Long Life

Metadata

• Author: Mary Oliver
• Full Title: Long Life
• Category:#books

Highlights

• Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. (Location 59)
• And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” This book is my comment. (Location 61)
• Writing poems, for me but not necessarily for others, is a way of offering praise to the world. (Location 64)
• Every vitality must have a mechanism that recommends it to existence—what seems like ornamentation or phantasm is pure utility. It comes from an engine of mist and electricity that may be playful, and must be assertive. And also, against the odds of endurance in the great-shouldered sea, prolific. (Location 84)
• I were standing on a boat deck when a humpback breached—leaped out of the water beside us—and trumpeted. Mist fountained from the blowhole, light flung a rainbow through the moisture; softly the mist rose and rained down onto the deck and baptized all of us. (Location 117)
• The arrangement was all, and the energy that made the arrangement. Still, each is part of the world. I take them back to the edge of the water, to the earthpile of ever reusable materials. (Location 131)
• All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it—not to have such music inside one’s head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live? (Location 146)
• Thus, we could improve ourselves quite well by habit, by its judicious assistance, but it’s more likely that habits rule us. (Location 154)
• Neither does the tree hold back its leaves but lets them flow open or glide away when the time is right. Neither does water make its own decision about freezing or not; that moment rests with the rule of temperatures. (Location 158)
• The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us. Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real. (Location 167)
• there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won’t listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. (Location 176)
• If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. (Location 179)
• Surely you can’t imagine they just stand there looking the way they look when we’re looking; surely you can’t imagine they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly more shade—surely (Location 202)
• It was April, a mourning cloak sailed by, and a blueheaded vireo sang high in a tree, not for us but we could think so if we wanted to. So we did that. But the graves we could not find. (Location 212)
  • Tags: pink
• Such architectures were the capsules of safety, and freedom as well, open to the wind, made of grass and smelling like leaves and flowers. I was lucky, no one ever found any of my houses, (Location 270)
• For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water. Most of the adult world spoke of such things as opportunities, and materials. To the young these materials are still celestial; for every child the garden is recreated. (Location 274)
• In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results. But in those early years I did not think about such things. I simply went out into the green world and made my house, a kind of cowl, or a dream, or a palace of grass. (Location 278)
• The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss. (Location 289)
• Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity. (Location 302)
• Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. (Location 370)
• And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world. Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs? (Location 376)
• it was the most casual of moments—as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity—the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: (Location 400)
• Yet I would hazard this guess, that it is more likely to happen to someone attentively entering the quiet moment, when the sun-soaked world is gliding on under the blessings of blue sky, and the wind god is asleep. Then, if ever, we may peek under the veil of all appearances and partialities. We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report. (Location 412)

New highlights added March 21, 2023 at 6:06 PM

• A MOUNTAIN is a mountain; on every sunny summer day it is exceedingly the same. A forest in fall, on one long blue day after another, is the same, and so it may be said for a lake, and even the oceans, whose energies run in habits that are discoverable and reliable. Ah, what a simple place then is the granular and leafy and liquid world! Except for that old master of motion, Aeolus, who keeps the winds in his cave, allowing them out only at his whim or command, to glide over the world and thus to make it not one world but a thousand—a thousand thousand! Somewhere in the past the word we use—“weather”—shaped itself out of the word meaning wind, or air. Who comes, the whisperer or the howler—the trampler, or the tender fingers of spring? It is the node of change among the fair certainties—the catalyst that can shake out our hours from quietude to rampage, or back again to beatitude. (Location 380)
• I prefer weather in the smallest quantities. A drop will do. The best weather, it might be said, is no weather. Like the poet Wordsworth, who preferred lakes to seacoasts, and moderate and green mountains to rugged, snowcapped peaks, and long, easy walks during which one might reflect, or even be creative, to the exertions that make history, I like best weather’s small, beneficent motions. They are not the sublime motions. Storm, cyclone, flood, ice and avalanche make news, and often have need of heroes. But they do not make poems. (Location 387)
• As for the trash, which gathered in spite of the signs, it did what trash does and ever will do; it lay there, and did not grow thin or fade or even, much of it, rot. Old stoves were predominant. And dozens of tires, lining the bike track, the standing water within them breeding uncountable numbers of mosquitoes. (Location 454)
• And, imagine! for what unaware years I picked the blackberries and the raspberries, and thought them sweet and fine—thought them good fortune. And found, on the rubbled hillsides, strange shapes of old jars, glass bent and reshaped by the flames. Nuggets of deep blue from medicine containers; once a glass airplane that originally held candy, with a chip missing from one wing. (Location 467)
• I think I know what our manifest, tree-filled, creature-lively world is—our garden and our pasture and our recreation. Also it is our schoolhouse, courthouse, church, graveyard, and the soft breath of eternity. (Location 478)
• I walk in the world to love it. Only one question, really, frightens me. I wonder why, in all the years I walked in the old burn dump—this waste place, this secret garden—I never met another soul there, who had come forth for a like reason. (Location 480)

