“Ox Cart ManIn October of the year,he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,counting the seed, countingthe cellar's portion out,and bags the rest on the cart's floor.He packs wool sheared in April, honeyin combs, linen, leathertanned from deerhide,and vinegar in a barrelhoped by hand at the forge's fire.He walks by his ox's head, ten daysto Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,and the bag that carried potatoes,flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goosefeathers, yarn.When the cart is empty he sells the cart.When the cart is sold he sells the ox,harness and yoke, and walkshome, his pockets heavywith the year's coin for salt and taxes,and at home by fire's light in November coldstitches new harnessfor next year's ox in the barn,and carves the yoke, and saws planksbuilding the cart again.”

“Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.”

“Moving slightly beyond the shade of the seventh column, the old man carefully positioned the shopping cart so that its four wheels were perfectly aligned with the expansion cracks in the sidewalk. Then, one by one, he lined up all seven plastic bags in the cart so that they, too, were parallel to the cracks. The bags were important for they contained the sum of everything he owned. Next, he felt the inside pocket of his old jacket for his Bible. He knew all of the Old Testament by heart and most of the New Testament, but he needed to feel its physical presence. It was there.”

“What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.”

“He's pulling the load of an ox and walking on eggshells.”

“Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books.”