Sublime

I focus on the fact that I’m here for my pleasure. Fishing trips can get hijacked by expectations.

“He recorded everything. The only way to understand the large is through the small. It’s like American first-person fiction.”

But he seemed to me to have either a strange reserve or a strange simplicity; to be fundamentally unfurnished with ‘ideas’. He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears, – nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious tastes. As I watched him strolling about looking at his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had anything that could properly

Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole? What choic

The possibility of progressive achievement in the shadow of sure disappointment defines the human condition.

How can words capture the full depth, structure, and texture of reality?"

He asked if I taught at Granby. I was startled, for a moment, that he hadn’t taken me for a student. But here was my reflection in his rear-view: a put-together adult with lines around her eyes.