Sublime

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.

my purpose for writing it before I die is to tell someone the fascinating life story of my hundred-and-four-year-old great-grandmother, who is a Zen Buddhist nun.

I wished I could have told Mariye that the clothes that had protected her from that something had been worn by her late mother before she married. But I couldn’t. I didn’t have the right. Neither did the Commendatore. There was but one person in the world who did, and that was Menshiki. But he would never exercise it. We all live our lives carrying

dregs

The lower shelves were where I kept the paperbacks I figured I’d never read again. The names on the spines, Herman Hesse, Raymond Radiguet, and Kyusaku Yumeno, had all faded in the sun. Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, and my Dostoyevsky, The Gambler, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov. Chekhov, Camus, Steinbeck. The Odyssey

though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.