Ellie Dunham’s Reviews > The Goldfinch > Status Update

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain Nile and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

It’s not about the outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag

When I was was a boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence

…it was not ammusing to her to see how torn-up I was over her.

I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear.