Deidre’s Reviews > Upstream: Selected Essays > Status Update

“Through these woods I have walked thousands of times…Stepping out into the world, into the grass; onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight.”

“This is the moment in an essay when…the moral appears…All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!”

“In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time’s shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe’s narrators…No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen [the death(s) of loved one(s)]”.

Edgar Allan Poe’s goal is “to challenge…death’s irreversibility…Discovering a ‘different’ world assumes experiencing manifestations of that different world. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.”

Emerson’s Nature “is a text that is entirely about divinity and first purposes… It does not demean by diction or implication the life that we are most apt to call ‘real,’ but presupposes the heart’s spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives.”

“Now [Emerson] is only within the wider, immeasurable world of our thoughts. He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that means above that page.” In other words, he lives forever.

“Forbears, models, spirits whose influence and teachings I am no inseparable from, and forever grateful for. I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them…I accomplish…through terrifying and continual effort, and with this innumerable, fortifying company, bright as stars in the heaven of my mind.”

“…Yes, it is a sin of voices that I hear, and they do not all say the same thing. But the fit of thoughtfulness unites them. Who are they? For me they are Shelley, and Fabre, and Wordsworth—the young Wordsworth—and Barbara Ward, and Blake, and Basho, Maeterlinck and Jastrow, and sweetest Emerson, and Carson, and Also Leopold.”

“…Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caring my. So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect. The moment is full of such exquisite interest as Fabre or Flaubert would have been utterly alive to…”

“For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample.”