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We spend an extraordinary amount of money and energy on keeping the dying alive for a few more days, for prolonging life at all costs… and yet, there is an extraordinary aversion to pouring our collective means into the problem of poverty… If nature was more alive to us, perhaps we’d be more less obsessed with our ‘health’ (usually the opposite); we’d cease to be a civilization of hypochondriacs, near-automatons…. We’d be able to put illness into perspective: namely, a perspective other than our own media-refracted paranoia…. This particular evening is remarkably beautiful; there’s less traffic these days, so you can hear the birds and the wind a little more than usual — the ears are more attentive. This is really the highest notion of what America is (or means): these ordinary evenings on the stoop or the hammock or on the side-porch at twilight. Living in prose isn’t really living: it’s existing — just hanging on, biting one’s fingernails. Poetry is living; life is a poem.
