Sublime

his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud—the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point.

Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws—in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness).

Tomas Espedal touches on this in his book Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life.

Germany, he presented his version of the famous Gun Trick. Inspired by the tale of William Tell, Torrini would fire a marked bullet at his son; the bullet would be found lodged in an apple on his son's head. But one evening, through a tragic mistake, the trick failed and Torrini fatally shot his son on stage.He was imprisoned for the killing and

extreme paucity of expression.

I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they call it—artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half bewildered his own mind and doesn’t know the difference between sanity and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and found the place

hardscrabble

He’d come to consider himself a connoisseur of the grotesque,

The nurse was a sick-looking man with grey, translucent teeth. He sucked them, audibly, as we walked. I wondered if he’d begun working here as a healthy person and then slowly absorbed the aura of madness and death surrounding him. I wondered what I was absorbing in my line of work.