He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum o...
How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.
What's the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On t...
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming...
Do you think I lie to you? No. But you think I might lie to you about dying. Yes. Okay. I might. But we're not dying. Okay.
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong...
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything unco...
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