New highlights added April 23, 2023 at 4:27 PM

• No doubt clocks are ticking loudly all over the world. I don’t hear them. (Location 878)
• If tone is wrong, nothing is right. (Location 926)
• Too many words, even the right words, can kill the poem. (Location 934)
• Sometimes you will feel, like nothing else, the sweet, electric drowse of creation. (Location 935)
• Plain as a needle a poem may be, or opulent as the shell of the channeled whelk, or the face of the lily, it matters not; it is a ceremony of words, a story, a prayer, an invitation, a flow of words that reaches out and, hopefully, without being real in the way that the least incident is real, is able to stir in the reader a real response. (Location 938)
• How thoroughly I have memorized the sound of that presence here, on this narrow cape, from years of rainwalk. I could lie in the dark anywhere, and hear it, and know whether or not I am home. I could walk in the night and tell you whether it was falling on the glossy shoulders of Little Sister Pond, or darkly and briskly on the longer fetch of Hatches Harbor. (Location 980)
• I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping. (Location 989)
• In nature what looks like ornamentation is always of the greatest utility. (Location 1009)
• You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions. (Location 1010)
• A CERTAIN lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world—especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate. It is no great piece of furniture in the universe—no Niagara, or rainforest, or Sahara. Yet it is beautiful, and it ripples in the weathers as lively as any outpouring from the Great Lakes. (Location 1012)
• I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life—that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change—there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless, I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back. (Location 1019)
• Opulent and ornate world, because at its root, and its axis, and its ocean bed, it swings through the universe quietly and certainly. It is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery. (Location 1031)
• And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little—where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don’t mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better. I mean whatever real rejoicing can do! We all know how brassy and wonderful it is to come into some new understanding. Imagine what it would be like, to lounge on the high ledge of submission and pure wonder. Nature, all around us, is our manifest exemplar. (Location 1033)
• Time must grow thick and merry with incident, before thought can begin. It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. (Location 1044)
• Moreover, there is always the hope and the chance that the astonishing natural beauty here will open the heart, of both tourist and resident, to a new striving after virtue; such immutable suggestive power the natural world has always had, and offers to each of us. And certainly this experience belongs to everyone, (Location 1106)
• One fall day I come home from the woods and drive downtown to pick up the mail. A town crew are removing the No Parking signs, some of the men with familiar voices and faces, the sons of Provincetown people I knew forty years ago. Then the truck moves on. It is late afternoon, just a glimmer of the softest, quietest darkness in the air. When I descend the post office steps I can feel, even here, a little sand under my shoes. And the long street, stringing west and east past so many shop windows, restaurant doors, pots of flowers, houses unchanged from a hundred years ago or standing in their renewed finery, is, for a moment, empty. (Location 1116)
• Those still in water were no more than islands, but when left on shore they revealed themselves entirely, huge, and as gorgeously shaped as sculpture, both inspired and fortunate. A blue light glowed from their crevices. They might have been souls. (Location 1130)

