His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth. In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.

When you do visit Zürich or Cape Town or Bangkok, they are very much alike: the amusement parks have striking similarities, the cafés all play the same Brazilian music, the malls are interchangeable, kids on the school buses resemble one another, and the interiors of middle-class homes conform to the same parameters. This doesn’t mean the world is

We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

The temptation for many filmmakers is to console too soon, or to console in the wrong ways; to encounter those who give us some fresh and necessarily unpretty version of “how it is” can be a tremendous relief.

American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

For years now, when I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk. I watch what he said sometime in the late 1990s. Each time that I write something, he said, and it feels like I’m advancing into new territory (he demonstrates “advance” with his left hand), somewhere I haven’t been before, and this type of advance often demands cer

We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa.

In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice.