What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red brown seeds beaded

Little Tear-Vase

Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil
inside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.
I, as a smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,

An “accelerated course” in French taste for tourists who are still in need of it ought to begin, in my opinion, with a visit to the Marché aux Puces and end with a visit to the studio of Georges Braque. On the one hand the odds and ends, coffee pots, cast-off rags, the second hand goods, in short, produced by several centuries of a unified and centralized culture; on the other, the same objects interpenetrated and flattened out in compositions that have little to do with the well-known genre of the nature morte, although they deserve the name much more legitimately than, for example, those by Chardin or Cézanne, which are so much more vives.

In 2016, at age ninety, the Welsh historian and essayist Jan Morris began keeping a ­diary for the first time. She composed an entry a day ­(occasionally two) for 188 days, ruminating on ­history, current affairs, art, and literature alongside matters of old age, love, fellowship, and creature comforts. The following is a selection.

Mid-July 1955, 889 years after the Battle of Hastings, the townspeople of Auvers, a one-steepled, overgrown tarry town near Paris, woke up to a spanking, hand lettered, red-white-and-blue poster festooned across the front of the café A Van Gogh.

Janet Flanner, under the pen name of Genêt, began writing her fortnightly "Letter” for The New Yorker in October, 1925, a few months after the magazine was founded.

When my son Henry was a year old I took him to Boston to meet my mother. She didn’t show up. It turned out that she had gone to Foxwoods Casino instead, which sounds bad and maybe was, but it had been three years since I’d seen her or even spoken to her; we wouldn’t see each other for seven more. I couldn’t blame her for trying her luck elsewhere.

Once you fight your way to the glass door, you find that it’s locked—and beyond it, on the street, there’s another crowd. But this one is more diverse, made up of both men and women. A policeman is stationed by the door. He’s holding a vessel of some kind. Of course: an oil lamp. Well, it took you a while. It’s Holy Saturday. The crowds are waiting for the Holy Fire to land.