Sublime

“Then tell me, am I ugly or not?” Her mother caressed her hair, saying: “No creature is ugly who is born in the image of God.” Then they sent her to the city to study: her sisters stayed in the big kitchen waiting for husbands. Immacolata was already engaged. “They did the right thing,” she said to herself. “I wouldn’t be a good wife. I’m not a

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always

the old woman’s injunction to “be proper” kills off any opportunity to expand.

I liked the colour of her arms and her hair. I liked her handwriting. She wrote the letter g with a huge tail that muddled the words on the line below. I liked her eyes and a bunch of other things too. I was jealous of how she talked to grown-ups. She could barge into a conversation and say no, you’re thinking of the Gloria that lives round the

Your father wouldn’t give me my freedom, she would say, and so I had to go to court and get it that way.…

The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons

I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice—for my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought.

Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds. The last class of my old

That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to