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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

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Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess,...more

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Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?

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An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I th...more

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I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: som...more

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You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding ...more

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In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except t...more

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins...more

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The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at ...more

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All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted we...more

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I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some inn...more

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A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will recor...more

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These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always desc...more

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That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we a...more

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Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in ...more