Sublime

And that’s the horror of it, to feel the animal flesh, terrified, being led to slaughter, covered in flowers and moaning in distress. It’s a whole theory of civilization, that image, the flowers and the slaughter, the flowers covering the slaughter. And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.

discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,

pernicious

Language fails us, always. Flimsy things, these words.

tribulation,

You’re descending at a hellish pace but there’s no fire here,

July Fourth bonfire is enormous—some fifty feet in diameter, half that height in the center, not yet lit so you can see the base of firewood but also the flotsam and jetsam of discarded lives: dilapidated chairs, bureaus, broken picture frames, wooden pallets, a child’s sled, the wreckage of a picnic table, what looks like part of a rowboat…The