Silk (Vintage International)

Life was seething in an undertone; it moved with a cunning languor, like a hunted animal in its den. The world seemed centuries away.

The rest of his time he spent in a liturgy of habits that protected him from unhappiness. Every so often, on a windy day, he went to the lake and spent hours looking at it, because, drawn on the water, he seemed to see the inexplicable spectacle, light, that had been his life.

The girl continued to stare at him, with a violence that wrenched from every word the obligation to be memorable.