“Do you have a light?” That’s what the guy who cleans our street asked me, a cigarette dangling from his lips, flexing his thumb as though he was giving a lighter a flick. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.” I don’t smoke, never have, and don’t carry fire about on my person. Sometimes, though, the simplest questions can get me thinking. After I answered him, I thought about the more literal, or maybe more metaphorical, meaning of his query. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had a thing about fire. He made a trip to Vesuvius once, walked all the way up the rim, and the bubbling volcano made a deep impression on him. He bought a cheap print of Vesuvius in Italy, which still hangs in his house in Concord, Massachusetts, which is now a museum. Fire was an image of creativity and spirituality for him. In his essay The Poet, he wrote: “We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about.” So I asked myself, Do I have a light that I carry about with me?

Everybody has a light. I don’t mean some vague spiritual concept, or aura, or anything at all nebulous or New Age-y. I mean a person’s ambiance, the first impression a person makes on you, the sense of clarity or obscurity you get from speaking or interacting with a person. I mean something very tangible that you can see immediately, part of the complex set of conscious and unconscious perceptions that makes you intuitively like or dislike a person. Some people can strike us as shady, for example, as having veiled motives. Others impress instantly with their brightness, a kind of light that ignites whatever it touches. Others seem to have too much glare, as if they cast a spotlight that they both pointed at themselves and managed to stand in at the same time. Others seem to conceal their light, whether out of fear or shyness or prudence, the kind of people Jesus advised:

Don’t hide your light under a bushel.

Each member of my family has a light. My wife’s is a soft glow that seems to emanate from under her skin, kind of like the light given off when you held your hands over a flashlight as a kid—your flesh pulsed with a lovely golden red phosphorescence. My eldest son has a dazzling light, like the reflections glancing from one of those mirrored disco balls at a party. My other son is a slow burner, something molten is always smoldering behind his eyes. Watch out when he erupts. And my daughter is like a firework, one with a very short fuse that is always showering sparks; she never really goes out, just sometimes shines more, sometimes shines less.

It’s not easy to see your own light. And it can be a hindrance. It’s difficult to radiate if you’re standing in your own light, checking on your luminescence. You cast too many shadows. And whatever light you have, you always have to tend it, feed it, make sure it doesn’t go out, make sure it doesn’t get swallowed up by neighboring blazes. I used to have a preference for distant fires; they are always so hopeful. But it’s impossible to warm yourself beside them. And it’s very hard to keep them going; you have to forage far and wide for kindling. Much better to have a roaring fire close to home, I think. Pile the logs up high and let them burn. That way you can see clearly what you are doing, while the glow tends to attract like-minded folks. And there’s always an extra light to give to people in the street.

Few writers can claim to have invented an entirely new form of literature, but Ramon Gomez de la Serna was certainly one of them. Born in the Rastro district of Madrid, Ramon (as he was invariably known) devised greguerias–acute observations of everyday life tinged by his surrealistic wit and then distilled into brief, aphoristic insights. In one of his several autobiographies, he says he coined the term greguerias (which means an irritating noise, gibberish or hubbub) around 1910. He was visiting Florence in that year, gazing at the river Arno from his hotel window, when he suddenly imagined that the banks of the river wanted to swap sides. This kind of whimsical perception became characteristic of his aphorisms. He even devised a formula for their creation: metaphor + humor = greguerias. He dubbed his peculiar writing style ramonismo. One of his characteristically arresting aphorisms has to do with helping a blind person cross the street:

After helping a blind man across the road, we remain slightly undecided.

I recently helped a blind woman across the road and was struck by how accurate Gómez de la Serna’s observation is. I was walking back home from the local shops when I saw an elderly blind woman picking her way along the pavement. Construction was going on up and down the street so the woman with her white stick was constantly coming up against barriers and piles of bricks. I caught up with her and offered to lead her through the construction zone and across the street. She gratefully accepted, took my hand and we set off slowly towards the corner.

Helping a blind person has to be one of the most intimate casual encounters you can have with a complete stranger in the street. If you think about a typical day, how many times do you actually touch a stranger? Very rarely, if at all. The only experience that comes close is exchanging money in a shop. Then your hand may brush the hand of the person behind the counter, but observe how careful you both are to make sure that your fingers do not touch. Admitting a stranger into your personal space, allowing him or her to touch your skin, is not undertaken lightly.

This is why helping a blind person across the street is so intimate, and part of the reason it leaves you undecided. I held the lady’s hand and we made very slow progress up the street. Her hand was very soft and wrinkled and slightly cold. There we were, it would be some time before we reached the corner, so I thought I should start a conversation. So for the remainder of our journey we made small talk—about the neighborhood, about how there always seemed to be construction going on—and I periodically gave her updates about where we were and how far we had to go the corner. Finally, we crossed the street and I pointed the lady in the direction she wanted to go and we said goodbye. I resumed my walk home.

I didn’t get but a few meters down the street, when I stopped and turned back to look at the lady. Had I taken her far enough? Would she make the rest of her trip alright? Should I have asked if there was anything else she needed? I was undecided. Just those few moments we walked together had created a kind of intimacy, a camaraderie, and I was now unsure if I had done enough for her.

Gómez de la Serna wrote thousands and thousands of greguerías. Each of his aphorisms is both profound and comical; no event is so trivial that it does not contain some kernel of humor or wisdom or an unexpected insight:

Ants rush about as though the shops were just closing.

The giraffe is a horse elongated by curiosity.

How quickly they pack suitcases in films!

Now, reading Gómez de la Serna always leaves me slightly undecided. Am I really seeing what’s going on around me? Do I need to add a little more metaphor and humor to my life? Am I making the most of all the hubbub?

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it—especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928,Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it — especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.

It was in a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. My parents gave me this book in 1981 as a high school graduation present. There is an inscription from them to me in it. My sister must have recommended that my parents buy the book; otherwise, I don’t imagine they would have known at the time that I was interested in such things. The book also contained a letter written to me by my sister in 1981, also on the occasion of my graduation from high school. I took the book down from my shelf for the first time in 25 years because I want to include Gibran in the encyclopedia of aphorists I’m working on. (Insert shameless self-promotion here: It’s due out from Bloomsbury USA in November of 2007, so consider your Christmas shopping for next year done!) In her letter, my sister complains that she can’t concentrate because her kids are climbing all over her but she wants “to write something you’ll never forget.” Reading her letter, I was astonished at how drastically some things have changed and how, equally dramatically, some things have remained exactly the same.

One of my favorite Arthur Schopenhauer aphorisms is:

If you want to know how you really feel about someone take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

I was delighted to see my sister’s letter, again. The tables have turned on us. Twenty-five years ago, she had three young children to contend with; now, I do. Back then, I was just embarking on my college education; my sister, after raising her family, has recently finished hers, and is now starting a career as a therapist and academic. In a strange but pleasant exchange of fates, we have switched roles. Today, I’m a bit like my sister was 25 years ago: a work-at-home parent, struggling to write something unforgettable amidst the din of a boisterous family life. And my sister is a bit like me as an 18-year-old: a recent graduate excitedly setting out on new learning and work experiences. We both, happily, still have our whole lives ahead of us.

I remember reading The Prophet during “senior week” in 1981. That’s the week after graduation in June when every high school grad in eastern Pennsylvania travels to the New Jersey shore for seven straight days of debauchery. I enjoyed my debauch, but in between I was reading Gibran, grateful that my sister had suggested that my parents get the book for me. I was deeply into the history of religion and spirituality at the time, with a particular interest in Gnosticism, a religious/philosophical movement that peaked in the Middle East around the first and second centuries. The Prophet is very much in the Gnostic tradition: Passengers on a ship implore a wise man travelling on board to share his wisdom, and the book consists of his aphorisms on life, love and death strung together into miniature essays.

When I told my sister I had found the letter, she quoted from memory one of the aphorisms that had meant the most to her. It was:

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

Just the day before she told me this, this was one of the aphorisms I had selected for inclusion in my encyclopedia.

In her letter, my sister wrote that she hoped I would carry my ideals into my future life and she wished that all my experiences would be growing ones. I had a lot of ideals as an 18-year-old. After graduating, I remember vowing to my parents that I would never wear a tie again. I had to wear a tie throughout primary school and high school as part of the school uniform. To protest what I felt at the time was a constricting concession to conformity and fashion, I deliberately wore the most outrageous ties I could find—bold pastels, brazen plaids, anything with golf clubs or ducks on it—and then I scribbled aphorisms (yes, aphorisms) on them. Some of my other ideals were more sophisticated, like the promise I made to myself never to sacrifice my inner, creative life in order to make a living.

I have not always lived up to my ideals over the past 25 years. I don’t mind wearing ties now, though my taste in them is still appalling. And my inner life has often been in conflict with the need to make a living. Reading my sister’s letter, though, I was happy to recognize the person she was writing to. It’s me, as I was then and still am, struggling to keep my ideals real. And I was happy to read again her words of encouragement, since I realized too that I need them just as much now as I did then.

I do not like it, for several reasons. First of all, I am very susceptible to motion sickness. Basically, I can get seasick in a bathtub so I’m always very careful to make sure I secure a seat facing forwards whenever I travel by train. (I try to avoid travelling by bus, because buses sway and bounce almost as much as boats and for some reason I can’t read on a bus or in a car without becoming ill, but I can read just fine on a train. Planes make me queasy, too.) Anyway, I was waiting for a train at a tiny rural station in Wales, which I reached by bus, unfortunately, because it was a Sunday and normal train services had been suspended. The train pulled in and I climbed aboard, selecting a seat facing in the same direction in which the train had been travelling. I was settling in, disentangling the cord of my iPod, hoping no one would sit next to me. Then the train pulled out and, to my dismay, started travelling in the opposite direction. (This was apparently one of those tiny rural stations in which the trains go out the same way they come in.) So I was now travelling backwards in the train, wondering if I could manage my nausea for the duration of the 35-minute journey. As I watched the rolling fields and flocks of sheep flee from my window, I realized there’s another reason I hate travelling this way: It feels unnatural to see the landscape receding from instead of rushing towards me.

Obviously, when you are travelling you are travelling to some place, and you want and expect that place to come out to meet you. You want to see your destination prefigured along the way. It could be the first glimpse of a city skyline in the distance, or the first glint of sea through the hills. Wherever you’re going, you are looking forward to a proper reception and part of that reception involves sneak previews of your destination, whether it’s your own front door or some strange new town. That’s part of the pleasure of travelling: enjoying where you are and looking forward to where you’ll be. But you are denied all that when travelling backwards in a train. You never really see where you are; you just see where you’ve been receding in the window. And you never see any prefigurements of where you’ll be; all the anticipation is taking place behind you. Travelling backwards in a train just doesn’t feel right.

The B&B where I was staying was on the banks of the River Wye, and my room looked right out onto the thick, swollen river. It had been raining for days and the river was bloated and brown and moving very fast. Periodically tree branches and other debris were swept past, so you could really see how fast the current was moving. Travelling in a train is like being swept up in the current of a river. Heraclitus wrote one of the best aphorisms about rivers, perhaps even one of the best aphorisms about anything:

One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water in which you first stepped has flowed on.

Travelling backwards in a train means not even being able to step into the same river once, because you only see the landscape after it has passed; you don’t feel the water swirling around your toes, you just see it disappearing downriver. I don’t want to have my back to where I’m going. I want to meet my destination head on. I may never pass this way again, so I want to enjoy the moment and I want to see it coming from afar. You get just one chance to dip your toe in the river; might as well make a splash. Floating backwards with the current would just make me sick.

I love to juggle and have been doing it for about the past 15 years now. It’s a very relaxing activity. Juggling is physically reinvigorating; it’s better than a double espresso when you’re feeling fatigued or experiencing a mid-afternoon dip in energy. And juggling is psychologically bracing; it calms the mind while also making you more alert. Plus, juggling is entertaining, both for the juggler and whatever audience happens to be around. Juggling still has a hint of magic about it, a defiance of gravity that elevates everyone who participates in it. And juggling is environmentally-friendly, contains absolutely no artificial ingredients and causes no harmful side-effects.

My ambition has long been to learn how to juggle five balls. At the moment, I can only juggle three. I’ve consulted various jugglers much more proficient than me who all confirm that juggling five balls is very, very difficult—one said it could take five to seven years to learn—and that you must first learn to juggle four balls. This was discouraging news. When I learned to juggle three balls some fifteen years ago, it took about 15 minutes to get the basics. I could keep the three balls going for just a minute or two, but got the hang of it very quickly and in no time was flipping balls behind my back and doing other kinds of simple tricks. But every time I tried to juggle four or five balls, I was always stumped. It’s just not as easy. To master it takes time.

There’s an obvious reason for this. When you’re juggling three balls, only one ball is in the air at any given time. The other two are in your hands. That means you only have to concentrate on one object in flight. When juggling four balls, two balls are in the air simultaneously; when you’re juggling five balls, three are in flight at the same time. Concentrating on more than one object in flight is very, very difficult. In fact, it’s impossible. If you were to actually follow each ball’s trajectory from the time you released it into the air until the time you caught it again, you would never get anywhere. The reason juggling more than three balls is so difficult is because you have to disperse your attention across a field of possibilities instead of focusing on a single variable.

In his great treatise on military strategy, The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote:

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

It’s true. The more assiduously you pursue a possibility, the more possibilities accrue. In juggling, though, as in life, that can be a disconcerting experience. I recently managed to juggle four balls for about 30 seconds. It was exhilarating to keep those four orbs in the air even for that short a period of time. But it was confusing, too. How do you keep track of two things travelling through the air in different directions? And how do you manage to catch them? The truth is, you can’t. Instead, you have to spread your attention out across the space in front of you and let your focus roam like the beam of a searchlight, holding one ball in your sights only long enough to guess where it’s going before moving on to the next. It’s a precarious business. You’re always scrambling to catch up, always adjusting and re-adjusting to new conditions, always afraid you’ll drop a ball. And so much depends on the throw. If you don’t place the ball correctly at the start, you can forget any hope of catching it. You can never rest, either. As soon as one ball is safely landed, you’re throwing another one in the air and trying to anticipate where it will fall. It sounds like the most frantic activity imaginable. But, when you’re inside it, it’s not. That’s one of the paradoxes and joys of juggling: your sense of security ceases as soon as it is seized, but your enjoyment multiplies as your uncertainties increase.

I love to juggle and have been doing it for about the past 15 years now. It’s a very relaxing activity. Juggling is physically reinvigorating; it’s better than a double espresso when you’re feeling fatigued or experiencing a mid-afternoon dip in energy. And juggling is psychologically bracing; it calms the mind while also making you more alert. Plus, juggling is entertaining, both for the juggler and whatever audience happens to be around. Juggling still has a hint of magic about it, a defiance of gravity that elevates everyone who participates in it. And juggling is environmentally-friendly, contains absolutely no artificial ingredients and causes no harmful side-effects.

My ambition has long been to learn how to juggle five balls. At the moment, I can only juggle three. I’ve consulted various jugglers much more proficient than me who all confirm that juggling five balls is very, very difficult—one said it could take five to seven years to learn—and that you must first learn to juggle four balls. This was discouraging news. When I learned to juggle three balls some fifteen years ago, it took about 15 minutes to get the basics. I could keep the three balls going for just a minute or two, but got the hang of it very quickly and in no time was flipping balls behind my back and doing other kinds of simple tricks. But every time I tried to juggle four or five balls, I was always stumped. It’s just not as easy. To master it takes time.There’s an obvious reason for this. When you’re juggling three balls, only one ball is in the air at any given time. The other two are in your hands. That means you only have to concentrate on one object in flight. When juggling four balls, two balls are in the air simultaneously; when you’re juggling five balls, three are in flight at the same time. Concentrating on more than one object in flight is very, very difficult. In fact, it’s impossible. If you were to actually follow each ball’s trajectory from the time you released it into the air until the time you caught it again, you would never get anywhere. The reason juggling more than three balls is so difficult is because you have to disperse your attention across a field of possibilities instead of focusing on a single variable.In his great treatise on military strategy, The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote:

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

It’s true. The more assiduously you pursue a possibility, the more possibilities accrue. In juggling, though, as in life, that can be a disconcerting experience. I recently managed to juggle four balls for about 30 seconds. It was exhilarating to keep those four orbs in the air even for that short a period of time. But it was confusing, too. How do you keep track of two things travelling through the air in different directions? And how do you manage to catch them? The truth is, you can’t. Instead, you have to spread your attention out across the space in front of you and let your focus roam like the beam of a searchlight, holding one ball in your sights only long enough to guess where it’s going before moving on to the next. It’s a precarious business. You’re always scrambling to catch up, always adjusting and re-adjusting to new conditions, always afraid you’ll drop a ball. And so much depends on the throw. If you don’t place the ball correctly at the start, you can forget any hope of catching it. You can never rest, either. As soon as one ball is safely landed, you’re throwing another one in the air and trying to anticipate where it will fall. It sounds like the most frantic activity imaginable. But, when you’re inside it, it’s not. That’s one of the paradoxes and joys of juggling: your sense of security ceases as soon as it is seized, but your enjoyment multiplies as your uncertainties increase.

“Can I say ‘annoying’?” That’s the question my daughter has been asking me of late, as she explores the boundaries of the new vocabulary she is learning. “Yes, you can say ‘annoying,'” I reply. “Can I say ‘shut up’?” she asks. “No, you can’t say ‘shut up.'” “And I can’t say ‘shit’,” she states matter-of-factly. That’s right, she already knows she can’t say ‘shit’ but she still gets a tremendous kick from just quickly confirming that fact with me because to do so, of course, means getting to say ‘shit’ all over again without fear of punishment. It’s like the joke my son told me the other day, warning me ahead of time that it contained a curse: A 6-year-old boy was scolded by his parents for still talking like a baby. ‘Why don’t you use more grown-up words,’ they said. So the next day, when he got home from school, his parents asked him what he had done in class and he said: ‘We read a book called Winnie the Shit.’

