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People often use the word "ecstasy" when talking about being in the presence of divinity, a word whose root, ekstasis, means to stand outside oneself, to be beside oneself, beyond oneself. Lying there, contemplating my knobbly ceiling, I was comically inside myself. I thought something might come…

[...] The people at this church were lit from behind their eyes. They seemed to be moved by the joy of a single certainty, like a cedar tent pole planted in a field, stillness at the center of swaying silk. As much as I insisted that I was no longer one of them, there was an echo of myself I was re…

This is an entire subgenus of subway passenger, the one who uses the purgatory of platforms and crowded cars to explain how they were saved p..]

[...] I appreciate the acknowledgement that on the average Tuesday morning most people are waiting in more than one way: waiting to get to their stop, …

Even with clocks, the subway seems to hover outside of time, a "heterotopia," or a space that exists beyond the reach of normal human systems and social mores.

I finally picked up Fear and Trembling when I was maybe twenty-five and living in New York. I had a lot of free hours to read at the time, and I was in the mood for existentialism - I'd lately experienced one of the radical life upheavals that tend to happen when you're twenty-five. Instead of ge…