Girl With Curious Hair

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism

I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.

I finally got to sit. My back had been starting to get that sort of museum stiffness.

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.”

But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it’s frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what’s going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age.

They examine and reexamine, with a sort of unhappy enthusiasm, the little ignorances that necessarily, Julie says, line the path to any real connection between persons.

We just want to ride, dude. Gratis. To the Reunion. We just want to do the bare unavoidable minimum. Pay taxes, die. Sternberg has resentment even he can’t see, it’s so deep inside. So an ugly mood, and a desperate need to evacuate his body. It’s loathsomely real, I’m afraid. But what’s to be done?

Mark’s field of time is harder to survey; because, since he is, at root, still an infant, his future is not yet something that cannot change. He believes there’s some simple, radical difference about him. He hopes it’s genius, fears it’s madness. Magda knows it’s neither. She knows that in truth Mark is just a radically simple person, wildly noncom

Julie has the best skin Faye’s ever seen on anyone anywhere. It’s not just that it’s so clear it’s flawed, or that here in low sun off water it’s the color of a good blush wine; it has the texture of something truly alive, an elastic softness, like a ripe sheath, a pod.