so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?

Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.

They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole

If they listen to the radio at all it’s often for music or else something with an innocence or ultimate neutrality about it, comedy or sport, something with a sense of play, of things mattering and then not mattering, of coming and going and leaving no mark.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Emilia-Romagna.

the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery

He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty. But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are

There in his chest is a heart that tilts and pitches. He can keep its beats slow and smooth, quell its habits of fear or panic or impulse, stop it yearning too much for home, curb its unhelpful states of abandon. Calm and steady, calm and steady. Metronome pacing out the breath. Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and