"The soul is not, as the common image would have it, in the body. His soul, at any rate, goes along with him, as companion. Together, they think apart the most inseparable things, breaking the lines they think along, leaving, as a lord might, every wall breached and every barrier in fragments. The very bricks of the street they unpattern, to consider the ground's lay, and the wall of the sky, too, they penetrate.

"What English novels call a sycamore is a maple (Acer pseudoplatanus), with helicopter seeds, like other maples. These (the bladed seeds), if properly pulled open, in the right sticky season, will stick to a child's nose, forming a false nose--insect-like, or like a mask from the Commedia dell'Arte. Near the end of most biographies, the subject's life work 'was now complete,' as if there were a plan from the beginning, a form needing only to be filled out, a kit. But my head. We might hope, without too much hope, that a life may be improvised."

--Keith Waldrop

"The Master of the Providence Crucifixion"

(in Hegel's Family, 1989)