Sublime

Eventually she begins to disappear into furniture, against walls, her bare ends blending into things like the end of a brushstroke. Perhaps this is the reason they begin to forget that she is there; they cannot find her edges, the parts of her to pull out from the background to identify her by. They walk past her, talk through her, and are surprise

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Mrs Cadwallader said, privately, ‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care o

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Madame Lapierre came from an upper-class, highly educated family. For her entire life she had lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to Passy, and I struggled to picture Father in those spaces. I imagined him sitting on the edge of a leather couch, or always staring out of a window, wanting to be elsewhere. I was relieved he wasn’t from Paris

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“Too much life enters this house,” Tillie Olsen, the writer, labor activist and mother of four girls, wrote in a letter to the poet Anne Sexton. “Up at 6, breakfast in shifts, lunch packing — then, if no one ill, or it isn’t a holiday, or any of the other ORs, the day for work until 4, sometimes longer or an evening — depending on housework load, s... See more

It is astonishing how many experts there seem to be nowadays whose mission in life is to lecture us about the perils of pleasure. Scarcely a week goes by without some ominous pronouncement about the price we must pay for our brief moments of indulgence. Even moderation, which used to be an acceptable excuse for the beef on your plate or the wine in

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« C'est curieux », dit finalement Lempereur, « comme on reste proches des auteurs auxquels on s'est consacrés au début de sa vie. On pourrait croire, après un siècle ou deux, que les passions s'éteignent, qu'on accède en tant qu'universitaires à une sorte d'objectivité littéraire, etc. Eh bien pas du tout. Huysmans, Zola, Barbey, Bloy, tous ces gen

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