Mary Oliver on knowledge and agency Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving from “Bone,” in Why I Wake Early: New Poems (Beacon Press, 2005), 5.
… And now, Janneken*, my dear lamb, who are yet very little and young, I leave you this letter, together with a gold real, which I had with me in prison and this I leave you for a perpetual adieu, and for a testament; that you remember me by it, as also by this letter. […]
Any attempt definitively to review our lives or integrate fully their divergent strands may be futile; for we cannot find a place from which to see ourselves whole, to catch the heart and hold it still. That is the profound insight of book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions. … For when in book 10 Augustine begins to […]
My obscurity to myself, yours to me, and mine to you, are not puzzles, waiting for fruitful suspicion to uncover the real script, Marxian, Freudian, sociobiological (though all these stories may be true, need finding out). They are to do with the inescapability of taking time. ‘I do not really know myself’ must be heard […]
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