laura’s Reviews > Alone With You in the Ether > Status Update

'Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he'd said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too. He didn't blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.' (2/2)

'There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it.' (1/2)

'One of Aldo's considerations when it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence. He wondered, first, how long it had taken for Regan to lose her sense of wonder with her own life, but then secondly, whether she'd ever had any to begin with.'

'"Every psychologist has seen some version of me before, I'm sure." He gave her a long, searching look. "Who told you that?" Her doctor. Her lawyer. Ajudge. A jury of her peers. Marc.'

'He wasn't sure what he'd expected. She seemed methodical in a way, with a plan of attack, or at least some sort of sequential geography. She'd said art was precise, and he believed her. He was sure now that she was an artist, whether she believed herself to be or not. She was constantly in the midst of an underpainting, imagining things as they could be before steadily making them true.'

'Everyone, in Aldo's experience, could be quantified by the things that mattered to them. [...] There was nothing introspective about the way [Regan] spoke about art; from time to time Aldo thought she might reveal some personal connection to the art or the artist, but even Regan's most enthusiastic observations stopped just shy of passion.'

Is it fucked up to say I like being in their heads? Or if I recognize their patterns of thought in myself?