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Downstairs, she bought a picture post card of Lake Michigan, and deliberately wrote a cheerful message on it to Mrs. Robichek. It seemed false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the spring in her toes, the y…

"Go to sleep," Carol said.

Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol's hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol's fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation …

The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had nothing to do with this Carol, was not addressed to her. I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, …

[...] something Rilke says about poetry in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Poems are not, he explains, “feelings—those one has early enough—they are experiences.” And from experience, he slips into memories, and launches into a page-long litany of them, and then he says (tra…

The premise is that in order to tell the best, richest, fullest stories, or (what amounts to the same thing) in order to offer the best possible interpretations, you have to lay the object you are interpreting next to human history as a whole, or as much of it as you can manage, and stretch it to s…