Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.
When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened—how we all became so imperfect.
When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time.
He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), a...
In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears with...
Elijah is inexplicably moved by the broken columns and fragmented floors. He cannot help but find a meaning and a message in their poverty of stature. This is what remains, he thinks. It seems a valuable lesson on a day when card catalogs are dying, ...
Here's what I think. We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seek with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then...
He was thirteen then, Elijah almost seven. Now, ten years later, Elijah realizes he’s older than Danny was. That all of those changes have happened to him, too. The changes that nobody has any say over. The biology—“growing” and “up” as a...
To feel such a longing for his own life, even as he’s living it—he wonders what that means.
She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of.
The quiet times are the ones to hold on to.
Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.
They have left the first stage of romance—the rhapsody of us. Where everything is you-me or me-you or a giddily tentative we. Now him and her are asserting themselves, each given a private, pensive depth. Within the rhapsody of us, Elijah could thi...
How did my world get so small?
Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the stor...
You can find sorrow in the arithmetic, and you can find a bittersweet hope.
