Sublime

Babette, disheveled, has the careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to know or care what she looks like.

Something huge and heavy and slow and far away and altogether unknown to him begins to say what it might mean. And then he proceeds to show her. . . .

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

Absence of community. America is one vast, terrifying anti-community. The great organizations to which most people give their working day and the apartments and suburban homes to which they return at night are equally places of loneliness and alienation.

Updike’s “A&P”

occult