Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“‘Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ‘let us at least have good manners.’”

“Any adequate response to the mystery of existence must be poetic, for only the poetic can take on the ‘why.’”

“I’m talking about how we—and I mean here the ‘we’ of people who have experienced some kind of trauma, which I think is a very large category indeed—how we manage the serious burden that we carry, how we contain it, what spent fuel pool or dry cask storage we improvise for material that is even now still leaking its lethal isotopes.”

“Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.”

“And so, finding that, for once, I was not sorry to be alone, I said to myself: I am happy. Perfectly happy, I repeated, as my eyes roamed wide over the brilliant desolate sea and the empty contours of the land. Were they, after all, searching for something that was lacking? I hardly knew.”

“Claims to ordinariness and salt-of-the-earth virtue—‘slumming it,’ as it’s crudely called—are themselves pretentious. The assumption that dropping your aitches or asserting a love of a cheap beer over a fine wine, or processed cheese over a Parmesan, will make you seem unspoiled or somehow more gritty is classic downwardly mobile play-acting.”

“The act of salvation is never performed, because anyone with the strength to carry it out is unaware that they must do it, and the knowing person is incapable of action.”

“Sometimes it is the evidence, the spectacle of another person’s grief that harrows you, more than the loss itself.”

“For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.”

“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”