Sublime

I found myself shaking his hand warmly. Minutes later I was out on the street. A boy walked splay-footed across a public lawn, nudging a soccer ball before him. A second kid sat on the grass, taking off his socks by grabbing the heels and yanking. How literary, I thought peevishly. Streets thick with the details of impulsive life as the hero

Daniel had come across a picture in an article he was reading online, Lower Broadway on a spring afternoon, delivery vans and cabs, halal food carts and fire escapes. That night, for the first time since he had come to China, he listened to the songs he had written over the summer.

It occurs to me now that I had come to see a part of Africa but not Africans.

“Iki is understood as a superior form…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

En débarquant en Afrique en 1893 pour un long périple au terme duquel il dénoncera vigoureusement le colonialisme, l’écrivain André Gide est frappé tout de suite par une entêtante odeur de feuilles vertes. Il parle de l’odeur végétale des indigènes. Ce n’est plus la même situation aujourd’hui que toute la planète pue la même odeur industrielle.

These photographs, finally, are mirrors, not windows. We look into them, and what they reflect back to us is something monstrous and hard to reconcile with our notion of ourselves. We look, and look, and then—sated with looking, secure in our reactions, perennially missing the point—we put them away.