Civilization’s like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it’s real, it dies.

TALKING HEADS’ Fear of Music

I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Samsara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.

“I’ve a gift, Ed.” The old Irishwoman has speckled woodpecker-green eyes. “Like Holly’s. Ye know what it is I’m talking of, so ye do.” Chatter swells and falls like the sea on shingle. “I’m guessing you mean the voices Holly heard when she was a girl, and the, well, what in some circles would be called her moments of ‘precognition.’ ” “Aye, there’s

Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match. Around every equinox and solstice, the soul’s owner has to be lured up the Way of Stones into the Chape

All the strength drains from my legs and arms, like I’m a puppet with its strings cut, pushed into the corner.

The girl in the mirror’s a woman, with her cropped black hair, her Quadrophenia T-shirt, her black jeans.

Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.

“Oh, not those eyes”—now the woman removes her strange blue sunglasses. “I mean your special, invisible eye, just … here.” She rests her fingers on Aoife’s right temple and strokes her forehead with her thumb, and deep in my liver or somewhere I know something’s weird, something’s wrong, but it’s drowned out when Immaculée Constantin smiles up at m