Sublime

gnomish quality about everything. A smaller-than-life quality, with a dash of the droll. What is this five-thousand-year-old book? The Mickey Mouse watch, Mr Tagomi himself, the fragile cup in Mr Tagomi’s hand … and, on the wall facing Mr Baynes, an enormous buffalo head, ugly and menacing.

bouquet

His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees.

So he turned note-taking on its head. Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he wrote them all on small pieces of paper, put a number in the corner and collected them in one place: the slip-box.

hardscrabble

bloviating

ersatz.

eschewing

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.