His headphones were dangling around his neck, so he put them on, hands shaking a little; pressed play on the CD in his Discman; and let the Brandenburg Concertos settle him. He only listened to Bach when he was desperate for order.

…but Dad was gearing himself up to say something, a gradual process that involved shifting around in his chair, some throat-clearing, lifting his tea halfway to his mouth and putting it down again, so Paul and Grandma broke off their staring contest and waited for him to speak. Grief had lent him a certain gravitas.

“I don’t disagree. But I think,” Walter said, with more confidence than he felt, “that this could only have been the work of a bored adolescent.” In truth, he was deeply shaken and was taking refuge in efficiency. 

“How do you bring in guests and supplies?” Walter was having some difficulty grasping the appeal of the place. It was undeniably beautiful but geographically inconvenient, and he wasn’t sure why your average executive would want to vacation in a cellular dead zone.

It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence.

Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.

Her relationship with the pool was adversarial.

They went out to the terrace, which had Italian pretensions.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Olivia said to Lucas, which in those days was one of her signature lines. (A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.)

He was skinny and unpleasantly pale, a strictly indoor creature.

He was ridiculous in some ways, but beneath all that he was a serious person, she understood that, he was a serious person who worked very hard.

Olivia did not, in fact, particularly like Lucas’s new paintings. They were derivative of Edward Hopper and could only have been more obvious in theme if he’d maybe painted the word LONELINESS across them in red.

“What a fortunate thing,” Olivia said finally, “being good at everything.” She herself had only ever been good at one thing, and possibly not even that.

Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not.

“You okay?” Ned asked. “Not at all,” Vincent said. “You mind if I take five?”

“We were just talking about you,” Olivia said when Vincent returned to the deck with a fresh round that she’d mixed inside. “I hope you made up some interesting rumors, at least,” Vincent said.

She arrived early and lingered outside for a while as a cross-section of affluent Brooklyn assembled on the sidewalk in their uniforms: flat-heeled boots and complicated arrangements of scarves for the women, beards and unflatteringly tight jeans on the men. It was a pleasure to watch them meet one another and

“Please close the door,” Jonathan said. Vincent did as he asked, but he said nothing further, and no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks. She placed the Saks bag by the coat stand, took off her coat and hung it, removed her gloves and draped them over the Saks bag, and finally, having run out of things to do, sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, crossed her legs, and waited. They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.

He’d thought the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse, but any given evening can always get worse.

“You’re still enjoying the city?” Mom always said the city in the way a preacher might say Gomorrah.

… the RV in the driveway had at first seemed malevolent, some kind of horrible joke, like their financial mistakes had taken on corporeal form and had parked there next to the house.

Marie seemed a little distant in the first few days, as they drove up out of Florida and into the South, but he knew that was just the way she dealt with stress—she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself—and by the end of the week she’d begun to come back to him.

“As in she’d literally stand there on deck filming the fucking ocean,” the steward said. “Pardon my language. Never saw anything like it in my life. I caught her doing it once, asked her what she was doing, but…” “But?” “She just kind of shrugged and kept doing it.” He was quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

… this was probably the last time in his life he was going to have a drink at a bar in Germany, but the flattening influence of the nearby airport meant that everyone was conversing in English.

“I was his last secretary before he went to prison.” “You weren’t.” “Oh my god,” Keisha says, looking at her boss in the way administrative assistants do when it’s just dawned on them that the boss was once an administrative assistant.

“Well, probably only from a word-derivation sense,” Keisha says with the hesitance of people who know no one else is nearly as interested in the topic as they are, and the conversation moves on, Simone forgets to ask what she means…

“Are you going to stay much longer, do you think?” “No.” He hadn’t exactly thought this through before he said it, but the answer rang true.

The waiter who lived in the next room had sex with a sous-chef every night, and Paul, who was extremely single, could hear every noise they made.

… after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.

Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.

“Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again.

I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.

There were no cafés where I grew up but they existed within my books and flourished in my daydreams.

We endured a parallel existence, shuttling back and forth between New  York and Detroit, brief rendezvous that always ended in wrenching  separations.

When he embraced an idea he looked at things from every angle.

Packed prudently, our bags were quite manageable.

The bathroom was narrow and candlelit with a few fresh flowers in a  small vase resting atop the toilet tank. Like a tiny Mexican chapel, one  that you could piss in without feeling blasphemous.

She had a dusty appearance, as if she had emerged from the bowels of a foundry.

I stayed in Berlin a few more days, revisiting places where I had already been, taking pictures I had already shot.

By the time I got back to New York I had forgotten why I’d left.

A thick torpor coupled with a surprisingly internal luminosity gave me  the impression I had been overcome with a numinous malady transmitted by  the Berlin and London fog. 

We drank tepid coffee and engaged in a semi-successful cultural conversation.

