Beautiful and Toxic Multitudes

Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13  I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual –Allen Ginsberg, Yiddishe Kopf Prompted by a recent tragedy, I turned again to the conclusion of Fyodor…

Be Here Now

In one of Tolstoy’s parables, a peasant is plowing a field. The narrator asks the old man what he would do if he knew that Death was coming to take him away within the hour….

On Ivan Ilyich

ahamkara [aham, “I”; kara, “maker”] Self-will, the ego mask, the principle in people which makes them feel separate from others. — Diana Morrison, A Glossary of Sanskrit from The Spiritual Tradition of India The Death of Ivan…