Sublime

Quand au soir de sa vie Muir raconte son enfance avec gourmandise, on imagine sa plume gambader, son œil bleu étinceler de malice au moment d’écrire tel ou tel souvenir, et un sourire affleurer dans sa barbe, abondante, mais qui ne savait guère dissimuler ses émotions, ses états d’esprit, cette lucidité amusée qu’il mettait en toutes choses. Il en

What struck me particularly about him was the mixture of a sort of innate natural ferocity with a similarly innate nobility—a mixture such as I have never come across in any other person.

The old man’s head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close in. It might as well have been a dream, he thought. I cannot keep him from hitting me but maybe I can get him.

On en est réduit à ça, maintenant. À explorer les trous de la carte, et à se mettre dans des situations impossibles. Muir tel qu’on le lit aujourd’hui, toute la vie de Muir est une nostalgie de la Sauvagerie, plus nulle part accessible, car la Terre n’est plus nulle part inconnue, sauf à s’imposer des défis absurdes, que mon corps trop âgé et pas a

Natan. He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide. Knew me like the smell of smoke, knew what I was, and what I wanted.

Bimini, part of the Bahamas, is just fifty miles east of Miami. In the nineteenth century, it was a way station for fugitives from the powerful, a home for pirates, a wrecking spot. Later it was known for alcohol smuggling and as the playground of that quintessential figure of American masculinist national literature: Ernest Hemingway. In fact, in

I lived wild, or as wild as one could be with a warm living room to return to.

I have a great fondness for boudin noir, which I think of as one of the aristocrats of the sausage family—a blood sausage made with pork, usually served on a warm bed of thinly sliced cooked apples. Smooth and rich and dark, it is a dish to be eaten in front of the fire on a day when there is frost on the ground and an icy wind butting against the