Sublime

Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words, he really has no interests outside tennis.

He hears his dead undergrad mentor quoting Mark Twain. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “In the field. I seem to have gotten a little lost.”

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Patrick Leigh Fermor would be quite high on any list, starting with The Traveller’s Tree, a wonderful book about the Caribbean, absolutely splendid. Everything he does, he has a sort of magic touch with. And I think Evelyn Waugh is very observant, very funny. I’ve read his books more than once.

The man who had been Malachi Constant, who had been Unk, who had been the Space Wanderer, the man who was Malachi Constant again—that man felt very little upon being declared Malachi Constant again.

William Vollmann, whose collection The Rainbow Stories

On another day, one of the timeless days after Max’s murder, she saw another vision of him. In South Africa a man walked out of prison after a lifetime sequestered from the public gaze. Nobody really knew what this Lazarus was going to look like. The only photograph the papers ever printed had been taken decades earlier. The man in that picture was

He’s Sih Hsuin Ma now—his old self turned inside out, like a jaunty, reversible jacket.

Considering the tragic effects of the colonialist experience in India, it should be obvious which vision of Shah Wali Allah’s theo-political views most successfully captured the imaginations of India’s oppressed Muslim population. As will become apparent, throughout the colonized lands of the Middle East and North Africa, the voice of modernism and