Activity

Six o’clock in the morning is when the pains raisins come out, and already the customers are lining up in the dark outside this tiny Parisian boulangerie waiting for the first batch. The baguettes are ready—piping-hot from the brick oven, fabulously, deliberately ugly and uneven in shape, slashed c…

I had slept well on a bench in the shade and now the summoning bell was ringing and I pattered into church in my bare feet. The pastor’s wife took my hand and pressed me down at her side in the front pew below the pulpit. I would rather have sat in the organ loft, but the pastor’s wife was in the a…

[...] perhaps this is what the beginning of true ageing is like. More and more, we lose our way in obscure halls and winding unswept corridors. We talk to each other through faulty local telephones and stumble headlong over a reserve hard to detect.

[...] Friendship never depends on promises or protestation, nor on time and space. Friendship is absolutely undemanding, except on one point. Friendship demands honesty, the only demand, but difficult.

Now I take you by the arm, my dearly beloved friend, and shake you cautiously. Are you listening to me? You’ve now said those words every day several times a day. You should know that those words in particular entail an appeal to your experience. They have been shaped, laboriously or voluptuously,…