Sublime

Grace, feeling at that moment she’d exchange an eternity of rest for a tube of lipstick, bit her lips to bring up the blood, and fell into desolation. It was her eighteenth birthday, and all she had at hand was a walk down by the Blackwater with her only two friends, and tea with her peculiar family. Other girls on days like these held parties to w

ebullience

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

I found myself shaking his hand warmly. Minutes later I was out on the street. A boy walked splay-footed across a public lawn, nudging a soccer ball before him. A second kid sat on the grass, taking off his socks by grabbing the heels and yanking. How literary, I thought peevishly. Streets thick with the details of impulsive life as the hero ponder

a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but

Basel,