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There is a speaker in Goethe’s poem, someone who tells the reader about the mountains and the treetops and the birds. What interested me was the person the poem was talking to, the “you” who would soon be at peace. If I were a poet who went for a walk and was reminded of my mortality, the obvious t…

Somewhere in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the writer imagines himself as a peeping Tom in a darkened corridor, terrified by the sudden possibility that he’ll be caught, that The Other (that important Existential personage) will shine a flashlight on him and reveal his shame. As long as he feels …

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is wh…

Sara gives me The Unquiet Grave, the book Cyril Connolly wrote the year he turned forty, when he was struggling with the question of what he wanted out of life. I can give this to you, Sara says, laughing, because you’re not unhappy with your work. She means my writing. “Approaching forty, sense …

The poets gave away their own books, handbound sometimes, and letterpress broadsides made on antiquated machinery, they gave their time to editing each other’s work in their bedroom offices, they paid to have it printed, they carried each other’s books in suitcases to give to other poets, they used…