Sublime

an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.

Nature is always less gaudy than I remember it. It has much better taste than I.

I thought I could stand apart, but looking back, I see that the parts of my thinking that were most reinforced were those that most dovetailed with those around me, and the parts that were hardest to hold were those that did not.

even he was at odds with his own patience, wanting to measure his ability to sprint and his ability to savor.

we were perhaps avoiding.

those who “consume” the news can be corrected. There are powerful, almost incontrovertible, codes of decorum maintained by and for people who are thought of as White, or who have been invited to participate in Whiteness. The racial disparity in published photographs of traumatized bodies is by now a recurring, and almost tedious, question.

Even when the end is certain, the days must be lived, and little can be done to hurry things along.