Activity

People had once been buried in charnel houses or tombs where all bones were mixed together; now everyone had "his or her own little box for his or her own little personal decay"

The news is only vaguely less eschatological

Beloved is in one sense a fable about the chiaroscuro of staying half-merged to someone else, the redemptive power and the unholy danger of “not separate from.”

illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospital gown and metallic adrenaline taste, the mutable and inexpressible shades of pain, demand articulation because they matter

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.