Sublime

song. Strangers had searched their house and taken anything they pleased. The wooden faces of the policemen and their lack of response were the worst, though, far more unsettling than the TV lights and the

He could not stay in his chamber: the house contracted to a nut-shell around him; the walls smote his forehead; bare-headed he rushed from the place, and only in the infinite air, found scope for that boundless expansion of his life.

walked slowly in the same direction. He looked about forty, very dark with a melancholy clean-shaven face. Some violent emotion

Where might the story go from here? Scan your mind, make a list. Which of your ideas feel too obvious? That is to say: Which, if Chekhov enacts them, will disappoint you by responding too slavishly to your expectations? (Hanov, on the next page, drops to one knee and proposes.) Which, too random, won’t be responding to your expectations at all? (A

Why, why had he left? Why had the elder sent him “into the world”? Here was quiet, here was holiness, and there—confusion, and a darkness in which one immediately got lost and went astray …

“Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?”

If only I could just have one more look at him, if I could see him one more time, I wouldn’t even go up to him, I wouldn’t speak, I’d hide in a corner, only to see him for one little minute, to hear him the way he used to play in the backyard and come in and shout in his little voice: ‘Mama, where are you?’