Sublime

nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in. Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother

I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probabl

I had taken him for confident when he was in truth full of worry and terror.

me?”

“I’m just taking away what doesn’t belong there.”

Good Orderly Direction?”

writing it in a hotel felt to Chekhov, as he put it, “like sewing on someone else’s machine.”

Big stories contain these tiny, utterly human moments.

With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric.