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.

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.

Theo is delusional