theparisreview: Here let me stop. Let me too look at Nature for a while.The morning sea and cloudless skya brilliant blue, the yellow shore: allilluminated, beautiful and grand.Here let me stop. Let me pretend that these are what I see(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,my recollections, the icons of pleasure.—Constantine P. Cavafy, “Morning Sea”Photography Credit Suzanne Opton
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theparisreview:

Here let me stop. Let me too look at Nature for a while.
The morning sea and cloudless sky
a brilliant blue, the yellow shore: all
illuminated, beautiful and grand.

Here let me stop. Let me pretend that these are what I see
(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)
instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,
my recollections, the icons of pleasure.

—Constantine P. Cavafy, “Morning Sea”
Photography Credit Suzanne Opton

(via thetinhouse)

Source: theparisreview

Edward Hoagland is a prolific American essayist and nature writer. Having lived much of his life in between New York City (where he was born in 1932) and the backcountry of Vermont, British Columbia, and Alaska, his writing reflects two essential but polarizing aspects of American life. He has been praised by writers like John Updike as “the best essayist of my generation,” and Edward Abbey as a “a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness and stubborn pertinacity of life.” In the upcoming Winter issue of The American Scholar, we will be publishing a piece he wrote called “On Friendship,” which explores how the intimacies shared with our closest companions keep us anchored, vital, and alive. In anticipation, we are looking back to an essay that he wrote for us called “Spaced Out in the City” about how smartphones and handheld gadgets are distancing us from our beloved cities. This observation seems increasingly relevant just two years later.
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Edward Hoagland is a prolific American essayist and nature writer. Having lived much of his life in between New York City (where he was born in 1932) and the backcountry of Vermont, British Columbia, and Alaska, his writing reflects two essential but polarizing aspects of American life.

He has been praised by writers like John Updike as “the best essayist of my generation,” and Edward Abbey as a “a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness and stubborn pertinacity of life.”

In the upcoming Winter issue of The American Scholar, we will be publishing a piece he wrote called “On Friendship,” which explores how the intimacies shared with our closest companions keep us anchored, vital, and alive.

In anticipation, we are looking back to an essay that he wrote for us called “Spaced Out in the City” about how smartphones and handheld gadgets are distancing us from our beloved cities. This observation seems increasingly relevant just two years later.

Who could fail to admire the weeds? Especially weeds impervious to weeding, weeds we make war on, weeds that persist no matter how many times they get pulled up by the roots and pitched. Outside my house there’s a parking strip, a city-owned expanse of dirt between sidewalk and curb, that I have endeavored to grace with a garden. Ha ha. I am a sporadic and inattentive gardener, and the weeds know it.
Priscilla Long waxes poetic about a verdant nemesis. Read.