Activity

“Yes, Wladyslaw, yes,” Mari said. She was very tired. From the depths of her exhaustion, where she no longer had the strength to follow what he was saying, she remarked that he had undoubtedly been very beautiful.

He answered gravely. “Very. I was so beautiful that people stopped on the street a…

They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

Pursuing her work in blessed seclusion, free from interference; molding and playing with all sorts of materials, a game that all at once, capriciously, could become irresistible and crowd out all other activity. Enjoying a sudden burst of practical energy and repairing everything broken in the hous…

But it is, too, a piece of writing about time running out, about the end of living space, about inevitable ends. The chapter called “Cemeteries,” for instance, examines how we helplessly think we can order things and control our fates; Fair Play never ignores real bleakness. Part of its analysis of…