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title: “Long Life” author: “Mary Oliver” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

Long Life

Metadata

• Author: Mary Oliver
• Full Title: Long Life
• Category:#books

Highlights

• Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. (Location 59)
• And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” This book is my comment. (Location 61)
• Writing poems, for me but not necessarily for others, is a way of offering praise to the world. (Location 64)
• Every vitality must have a mechanism that recommends it to existence—what seems like ornamentation or phantasm is pure utility. It comes from an engine of mist and electricity that may be playful, and must be assertive. And also, against the odds of endurance in the great-shouldered sea, prolific. (Location 84)
• I were standing on a boat deck when a humpback breached—leaped out of the water beside us—and trumpeted. Mist fountained from the blowhole, light flung a rainbow through the moisture; softly the mist rose and rained down onto the deck and baptized all of us. (Location 117)
• The arrangement was all, and the energy that made the arrangement. Still, each is part of the world. I take them back to the edge of the water, to the earthpile of ever reusable materials. (Location 131)
• All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it—not to have such music inside one’s head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live? (Location 146)
• Thus, we could improve ourselves quite well by habit, by its judicious assistance, but it’s more likely that habits rule us. (Location 154)
• Neither does the tree hold back its leaves but lets them flow open or glide away when the time is right. Neither does water make its own decision about freezing or not; that moment rests with the rule of temperatures. (Location 158)
• The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us. Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real. (Location 167)
• there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won’t listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. (Location 176)
• If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. (Location 179)
• Surely you can’t imagine they just stand there looking the way they look when we’re looking; surely you can’t imagine they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly more shade—surely (Location 202)
• It was April, a mourning cloak sailed by, and a blueheaded vireo sang high in a tree, not for us but we could think so if we wanted to. So we did that. But the graves we could not find. (Location 212)
  • Tags: pink
• Such architectures were the capsules of safety, and freedom as well, open to the wind, made of grass and smelling like leaves and flowers. I was lucky, no one ever found any of my houses, (Location 270)
• For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water. Most of the adult world spoke of such things as opportunities, and materials. To the young these materials are still celestial; for every child the garden is recreated. (Location 274)
• In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results. But in those early years I did not think about such things. I simply went out into the green world and made my house, a kind of cowl, or a dream, or a palace of grass. (Location 278)
• The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss. (Location 289)
• Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity. (Location 302)
• Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. (Location 370)
• And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world. Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs? (Location 376)
• A MOUNTAIN is a mountain; on every sunny summer day it is exceedingly the same. A forest in fall, on one long blue day after another, is the same, and so it may be said for a lake, and even the oceans, whose energies run in habits that are discoverable and reliable. Ah, what a simple place then is the granular and leafy and liquid world! Except for that old master of motion, Aeolus, who keeps the winds in his cave, allowing them out only at his whim or command, to glide over the world and thus to make it not one world but a thousand—a thousand thousand! Somewhere in the past the word we use—“weather”—shaped itself out of the word meaning wind, or air. Who comes, the whisperer or the howler—the trampler, or the tender fingers of spring? It is the node of change among the fair certainties—the catalyst that can shake out our hours from quietude to rampage, or back again to beatitude. (Location 380)
• I prefer weather in the smallest quantities. A drop will do. The best weather, it might be said, is no weather. Like the poet Wordsworth, who preferred lakes to seacoasts, and moderate and green mountains to rugged, snowcapped peaks, and long, easy walks during which one might reflect, or even be creative, to the exertions that make history, I like best weather’s small, beneficent motions. They are not the sublime motions. Storm, cyclone, flood, ice and avalanche make news, and often have need of heroes. But they do not make poems. (Location 387)
• it was the most casual of moments—as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity—the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: (Location 400)
• Yet I would hazard this guess, that it is more likely to happen to someone attentively entering the quiet moment, when the sun-soaked world is gliding on under the blessings of blue sky, and the wind god is asleep. Then, if ever, we may peek under the veil of all appearances and partialities. We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report. (Location 412)
• As for the trash, which gathered in spite of the signs, it did what trash does and ever will do; it lay there, and did not grow thin or fade or even, much of it, rot. Old stoves were predominant. And dozens of tires, lining the bike track, the standing water within them breeding uncountable numbers of mosquitoes. (Location 454)
• And, imagine! for what unaware years I picked the blackberries and the raspberries, and thought them sweet and fine—thought them good fortune. And found, on the rubbled hillsides, strange shapes of old jars, glass bent and reshaped by the flames. Nuggets of deep blue from medicine containers; once a glass airplane that originally held candy, with a chip missing from one wing. (Location 467)
• I think I know what our manifest, tree-filled, creature-lively world is—our garden and our pasture and our recreation. Also it is our schoolhouse, courthouse, church, graveyard, and the soft breath of eternity. (Location 478)
• I walk in the world to love it. Only one question, really, frightens me. I wonder why, in all the years I walked in the old burn dump—this waste place, this secret garden—I never met another soul there, who had come forth for a like reason. (Location 480)
• No doubt clocks are ticking loudly all over the world. I don’t hear them. (Location 878)
• If tone is wrong, nothing is right. (Location 926)
• Too many words, even the right words, can kill the poem. (Location 934)
• Sometimes you will feel, like nothing else, the sweet, electric drowse of creation. (Location 935)
• Plain as a needle a poem may be, or opulent as the shell of the channeled whelk, or the face of the lily, it matters not; it is a ceremony of words, a story, a prayer, an invitation, a flow of words that reaches out and, hopefully, without being real in the way that the least incident is real, is able to stir in the reader a real response. (Location 938)
• How thoroughly I have memorized the sound of that presence here, on this narrow cape, from years of rainwalk. I could lie in the dark anywhere, and hear it, and know whether or not I am home. I could walk in the night and tell you whether it was falling on the glossy shoulders of Little Sister Pond, or darkly and briskly on the longer fetch of Hatches Harbor. (Location 980)
• I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping. (Location 989)
• In nature what looks like ornamentation is always of the greatest utility. (Location 1009)
• You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions. (Location 1010)
• A CERTAIN lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world—especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate. It is no great piece of furniture in the universe—no Niagara, or rainforest, or Sahara. Yet it is beautiful, and it ripples in the weathers as lively as any outpouring from the Great Lakes. (Location 1012)
• I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life—that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change—there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless, I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back. (Location 1019)
• Opulent and ornate world, because at its root, and its axis, and its ocean bed, it swings through the universe quietly and certainly. It is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery. (Location 1031)
• And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little—where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don’t mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better. I mean whatever real rejoicing can do! We all know how brassy and wonderful it is to come into some new understanding. Imagine what it would be like, to lounge on the high ledge of submission and pure wonder. Nature, all around us, is our manifest exemplar. (Location 1033)
• Time must grow thick and merry with incident, before thought can begin. It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. (Location 1044)
• Moreover, there is always the hope and the chance that the astonishing natural beauty here will open the heart, of both tourist and resident, to a new striving after virtue; such immutable suggestive power the natural world has always had, and offers to each of us. And certainly this experience belongs to everyone, (Location 1106)
  • Tags: favorite
• One fall day I come home from the woods and drive downtown to pick up the mail. A town crew are removing the No Parking signs, some of the men with familiar voices and faces, the sons of Provincetown people I knew forty years ago. Then the truck moves on. It is late afternoon, just a glimmer of the softest, quietest darkness in the air. When I descend the post office steps I can feel, even here, a little sand under my shoes. And the long street, stringing west and east past so many shop windows, restaurant doors, pots of flowers, houses unchanged from a hundred years ago or standing in their renewed finery, is, for a moment, empty. (Location 1116)
• Those still in water were no more than islands, but when left on shore they revealed themselves entirely, huge, and as gorgeously shaped as sculpture, both inspired and fortunate. A blue light glowed from their crevices. They might have been souls. (Location 1130)