“Adolescent Daydreams”
“Once his mother left the room, he flounced toward the bed and dropped himself down onto it with the dead weight of a falling dumb bomb. Horizontal, eyes closed, arms extended along his sides: this was the position he assumed as he wrestled with the nymphs, wolves, and ghosts of adolescence. In the background, the […]
Continue reading“The Magic of Music”
“Music had always, since his early childhood, shown Skylar the transfiguring power of art. Music possessed a facility for communicating directly with one’s soul and, once in communication, an ability to extract from it a fine and delicate feeling. From this feeling, music could shake off all excrescences and dross, leaving a filament which it […]
Continue reading“The End of Exams”
“It was about two o’clock in the afternoon on the day after Skylar’s last final examination. A cylinder of yellow sunlight passed through the narrow casement window in the sophomore’s bedroom, inflaming a golden aureole around Artus’ head. The rectangular lights of the mullioned window had been refashioned, all luminous, stretched and laid flat on […]
Continue reading“Genuine Happiness”
“When one has gained inner stability, then a quiet joy constantly fills one’s life. One no longer depends on external developments to bring happiness; one is already happy. The sun may shine or the rain may fall; the stock market may rise or it may drop; wrinkles, gray hair, and illness may come, but the […]
Continue reading“Oneness”
“In truth, the world and the individual are all merely reflections of Reality, in the same way that an ocean might alternately show a surface placid as far as the eye can see or one roiling with precipitous billows, but never stop being the same ocean. Just as an onlooker usually notices only the surface […]
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