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It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe.

Collision

“I know,” Gentry says. “You just want to do your time. It don’t work that way slick. See, you’re still thinking with your civilian mind. You have to start thinking with your prison mind.”

The Lunch Break

“Boone and Dave went to Brittany’s trailer to tell her that they’d just dismissed her assistant/drug mule.”

The North Wing

How close are the ties that bind a family? What would you do to protect your alcoholic, screwup cousin?

Final Score

Wow! Great story, what a start!!

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit.

She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

The full-scale Wabash Avenue once-over and then some. Has he ever been scrutinized quite this close before? Normally at about this point there begins to drift across the face of the broad in the scene a look of evasiveness Hicks has grown used to, followed by some form of "How cheapened has my life become that I have to put up with attention from palookas like this?"

"Yes, it was tragic," she said, with a voice like flint. And didn't say, as she might have done-at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of com-bustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn't it?

A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow-pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing.

In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he'd spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they'd done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations.

It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens-and the Sheringhams-still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they'd used to, as if they'd become one common decimated family.

An Oral History of Atlantis

"Hans," my father said, "it's time for you to fly." Instead I walked all the way to Manhattan, arriving at noon. This was the day before the day the city blew up every bridge, back when they thought rats spread the dread virus MtPR, pronounced "Metaphor," which they wanted to contain or exclude, it was hard to remember which.

By the time Zoe was in college, she found many occasions to tell me that my generation had fucked up in every major way. We'd ruined the planet, we'd let a criminal 1 percent own everything, we'd gotten everyone used to constant war. Our current life-form was an invasive species, worse than kudzu, choking out anything around us.

Watch Your Step

"Listen," you said. "This afternoon my uncle had me over for lunch." And soon you were telling me everything. That was the problem: you enjoyed the narrative of your own im-portance. It made you a charming conversationalist but a very bad spy.

Our participation in the diminishment of nature is another form of self-betrayal; I want to give nature as much priority as I give myself, want to feel it as an extension of the same body that walks in my two boots over the ground. The grass is my thinker, my speaker, my twine.

…Wren says, "I basically feel like I've
been preparing for an apocalypse my whole life."

"I mean, most kids my age have been hearing about climate change since we were born and walk around with a sense of doom, knowing this world will be totally different before we are old. The crazy thing is that it sounds slightly thrilling to me. No rules! I like the idea of having to use my skills to survive."

The two valleys drop away and rise up again in layers; the sky feels huge above and beneath us, as if we stood on the prow of a ship and could fall into the sky like water. As the sun comes over the forest edge, white light blots out the hills, splashes down through the new leaves, and blinds us.

What if one of the grime-covered kids from the MOTH decided to take it out on the "merely rich" "cosmopolitan class" without identifying Vera as a fellow downcast child, albeit one without a biological link to the colonial era?

The apartment was a combination of a two-bedroom apartment and a studio, which together formed three bed-rooms. The living room was called the Maginot Line by Daddy (a fine entry in the Things I Still Need to Know Diary).

"Fun never ends around here." She took Dylan by the hand and dragged him away into their side of the apartment while Vera enjoyed the extra moments she spent with Daddy alone even if he was mostly silent with his mouth open. (Looking at Social Media)

Scalp Hunters
Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon's suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon's nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad.

Then, as the light was stronger, he could see the tops of the palms blowing in the gale and then, as the sun began to come up behind the hills, the palm trunks were whitish gray and their blowing branches a bright green and the grass of the hills was brown from the winter drought and the limestone tops of the far hills made them look as though they were crested with snow.

Then, astern of the boat and off to starboard, the calm of the ocean broke open and the great fish rose out of it, rising, shining dark blue and silver, seeming to come endlessly out of the water, unbelievable as his length and bulk rose out of the sea into the air and seemed to hang there until he fell with a splash that drove the water up high and white.

His life was built solidly on work and on the living by the Gulf Stream and on the island and it would stand up all right. The aids and the habits and the customs were all to handle the loneliness and by now he knew he had opened a whole new country for the loneliness to move into once the boys were gone.

Thomas’ three boys visit the island

…swam out in the green water, their bodies making shadows over the clear white sand, bodies forging along, shadows projected on the sand by the slight angle of the sun, the brown arms lifting and pushing forward, the hands slicing in, taking hold of the water and pulling it back, legs beating along steadily, heads turning for air, breathing easily and smoothly.

But he did not worry much about any of it. He had long ago ceased to worry and he had exorcized guilt with work insofar as he could, and all he cared about now was that the boys were coming over and that they should have a good summer. Then he would go back to work.
He had been able to replace almost everything except the children with work and the steady normal working life he had built on the island.

…just as he knew how many stairs there were to each flight of his own house and which way each of the twelve doors opened.
But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning.

Outside Context Paradox!

During a crisis, everyone was plunged into the animal fear that she frequented all year round. The only benefit of her generalized anxiety disorder was that it prepared Hope for the Worst-Case Scenario; she was never surprised when one materialized because the Worst-Case Scenario was where she spent most of her time.