Sublime

A Sigridur, quando muito pequena, confundia o ontem, o hoje e o amanhã. Dizia: amanhã foi muito bonito. O meu pai achava que era uma forma de ter visões. A Sigridur só o dizia quando se referia a coisas positivas, alegrias e contentamentos que recolhia. Era uma forma de prever que o dia seguinte seria tão bom quanto o anterior.

Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were. She looked past the building to the sky. It was a deep, blue velvet night,

chiaroscuro).

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

‘You busy?’ said the boy to Grace. ‘Do you want to do something? What do you want to do?’ She looked astonished. What did she want to do? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. The thought had rarely occurred to her. She knew what she ought to do, and what she ought not to do; the idea that she was allowed to want anything at all was appalling.