Long-simmering anxiety has a new focal point, a new excuse for indulging in much darker fears. Borders are being closed.
These are destabilizing days when there always seems to be a screen playing something upsetting in the room.
Finding lightness becomes the job. And if it cannot be found, it must be invented.
The mathematical precision of these birds looked improbable. Maybe it was a sign of some cosmic change, a hidden pattern made visible.
I closed the book and watched everyone on the subway swiping and scrolling, hunting for something. Or escaping.
We talked about not staying in New York. We talked about finding a way back to Helsinki and we discussed moving to Taipei.
The turbulence began the moment we entered American airspace. It was hard not to read this as an omen.
People sweep through the galleries, looking at the paintings only through the screens of their phones. Taking pictures is how we see the present moment.
Meanwhile, China has quarantined a city of eleven million people with more cities to follow.
I remember smoking a cigarette in the subzero wind while watching the lights of freighters on the horizon. I thought we were at the edge of the earth.
I was shaken by Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Finnish National Gallery.
Whenever I come across Goethe’s maxim that architecture is frozen music, Helsinki is what I see.
Looking at the sky tonight, I think about the philosophers who believed the stars were rational creatures and the sun could sing.
Alone in Helsinki. The sky is pure gloom with rain that hangs in the air, refusing to fall.
The idea cohered on the train somewhere between Turku and Helsinki: take a photograph and write at least three sentences every day.
It seems perverse that a deeper sense of community would come from living someplace remote rather than among the crowds of the city.
This season is defined by muted Bergman films projected on the wall in the hour of the wolf.
I came across moments in the forest that felt ceremonial, the ancient rites of geology operating at scales beyond my comprehension.
I stared at the empty cabins along the shore, half-wondering if I was still dreaming about my father.
I went to a 700-year-old church on Sunday morning and the service was purely tonal because I don’t understand Finnish. It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard.
