Sublime

‘You never did. But do you want to, even now? You can’ – he seemed to be leaning out of himself – ‘I’m just here.’ He breathed as if the air were thin. His lips were red. The buttons on his coat had come undone and he looked at Thomas with an elated will that had no desire in it. I know that look, thought Thomas, I’ve seen it before, when Lowlands

Without bothering to look up or down the street he went down the walk and let himself in.

D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of herself she’d extend to the space around her.

Ghost [Beneath] Swear.

The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.

With every atypical act or word, he was driving me further from the memory of the person I had known, and despite everything that had happened, preserving that idea of him was important. That is why I called the special number he had left me for emergencies: I didn’t know what to do with him, couldn’t coexist with him any longer in this altered sta

On the screen, they both looked eerie, strange, their faces smeared into softness and their eyes extra bright.

My will was strong, but my limbs refused their office.

There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”