Aeon Magazine » Oceanic Feeling

The wisdom of gardens

Damon Young — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:00:03 +0000

The doctor had a calm, sing-song voice. Every word was measured and mild. The only jarring note was sartorial: his navy blue striped shirt and gold cufflinks clashed with the Miami Vice pastels of my wife’s quarantined hospital room. As if he were casually pulling down options from a computer menu, the specialist told Ruth [...]

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Ladder to heaven

George Zarkadakis — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 05:00:28 +0000

I travelled on the night train from Athens and arrived in Thessaloniki six hours later, in a sleepless daze. The small neon-lit café by the bus stop was crammed with plastic tables and chairs. I must have fallen asleep while I waited there, as I found myself being shaken back to consciousness just as the [...]

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Ivory challenge

Katie Grant — Fri, 31 May 2013 05:00:05 +0000

Most days, I play the piano for at least an hour, usually longer. But my dedication springs from fear not love. Of course, many soloists suffer from perfectly rational performance nerves, but my fear is less rational: it’s the fear of anybody, anybody at all, actually hearing me play and it’s so powerful it stops [...]

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The art of attention

Sven Birkerts — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

It starts with the slightly awkward heave — leg up and over the seat, feet locating the stirrups — and the indrawn breath that says ‘Let’s go.’ This is a new discipline for me, this stationary bike, and I make sure to pace myself. I tip from side to side, easily and rhythmically, with a [...]

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Shadow plays

Kapka Kassabova — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:00:58 +0000

You press the pedal at the base of Eduard Bersudsky’s sculpture Piper (2013). The shadow on the wall moves, the cogs begin to hum, the little bell rings, and the pair of gendered fauns flex their legs to activate the dog typist at the typewriter hammering out memos lost to history. Tip, tap, tippity-tap, its [...]

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At the Seder

Adam Blitz — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:00:13 +0000

In 2004 Damascus was on the cusp of modernity. The first privately operated bank had just been established, plans for a securities exchange were underway, the internet was in its infancy, and the Old City’s first boutique hotel was getting ready to open its doors. All the while the Al-Assads, Syria’s first couple — if [...]

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Is yoga a religion?

Erik Davis — Fri, 03 May 2013 05:00:17 +0000

I started practising yoga 12 years ago at a newly opened studio in San Francisco called the Yoga Tree. One day, I was coming out of a back bend — ustrasana, or camel pose, to be exact — when my bodymind abruptly and briefly fluttered into a tingling otherworld of uncanny and dizzying bliss. After [...]

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Desert silence

Robert Twigger — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:00:25 +0000

By the twisted, paradoxical nature of things, a 4x4 with a throbbing engine — the 4.2 litre non-turbo diesel in a Nissan Patrol or Toyota Landcruiser — is the best way to experience the single most entrancing characteristic of the desert, the one that sucks you in and leads you to all the others you [...]

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A sublime contagion

Sarah Perry — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:38 +0000

As I walked the green miles of the Undercliff where the French Lieutenant’s Woman met her lover, there came a change of air. The dense undergrowth was obscenely verdant — bees worrying at pink rhododendron, peacock butterflies crossing my path — and now and then I’d burst out and find I stood at the cliff’s [...]

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Stories in the night

Melanie McGrath — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:00:15 +0000

Insomniacs rarely forget when their sleeplessness first began. For some, like the writer Margaret Drabble, it emerges with the birth of a child; for others, it’s an episode of illness or the loss of someone they love. For me, it starts at an uncle’s house in Essex. I am four or five and my uncle [...]

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