Sublime

He recognized the familiar, individual, beautiful intake of her flat young abdomen, its wonderful “play,” the frank and eager expression of the oblique muscles and the “smile” of her navel—to borrow from the vocabulary of the belly dancer’s art.

Who knows, maybe this accursed old man, who loves mankind so stubbornly in his own way, exists even now, in the form of a great host of such old men, and by no means accidentally, but in concert, as a secret union, organized long ago for the purpose of keeping the mystery, of keeping it from unhappy and feeble mankind with the aim of making them ha

“To drown in depravity, to stifle your soul with corruption, is that it?”

Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood.

So I, too, have hopes that though I doubted once, I’ll be forgiven if I shed tears of repentance.”

her sorrow remained lodged in her body for the next fifty-six years.

She scooped up the child, tucked him under her arm, and half ran and half stumbled toward the roaring sea. “Oh, mother! No! Don’t leave me!” Ooruk cried. And at once you could tell she wanted to stay with her child, she wanted to, but something called her, something older than she, older than he, older than time.

Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it?