Sublime

Du moins, il est facile de comprendre la réaction de ceux qui ont décidé de fuir. Comment accepter de se tourner volontairement vers cet attracteur quand on allait tranquillement vers l’horizon de l’universelle modernisation ? Accepter de regarder en face une telle situation, c’est se retrouver comme le héros de la nouvelle d’Edgar Poe, Descente da

desiderata.

To the ‘right’ he shows the consequences of a love of money and markets, of government by corporation, of an economic growth unmoored from place, which eats through nature and culture and leaves ruins. To the ‘left’ he shows the consequences of a rootless individualism, of rights without rites, of the rejection of family and tradition, of the champ

My father had not so much left us as completed, made visible, an absence that had been present among us all along.

I hungered for cast-iron certainty even though I realized that I was living in a morass of uncertainty—why

My mother returned to County Clare afterward, as if America were just a dream she’d fallen into as a girl, who had awoken years later as an old woman in an empty house. She lived now in the stone cottage where she’d been born, writing me occasional letters of matters so foreign that they seemed written by, or to, a stranger: stories of stillborn sh

Economists call it a tragedy of the commons: People insist on their freedom to denude their “private property” in any way they wish, to horde the wealth they pull from the land or sea, and while the party’s going strong, no one much cares what the repercussions may be.

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he’d clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure