“Why did she think herself different and weird? Front and center was her awareness of Eternity: she intuited that everything, absolutely (or, at least, relatively) everything that people in the world saw, felt, and thought about, was, in a crucial sense, unimportant. From experience she knew that there was an entirely different, better, infinite, and […]
Continue reading“Skylar’s saunter to school took, then, an ever-so-slightly-indulgent path on which stones came to magical life, fallen leaves wheezed goodbye to the world, and gutter water sluiced in turbulent runnels. These observations of animate nature were interspersed with time-transcendent, frozen moments in which he experienced a tangible sense of stoppage, of everything: of people, pebbles, […]
Continue reading“He would have instantaneous rapport with her. Both would look and both would see; each would touch in synchrony. Like twins they would know one another’s thoughts without the exchange of words. All four eyes would drink in the petaled emanations of moonlight from the gleaming disk overhead. Both hearts would swell, joy-filled, at the […]
Continue reading“Romance! Yes, these were dreams of romance, and he cherished them. For him there existed a girl who embodied the eidolon of femininity and glinted with its many precious facets. He saw her as lovely, of course, but with the loveliness of a child, innocent and pure. Tenderness was the blood-stuff of her heart. Yet […]
Continue reading“On a long road, well into the night, the first frenzied, chaotic sounds of ‘The Wheel’ emerged from the car’s speakers; then the introductory beats of the side drum; and finally, that gorgeous, drawn-out note from the steel guitar: the one that was like the universe extending its vast arms in embrace. The man’s hand […]
Continue reading“In the flats, the water was uniformly shallow and the foam residue of the waves extended for hundreds of yards, like suds in the bottom of a huge drained bath tub. Lanes formed behind the waves in this area, straight long-line streamers stretching out behind them as they broke towards shore. Auburn kelp fronds, swept […]
Continue reading“All these impressions struck Skylar at once. Just the sight of the girls playing volleyball on the beach conveyed the totality of this understanding to him. And no playwright could have scripted this first glimpse of California better than fate had. To drive in at night—the darkness assuring that even the two boys still awake […]
Continue reading“Artus sought to clarify the matter. ‘I see your difficulty, Boone. The details get a little complex at this point. But let me take a stab at it. If we were to look at an empty room and someone asked us what we saw, we might say ‘Carpet, curtains, walls, a ceiling, a door, and […]
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