. Such a Post-it on my bathroom mirror would make me cringe. But to write and read it by walking just feels practical. Without the walk, I feel as though I’ve forgotten to do something important, something without which the rest of my day will go sideways. At bottom, maybe that’s what prayer is. A kind of note to yourself, with your God looking on, written in your religion’s handwriting, to remind you of whatever you think you need to be reminded of—to remind you how to live a better life. Maybe all the major religions knew that how you started your day would effectively be a prayer anyway, that whatever you do every morning, whatever frame you give to your day, effectively becomes what you worship.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age

“The ads on the subway kiosk that featured life-size photographs of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, the words think different emblazoned beside a little white apple, as though Einstein and Picasso had time-traveled to 1999 and derived their genius from a computer, as though the gateway to a unique way of seeing was looking at the world through a screen. I felt like a wild animal who’d mistakenly wandered into the zoo. A born believer who’d wandered into a culture of heretics.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude