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.
Whenever I come across Goethe’s maxim that architecture is frozen music, Helsinki is what I see.
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.
The priest apologized for the warm weather. “This new climate is beyond me,” he said.
The tears of things. If I squint at this phrase a certain way, I catch a glimpse of how I might better relate to grief.
I want to commune with nature but I do not know how. Some lizard-brained part of me wants to pull out my telephone and look for new headlines, new information.
For years I’ve nursed elaborate fantasies of living in a remote cabin or better yet a double-wide in the Mojave desert. But would isolation make me more sensible?
Korpo, Finland. I remember believing the world would make sense when I grew older. But it never did, and it probably won’t.
I wonder what the effect will be in the long run, bearing witness to so much handwritten pain. “First let this be consolation,” she says. “Then let it be courage.”
I try to see the world through my father’s eyes, his sense that everything looked like science fiction.