I badly needed coffee, so I entered a small café and took a  seat. Unfortunately the Silver Moon Café was not a café at all, but once  entered, it was nearly impossible to leave.

I had accomplished my mission, losing only one pair of glasses.

My real estate lawyer attempted to sway me against buying the bungalow  due to its ramshackle state and questionable resale value. He failed to  comprehend that these were positive qualities in my book.

Later at my hotel I heard gulls screaming and watched as two of them  plunged toward the recesses of the tilted crown of the great roof  outside my terrace. I believe they were conjugating or whatever bird  fucking is called, but after a while they were silent, so either they  were satisfied or had died trying.

I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

On the whole I thought more than I wrote, wishing I could  just transmit straightaway to the page. When I was young I had the  notion to think and write simultaneously, but I could never keep up with  myself.

Behind her smile I could see so many other things, a catastrophic sadness.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

There were books lining the walls and halls, books that I knew and books I wished to know.

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the  middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?

Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a  giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of  petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time.  Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback  loop. He’s been the puppet of his own constricted desires.

… women in danger of being strangled should avoid any fashion accessories that tie around the neck.

Nothing with a beak can be truly cute, in Charmaine’s opinion.

Men don’t like to think about makeup, they like to think everything  about you is genuine. Unless of course they want to think you’re a slut and everything about you is fake.

You still working on that? as if eating is some kind of a job.

So he sought help from a physician whose tolerance for experimentation outweighed his fear of malpractice

When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they  think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just  following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster.

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city  of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization.

[T]he laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague.  What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”?  And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as  rote discipline?

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own  curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for  the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other  people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.

What I remember is my ignorance. I remember watching her eat with her  hands and feeling wholly uncivilized with my fork. I remember wondering  why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to India for spring  break and returning with a bindi on her head and photos of her smiling  Indian cousins. I told her, “Nigga, you black” because that’s all I had  back then.

He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range  of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls  in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water  eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated  way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite  season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she  is as intelligent and capable as anyone.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and  fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice  policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

I would walk through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size  of living rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these  restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they  were laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a  decade to catch on.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel  no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

His manner was like all the powerless black people I’d ever known,  exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plunder that they  could not prevent.

To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.

It recalled New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear.

She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy  years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black person’s  precise age.

A must-read (especially if you’re looking to cry on the Subway)

The children were like children from anywhere, maybe a little less so.

He was due some vacation days and he took them.

Fucking her you felt like you were really getting something accomplished, like you were a team, you two were good at it, that it was  a thing that could be won.

Who the hell is this?” the nearest man asked. He’d gone bald, and an outsized Adam’s apple moved in his lank neck. The one behind him was  from the looks of him a relation, bigger and with a full head of hair. A son or much younger brother or a cousin from one of those families where the kin bear too much resemblance and together seem like  iterations of an old idea.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one  in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already  staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around  among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on  something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space  between those two possibilities, drifting.

When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved  downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum  commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there.

“I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.

The house was rank with sleep and the night was windy, full of tree sounds.

Well, Doll always said, Just do what you’re told and be  quiet about it, that’s all anybody ever going to want from you. Lila had  learned there was really more to it than that. But she was very quiet.

Everything she said seemed to surprise him a little. No wonder, when it surprised her, too.

She thought, What would I pray for, if I thought there was  any point in it? Well, I guess the first thing would have to be that  there was some kind of point in it.

It was just like before, and everything was different.

There was a kind of haste in his cheerfulness. She had hurt him, and he couldn’t quite hide it.

She understood the word “resurrection” to mean just what she wanted it to mean.

The old man would look into her face for sadness or  weariness, and she would turn her face away, since there was no telling  what he might see in it, her thoughts being what they were.

One time when you weren’t even walking yet he took you  fishing with him. He had his pole and creel in his hand and you in the  crook of his arm and he went off down the road in the morning sunshine,  striding along like a younger man, talking to you, laughing. He came  back an hour later and set the empty creel on the table and said, “We  propped the pole and watched dragonflies. Then we got a little tired.”  And what a look he gave her, in the sorrow of his happiness. He might as  well have said, When he is old enough to understand, tell him about the  day we went fishing.

Beautiful, beautiful prose and deep characters. Lost my interest a bit towards the end.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited  in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just  prefer to do it in secret.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when  you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate  your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you  abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets  better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite  of it.

It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are  synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept  compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble, effortlessly deflect  unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on  personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the  headphones’ backbeat, all simultaneously.

He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

…the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light.

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the  fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds  stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s  like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if  everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.

Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space…

…the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia  and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the  Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or  hip ennui.

Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height.

Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents.

No one single instant of it was unendurable.

Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal  diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as if the report  were part of an intimate conversation.

Nadav Spiegelman

My Bookshelf