Sublime

Half-jokingly but mostly seriously, Millie tells her mother that “the self is an illusion and completely false.” She is so thoroughly decluttered that she has done away with all her commitments and finally even her personhood. “I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie,” she reflects. “The questions come naturally, as if supplied by

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

I realise, suddenly, how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia.

While she walked, Sylvie discovered that she wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis. It settled so quickly inside her that she realized she must have known, on some level, that it was coming. When the specialist had used the word incurable, she’d thought: Of course. That sounds right. Whenever something went wrong in her house while she was growing

Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows.

Those who are permanently exiled to the kingdom of the unwell are still expected to perform daily penitential rituals of “wellness,” handing over money, time, and physical energy to a process that is closer to haunting than it is to healing.

I wondered aloud if Margaret might be experiencing a similar resurgence of grief for Paul as she faced her own mortality.

Don’t we all of us slay each other, day in, day out, hour after hour, with our exquisite smiles and shattering indifference, our lavish displays of wealth that the more impoverished members of society can only lower their eyes before?