Sublime

breathes in the scent of the field, listens to the

As a child, they showed him what life could be like: an adventure undertaken in the name of curiosity alone.

callousness

At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He serio

it sat between them like a scrim, blurring everything.

It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying.

that part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see.

it read a lot like an undercover had got killed.