Sublime

Sisyphean task,”

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

lone elderly woman swimming slowly, her neck jutting forward like a determined turtle.

She talked to herself so often that she’d stopped realizing when she was talking aloud and when she was not. She had favorite secret places around the palace. She’d sit on empty thrones and command invisible servants, or drape herself with jade for an invisible suitor. She burned blue cakes of copal just to watch the smoke. She climbed up the

The only good present my mother ever got me was a book called Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rilke, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago. The three had never met, but they adored each other’s work, and for four years they all wrote sonnets and sent them to one

tenuous

“Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.”

The fables seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away.

She was a harbinger of the sub rosa, the new world awaiting me in just a few weeks.