The Edge

Photo by Andrea Windolph on Unsplash

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.

Frances Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

The Wisdom of Not Knowing

I was reading Anna Karenina when this whole thing started

I pulled it off a dusty shelf in a used book store on Dauphine Street
and paid in dollar bills and cents — $8.10 — on February 17

Virginia and I were in New Orleans seeing colleges
So innocent as the coronavirus spread to
the Diamond Princess cruise ship

Now I read The Washington Post.
Russian counts and love affairs seem
frivolous pleasures

But I still need Tolstoy to remind me

All we can know is that we know nothing.
And that is the height of human wisdom.

Leo Tolstoy