Status Updates From Provincials: Postcards from...

Even though we might have been aware of the power of the English language, it was too far away for us to take it seriously. We treated it the way children treat god—as being necessary only during examinations.

Microsoft Word underlines these words in red [...] even when they work efficiently in giving us the sense of the stone: "caen-stone," "enfouldered," "rugas," "foveoles," "foraminous cavo-rilievo," "fiducial stones." The study of these stones becomes analogical to a deeper understanding of the difference in "dialect," in language: "I study you glout and gloss, but have / No cadrans to adjust you with."

The background in Zoom conversations gradually began to seem like a birth certificate. By "birth certificate" I mean a pedigree certificate.

I do not believe that cosmopolitanism and provincialism are antithetical. The forest, which is the most cosmopolitan space I know, one perhaps even more accommodative than the human heart, is also, by virtue of being tied to a place, genetically provincial.