Sublime

In John Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley, he moves across the country with a black dog. And the repeated joke he depicts, and it is nauseating, is that when he stopped for gas in the South, people kept saying, “I thought that was a nigger in your car.” The joke was a warning. Charley could not, after all, be in the front sitting alongside a Wh

John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail: He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results f

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was

Truffles grow a few centimeters under the ground, on the roots of certain oak or hazelnut trees. During the season, from November until March, they can be tracked down by nose, providing you have sensitive enough equipment. The supreme truffle detector is the pig, who is born with a fondness for the taste, and whose sense of smell in this case is s

It arrived in August, a beautiful thing, powerful and yet lithe. It was almost as easy to handle as a passenger car. And because my planned trip had aroused some satiric remarks among my friends, I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.

Il passe l’été 1868 et l’hiver suivant à travailler. Dans les montagnes qui barrent l’horizon, la taille des arbres et la pureté de l’air l’attirent, il sent la présence de la Grande Sauvagerie, il ne l’a pas encore trouvée en Californie, il la veut, il l’a toujours voulue. Il lui faut y retourner. Il travaille où il peut tant que c’est en plein ai

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words