The Outsider

Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes.

C’est curieux, cette volonté d’établir un bilan, de se persuader au moment ultime qu’on a vécu ; ou peut-être que pas du tout, c’est le contraire qui est affreux et étrange, il est affreux et étrange de penser à tous ces hommes, à toutes ces femmes qui n’ont rien à raconter, qui n’envisagent d’autre destin futur que de se dissoudre dans un vague co

In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism . . . ​‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. . . . He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from

He read the suicide story twice against the racket of steel blades grinding single estate beans. Something rankled. There was a prolonged and dangerous-sounding hissing, and a solitary stream of espresso poured into a white cup. Edward Fellowes jumped from the bridge late on Thursday night. But there were any number of bridges along the Tyne, why w