[...] I was already aware of a great Somethingness that was at work in the world. The signs were everywhere: the way I saw symphonies of color when I closed my eyes to think; the way ocean tides felt sentient, like a creature to whose moods I submitted my body; the discovery that air looks invisible but a bright light beamed in a dark room reveals millions of particles swirling.

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 getting engaged, my boyfriends of five years and I had broken up and moved out, and my future, my home life, my social circle, my reading, my time were up for reinvention. I quit my job and moved uptown and started going to classes with people who worked for hours on a single sentence and talked about devoting themselves to catching inspiration and channeling it into book form. I'd been working a corporate job; now I had a friend who put on a three-piece suit before sitting down at his desk to write, out of respect for the Muse. In a span of eighteen months, my life had grown unrecognizable.

I was happy and I was also burning up with questions, walking around New York, looking for a sign. [...] I waited for the real moment when I'd know what to build a life on and how to be. It didn't come. I looked around: most people seemed to be waiting, too, though they rarely used terms like "epiphany" or "conviction". I waited some more.

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, but also waiting for news, for inspiration, for intervention, for a promotion, for a diagnosis, for breakfast. THe pamphleteers understand that all suspended desire, in some sense, feels the same.

[...] 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 remembering by sitting in church, and I needed to stay close it. [...]

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 from outside me and penetrate to my deepest bones, to shoot wisdom into me or wrench a doubt out of me. Swoop in here, I told the ceiling knob, give me something to work with. Please, please call.

No one called. Nothing happened. It was just me, obediently talking to the ceiling.

Accordingly, it is just as common to look for membranes where there are none. We trace our fingers over the faces or bodies of people we love as if we wish we could leave unspoken thoughts and feelings behind like residue. We place our foreheads together and press gently, as if to see whether we can merge that way. We struggle toward each other out of our little meat suits.

Keeler, California, is so far way that when you scan the radio for a station, it dials through empty airwaves until it comes all the way around to your original blank frequency, and goes again. I was driving south to north through the center of the state on the hunt for someplace remote and dry, extreme, unlike any of the landscapes familiar to me. I was following the grand American tradition of running westward from my problems. [...]

[...] Minnie is actually the fourth Minnie Dora Bunn; the original Minnie Dora Bunn was one of the charter members, and she and every subsequent Minnie Dora Bunn have served as Society president in their turn. The Minnie I spoke to, let's call her MDB4, recently gave birth to her first child, a girl, whose name surprised no one. [...]

I once had a disagreement with a boyfriend about the details of this process. The dispute was more semantic than factual. He described organisms like Pando this way: aspen trees "share their roots" they reach out underground and clasp onto one another as if holding hands. They survive collaboratively. I insisted that the trees weren't holding hands. They were the same tree at root, shooting up many varied expressions of itself, a triumphant single organism. He saw a collective and I saw an individual - which, he observed pointedly, seemed like a pretty decent metaphor for some more critical differences in our dispositions. I rolled my eyes.

[...] Americans' unwillingness to prioritize how we deal with the dead (or our supposition that the story, or the parts of it that matter, stop with the heartbeat) may constitute a failure of moral imagination, but it absolutely fails to imagine the way the living and the dead remain connected, no matter how the living feel about it. The dead tell us how we're dying, how we're living, who among us gets a better shot than others at a whole and healthy life, and how we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world. Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the progress we have yet to make, the wrongs we have yet to correct - all these are mirrored back to us by the dead. No one likes to be reminded of these things, but they don't go away just because the bodies do.