Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.
Collection
On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems ‘Native Guard.’ I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents?
A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for.
I’m working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone’s interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard’s.
There’s not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.
But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.