Elvis, Stop Dat! You Know It Is

If You Encounter A Human Shadow Burned Permanently Into The Concrete In Hiroshima, You Realize That This Is The Trace Of A Very Ordinary Person Now Elevated Into The Emblematic. Time, Shame, Complicity, Or Discomfort Are The Only Things That Make Us Pretend History Is Impersonal Or Far Removed From The Power And Consequences Of Our Every Lived Moment.

What I've Come To Learn Is That The World Is Never Saved In Grand Messianic Gestures, But In The Simple Accumulation Of Gentle, Soft, Almost Invisible Acts Of Compassion, Everyday Acts Of Compassion. In South Africa They Have A Phrase Called Ubuntu. Ubuntu Comes Out Of A Philosophy That Says, The Only Way For Me To Be Human Is For You To Reflect My Humanity Back At Me.

We Are Hunting The Demons That Haunt Others. We Get A Smell And Off We Go. And You Know Why, Sunil? You Know Why We Are So Good At Hunting The Demons Of Others? Because We Are So Good, Gifted Even, At Stalking And Evading Our Own. But All Demons Hunters Think That They Are Really Heroes, And You Know What All Heroes Need?

Fiction And Poetry Are My First Loves, But The Really Beautiful Lyrical Essay Can Do So Much That Other Forms Cannot.

There Was A Positive Side To Not Trying At Something: You Could Always Pretend That Your Life Would Have Been Different If You Had.