Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and author of 2018¿s Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the first-ever biography of the French theorist. She has published two previous books on Czes¿aw Mi¿osz: An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czes¿aw Mi¿osz and Czes¿aw Mi¿osz: Conversations. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford¿s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford¿s Hoover Institution. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement and has also contributed to the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
Contents One: California Considered as an Island Two: The Burning City Three: What the Beaver Said Four:
To earn honestly one
s bread one goes to America.
Five: Patmos Six:
I did not choose California. It was given to me.
Seven:
Nothing witnesses here.
Eight:
American when will you be angelic?
Nine: A Defector from the Age of Aquarius Ten: Lessons under Lamplight Eleven: Prophet of Être Twelve:
Only Her Love Warmed Him
Thirteen: Ars Moriendi Fourteen:
Home, always back home.
Fifteen:
There will be no other end of the world.
Acknowledgments Notes and Permissions About the Author