Sublime

in McConnell, Sam had found someone as interested as he was in another existential threat to humanity: Donald Trump. Trump’s assault on the government, and on the integrity of US elections, belonged, to Sam’s way of thinking, on the same list as pandemics and artificial intelligence and climate change.

Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

In the words of narrator George Manuel, “perpetual debt binds us firmly to the store.”