Material days were long and hot, but that is summer. Farmers and others who work by sunlight praise the season. It is a vacation from school for children all over America, and so their numbers in public spaces tends to increase during these sordid months. Because of the heat, the tawdry fashion sense that dominates America plunges to an all-time low. People would go…
The idea of living one foot in the grave comes from the Zen masters, some of whom would carry a tiny coffin with them when they traveled, a reminder of their mortality, a token of the temporary nature of existence. The idea has become misused and distorted in the West, which tends culturally to make an enemy of death and view it as something…
The way I remember it, sometime during the summer of 1975 I picked up a copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics for 25-cents from the local pharmacy. The cover depicted the ghostly apparitions of a coonskin-cap-wearing frontiersman and an Indian with a mohawk clenched in mortal combat. Behind them a stunned night watchman nearly drops his flashlight in horror. Inside there was…