Words have an awesome power, and there’s no clearer example of that than when children deploy new vocabulary to see what effect their words have on the world. My daughter, for example, wields the word ‘annoying’ all the time now, using it to describe anything and everything that elicits her displeasure. My son, who’s eight, enjoys using mild curse words in safe contexts, like in a joke. He hears other kids using them for real in the schoolyard and can see the mixture of shock and admiration their use evokes in other children. My kids are learning that words are not just airy nothings; they have a very real and dramatic impact on the world—they can make other people laugh or cry, they can help get you what you want, they can get you into or out of a lot of trouble, too.

Adults are usually unconscious of the latent power of language, but you can feel it in full force again when learning a foreign tongue. One of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s best aphorisms is:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I felt my linguistic limits extended when I learned Dutch about 17 years ago. Each language has words in it that don’t exist in any other tongue, and one of the greatest joys of speaking another language is stretching your mind to encompass this new vocabulary. Gezellig is a word like that in Dutch. It has so many nuanced meanings that it’s impossible to find a simple English equivalent. Indeed, there is no single English equivalent since gezellig is a word that expresses a distinctly Dutch state of mind. It means different things in different circumstances. An evening with friends can be gezellig, meaning friendly and intimate and fun. But inanimate objects can also be gezellig, like a room with a roaring fire in the fireplace, meaning cozy and inviting. But an individual can also be gezellig, meaning that he or she is warm and welcoming. It was not until I learned Dutch, and came to understand the meaning of this word, that I was able to recognize the quality of gezelligheid when I saw it. This not only added a new word to my vocabulary; it added a new experience to my world.

And so it is with my daughter. At almost four years old, she is intrepidly exploring the world of words, experimenting with language to see which words cause happiness, which words cause pain, which words make people laugh, which words make them cry. By trying out words like ‘annoying’, ‘shut up’ and ‘shit’ on me, she’s testing to see if they cause the desired effect. This is something we never stop doing. What American poet John Hall Wheelock wrote is just as true of adults as it is for children:

A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.

I can see why President Bush likes it. Although, technically speaking, he’s into “clearing brush”. And he uses power tools, which disqualifies him. Chopping wood is one of those primal activities that directly meets a basic need, and consequently provides a primal kind of satisfaction. These days we usually meet our basic needs at one or two removes. Few of us grow or kill our own food anymore, for example, even fewer make our own clothes, and fewer still build our own houses. But almost anyone can chop wood, thereby providing fuel to keep yourself and your family warm. It’s an ancient chore, provided you use and ax and not a chain saw, and is very conducive to contemplating the bare necessities of life.

The first thing you need, of course, is an ax. I had only an old one, the wooden shaft worn smooth with age and the head flecked with rust. This ax clearly hadn’t been cleaving any timber recently. I ran my thumb along the edge and it felt about as sharp as a butter knife. This just wouldn’t cut it, I thought. I don’t chop wood every day, so initially thought I should have the ax sharpened first. But a friend, with more experience than I, took a few whacks to show me that it would do just fine. With a few fell swoops, the logs split open with a crack. Often the best preparation for a task is just doing it. Use sharpens a dull ax. So I launched into the logs with gusto, letting the chips fall where they may.After a while, chopping wood becomes a meditation. You’re still paying attention to what you’re doing (you’d better be anyway), but your mind also wanders into a placid place where all kinds of thoughts bob up, bounce around on the surface for a bit and then vanish. It’s satisfying on both a physical and psychological level. I enjoyed inflicting violence on those logs, hoisting the ax above my head and bringing it down with as much force as I could muster. And it was very rewarding to hear the logs burst open with a sound like a gunshot. My enjoyment was enhanced by knowing it was all for a good cause (i.e. building a fire that night). I also enjoyed following where my mind roamed. It’s sort of like walking a dog: you keep the dog on the leash, restricting its movements, until you get to the park, where you let him loose to run wherever he wants to. It was a pleasure to let my mind off the leash while chopping, and to follow it at a leisurely place. I thought of the aphorisms of Jesus, the ones found in the gnostic gospels rather than the New Testament, and one aphorism in particular that has always haunted me:

I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

When I was finished, I was sweaty, tired and satisfied. Then I started neatly piling the logs up in a stack. You’re not finished anything until you’ve cleaned up the mess you’ve made. Seeing the logs all stacked up against the wall gave me the same kind of satisfaction as contemplating a well-stocked wine cellar: the bottles look very attractive in their tidy rows, but you know you’re going to have even more fun drinking them. We now had more than enough logs to keep us warm for a good long while. It’s probably the only time I was really happy to see all my hard work go up in smoke.