Essays on life and age
The Age of Waiting
Heart Traces & Song Lines in the Anthropocene
- Paperback
Buy on Amazon: The Age of Waiting (opens Amazon)
Our era, the Anthropocene, the era of a world human-made is not a time of optimism. It seems our journey on the earth has been oblivious. Burdened by apprehension, we wait. As we wait, we move slowly, this way and that, revisiting old possibilities, listening for messages from other times.
Hints, clues, images, fragments of thought, remembered smells, half-forgotten music, minute promptings point the way towards a possibility we cannot quite articulate. Deep within the world that humans have made and are making, one still can sense promptings that might lead to other ways of seeing, ways of proceeding that are only vaguely now imagined, patterns that are not quite accessible.
— From the foreword to The Age of Waiting
Also by Douglas J. Penick
Winter Light
Five essays on old age as its own time of life, told through Titian, Beethoven, Cézanne and others.
The Oceans of Cruelty
Twenty-five tales from India, retold: a young king, a corpse-spirit and the dark power of stories.
A Terrace in Rome
Translator
Pascal Quignard's novel of a seventeenth-century engraver, in its first English translation.
From the Empire of Fragments
A collection on the lives of the culturally displaced (Hammer and Anvil Press, 2015).
Out of print