The Dog is a companion which to live with is not merely to train it to be semi-human, but also opening oneself to the possibility of becoming partly dog.
The Essay is a piece of writing that hangs somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: This is what I think, and this is what I am.
The Essay is a genre that goes back four hundred years to Montaigne, and yet it seems a mercurial, newfangled, sometimes hokey affair that has lent itself to many of the excesses of the age, from spurious autobiography to spurious hallucination, as well as to the shabby careerism of traditional journalism.
The Essay belongs to the animal kingdom, with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the flat conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the vegetable kingdom, instead.
Silence is exhilarating at first as noise is but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
Solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
Sophistication is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.
