Sublime

people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It’s a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax.

Augustine wryly notes, “I do not think he can have any friends. If it is wrong to believe anything, then either one does wrong by believing a friend, or one never believes a friend, and then I do not see how one can call either oneself or the friend a friend.”

John Barth’s long story “Lost in the Funhouse,”

If we were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern commerce.

Given who had dumped her, almost in fact, jilted her, given too, my blood association with this person, my mind in that moment just couldn’t go there.

He often spoke of “dear old Adolf” and his SS, who knew what to do with thugs who picked on artists. America was the place, he said, “where honest men were all robbed and bludgeoned by scoundrels.”

“I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see. The precious things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it. I hope that doesn’t sound harsh.”

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