Sublime

But that’s not all, the kid said. He gave me a dollar—and he told me to be sure to give it to whichever kid actually brought his car around.

“Something happened that made you decide you’d had all the life you could stand. So you ended it there. Except you have to stay alive, for your father.”

The peasants had sucked me as dry as a failed harvest, I would have perished, I went among men and did not perish.”

The Fitzgeralds rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Paris that spring, and in May, 1925, he and Ernest Hemingway met.

It’s easy to know what life is like for Daddy. Daddy is happiest when he is fixing up a place and putting it in order. Daddy smells like turpentine and he has black and white hair like a sheepdog and when he’s at home he wears white sneakers stained green from mowing the lawn.

Chocolate was now just a memory of another age, and without chocolate people forgot sweetness, and without sweetness they forgot childhood, and without childhood they forgot the beginning, and without the beginning they couldn’t see the end.

Given my limited time, though, I’ve had to think about how I might reinforce my bonds with them. So I’m building separate lists of my memories of each of the kids. I’m making videos so they can see me talking about what they’ve meant to me. I’m writing letters to them. I also see the video of my last lecture—and this book, too—as pieces of myself t