Sublime

galantine

“crossing over from salt water into fresh water,” consciously pitching his prose to a general audience. In his third book, he adopted a more conversational voice. But only with his fourth book did he finally succeed in producing the kind of writing that he “had always aspired to”:

Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety,

Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends. He was okay with losing his prized Mont Blanc pen. “I can buy another one just like it.” He was okay with criticism too. He showed my father a few pages he was proud of having written. My father told him his insights into Heraclitus were brillia

Flourishing seemed wrong in a man so disheartened as he was.

He was utterly still, the type of quiet that I had thought could not belong to humans, a stilling of everything but breath and pulse—like a deer, listening for the hunter’s bow.

he talks, somebody once remarked, “like a sausage recipe with footnotes.”

One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.